WHO WE ARE: "Wrestlers" and VJs and Divorced Dads!

FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025

An assault on the human experiment: As Secretary Rumsfeld used to say, a nation marches into the future with the species it has.

Within our own imperfect species, some attitudes die very hard. Experts say that such attitudes are bred in the bone. For better or worse—quite often for worse—they're part of who we are.

One such attitude was on display last night on the Fox News Channel. Every night, CEO Suzanne Scott pries open the garbage can and this sort of conduct crawls out:

Kid Rock Tells Fox News America Has Low Birth Rate Because ‘No Guy Wants to Sleep’ With ‘Ugly Ass, Broke, Crazy’ Liberal Women

That's the headline on the report from Mediaite. As you can see by clicking this link, this is part of what crawled forth onto the land:

During an interview on Thursday with the 54-year-old musician, Fox News host Jesse Watters played a clip of a group of liberal protesters and asked, “When you play your concerts, do you ever see anybody with blue hair, armpit hair—female armpit hair? Some of these people we’re looking at, Kid, I don’t know.”

“Listen, I was just watching your clips, and you know, we have this low birth rate in America, and it all made sense,” replied Kid Rock. “It just hit me right now because who’s gonna sleep with these ugly ass, broke, crazy, deranged, TDS liberal women?”

He continued, “I mean, you look at these rallies, it’s like a bunch of women that no guy wants to sleep with and a bunch of dudes that want to sleep with each other.”

Watters had spotted some armpit hair. It had shaken him right to his soul, and his guest knew where to go from there.

Kid Rock is 54; Watters is 46. Certain attitudes, bred in the bone, are slow to disappear. On the Fox News Channel, those attitudes are put on display every night.

Two hours later, Greg Gutfeld crawled out for his own prime time, "cable news" show. He opened with his standard two minutes of jokes, the better to create an illusion by.

This is not a comedy show; it isn't "political satire." It's a stone-cold a corporate propaganda vehicle which hides behind comedy elements.

Last night, it was still exactly10:00 p.m. when this strangely angry man offered this as his second joke:

GUTFELD (5/15/25): Michelle [Obama] also admitted on the podcast that she fights with her husband over the thermostat.

She wants it at 70 degrees, while he wants it up his butt.

The claim that Barack Obama is secretly gay is now a standard part of this ghastly "cable news" program. (Also, President Obama's wife is secretly a man.) It gets mixed in with various claims in which the (female) co-hosts of The View are relentlessly compared to horses and cows and pigs and whales and dogs of various sorts.

This little guy, with his Russkie wife, almost seems to be sunk in angry incel culture. Suzanne Scott turns this fellow loose each night with a cast of flunkies hired to say that they agree with his various endless tirades.

Watters, Gutfeld, Kid Rock?  They're part of who we are! So are the major orgs in Blue America which refuse to report or discuss what happens on these astonishing shows on this ersatz "cable news" channel.

The ugly conduct on this channel constitutes an assault on the human experiment. More specifically, some of the conduct is ugly. Some is the conduct is merely stupid, is merely the work of clowns.

The channel's conduct represents an assault on the possibility of the American project, challenged as it already is. But at the New York Times, at MSNBC, at CNN, at Mediaite, the various suits who set the rules have agreed that this idiotic, ugly conduct can't be reported and also can't be discussed.

David Brooks won't talk about this. Neither will Lawrence O'Donnell.

With that, we return to the all-star lineup assembled for the Gutfeld! program of last Tuesday night. 

Just how stupid does this channel get?  These are the people Scott had waved onto the air, with the direction that they should help a defective host pretend to discuss the world's major news events:

Panelists, Gutfeld! program: May 6, 2025
Kennedy: Former MTV VJ
Tyrus: Former professional "wrestler"
Jamie Lissow: Star of "The Divorced Dad Comedy Tour"
Paul Mauro: Former NYPD Inspector 

It was the standard gathering of stumblebum flyweights, with the gay-baiting, misogyny-adjacent Gutfeld in the driver's seat. For the record, no other part of American journalism is perfect. Also, though, no other part of American journalism is as defiantly stupid as this.

