BLUE RUIN: As flames were devouring the Hollywood hills...

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2025

...Fox News was devouring the discourse: What ever happened to all those drones—to the drones which were swarming all over New Jersey?

We'd been wondering in recent days. Yesterday, somebody asked. 

As seen on the Fox News Channel, a reliable Stepford inquired about this forgotten tale. He spoke with a plainly disordered man:

(PETER) DOOCY (1/9/25): A story that kind of disappeared very suddenly—Do you any idea whatever happened to the drones?

TRUMP: What happened to drones?

DOOCY: Well, you said you knew—you thought the government knew what was happening with these drones over New Jersey. There were some by Bedminster?

TRUMP: I don’t know. They’re all over Bedminster a lot, so I can imagine—

I’m going to give you a report on drones about one day into the administration. Because I think it’s ridiculous that they’re not telling you about what’s going on with the drones...

The imitation of an answer continued on from there. Videotape of the full exchange is provided by Mediaite in its brief report on this press event.

According to the incoming president, "they’re not telling you about what’s going on with the drones." In fact, no one's discussing the drone invasion any more—and that includes Fox News!

At Fox, the flames of the drones had raced up a hillside. But then, all of a sudden, just like that, they disappeared over a hill. 

They had their fun with the tale for a couple of weeks. At that point, the tale disappeared.

For the record, that was Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel, speaking with the incoming Donald J. Trump. Full disclosure:

There won't be a report on the drones "about one day into the administration." In all likelihood, that particular wildfire has completely run its course. In all likelihood, it won't flare up again.

It's true! The disordered man in question did say, at one point, that "the government knew what was happening with these drones over New Jersey." In all likelihood, he'd simply been devouring one more hillside within our rapidly failing nation's rapidly failing culture.

In the past few days, Blue Ruin has come to large parts of The City of Angels in the form of runaway fires. A more familiar version of Blue Ruin had come to our tribe in the form of the November 5 election—and yes, we Blues had worked very hard to earn our way out in the years, and in the decades, which preceded that event.

We'd earned our way out by ignoring the (unexplained) apparent craziness of President Biden's (unexplained) policy at the southern border. By ignoring President Biden's refusal (or inability) to speak about that and about other major issues. 

By hoping and praying that we could Lock Trump Up. By the endless hours we endlessly spent massaging that tribal dream, even as our tribunes disappeared the topics the electorate was more concerned about. 

By the way we've looked down on "the basket of deplorables" over the course of the past sixty years (on our nation's lower breed). By the way we pursued one absurd position after another in the realm which came to be described as "Woke"—by the way we were unable to see, or unwilling to finger, the plain absurdity of so many of those tribal manifestations. 

By our refusal to see that something seemed to be wrong with the leader of our own party, with the incumbent President Biden. 

Across the nation, the others could see that something seemed to be wrong. Until the night of June 27, we alone couldn't see this apparent problem—and many of our leading figures said he was sharp as a tack.

In such ways, we Blues worked to earn our way out. Our dumbness has been visible to everyone—to everyone except us. 

(In fairness, this is one of the ways we humans are wired. It has always worked this way with our species' tribes.)

Today, though, the topic is the form of ruin which has come to large parts of Los Angeles. Also, though, the topic should be the devouring of the American discourse, the devouring of the American intellect, which was being performed again yesterday all over the Fox News Channel.

Flames devoured the hills of Los Angeles; Fox News has devoured the discourse. And as Fox News has executed that form of Blue Ruin, the New York Times has gazed away, refusing to say their names.

We'll go ahead and say them today. These are the "jugglers and clowns" we watched yesterday as they made mincemeat out of the discourse:

Co-hosts on Fox & Friends, 1/9/25
Lawrence Jones
Steve Doocy
Ainsley Earhardt
Brian Kilmeade

Panelists on The Five, 1/9/25
"Kennedy"
Jessica Tarlov
Jesse Watters
Dana Perino
Greg Gutfeld

Panelists on Gutfeld!, 1/9/25
"Tyrus"
Kat Timpf
Greg Gutfeld (host)
Dana Perino
Jamie Lissow 

Adam Carolla (very special guest)

We watched those collections of jugglers and clowns they pretended to discuss the Los Angeles fires—as they devoured the possibility of having an actual discourse. 

Flames were devouring the Hollywood hills. These flyweights went after the culture.

Since 1965, we Blues have been working very hard to bring ourselves down. As happenstance had it, we ourselves were physically present that year when this effort started.

We hope to describe that historic event next week. For today, we direct you to the eating of the American discourse—to the flames which continue to devour American journalistic and intellectual culture.

(By the way: Where are all the brilliant professors who should be discussing Fox News? Where are the "academics?")

Yesterday, as we watched Fox News, who was the least fair of them all as they pretended to discuss the Los Angeles fires? We'd probably name Kennedy first, but that involves a long-standing bit of personal prejudice. 

We'd also name Adam Carolla, who arrived on the scene with the ugly, stupid, gong-show misogyny of The Man Show. That was back in the early days of the never-ending pushback by the masculine children of this type. Pepperidge Farm remembers:

Adam Carolla

[...]

Carolla co-hosted the syndicated radio call-in program Loveline with Drew Pinsky from 1995 to 2005 as well as the show's television incarnation on MTV from 1996 to 2000. He was the co-host and co-creator of the television program The Man Show (1999–2004), and the co-creator and a regular performer on the television show Crank Yankers (2002–2007, 2019–present). 

Crank Yankers! This is who, and this is what, these unyielding throwbacks are.

Carolla and Kennedy would be our individual choices for yesterday's worst players. We'd also wonder what's going on with the strangely backsliding Jessica Tarlov at this point in time.

The larger question concerns the way Blue America's journalistic and academic elites have chosen to look the other way as this destruction of the nation's discourse and intellect has continued to roll along on a daily, round-the-clock basis.

Yesterday, the Stepfords were advancing the mandated instant claims about the Los Angeles fires. At Trader Vic's, a werewolf's hair was once said to be perfect.

So were yesterday's "cable news" recitations.

At some point, some clarity may be available concerning the claims these children have been reciting. This very morning, we strongly recommend the preliminary assessments offered in this New York Times news report:

‘Completely Dry’: How Los Angeles Firefighters Ran Out of Water.

[...]

Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.

“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.

Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.

As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.

The problem can be especially acute during high-wind conditions, like those Los Angeles experienced this week, when firefighting aircraft could not safely make their usual aerial drops of water and fire retardant.

There's more to be found in that assessment—in that preliminary assessment. Even one of the stars of the current show is paraphrased saying this:

Rick Caruso, the real estate developer and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor who served two stints as president of the Department of Water and Power, said he had a team of private firefighters deployed in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night, helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, Palisades Village, as well as some nearby homes.

All night, he said, the team was reporting that water was in short supply. He said it would take time to account for the supply problems, but suggested there appeared to be a shortfall in preparation.

Will it turn out that there actually was some sort of (serious or actionable) "shortfall in preparation?"

As always, everything is possible! That said, even Caruso has been quoted saying that it will take time to account for the supply problems—and of one thing you can be sure:

By the time some such account has been reliably assembled, the wind-whipped flamers on the Fox News Channel will have leaped ahead to some other set of instant tales.

Flames are devouring the hillsides of The City of Angels. The American discourse is being devoured by an endless array of flamers on the Fox News Channel, but also across the podcast dial.

Back in the early 1990s, it was the New York Times and the Washington Post which invented the Whitewater pseudo-scandal. Starting in March 1999, it was those same mainstream orgs which drove the punitive, twenty-month War Against Gore which sent George Bush to the White House.

Today, our discourse is being devoured by life forms like Gutfeld, Carolla and Kennedy, along with the corporate-owned blowhard Tyrus, a former professional "wrestler."

This array of jugglers and clowns is being paid by the corporation to advance the corporation's Storylines and interests. As they strut and recite their claims, Blue America, producing Blue Ruin, agrees to look away.

We've decided to start saying their names. Fuller profiles will follow, but no one's dumber than we Blues are. We've been proving that point, again and again, as we've worked to earn our way out over these past many long years.

We've long been convinced that we're the smart ones. Sadly, no—we aren't!

THURSDAY: Fire can destroy a city!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025

Cultures can be destroyed too: It's worth recalling that cities used to burn down fairly often. We were a high school student—in California, no less—when we first heard these lyrics from an old American song:

The Baltimore Fire

[...]

Amid an awful struggle of commotion
The wind blew a gale from the ocean.
Brave firemen struggled with devotion
While their efforts all proved in vain.

"Fire, fire," I heard the cry
From every breeze that passes by.
All the world was one sad cry of pity. 

Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore the beautiful city.

We first heard the old song on the Folkways album, The New Lost City Ramblers, Volume 3. It was the first of our many albums by those keepers of Americana.

(The fire in question occurred in 1904. To hear that recording, click here.)

The disaster continues in Los Angeles—and there's still no way of knowing how bad the gale may decide to make it. That said:

Cultures can be burned to the ground too. As the City of Angels continues to burn, so does our own nation's failing culture.

How bad will it get in the City of Angels? We can't tell you that. With respect to the way our culture is burning, we'll offer this handful of signposts. 

Claims about mishandling of the fire:

For starters, we'll recommend the new post by Kevin Drum which appears beneath this headline:

Elon Musk is the new emperor of misinformation

Kevin starts with a list of eight claims about the fire which Musk has retweeted. "Every single thing on this list is either badly misleading or flat-out wrong," Kevin writes.

Is Kevin's assessment accurate concerning all eight of those claims? We can't necessarily tell you that, hut his post comes with links to news reports which contradict the various things the vastly disordered Musk is pushing on this particular day. 

Here are the first three of those retweeted claims:

They didn't fill the reservoirs.

They cut $17 million from the fire budget.

They sent [fire] supplies to Ukraine.

In his post, Kevin links to actual news reports—actual news reports which contradict those claims. Truly, a claim can move across the world faster than wind-driven flames.

(Such claims can be true or false, though false claims tend to move faster.)

These first three claims moved quickly last night, leaping from Stepford to Stepford. Most specifically, we saw them being repeated all over the Fox News Channel last evening, and then again on this morning's Fox & Friends. 

We recommend that you click the links in Kevin's post to see the reporting in question. In fact, the fire budget was increased by $50 million, Politico reports.

Claims about climate:

The last of the eight claims retweeted by Musk was this sarcastic coup de grace:

But yes, this [Los Angeles fire] is all caused by "climate change."

The "scare quotes" are meant to suggest what people are still explicitly told on the Fox News Channel, by such arsonists as the pitiful Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters.

Viewers are still told that climate change is a "scam" and a "hoax." That continues to this very day by the well-paid corporate trumpets who appears on the Fox News Channel.

The astonishing RNC:

Our culture is being burned to the ground by the conduct of entities like the Fox News Channel. MSNBC has been bad enough. The Fox News Channel is worse.

Then too, our culture is being burned to the ground by the kinds of flyweights who would issue a press release like the one shown below. 

It came from the RNC. As David Gilmour reports at Mediaite, its factual claim is flatly false. Sadly, that's not even what we're talking about at this point in time:

Text of tweet by RNC Research:

California Senator Adam Schiff (aka Pencil Neck) just did a six-minute primetime interview on MSDNC. 

He didn’t mention the wildfires currently plaguing his state ONCE—he just ranted about President Trump. 

What a scumbag.

Truly, that's astounding. We refer to the way overt name-calling of a certain type is now an established part of American political discourse.

In that tweet, Senator Schiff is given a new nickname, "Pencil Neck." At the end, he's dismissed as "a scumbag." A childish nickname is included for a cable news channel too.

This degraded culture comes to us, live and direct, from the mouth and the mind of the incoming president, who introduced this cartoonization of public speech during the 2016 presidential campaign.

As Gilmour notes, the factual claim in that tweet was flatly bogus. Schiff actually had discussed the Los Angeles fire at substantial length.

It's the braindead name-calling to which we call your attention today, a type of dumbnification which tracks directly to Trump. If a sitting president can be referred to as "Sleepy Joe," why can't a senator be "Pencil Neck," or of course "Shifty Schiff?"

Our culture is being burned to the ground in this dumbnified fashion. For the record, we Blues have played a role in this too. We'll return to that problem tomorrow.

The city of Baltimore burned to the ground. Strong men in anguish prayed as the conflagration continued.

Fair Baltimore, the beautiful city! Within two years, it was largely rebuilt. Rebuilding a culture is harder. 

Who knew?: The McGarrigles recorded that old song too. To hear them, just click this.

It basically dates to Charlie Poole. This was the look and the sound of Americana in the old days, way back when.

BLUE RUIN: Can you run a large modern nation this way?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025

Bogus claims can spread faster than flames: Here at this incomparable site, we've been trying to address a set of extremely important questions. 

As a general matter, those questions are variants on one basic point of incomprehension—on a bit of puzzlement widely voiced here in Blue America:

How in the world did we ever lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

We Blues!  Quite routinely, we say that we can't imagine a reason why a decent person would ever have voted for someone like Donald J. Trump. In the face of such incomprehension, we tend to fall back on a preferred explanation for our (rather narrow) loss:

Trump's voters must all be racists!

This pleasing assertion is on wide display in Blue America's comment threads. Sometimes, our highest-profile tribal leaders even say such things as this:

BLUE AMERICAN POLITICAL LEADER (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call "the basket of deplorables." 

(Laughter/applause) 

Right? 

(Laughter/applause) 

They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

As you can see by clicking here, that's the way these remarks were transcribed by the leading authority on this now-famous assessment.

In fairness, everyone speaks unwisely at some point in time. Unfortunately, that unwise statement went viral. 

Over on the Fox News Channel, the statement lingers as part of the national discourse. It may even explain why some people voted for Trump this part year, a full eight years after the fact.

Briefly, let's be fair. In that instance, the speaker said that only half of Trump's supporters were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it." 

(Were all those people "irredeemable?" It depends on how you parse the last part of that passage.)

At any rate, that was only half of the fellow's supporters! According to the speaker in question, the other half of his supporters were a different kettle of fish:

BLUE AMERICAN LEADER (continuing directly): But the "other" basket—the other basket—and I know, because I look at this crowd, I see friends from all over America here...but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. 

It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but—he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Interesting! According to this high-profile leader, fully half of Trump's supporters were in fact redeemable. They actually weren't "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it," the way the other half were!

According to this political leader, we should empathize with those people. So it was in 2016—and  presumably, it was from this second basket of people that we Blues lost votes this last time around. 

Some voters for Biden now voted for Trump. Some voters for Biden stayed home this past year. Presumably, those switchers are drawn from the basket of redeemable people, not from the people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

According to that political leader, we should try to understand why they did what they did. We lost votes from people who aren't irredeemable. So how did we lose their votes?

For today, we're jus trying to clarify the question we've been attempting to chase. The basic fact remains true, as always:

No one else will ever be as smart or as decent as we Blue Americans are.

We Blues! We're fated to live with the effects of our vast superiority. This past year, we somehow managed to lose some votes from people who are at least redeemable. So how in the world did that ever happen? How did we lose their votes?

In the comments threads of our own Blue nation, some of us continue to "labor under a mistake." We continue to think, and to say, that everyone who isn't just like us is racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. 

According to experts, this is the oldest conceptual framework in all of human affairs. This picture of the world is bred in the bone. It's the way we humans are wired.

Still and all, the question remains. How did we manage to lose those votes? What led the switchers to switch?

Was it something we said or did? Why did some voters leave us?

For today, we just wanted to clarify the reason for the season—the basic rationale behind our current search.

Many of us can't imagine why a decent person would have voted for Candidate Trump—or, perhaps, why a decent person might have decided to vote against a gang of people like us.