With that, we pause for a minor aside:

There's often (not always) an obvious element of truth to this host's endless diatribes.  That said, he can't seem to offer his critiques without the furious anger and the ugly assaults which are his basic stock in trade.

The inability to beat back anger is a part of who we are. It dates all the way back to "The Rage of Achilles" (and of Agamemnon) at the very dawn of the west. 

Today, the inability to beat back anger presents in such ways as these:

Trump’s Comms Director Blows Up at Reporter: ‘You Must Be Truly F*cking Stupid’

[...]

“CNN had this blithering idiot on @InsidePolitics from The Daily Beast named @JoannaColes making unsubstantiated claims about President Trump’s health,” he wrote at the time. “Joanna is a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”

That would qualify as one meltdown. Also, we can offer this:

‘SHAME ON YOU!’ Seb Gorka Totally Melts Down Under Questioning in Live Interview

[...]

"Oh, of course you don’t. It’s just accidents. The four symbols represent the letters MS. This is why Politico is a joke. This is where you are gutter press and fake news that those four symbols that just happen to comport with the letters, MS, and the numbers 13, don’t, in this case, represent MS-13. You’re sitting here live defending a member of MS-13. That’s why I regret coming here. Because this isn’t journalism, this is protecting those who hate America. Shame on you. We are saving lives. Saving lives!"

For the record, we're fairly sure that Dasha Burns isn't the "gutter press." That said, we suggest that you might want to review those two reports from Mediaite. 

(On tape from that same Politico event, we saw Callie Means constantly responding to sensible questions from Burns with barely disguised hints of his great magisterial anger. He managed to hold his condescension and his anger in check in a way that some others didn't.)

Those instincts are part of who we are as we try to march into the future. So was the conversation which took place on Tuesday evening, May 6, on the Gutfeld! program.

The CEO had grouped a former VJ with a former "wrestler," and also with a Divorced Dad. They were now invited to slime Dr. Fauci for perhaps the ten millionth time.

There was no sign that any of these flyweights had the first freaking idea what they were talking about. For the record, the former "wrestler" is an ever-expanding blob of self-regard. The former VJ is quite hard to describe.

The flyweights proceeded to deliver the dope about the aforementioned Fauci. It started with a bogus claim from the poisonous host about the size of Dr. Fauci's federal pension, then spiraled down from there.

The VJ, the "wrestler" and the poisonous host had a great deal to tell us this night. 

Dr. Fauci is "a horrible, vile person," Fox viewers were quickly told. The problem is that he's just "so immoral and authoritarian."

Also, Dr. Fauci had killed a million people in the course of the Covid pandemic. "His ass should be dragged through the House and the Senate every damn day" in the course of a grand inquisition about "the beagles and the lockdowns and the school closures and the church closures and all the rest of it," Red America's voters were told.

Viewers were told that Dr. Fauci had been helping the Chinese develop bioweapons. Those weapons were "worse than mustard gas." They were "worse than what Hitler had." 

If the Chinese has been giving Hunter Biden diamonds, "what do you think they were fiving him for helping them make bioweapons?" Inquiring minds at the Fox News Channel very much wanted to know!

At one point, the disordered person who helms the show gave voice to an unexplained thought. "We don't even have time to look at his role in AIDS,"' the poisonous fellow said, as if his collection of defectives would have had the slightest idea about any aspect of that.

The gong-show went on and on, in standard Fox News Channel fashion. Apparently because conversations like these are being scored as "political satire" and "entertainment," the chroniclers at Mediaite have apparently been told that they must take a dive with respect to these presentations.

A studio audience cheered as this unpacking pf garbage went on. Finally, the capper came from the former professional "wrestler." The massive bag of self-regard brought the segment to a close:

TYRUS (5/6/25): A lot of people don't have grandparents today because of that son of a bitch.

GUTFELD: Yeah! All right!

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

GUTFELD: Up next, Greasy Gavin is back.

"Greasy Gavin" is Governor Newsom. Basically, this is all these idiots have.

These "conversations" take place night after night on this primetime "cable news" program. It airs at 7 p.m. on the coast, but Variety praises it as the most-watched "late night" program.

Nancy Pelosi has used too much Botox. President Obama is gay.

Liberal women are all too fat. With apologies, President Biden's pants are still full of "turds."