In our own view, there quite a few such reasons. Other Blues can see them at all!

In our search, we're trying to address that one small lapse. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we Blues are sometimes stuck with this one small bit of angry incomprehension.

Question:

When we admitted geniuses give voice to this massive incomprehension, is it possible that we drive even more voters away?

This afternoon: Can a large modern nation really function this way? Bogus statements can travel faster than the flames from a very large fire!

Tomorrow: We recall what Alberta said

WEDNESDAY: What did Trump know and when did he know it?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2025

What did Jack Smith find?  Future Supreme Court Justice Aileen Cannon has hauled off and done it again.

That said, it seems that the DOJ still hopes to split the baby in question. Headline included, here's the start of the New York Times' breaking news report:

Justice Dept. to Hold Off Releasing Report on Trump Documents Case

Federal prosecutors said on Wednesday that they planned to hold off on releasing a portion of a report by the special counsel, Jack Smith, detailing his investigation into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s refusal to give back a trove of classified documents he took from the White House after leaving office.

But if the Justice Department can overcome an order blocking the rest of the report from coming out, it plans to release a separate volume concerning Mr. Smith’s other investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, prosecutors said.

The department’s decisions—laid out in a filing to a federal appeals court in Atlanta—brought a measure of clarity to what amounts to the final chapter of Mr. Smith’s work, which began more than two years ago and led to the first federal indictments of a former president in American history.

Overturning the election maybe, mishandling classified documents no? The "measure of clarity" laid out today falls a bit short of overwhelming.

For ourselves, we'd like to see the DOJ release the report about January 6. For the record, specialists seem to agree that there may not be much that's new in some such report. In this passage, Feuer and Savage explain why:

It is possible that even the release of the volume on the election interference charges may not contain much in the way of new or revelatory information. That is because in October, Mr. Smith filed an exhaustive 165-page brief laying out the evidence he planned to offer at trial.

That "exhaustive 165-page brief" was released on October 2. At the time, we the people were badly distracted as we tried to determine whether Haitian migrants were, or perhaps were not, eating a wide array of the state of Ohio's pets.

That, and other such issues! In the face of all that gorilla dust, we're not sure that Smith's specific findings were ever fully discussed

For ourselves, we remain curious about one question concerning the events of January 6, 2021. That question would be this: 

On that morning, did President Trump know or believe that violence was going to take place at the Capitol? 

Also this:

Had President Trump and/or members of TrumpWorld actively conspired with the organizations which had apparently planned to engage in such violence?

As far as we know, the January 6 committee never produced evidence of such connections. We're not clear concerning what Smith did or didn't find.

What did Trump know (or expect) and when did he know or expect it? We still aren't clear about that matter. Now that our pets are all safely indoors, we'd like to see a full account of what Smith actually found.

BLUE RUIN: Did we lose some votes this way?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2025

Was the public lied to? Did we lose some votes this way? Also, was the public lied to?

We'll guess that the answer to the first question is yes. For now, let's return to Clarence Page's column, the one in which he wrote about 2024's "Lie of the Year."

We linked to Page's column in last Friday's report. As you may already know, Clarence Page is a good, decent person who's also smart and experienced.  

His emotional IQ is quite high. He started his column like this:

Behind the “Lie of the Year,” some bitter truths

As it has been doing yearly since 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year. There was an abundance of nominees.

And, it turns out, they chose the same whopper I identified as a top contender months ago: President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Haitian migrants were eating the household pets of Springfield, Ohio.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” said the former and now future Republican president during his Sept. 10 debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The people that came in,” he continued to a TV audience of an estimated 67 million viewers. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Oh, really? An astonished-looking Harris gave an incredulous laugh, but the line was not a new one for Trump and his MAGA movement supporters, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, whom Politifact co-credited for the Lie of the Year.

In our view, a fact-checking site should be careful about using a problematic term like "lie." 

That said, there's no doubt about it at all—that repulsive claim by Trump and Vance was one of the most repulsive, repeated misstatements of this or any year. Their repulsive and repeated misstatements about Springfield, Ohio's Haitian residents dragged the American discourse down about as far as a nation's discourse can go.

That said, there were many other misstatements in the course of the year now past. In our view, serious fact-checking sites should perhaps avoid the carnival game of picking the one most egregious misstatement.

At any rate, so it went, with PolitiFact voting for the eating of the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. When Candidate Trump and Candidate Vance spread that pile of garbage around, they showed us something unmistakable about their bodies, their selves:

At best, these men are serious nut-balls. At worst, it's worse than that.

Trump and Vance showed us what they currently are when they spread that garbage around. But Clarence Page, a Grade A person all the way down, continued directly as shown:

Yet, before I happily rip into that bone-headed attempt to slander innocent refugees living and working peacefully in Springfield...allow me to note a leading alternative nominee in the eyes of some prominent conservative commentators: Democratic President Joe Biden.

“It’s hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the total rot of American media than this,” huffed Dylan Housman, editor-in-chief of the conservative Daily Caller, in a column decrying Politifact's choice for the dubious award.

Trump's and Vance's lie, Housman offered, “is the equivalent of a speck of dirt sitting at the base of a mountain that is one of the biggest scandals in American political history: the lie that Joe Biden was acting as president in 2024 and was mentally capable of serving another four years.”

Biden’s whopper deserves more attention, wrote Housman, “because it tells us the media has learned nothing. Through all the navel-gazing, post-mortems and autopsies, the corporate media has learned nothing about why Donald Trump is president and nobody trusts them.”

And on and on come the protests from the right. As I often point out when political arguments break out at my own home, everyone is entitled to have their own wrong opinion.

As we noted last Friday, we ate dinner with Page one night at a charity event. As happenstance luckily had it, we did a comedy show with him a few years later. 

(Page's set that night was good; ours was perhaps somewhat better. We ruminated on that occasion about our semester, freshman year, in Phil 3: Problems in Philosophy, as taught by the extremely young Robert Nozick, 27 years old at the time. 

(How can we know that 7 plus 5 equals 12? That was one of the problems we were asked to untangle in that introductory class. Who is this "problem" a problem for? we asked on the stage that night with a thoughtful Page looking on.)

We're proud to say that we know Clarence Page if just a small, tiny tad. We've never met Dylan Housman—but are you sure that he's totally wrong in what he said, in his own column, about 2024's "Lie of the Year?"

For the record, Page has summarized Housman's column in a perfectly reasonable way. As you can see by clicking here, this is part of what Housman said in his column for the Caller:

HOUSMAN: The Real ‘Lie Of The Year’

[...]

The point is that this [PolitiFact] “Lie of the Year” is the equivalent of a speck of dirt sitting at the base of a mountain that is one of the biggest scandals in American political history: the lie that Joe Biden was acting as president in 2024 and was mentally capable of serving another 4 years.

There is no lie that could have been conjured up by any other person in American politics that could compete with this. The scope of the lie was enormous; the entire corporate media, Democratic Party and executive branch of the federal government conspired to hide the condition of the president. The consequence was historic; Biden cost the Democratic Party any prayer of winning the 2024 election by staying in the race and dropping a live grenade in the lap of Kamala Harris, who was utterly unequipped to handle it. And the stakes were life-or-death; with multiple major wars happening in the world, domestic unrest on college campuses, devastating inflation and declining social trust in the country, we had no president at the wheel.

The glaring obviousness that this is not only the lie of the year, but the lie of the decade and perhaps the lie of the 21st century so far, is why I love this story. The utter delusion it requires any media outlet that pretends to be serious to pick the cat-eating “lie” as the biggest of the year is almost too rich to fully appreciate. It’s the news equivalent of an absurdist Monty Python skit, or trying to stop a nuclear bomb by shooting a spitball at it.

Our view? Typing hard in Red America, Housman is being pretty silly when he downplays the repulsive nature of what Candidates Trump and Vance did.

On the other hand, there it sits, to this very say—the repeated claim, by various people, that President Biden was still sharp as a tack as he ran for re-election. 