The angry stumblebum booked on this show are part of who we are. So is the refusal in Blue America to discuss this nightly assault.

Lawrence O'Donnell won't talk about this. Neither will Rachel Maddow. David Brooks won't mention this either. 

As Dylan noted long ago, all three "went to the finest schools." The silence they exhibit is part of who we are.

There's nothing anyone can do about this. As with Russell and Gödel, so too here:

This is all we have.

WHO WE ARE: Why does anyone believe Donald Trump?

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2025

Why does anyone believe us? Long ago, Betrand Russell was gobsmacked by a silly "paradox." As we noted yesterday, we love the passage in question.

Hold on, though. There's more!

In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead spent 700 pages establishing the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 (or doing some such thing). As we noted yesterday, we love to contemplate the apparent absurdity of that.

It's as we noted yesterday! According to the later Wittgenstein, the greatest thinkers in the western tradition have routinely been gobsmacked by the darnedest things. Their work has featured "the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking" pretty much all the way down!

Right here in the present day, President Trump has an extremely strong inclination to say the darnedest things. Why does anyone believe him? Why do any voters believe the things he says?

Why do voters believe what he says? More in sorrow than in anger, our answer proceeds like this:

Late last month, Michael Tomasky wrote a piece for The New Republic which asked that very question. We'd call his piece instructive.

The triple headline it sported was perhaps a bit impolite. Below, you see the core of his presentation: 

Fooled Again
Who Were Those Gullible People Who Believed Donald Trump’s Bullsh*t?
His campaign promises, from peace in Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many people believed him.

[...]

One thought keeps popping back into my head: Who were these people who were gullible enough to believe Donald Trump’s bullshit?

How many times did Trump say he’d end that war [in Ukraine] on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast.

But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase “in 24 hours” many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?

What kind of voters were dumb enough to believe all that stupid sh*t? Tomasky, whose work we've long admired, very much wanted to know!

Our answer would go like this:

For the record, 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump. Those millions of people weren't all the same person. 

They didn't all believe (or disbelieve) the exact same things. They hadn't all heard the same things. They didn't all have the same ideas about what Candidate Trump had promised, proposed or said.

Imaginably, many of them had never heard the things he'd said about ending the war in Ukraine. In fairness, Tomasky also seems to have been a bit behind the curve on that topic. 

Editor, name-call thyself! To see what we mean, you can scroll through this voluminous fact check by CNN's Daniel Dale:

Fact check: ... Here are 53 times Trump said he’d end Ukraine war within 24 hours or before taking office

[...]

On the campaign trail in 2023 and 2024, Trump said on dozens of occasions, in an entirely serious tone, manner and context, that he would end the war in Ukraine either within 24 hours of his return to the White House or even sooner than that. He said over and over again, including at both presidential debates of 2024, that he would have the war “settled” when he was president-elect, before his inauguration.

Over and over, Dale presents instances where Candidate Trump said that he would end the war even before taking office. Routinely, the candidate's promise concerning the war in Ukraine was even stranger than Tomasky recalled. 

Over and over, the candidate said he would settle the war even before his inauguration! Presumably, some such negotiation on his part would have violated aspects of American law, but he said it again and again, as Dale documents in his lengthy list.

In his column, Tomasky seems to have forgotten all that, assuming he ever knew it. In the process, he understated the strangeness of what Candidate Trump actually said. 

That said, Tomasky follows the news on a daily basis; it's his occupation. He doesn't work in an Amazon facility. He doesn't deliver the mail door-to-door, and he doesn't drive a truck.

We've always admired Tomasky! But despite the fact that the news in his occupation, he himself didn't seem to be aware of what the candidate repeatedly said.

It isn't the borderline mistake he made. Instead, it's the tribal arrogance. The guy who follows the news for a living was now mocking tens of millions of regular people about how dumb and how clueless they were.

There's a ton of tribal arrogance here in Blue America. We Blues have never quite found the way to move past that undisguised attitude.

Tomasky has always struck us as the last person who would ever succumb to that point of view. That said, these are deeply challenging times.

Why did people vote for Trump? We can think of a million reasons! The arrogance displayed in that column would be one of those reasons, but the reasons continue from there.

Why did people vote for Trump? In some cases, they voted for him because of the unexplained southern border. (It remains unexplained to this day.) 

In some cases, they voted for him because of the remarkable state of affairs involving President Biden himself. The problematic behavior there is just starting to hit the fan.

In some cases, they voted for him because of the positions which came to be derided as "woke." With respect to that arena, we Blues have adopted many positions which help establish a basic point:

There's no such thing as a good intention which can't be unwisely pursued.

Different people voted for Trump for different reasons. In some cases, people voted for Candidate Trump because, as they were watching the Fox News Channel, they saw a piece of videotape like this:

CA student details experience being forced to share locker room with biological male
California student Celeste Duyst discusses her experience being forced to share a locker room with a biological male and the response to telling her story on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'

In our view, Fox & Friends Weekend is an assault on the human experiment. That said, some people voted for Candidate Trump because they saw a tape like that on that particular program.

We Blues! We have a lot of splainin' to do at the present time. We know of no sign that we'll be able to rise to the challenge. In our view, the situation may be even worse than it seems.

We were disappointed by the arrogance in Tomasky's column, but it's a common trait here in Blue America. He didn't remember what Trump had said, but he name-called the lesser breed, as a group, for how stupid and dumb they are.

Russell fell for "the liar's paradox." Michael Tomasky, a good, decent person, eventually fell for that.

From the Blue perspective, we're stuck with a very unusual president. He persistently says the darnedest things.

Tens of millions of fellow citizens believed that we were worse!

Tomorrow: As heard last week on the Gutfeld! show:

"A lot of people don't have grandparents today because of that son of a bitch."

WEDNESDAY: What happened in an array of incidents?

WEDNESDAY MAY 14, 2025 

Great Awakenings, don't fail us now: One day short of four weeks later, an inquiring mind apparently wanted to know.

On April 18, President Trump had seemed to say that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had the letters and numbers "M, S, 1, 3" tattooed right on his knuckles! 

The implausible claim was happily bruited all through Red America. Three weeks passed before the New York Times offered a half-hearted attempt to fact-check what the president had said.

The normalization is everywhere now. To appearances, so is the cowardice, or perhaps the mammoth indifference. 

Today, Secretary Noem testified before the Homeland Security Committee in the House. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) wanted to nail down the facts about the president's claim.

He asked and asked and asked and asked. According to a reasonable transcription by Mediaite, the colloquy which wasn't a colloquy started off like this:

SWALWELL (5/14/25): Madam Secretary, you agree that the letters “M-S” and the number 13, in Times Roman Numeral font, that they are doctored on this photo, right?

NOEM: Congressman, Abrego Garcia is–

SWALWELL: No, no. I’m just asking about this photo.

NOEM: –a known member of MS-13. It wasn’t based off of tattoos. It was based off an entire case.

SWALWELL: OK, and I’ll accept that for the purpose of this question. You agree, though, that this is doctored? Is that right?

NOEM: The same protocols that are applied to every–

SWALWELL: Madam Secretary, I want you to have credibility and I want you to be taken seriously. Is this doctored or is it not doctored?

NOEM: Sir, I am taken quite seriously because–

SWALWELL: Is it doctored or not doctored?

NOEM: –I approach my job with the importance that the president has given me to do my job.

SWALWELL: I understand. Is it doctored or not doctored?

NOEM: One thing that’s important to remember is that every single time a case is built–

SWALWELL: Madam Secretary, I have a 7-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 3-year-old. I have a bullshit detector. I’m just asking you: is this doctored or not doctored?

In our view, he could have gone with "photoshopped" instead of "doctored." In our view, he could have skipped the part about the "bullshit detector."

That said, the question went on and on, as did the lack of an answer. Eventually, believe it or not, the lady actually said this:

NOEM: So what is your point?

SWALWELL: My question is, the numbers, and the letter MS-13—could you look at the photo, please? It's right in front of you—

NOEM: Are you saying Abrego Garcia is not a wife beater? That he's not a criminal? That he's not a human trafficker? That he's not a member of MS-13?

To our eye and ear, that didn't seem to be what the fellow was "saying." Indeed, was he "saying" anything at all? It seemed to us that he was actually asking a question!