The claim that he was running circles around his staff, so deep were his wellsprings of energy. The claim that he would be perfectly able to serve for another four years.

For ourselves, we had largely stopped believing such claims as of August 2023. We have one friend—a very good and decent person—who told us that he still believed those claims as of maybe one month ago.

Was President Biden still sharp as a tack? Was he prepared to serve for another four years? As we noted on Monday, this is what happened, on last Sunday's Meet the Press, when Senator Schunmer was asked:

WELKER (1/5/25): Do you feel, as we have this conversation today, that President Biden could serve another four years, had he stayed in the race and potentially won?

SCHUMER: Well, I'm not going to speculate. As I said, I think his record is a stellar one. And he'll go down in history as a really outstanding president.

The fact that Welker asked was striking enough. It seemed to us that Senator Schumer's refusal to answer was in fact a fairly clear reply.

Don't get us wrong! Despite our concerns about his acuity, we were going to vote for Candidate Biden had he stayed in the race. We were going to vote for Candidate Biden because of the massive intellectual and moral disorder put on display by the other candidate (and by his running mate), again and again and again and again, all through the past many years.

We were going to vote for Candidate Biden, but that's not the question we're asking. The question(s) we're asking are substantially different, and they boil down to this:

Is this one of the ways we lost some votes in this year's election? Is that one of the ways we Blues may have earned our way out?

We'd assume that the answer to those questions is yes. We'll continue this rumination tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Housman says that we were lied to. Is there any chance he's right?

Housman says this may be why Candidate Harris lost. Is there any chance that's right?

TUESDAY: While others observed the effects of Blue Ruin...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2024

We explored an award-winning text: We basically lost the whole day today on this, the latest of our alternate week Medical Mondays Plus One.

Returning to our sprawling campus, we saw that other people had been exposed to the effects of Blue America's loss in November's election. 

They'd watched the incoming president offer his latest highly peculiar remarks. For ourselves, we'd been locked away, way across town, exploring a peculiar, though widely honored, text.

Regarding incoming President Trump:

How did we ever lose to this guy? Many of us in Blue America have struggled with that question.

Those of us in Blue America can see the way the other guy's voters got conned and misled by Red America's various teams. We may have a harder time seeing the ways those of us in Blue America may have helped earn our way out.

We'll return to that topic tomorrow, adding this unpleasant question to the pre-existing mix:

Is it possible that those of us in Blue America have also been conned, along the way, by our own tribe's leadership cadres?

We'd say that yes, it's quite possible. We'll return to such matters tomorrow.

On a massively grimier note, Greg Gutfeld has returned to the air at the Fox News Channel after a lengthy paternity leave. 

The early results have been ugly. As we've noted in the past, part of the responsibility for that moral and intellectual disgrace lies directly with Our Own Blue Elites.

More on Gutfeld's return tomorrow. For today, this:

During today's Medical Monday Plus One, we perused an interesting, later addition to an honored text. We refer to the preface to this award-winning book:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

As we told you on Saturday, the monumentally puzzling book was published in 1979. Perhaps inevitably, it won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

We've presented its title in bold. Below that, we've presented a puzzling summary which appears on the honored book's cover.

The book was published in 1979. The preface to which we refer was published twenty years later. In it, the author offers a surprising complaint:

He complains about the endless array of people who haven't been able to discern what the book is about!

The preface appeared as part of a twentieth-anniversary edition of the honored book. Title included, the new preface started like this:

Preface to GEB's Twentieth-anniversary Edition 

So what is this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid—usually known by its acronym, "GEB"— really all about? 

That question has hounded me ever since I was scribbling its first drafts in pen, way back in 1973. Friends would inquire, of course, what I was so gripped by, but I was hard pressed to explain it concisely. A few years later, in 1980, when GEB found itself for a while on the bestseller list of The New York Times, the obligatory one-sentence summary printed underneath the title said the following, for several weeks running: "A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids." After I protested vehemently about this utter hogwash, they finally substituted something a little better, just barely accurate enough to keep me from howling again. 

Many people think the title tells it all: a book about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician. But the most casual look will show that these three individuals per se, august though they undeniably are, play but tiny roles in the book's content. There's no way the book is about those three people! 

Well, then, how about describing GEB as "a book that shows how math, art, and music are really all the same thing at their core"? Again, this is a million miles off—and yet I've heard it over and over again, not only from nonreaders but also from readers, even very ardent readers, of the book. 

The complaint continues from there, at substantial length. We'll produce additional text at some point in the near future. For right now, let's review:

Twenty years after the book appeared (and was widely hailed), the author was complaining about an unfortunate fact. Basically, no one has been able to explain what the book is about!

At first, the New York Times got it wrong, the author says. In fairness, the summary the author quotes—"A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids"—makes no apparent sense. 

At first, the New York Times got it wrong—but after that, so did almost everyone else. For today, we ask you to consider only this part of the rolling complaint, as voiced in paragraph 3:

Many people dimwittedly thought the book was about Gödel, Escher and Bach! Except, "There's no way the book is about those three people!" the author now complained.

Our reaction would be this:

If "many people" thought some such thing, should that have been surprising? As the author explicitly noted, the title of his book includes those three names! Indeed, that's how the book's title starts:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

That's the title of the book! Could that be where people got the idea that the book was about those three people?

Consider the perfect beauty of this strange presentation:

Twenty years after a major book was published and was massively honored, its author is complaining that no one has been able to explain what the book is about! In that, we'll admit we discern a tiny hint of pomposity on the part of the author in question. But we also find a suggestion of the inability of our academic and journalistic elites to come to terms with a wide array of highly significant manifestations—not excluding the pied piper appeal of our incoming chief executive, who sounded off again today in highly peculiar ways.

In a work upon which GEB is based, Bertrand Russell spent hundreds of pages proving that 1 + 1 = 2 (or something like that). Later, Douglas Hofstadter wrote an impenetrable but award-winning book, then complained, twenty years later, when no one was able to explain what the book was about.

(One thinks, perhaps, of Finnegans Wake. Was this a non-fiction companion?)

Along the way, certain elites alleged that they understood and revered the book. Twenty years later, a petulant author seemed to be complaining that no one has been able to discern what his book was even about.

As he continues, Hofstadter tries to square that circle. Twenty years later, he tries to explain what his book actually is about. 

In our view, he tries and he fails. Gaze on the works of our academic elites! Gaze on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

(The later Wittgenstein was all about this. For better or worse, he too had almost no ability to explain what his work was about!)

We Blues won't be saved by our high elites. As January 20 approaches, is it likely that we Blues will be able to save ourselves?

BREAKING: We're losing a large chunk of time today!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2025

Back to those alternate Tuesdays:  We're losing a large chunk of time today. With the holiday season passed, it's back to those alternate Tuesdays.

We won't be posting until mid-afternoon. Frankly, it's always something!

MONDAY: Schumer refuses to speculate!

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2024

Sanders-Townsend jumps in: The very fact that the question could have been asked helps define the shape of this potentially disastrous era.

The question was asked on yesterday's Meet the Press. Actually, we refer to a pair of questions:

WELKER (1/5/25): Leader Schumer, what do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden's mental acuity?

SCHUMER: No. Look, we didn't. And let's—let’s look, let’s look at President Biden. He's had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal—since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record. And he's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him.

WELKER: Do you feel, as we have this conversation today, that President Biden could serve another four years, had he stayed in the race and potentially won?

SCHUMER: Well, I'm not going to speculate. As I said, I think his record is a stellar one. And he'll go down in history as a really outstanding president.

At that point, Welker moved on.

Could President Biden have served another four years? The simple fact that the question was asked helps define the shape of the political era—and of last year's presidential election, which Blue America narrowly lost

Welker believed it made sense to ask if President Biden could have completed a second term. We were struck by Senator Schumer's answer, in which he didn't say yes.

Schumer said that he and his colleagues didn't mislead the public about the president's mental acuity. He also said he wasn't willing to speculate about the answer to Welker's follow-up question.

Later in that same program, Welker asked Symone Sanders-Townsend about that exchange. We were surprised, but not surprised, by what Sanders-Townsend said:

WELKER: Symone, let's talk about the Democrats. I thought the conversation with Leader Schumer was fascinating. I asked him if he thought President Biden could serve another four years. He kind of pivoted, didn't answer that directly. There's obviously a lot of soul searching going on right now in the Democratic Party. What did you make of what we heard from Leader Schumer?

SANDERS-TOWNSEND: Well, I was very surprised that, when you asked the question about mental acuity, he didn't more forcefully push back. The question on the table is, "Is—is the president all the way there?” And the answer is unequivocally yes. Now, people can say that you feel as though President Biden might be a little too old to do the job, but he is doing the job. And his mental acuity is there. So, I think that there's a conflation of two things here: his mental capacity and serving another four years, as old as he is. But those are two separate things in my opinion. And look, these people that have known Joe Biden their entire political lives, I know Joe Biden is like, "Can you all just please defend me a little more?"

At that point, Welker moved on.

Sanders-Townsend said she was surprised by Schumer's reaction. Turnabout being fair play, we were surprised by hers! 

She said she's sure that President Biden "is all the way there." We aren't sure about that ourselves, and we haven't been for some time.

As we'll start discussing tomorrow, this could surely be one of the ways Blue America lost some potential votes during last year's election.

Schumer wasn't willing to say that President Biden could have continued to serve. He said he hadn't misled the public about the president's mental acuity.

(President Biden is "a great guy," he added as he continued.)

This week, we're looking for the various ways we Blues may have lost the last election. We're looking for some of the factors which may have led otherwise persuadable people to vote for Candidate Trump.

On June 27 of last year, President Biden produced a disastrous debate. Four weeks later, he left the race.

Is that one of the ways we lost some votes? Tomorrow, our discussion continues.

BLUE RUIN: This is a story of human discernment!

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2024

Ways we earned our way out: This is a story of human discernment—a quality which is often in short supply. More specifically, this is a story concerning the ways we Blues have earned our way out.

You'll note that the key word there is plural. The key word there is "ways."

Human discernment being what it is, we humans are routinely inclined to search for the simplest possible explanation for whatever it is we're trying to explain at some particular point in time. And so it has tended to go as we the people of Blue America have tried to explain why we lost the 2024 presidential election.

(Admittedly, we lost by a bit less than 1.5 points. Among the workers on the Fox News Channel, that's now described as "a landslide.")

Four years earlier, in 2020, we won the presidential election, in that case by roughly 4.5 points. In short, our story goes like this, if only in part:

Over the course of the past four years, we Blues went from +4.5 percentage points to -1.5 percentage points. 

On balance, we lost something like six percentage points over the course of four years. And so, an obvious question arises, ripe for explanation:

How did we manage to lose those votes over the course of four years? 

How did we manage to lose those votes? Throughout the week, that will be one of our basic questions. But we'll also be asking such questions as these:

Why was the election that close back in 2020? Why didn't we win in 2020 by even more than 4.5 points? 

Stated a slightly different way: 

Considering the candidate we were running against, why didn't we win that election by a much larger margin?

In short, how did we manage to lose potential votes in the years—indeed, in the five or six decades—before our win in 2020? How have we managed to drive away potential voters over these many long years?

This week, we're finally going to list some of the obvious ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out. We'll be listing some of the ways we earned our way out in the past four years, but also over a longer span of time, dating all the way back to the 1960s.

Briefly, let's be less polite. We're going to list some of the blindingly obvious ways we Blues have managed to throw away votes—and there won't be just one way we did that. As with the Reds, so too with us Blues:

We Blues have managed to drive away voters in a wide assortment of ways.

We've burned away votes in various ways. That said, human discernment can sometimes be quite limited. Among us Blues, as among the Reds, there exists a constant impulse to seek the one lone "answer" to a question—in this case, to seek the one lone explanation for our (rather narrow) defeat in this year's White House race.

We're inclined to present some lone explanation, but we didn't shed potential vote in only one way! Through our incessant human bungling, we Blues have managed to shed potential votes through a wide array of self-defeating behaviors. 

That brings us to a starting point for this week's reports. We refer to a recent "news analysis" piece in the New York Times, and to Kevin Drum's reaction to that piece.

Here are the reports in question. with the Times report going first:

NEWS ANALYSIS  
How the Democrats Lost the Working Class
The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

To peruse that analysis piece, click here. This was the start of Kevin's rebuttal:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety

In the New York Times today, Jonathan Weisman tells the story—well, a story—of how Democrats lost the white working class. It's all about economic anxiety.

Maybe so, but even Weisman himself acknowledges the obvious:

It started in 1968 with "hardhats for Nixon." This was long before de-industrialization. It was all about Vietnam and the counterculture...

Kevin's response continues from there. To peruse it, just click this.

In his essay for the Times, Weisman attempts to explain why the Democratic Party has lost votes among "working class" voters (variously defined) over the course of (however many) years.

As we noted yesterday, Weisman goes all the way back to 1964 to track—or perhaps to pretend to track—the loss of those "working class" votes. At the start of his response, Drum says this shedding of working class votes dates to 1968.

In recent years, there's no question! As we noted yesterday, Democratic Party candidates have plainly lost "working class" votes over the course of the past five White House elections.

In 2008, Candidate Obama won something like 53 percent of such votes, according to (imperfect) exit polls. In last year's election, Candidate Harris won something like 43 percent of those votes.

As such, the loss of working class votes helps explain—is clearly part of—last year's (narrow) defeat. So how did we lose those votes over the course of those sixteen years? 

Plainly, that's a decent question. But now, please notice this:

The headline on Kevin's post seems to suggest that there is only one explanation for the loss of those votes. The headline seems to say that we lost those votes for reasons of culture, not for reasons of economics.

That's what the headline seems to suggest. Inevitably, Blue American commenters quickly stepped in, in some cases dumbing things down to the ground. 

As we humans are inclined to do, some of those commenters offered single, sweeping explanations for the loss of those votes. That said, Kevin ended his post with this passage:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety

[...]

So I continue to have problems with the economic anxiety story. I'm not dead set against it, since financial anxiety can manifest itself in lots of different ways. Still, the bulk of the evidence really seems to point much more toward cultural issues than economic ones.

Kevin seems to be saying that there might be more than one reason for the loss of those working class votes. "Economic anxiety" could be part of what happened, he seems to say—but so could "cultural issues," which he thinks mattered more.

In closing, full disclosure:

According to the Cook Report, 155.2 million people voted in last year's election. Just over 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump.

Candidate Trump was elected by a very large number of people. Also this:

Given the way our exit polls slice and dice the electorate, 27% of this year's voters reported having income of less than $50,000. Also, 57% of this year's voters didn't have a college degree.

Given the ways we slice and dice, those are the numbers analysts may use to define the "working class." Tens of millions of different people are involved—and no, they aren't all the very same person! 

They aren't all the same person! Some have to ride their bikes to the grocery story because they can't afford to put gas in their cars. Many others don't have to do that.

They aren't all the same! But in comment threads throughout Blue America, we Blues frequently march off in search of simplification. Along the way, through our rude and undiscerning behavior, we may even play a role in the eternal practice of driving away potential votes.

We insult Others in sweeping ways; we say extremely dumb things. This is the eternal road to perdition, and it's one of the ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out over the course of the past sixty years.

It started with Nixon, Kevin says. We'd say that's basically accurate. It also includes the wide array of stupid things we Blues routinely insisted on doing and saying during the past four years.

There's no cure for human, the experts all say. All this week, we'll try to answer a very important question:

Through our lack of perfect discernment, how did we Blues manage to shed potential votes to such an extent that we actually managed to lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

The Donald squeaked out a narrow win. How did we endlessly self-impressed Blues manage to help him do that?