Secretary Noem wasn't in her mega-prison attire today. She was also refusing to answer.

Last night, she appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime. While there, she went with this account of what happened last Friday at that detention center in Newark:

NOEM (5/13/25): I tell you what, Jesse, what happened last Friday was we had members of Congress assaulting law enforcement officers. They were cooperating with criminals to create criminal acts. 

And then they’re saying that they were providing oversight. This wasn’t oversight. This was committing felonies. This was going out and attacking people who stand up for the rule of law. 

And it was absolutely horrible. I can’t believe they act like this and then they defend it and then they are doing these acts of violence to get people out of detention centers that are rapists, that are murderers, that are people that are foreign terrorist organizations, that have been out there victimizing our communities in the United States of America.

What are they trying to do? Release these people back into the country so that there can be more Laken Rileys? So there can be more Jocelyn Nungarays? I don’t understand what their point is. They have completely lost their minds. They have completely lost their minds.

According to Noem, three members of Congress had assaulted law enforcement officers. In some way which went unexplained, they'd been "cooperating with criminals to create criminal acts."

According to Noem, they may have been trying to release [rapists and murderers] back into the country so that they could commit more murders! Eventually, she even played this card, speaking of the alleged violent attacks on ICE officers:

NOEM: The fact that a member of Congress punched them, hit them, body-slammed them, and then claimed that they were the victims, it's astounding to me.

As we noted yesterday, Tricia McLaughlin seemed to have abandoned the claim that someone got body-slammed that day. Just like that, the slam was back, though the videotape of the body slam was still strangely absent.

Needless to say, Jesse just sat there and took it as Secretary Noem declaimed.

Conduct of this kind represents a type of silent secession. Red America's tribal leaders are claiming the right to tell Red America's voters whatever they want them to hear.

As this conduct heightens, Blue America's major news orgs keep acting like there's nothing to look at. Meanwhile, and for the record, the Washington Post's review of the forthcoming Tapper / Thompson book starts off today like this:

‘Original Sin’ indicts the ‘cover-up’ of a steeply declining Joe Biden

In December 2022, Jon Favreau, a co-host of the massively popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” took his family to visit the White House. Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, had extensive connections within the Biden administration and brought his family along to visit his old stomping grounds. After a brief detour to say hello to a friend, Favreau went to his old office and was surprised to find President Joe Biden sitting there, charming his family. Not only that, the president had recognized Favreau’s mother-in-law from a fundraiser she had attended years earlier; he soon invited the whole group to the Oval Office, where he regaled them with a blow-by-blow account of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s failed confirmation hearings in 1987. The president’s staff seemed either blithely unaware that he was devoting a huge chunk of a weekday afternoon to story time or unwilling to intervene, but then again, Biden had always been a yapper.

In April 2024, Favreau visited the White House with his podcast co-hosts and several other “influencers” at a meet-and-greet the night before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Biden was incoherent and frail; he kept telling stories that no one could understand. Sixteen months had passed, but he seemed to have aged a half-century. An alarmed Favreau approached a White House aide, but his concerns were brushed off. The president was just tired, he was told. It was the end of a long week. There was no reason for concern. Two months later, Biden delivered the single worst performance in the 60-year history of televised presidential debates, dooming his reelection campaign, destroying his presidency and essentially delivering the country to Donald Trump.

Favreau’s experience was hardly unique. Far from it. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s account of Biden’s marked deterioration throughout his presidency, is littered with similar anecdotes. The result of more than 200 interviews, the book is a damning account of an elderly, egotistical president shielded from reality by a slavish coterie of loyalists and family members united by a shared, seemingly ironclad sense of denial and a determination to smear anyone who dared to question the president’s fitness for office...

That's what the Post's review says. There will surely be more where that comes from, and not just concerning President Biden's apparent mental decline.

Over the course of American history, this flailing nation has experienced three or four (religious) "Great Awakenings." For an account of those Great Awakenings, you can just click here. 

Our view? We could possibly use a widespread (civic and secular) Great Awakening pretty much right about now.

WHO WE ARE: Bertrand Russell, plus Tyrus and Kennedy!

WEDNESDAY MAY 14, 2025

Snapshots of who we are: Off on our monthly medical mission, during yesterday's several down times, we turned again to one of our favorite passages.

The passage is drawn from Stephen Budiansky's 2021 book, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. The passage in question deals with Bertrand Russell, a giant of the twentieth century whose IQ was something like 300 or was perhaps a bit higher than that.

We enjoy pondering this pregnant passage. This is part of who we are:

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

[...]

(page 108): ...Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

Say what? In Budiansky's formulation, Russell and Whitehead took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2." They did so in their giant work, Principia Mathematica.

Budiansky seems to be chuckling about that apparent side trip to Mars. For ourselves, we're not entirely sure what was involved in that "often remarked" bit of intellectual labor.

That said, we find the surface nuttiness of that passage appealing. Skipping past other puzzling passages in Budiansky's presentation, we find Russell chuckling at his own behavior on the next page of this book:

(page 109): "Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is the Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence, "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.

"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first, I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradictions quite easily, and that there was some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored.

It did indeed come to be known as "Russell's Paradox." According to Budianksy, Russell started out regarding the alleged conundrum at its heart as a "triviality"—as a matter unworthy of a grown man's time. Somehow, though, he came to regard that triviality as "a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored."

As he continues, Budiansky quotes other statements in which Russell displays "his usual self-mocking humor." At one point, Russell ruefully notes the fact that virtually no one on the face of the earth ever made it all the way through the lengthy book he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead.

(According to Budiansky, Russell and Whitehead's "massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of the Cambridge University Press when it was finally done.")

As an intellectual, but also as an activist, Russell was a giant. Have we mentioned the fact that his IQ was something like 300—a perfect bowling score?

On a purely technical basis, Russell was very smart! That said, he somehow got deeply tangled in a triviality which was, on its face, a bit of a parlor trick. 

Almost no one read the book. According to Budianksy, Kurt Gödel was one of the few who did. Today, Gödel is routinely described as "the greatest logician since Aristotle," a span of well over two thousand years.

That reputation is the fruit of Gödel's "incompleteness theorem(s)." That leaves us with another apparent conundrum:

How could the greatest work in logic in 2500 years possibly have been built on the framework of something as apparently silly as Russell's famous "paradox?" How could any such thing be true in this, the smartest of all possible worlds? 

We don't exactly understand that passage from Budiansky, but we like to ponder it on occasion. We love to picture Russell and Whitehead fighting their way through 700 pages to prove, show or explain the basic fact in which 1 +1 does equal 2.

We enjoy marveling at that puzzle. We tend to lump it in with Albert Einstein's inability to explain the important concept known as "the relativity of simultaneity" when he was persuaded to write the first "Einstein made easy" book, way back in 1916.

On its face, Einstein's explanation of that concept (in that book) made no apparent sense. In his 2007 biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson may have explained how that situation came about: 

Einstein: His Life and Universe

[...]

In 1916, ... [Einstein] wrote a formal exposition of his general theory of relativity, which was far more comprehensive, and slightly more comprehensible, than what he had poured forth in his weekly lectures during his race with Hilbert the previous November.

In addition, he produced an even more understandable version: a book for the lay reader, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, that remains popular to this very day. To make sure that the average person would fathom it, he read every page out loud to Elsa's daughter Margot, pausing frequently to ask whether she indeed got it. "Yes, Albert," she invariably replied, even though (as she confided to others) she found the whole thing totally baffling.

"Elsa's daughter Margot" was Einstein's 16-year-old niece. According to Isaacson, she was so much in awe of her famous uncle that she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she actually didn't understand his book for general readers.

Einstein was a giant as a theoretical physicist. He doesn't seem to have been equally skilled as a "popular writer."

There's no reason why he should have been! We lump this in with this discussion for the following reason:

To this day, we know of no one who has noted the fact that Einstein's explanation of that topic in that book didn't seem to make sense. 

Indeed, almost a hundred years later, in his biography of Einstein, Isaacson produced the same explanation of that key topic, without comment or challenge. Eight years after that, Nova presented the same explanation in a retrospective on relativity for viewers of PBS. 

On its face, the explanation doesn't seem to make sense. We're prepared to blame Einstein's niece for that—but a century later, it still seemed that no one had noticed.