There's more than one answer to that question! In our view, a lot of potential votes were shed in a lot of avoidable ways—and yes, it goes back to the 1960s. We ourselves were physically present on the day it started!

Tomorrow: President Biden

SUNDAY: Can you believe the things you read?

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5, 2025

We're going to go with a no: Jonathan Weisman's lengthy piece for the New York Times appears beneath this packaging:

NEWS ANALYSIS
How the Democrats Lost the Working Class
The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

This essay hasn't yet appeared in print editions. For Kevin Drum's reaction, click here. For Paul Krugman, just click this.

We expect to discuss Weisman's essay in the coming week. For today, we direct your attention to one particular passage:

WEISMAN (1/4/25): In November, 56 percent of voters without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump. In 1992, just 36 percent of voters with only a high school diploma voted Republican—about the same percentage that Barry Goldwater got in his overwhelming defeat against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Can you put your faith in the things you read? In this case, should the answer be no?

That passage seems to record a 20-point gain in support for the GOP, from 1992 to 2024, among a certain group of voters. That would be a very large gain—but for starters, riddle us this:

Are "voters without college degrees" the same as "voters with only a high school diploma?" 

The way our exit polls have been conducted, the answer isn't entirely clear—but let's set that to the side. Instead, let's think back to what occurred in 1992, when "just 36 percent of voters with only a high school diploma voted Republican."

For starters, it's true! According to this data set from the New York Times, Candidate George H. W. Bush (R) got 36% of the vote from "voters with only a high school diploma" in that election year.

This past year, Candidate Trump got 56% of the votes from that group, according to exit polls. That does look like a 20-point increase, but an obvious problem obtains:

As you may recall, 1992 was a three-candidate race! Here's the way the vote in question broke down, according to those same New York Times data:

Voters with only a high school diploma, 1992
Bill Clinton (D): 43%
George H. W. Bush (R): 36%
Ross Perot: 21%

Perot drained off 21% of that group's vote in that three-candidate race. For that reason, we're comparing apples to kumquats when we're asked to compare Bush's 36 percent vote share to the 56 percent Trump received in this year's two-candidate race.

As for Goldwater in 1964, he does seem to have received something like 34-38% of the vote from the group in question. That said, he only won 38.5% of the overall vote in that year's historic landslide. For that reason, it looks like an obvious case of cherry-picking when Weisman uses that year as the starting point for the current comparison. 

Sur enough! In 1960, Candidate Nixon received something like 48% of the "high school only" vote—and in 1968, Nixon is said to have outperformed Candidate Humphrey with that group! 

(He did so by a single point, 43%-42%, with third-party Candidate Wallace attracting 15% of that group's vote.)

Weisman's selections seem designed to embellish the apparent size of the Republican gain within that demographic. For those who want to know how this group has voted in recent elections, here are the exit poll numbers for voters with "no college degree:"

Voters with no college degree:
2008: Obama 53, McCain 46
2012: Obama 51, Romney 47
2016: Trump 51, Clinton 44
2020: Trump 50, Biden 48
2024: Trump 56, Harris 43

Over the past five White House elections, the Republican share of that group's vote has risen by ten points. That's a very large gain right there, using numbers which have come from roughly comparable administrations of our imprecise and imperfect exit polls. 

(Full disclosure: George W. Bush seems to have won that group in 2004. Sometimes, it all depends on where you start your comparisons.)

It made no apparent sense for Weisman to base his comparisons on a three-candidate race in 1992, or on the unique blowout loss experienced by Goldwater in 1964. Can you place full faith in the things you read? 

On the very rare occasion, the answer might seem to be no!

SATURDAY: We humans do have our higher pursuits!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2025

Gödel, Escher and Bosh: "What Can I Do For You?"

Once again, it was one of Dylan's questions, during his Christian period. Three albums emerged from that era, including Saved, the 1980 album which included this heartfelt cut.

We're not religious ourselves. Beyond that, we have no cosmological beliefs, beyond the assumption that we humans—at least those of us in the West—don't have the slightest idea who or what or where we are, or how we got wherever we are, or how the realm in which we're found can best be characterized.

Still, "What Can I Do For You?" strikes us as a superb performance of a song which can have strong secular application. A bit of tape we watched yesterday reminded us of the Christian albums, each of which had at least one song we very much liked and admired.

"What Can I Do For You?" was one such song. As our national culture—such as it was—continues to crash and burn. the song is asking a question we ourselves continue to chase.

Then too, there's what Kevin has said.

As we've long noted, we think Kevin Drum's work on lead exposure is the best work we know about in the whole quarter century of online exposition. Plainly, though, he was trying to trigger us when he listed the Hofstadter book among his twenty favorites in this recent street-fighting post.

Why would he want to lash out like that? We have no idea.

He stuck it in at #11, pretending he meant for its inclusion to go unnoticed. To what book do we refer? We refer to this (award-winning) book, a book of close to 800 pages:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

As if that isn't bad enough, the publisher includes this grabber as a capsule description:

A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow! You may be getting our point.

At one point, maybe twelve years ago, we actually tried to peruse this famous book. To be fair, the book did win several major awards. The leading authority offers this short account of the world's longest possible book:

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter.

By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through short stories, illustrations, and analysis, the book discusses how systems can acquire meaningful context despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses self-reference and formal rules, isomorphism, what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. One point in the book presents an analogy about how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

Gödel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science Hardcover.

"Confusion over the book's theme?" Where could that have come from?

In fairness, we included the passage about the awards.  That said, here's what the leading authority tells us next about this award-winning book:

Structure

Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of interweaving narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, usually Achilles and the tortoise, first used by Zeno of Elea and later by Lewis Carroll in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles." These origins are related in the first two dialogues, and later ones introduce new characters such as the Crab. These narratives frequently dip into self-reference and metafiction.

Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally used to connect ideas, such as the "Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach's Magnificat in D; "SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"; and "Typographical Number Theory", or "TNT", which inevitably reacts explosively when it attempts to make statements about itself. One dialogue contains a story about a genie (from the Arabic "Djinn") and various "tonics" (of both the liquid and musical varieties), which is titled "Djinn and Tonic". Sometimes word play has no significant connection, such as the dialogue "A Mu Offering", which has no close affinity to Bach's The Musical Offering.

One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab canon, in which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of common phrases that can be used as either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines that double as an answer to a question in the next line. Another is a sloth canon, where one character repeats the lines of another, but slower and negated.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow! By now, you surely must know what we mean. 

For ourselves, we'd be slow to assume that the judges who awarded those prizes actually read all the way through this book. Beyond that, its reasoning largely turns on "Russell's Paradox," a formulation which we regard as the upper-end academic clown show of the last century.

With apologies, this arrives early in the 787-page book, mostly on page 17:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

[...]

In the examples we have seen of Strange Loops by Bach and Escher, there is a conflict between the finite and the infinite, and hence a strong sense of paradox. Intuition senses that there is something mathematical involved here. And indeed in our own century a mathematical counterpart was discovered, with the most enormous repercussions. And, just as the Bach and Escher loops appeal to very simple and ancient intuitions—a musical scale, a staircase—so this discovery, by K. Gôdel, of a Strange Loop in mathematical systems has its origins in simple and ancient intuitions. In its absolutely barest form, Godel's discovery involves the translation of an ancient paradox in philosophy into mathematical terms. That paradox is the so-called Epimenides paradox, or liar paradox. Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: "All Cretans are liars." A sharper version of the statement is simply "I am lying;" or, "This statement is false." It is that last version which I will usually mean when I speak of the Epimenides paradox. It is a statement which rudely violates the usually assumed dichotomy of statements into true and false, because if you tentatively think it is true, then it immediately backfires on you and makes you think it is false. But once you've decided it is false, a similar backfiring returns you to the idea that it must be true. Try it!

The Epimenides paradox is a one-step Strange Loop, like Escher's Print Gallery. But how does it have to do with mathematics? That is what Gödel discovered. His idea was to use mathematical reasoning in exploring mathematical reasoning itself. This notion of making mathematics "introspective" proved to be enormously powerful, and perhaps its richest implication was the one Gödel found: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. What the Theorem States and how it is proved are two different things. We shall discuss both in quite some detail in this book. The Theorem can be likened to a pearl, and the method of proof to an oyster. The pearl is prized for its luster and simplicity; the oyster is a complex living beast whose innards give rise to this mysteriously simple gem.

Gödel's Theorem appears as Proposition VI in his 1931 paper "On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I." It states:

To every w-consistent recursive class K of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Fig (K) (where v is the free variable of r).

Actually, it was in German, and perhaps you feel that it might as well be in German anyway. So here is a paraphrase in more normal English:

All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.

This is the pearl.

So much to ridicule, so little time—and we do regard that as a clown car. But in this, the world within which Dylan longed to serve, that's a prime example of the (high academic) business we've chosen.

The sheer folly of "This statement is false" would almost seem to come straight out of the work of the later Wittgenstein. We've run through this folly several times in the past. Today, we won't go there again.

In fairness, this endless book won major awards! On the other hand, we regard it, on its face, as a work of manifest nonsense on an ascending scale.

(This statement is false, the logician once said. But to what statement was he referring? No such statement existed!)

"What can I do for you?" Dylan once asked. We've been chasing the same puzzle too, with no good outcome in sight.

Our national discourse, such as it ever has been, has descended all the way onto the garbage pile. Our journalists continue to refuse to discuss the actual state of play as an apparent madman ascends our ultimate crystal stair.

Our discourse sits on the garbage pile. On the highest end of our academic discourse, big piles of bosh fail to help.

We regard GEB as the world's least coherent, most self-impressed and self-referential book. Admittedly, it won several major awards, and our view could always be wrong, if only in some minor way which has long escaped detection.

For extra credit only: "All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions?"

Is there anything "normal" about that "English?" On what planet? Discuss!

VOTERS: Triumph of the jugglers and clowns!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 2025

Dylan nails it again: What was the gentleman talking about when he spoke of "American carnage?"

You're asking an excellent question! 

The speech in question can be read here. Eight years later, as a new year began, we were lost in American squalor:

DONALD TRUMP JUNIOR (1/1/25): Biden’s parting gift to America—migrant terrorists.

We refer to moral and intellectual squalor. The gentleman included a photo of the New Orleans assailant's white truck. 

Minutes later, a flyweight followed suit:

REP. GREENE (1/1/25): New Orleans terrorist attacker is said to have come across the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!!

Shut the border down!!!

Who did our government bomb lately that is taking it out on innocent Americans?

For the record, we don't even know what that last question meant. And no—instant shouting about what "is said" to the side, the New Orleans perpetrator didn't come across the border at all!

In fairness, Rep. Greene's one suggestion—"Shut the border down!!!"—isn't the worst idea in the world, taken on its own. (Though that of course would depend on what is meant by the familiar suggestion.)

How did it [ever] get this far? You're asking an excellent question! This morning, watching Fox & Friends, we thought about a few of the Fox News Channel's collection of broken toys:

Fox News Channel journalists:
Emily Campagno: Former head cheerleader, Oakland Raiders
Tyrus: Former professional "wrestler"
Kennedy: Former VJ, MTV
Greg Gutfeld: Fellow who asked, on (at least) three prime time programs this summer, if Hunter Biden has started "banging" or "[BLEEP]ing" Jill Biden yet

He asked and he asked, then he asked again. As he did, the people who went to the finest schools agreed to avert their gaze.

At the age of 60, Gutfeld serves as monarch of a stream of flyweight D-list comedians on our most-watched "cable news" channel. 

Gutfeld handles the broken toys. Bob Dylan, who's back in the news again, once referred to such an assembly in the following manner:

Like A Rolling Stone

[...]

Ah, you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns 
When they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain't no good
To let other people get your kicks for you.

"Jugglers and clowns," the younger man said. Today, such types are ascendant.

The sheer stupidity on the Fox News Channel this morning was matched by the sheer stupidity on the Fox News Channel last night. Then again, have there occasionally been jugglers and clowns supplying kicks for us over here in our own Blue America? 

Briefly, let's be clear! There's no reason why a former "wrestler" couldn't be an insightful news analyst. There's no reason why a D-list comedian couldn't be able to offer insightful analysis.

There's no reason why commentators of the Fox News Channel kind couldn't offer insightful analysis. That said:

As a general matter, the Fox News Channel has established one basic fact. As a general matter, selection of people like these to serve as a nation's major tribunes will quite likely turn out to be an extremely bad idea.

For the record, the jugglers and clowns will be keeping it up as the new year proceeds. 

Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly and jugglers and clowns gotta juggle. That, of course, is especially true when the jugglers and the clowns are being paid large sums to perform that service.

That said, though our major news orgs have agreed not to try, it has always been relatively easy to spot the juggling being conducted by the other tribe.

How about our own Blue tribe? Have we had our own jugglers and clowns in recent years? 

The latest column by Clarence Page raised that question for us once again. Page writes for Tribune Content Agency—for the Chicago Tribune. He's a good and smart and decent person. We once sat next to him, all evening long, during a charity dinner event.

His column was published on December 30. Headline included, his column started like this:

Behind the “Lie of the Year,” some bitter truths

As it has been doing yearly since 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year. There was an abundance of nominees.

And, it turns out, they chose the same whopper I identified as a top contender months ago: President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Haitian migrants were eating the household pets of Springfield, Ohio.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” said the former and now future Republican president during his Sept. 10 debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The people that came in,” he continued to a TV audience of an estimated 67 million viewers. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Make no mistake! That repeated claim, by Trump and by incoming second banana Vance, was an unmistakable example of modern American squalor. But given the profusion of bogus claims within our failed American discourse—given the "abundance of nominees"—certain questions may seem to arise: 

Should a major fact-checking site be picking one single "Lie of the Year?" Also, should a major fact-checking site be trafficking in the difficult term "lie" at all?

To be honest, it seems a bit flyweight to us when PolitiFact adopts such practices. That said, a nation has essentially ceased to exist when a high-profile pair of jugglers and clowns can traffic in statements about the eating of pets in the way Trump and Vance repeatedly did. 

There and elsewhere, Trump and Vance did engage in the ultimate act of squalor. But Page goes on in his piece to roll his eyes about a different view—about an alternate view advanced from within the ranks of the other tribe.

Let's be clear! The complaint in question is largely dumb—but that may not be all it is. In our view, Page makes it a bit too easy when he brushes that pushback aside.

Have we Blues had our own jugglers and clowns? Have we allowed ourselves to be misled by ridiculous statements and by absurd, unexplained behaviors by major figures within our own flailing tribe?

Like the citizens of the fictional Oran, have we failed to see the unmistakable signs of the plague all around us? "Like everybody else," have we been "wrapped up in [our]selves?" Did we "forget to be modest?"

The younger Dylan may perhaps have seen our cadre coming. Again and again, our tribunes "went to the finest schools," but do we now sometimes resemble this group?

You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal.

We didn't lose by much this year. But we did manage to lose, and the results could turn out to be catastrophic.

Many of us still can't imagine why any decent person wouldn't have voted the same way we did. The answer starts with the complaint Page brushes aside, but it dates back much farther than that.

The car ride starts with President Biden. But then again, it also starts in the autumn of 65.

American squalor is now in the saddle. How should we Blues react?

Next week: Your question answered at last

VOTERS: Incoming president does it again!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2024

This is the discourse we've chosen: "Th[is] darkest evening of the year?"

These "darkest evenings" are rather common at this point in time. Yesterday morning, in the second half of the 10 o'clock hour, the broadcast team at the Fox News Channel got over its skis just a bit.

There's certainly nothing new about that! But as you can see by clicking this link, here's what was said by correspondent Alexis McAdams, starting at 10:39 a.m. Eastern:

MCADAMS (1/1/25): According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate. This is just coming into our newsroom. This is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt, working their federal sources on this.

The suspect drives that truck, with a Texas license plate, right through Bourbon Street. According to their sources to Spunt and Jenkins, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago, OK?

So said McAdams, by now at 10:40 a.m. By now, it seems that one part of what she said was simply wrong. But it's perfectly clear that McAdams had ventured out over her skis.

As every Fox News viewer would know, Eagle Pass is a south Texas border community. Especially at Fox, Eagle Pass has played a leading role in the general immigration story in the course of the past year. 

McAdams had now said that the perpetrator of the murders in New Orleans had "come through Eagle Pass" just two days before, according to federal sources.

The insinuation was fairly obvious. At that point, Fox News Channel anchor Molly Line let the insinuation pass. 

Elsewhere, down in the Sunshine State, someone else may have leaped at the bait. Eight minutes after McAdams' report, an incoming president offered this post on the inaptly named Truth Social site: 

INCOMING PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP (1/1/25): When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!

So posted the incoming president. His post drove the notion that the perpetrator, whose identity was still unknown, must have been a terrorist—an illegal immigrant?—who had recently entered the country across the southern border.

Needless to say, it could have turned out to be true! But as the matter has turned out, it seems that it actually wasn't.

As it seems to have turned out, the perpetrator was an American citizen, born and raised in Beaumont. But in this way, an incoming president spread an insinuation far and wide. 

As the new year dawned over our flailing nation, this was again a major part of the national discourse we've chosen. 

By 10:48 a.m., the Fox News Channel's David Spunt was clarifying the matter. By clicking here, you can see what Spunt now said:

SPUNT: So we're hearing that the vehicle was traced to coming across from Mexico into the United States from Eagle Pass, Texas two days ago. To be clear, we don't one hundred percent know that this man, and we do know that the suspect was a man, was the person driving that across the border. That is unclear at this point.

They didn't know it "one hundred percent?" In fact, they didn't know it at all! But by now, the insinuation had gone forth to the nation. An incoming president seemed to have taken the insinuation and run.

Rather plainly, the insinuation lurking in McAdams' report advanced preferred Storyline. The incoming president seemed to run with the insinuation as millions of people looked on.

This is part of the discourse we've chosen as we begin the year in this, our flailing nation. In his instant post, the incoming president seemed to be driving the latest clown car. For many voters in Red America, this is one of the clown cars they've chosen over the past dozen years.

(We're dating back to the start of the clown car claims, broadcast on Fox by Donald J. Trump, about President Obama's imagined place of birth. Greta van Susteren—for the record, she and her husband were Rachel's drinking pals—served as the "caddy" for Trump's endless inane birther claims.)

Many voters in Red America have chosen to ride in that car. But what about the various cars those of us in Blue America have possibly chosen to ride in?

Have we, the voters of Bue America, chosen to rise in some clown cars too? Has some such lack of discernment been a part of the discourse we've chosen?

Those of us in Blue America have been slow to spot the fact that we've engaged in errors of discernment too.  In Tuesday's report, we offered a glimpse of the darkness which can even lurk in Blue American hearts. 

According to experts, such occasional hearts of darkness are part of our species' basic wiring. The clown cars which have carried us to this place are simply part of the deal.

In our view, we Blues have also been riding in clown cars over the past many years. Next week, as the new year unfolds, we plan to suggest some possibilities for you.

The incoming president has been this way for years. He's one of the clown cars we've chosen.

That said, what about us over here? Isit possible that there have been ways in which we Blues have chosen to ride in such cars? Have there been ways in which our own imperfect discernment has probably driven voters away, may have quite probably cost us votes in this past year's narrow election?

Lori Mosura's a skid mark, some voters have said. She needs to get it good and hard! She needs to be culled from the herd!

Tomorrow: Whatever seems to come next

WEDNESDAY: Man is shoved onto subway tracks!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2025

Trump won by millions and millions: Absent this morning's event in New Orleans, it might have been the leading topic on this morning's Fox & Friends. It could have been a contender!

We're not even saying that would have been wrong! Even as we sit here typing, this is the start of the news report at the New York Times:

Man Is Arrested in Subway Shoving in Manhattan

A 23-year-old man was arrested and charged with attempted murder on Tuesday night, hours after a man waiting on a Manhattan subway platform was violently shoved into the path of an oncoming train.

The victim, whose name had not been released, was in critical but stable condition at Bellevue Hospital, the police said.

The man who was arrested in the shoving, Kamel Hawkins, was also charged with second-degree assault. He has a string of past arrests on charges of assault, harassment and weapons possession, according to police and court records.

That might have been the featured news event on today's Fox & Friends. As has been decreed by Caesar, everyone would have agreed with everything everyone said.

As everyone knows, the Fox News Channel presents certain established Storylines concerning events of this general type. By the way, can anyone say that the Fox News Channel's established framework is obviously "wrong?" 

At this point, we offer a question:

Is it possible that those of us in Blue America have perhaps been dumbnified a tiny bit by the established approach to such events of our own tribal orgs? (We refer to an established approach in which we agree to glance away from the themes which are driving the discourse at Fox.) Is it possible that Red America is actually being exposed to the more intelligent approach to events of this type?

(Quickly, also this: Under established rules of the game, it's journalistically normal to discuss behaviors of this type in terms of mental illness and mental health. Such concepts are not allowed to appear within our failing nation's political reporting or discussions.)

This morning, also this:

Last evening, as the old year ended, the incoming president was asked about President Biden's reported belief that he would have won the election had he stayed iin the race.

The incoming president doesn't seem to agree. As he gave his response, he cleared up a lingering question about the November election:

TRUMP (12/31/24): Well, he was way behind. He would’ve really, I assume, not had a chance. He was way behind her, and we won in record numbers, as you know. in every swing state. 

We won the popular vote by millions and millions of people, so—

Hey look, I wish him well. He had a chance to do it in the debate and that didn't work out too well for him. That was, I guess, the reason that really led to his downfall.

Interesting! The selling of message never stops on various sides of various aisles. That has perhaps never been more true than with the endless selling of message performed by the incoming president, pretty much all through his life.

According to the incoming president, he won the nationwide popular vote "by millions and millions of people." Also, he seems to have said that he won by "record numbers" in every swing state—even in Michigan, where he won by less than one point!

The messaging never stops, and not just from Donald J. Trump. Just last night, we saw the latest Stepford on the Fox News Channel describe November's election as "a landslide." 

Needless to say, no numbers were cited. According to the Cook Political Report, here's where the numbers stand:

Nationwide popular vote, 2024
Donald J. Trump (R): 77,301,997 (49.80%)
Kamala Harris (D): 75,017,626 (48.33%)

Our question: Is fewer than 2.3 million votes actually "millions and millions?" Before you answer, remember what we showed you yesterday: 

In certain precincts, 2.1 percentage points is less, while 1.47 percentage points is known to be much, much more.

Did Candidate Donald J. Trump actually win "by millions and millions of people?"  At the New York Post, Douglas McEntyre has reported what the incoming president said. McEntyre was careful to avoid citing any actual numbers. 

Within the world of modern journalism, statistics can be very hard. Storyline is understood to be easy and pleasing.

Numbers can be annoying and hard. Tribal dogma is easy. That said, riddle us this:

Is it possible that, on balance, the Fox News Channel has been more right than MSNBC about that event in New York? Is it possible that cable viewers in Red America have been dumbed down less, in this particular content area, than those of us who are Blue?

We're asking you if that is possible. Over here in Blue America, how's our mental and intellectual health as another year starts?

Also this: As we noted in Monday's report, Woody Guthrie has said this:

Well now I just ramble 'round to see what I can see.

It's a wide, wicked world, sure a funny place to be.

Is it possible that the messaging is general within our flailing nation, over some topics more than others? Also, is it possible that, on the rare occasion, our messaging here in Blue America may have tended to dumb us down?

A final bit of information:

At this point, the man who was shoved onto the tracks is apparently still alive.