So it went with Russell and Gödel, and also with a century of presentations about Einstein's revolutionary work. During that century, along had come the later Wittgenstein, breaking with Russell as he offered a view of the western world's highest-order reasoning.

His view went something like this:

Was Wittgenstein Right?

[...]

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed, the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail...It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. 

So said Professor Horwich, in a post for the New York Times. It seems to us that Horwich was basically right about Wittgenstein's work, which is itself extremely hard to decipher.

Uh-oh! According to that analysis, Russell and Gödel had been trapped in a realm of "confusion and wishful thinking." They got tangled up with "mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking."

Can some such theory be accurate?  We're speaking here of Russell and Gödel—even, in a tangential way, of the fact that Einstein's apparently bungled explanation continues to be good enough for academic and journalistic work.

Early in the last century, there they sat—Russell and Gödel, with a cast of thousands to follow. Their possible failures—their alleged capture by linguistic illusion and muddled thinking—is one part of who (and what) we are.

Today, in a slightly different realm, our flailing nation's public discourse lies in the hands of a whole different breed of cat. Last Tuesday night, on the Fox News Channel, this is who they were:

Panelists, Gutfeld! program: May 6, 2025
Kennedy: Former MTV VJ
Tyrus: Former professional "wrestler"
Greg Gutfeld: Host. Also, co-host of The Five
Jamie Lissow: Star of "The Divorced Dad Comedy Tour"
Paul Mauro: Former NYPD Inspector 

Not that's there's anything (automatically) wrong with it!

The Fox News Channel had assembled that Gang of Five to discuss an array of news topics on a prime time "cable news" program. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what they said.

Russell and Gödel were part of who we are. So are Kennedy and Tyrus.

There's no reason why analysts like Kennedy and Tyrus couldn't offer insightful commentary on various issues and topics. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what they said that night about Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. If the later Wittgenstein can be believed, we humans are strongly inclined to wander off into various types of error.

Kennedy and Tyrus are part of who we are. So are the people in Blue America who insist on ignoring what's being said, and what's being done, on the Fox News Channel.

In truth, we Blues also seem to have a whole lot of splainin' to do! Major aspects of the Biden years remain unexplained, with some of the mysteries of that tenure starting to hit the fan.

Once in a while, in the face of all that, we like to think about the pages devoted to 1 + 1 equaling 2. Russell's IQ was roughly three million. What hope can there possibly be for us if he somehow got himself all tangled up in that?

Tomorrow: As heard last week on the Fox News Channel, but cited exactly nowhere:

"A lot of people don't have grandparents today because of that son of a bitch."

WHO WE ARE: An act of fraud which was exactly that!

TUESDAY MAY 13, 2025

McEnany misgenders: Frost wrote of "a house which is no more a house," located in "a town which is no more a town."

Right here, in our own present day, his formulation might be helpful. We Americans live in a nation which is no more a nation—a former nation serviced by public spokespersons who are no more any such thing.

To appearances, Tricia McLaughlin may be one such person. To his credit, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has now said this about the Homeland Security spokesperson who seems to be something else:

Hakeem Jeffries Angrily Condemns ‘Joke’ DHS Spox For Threatening Arrests of House Democrats

[...]

Jeffries cut in, “It’s a red line. It’s very clear. First of all, I think that the so-called Homeland Security spokesperson is a joke. It’s a joke.”

For the full report from Mediaite, you can just click here.

Jeffries called McLaughlin a joke. Was he perhaps being kind? As we noted yesterday, this is what "the so-called Homeland Security spokesperson" told the world last Friday afternoon, in an official release:

Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center

NEWARK, NJ –Today, as a bus of detainees was entering the security gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center, a group of protestors, including two [sic] members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez, Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack, the first security check point. 

“Members of Congress storming into a detention facility goes beyond a bizarre political stunt and puts the safety of our law enforcement agents and detainees at risk. Members of Congress are not above the law and cannot illegally break into detention facilities. Had these members requested a tour, we would have facilitated a tour of the facility. This is an evolving situation,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. 

And so on from there.

In that initial release, McLaughlin misnumbered the numbers of Congress who were present on the scene. She did name two such members, including Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (R-NJ), who is eighty years old.

McLaughlin claimed that Rep. Coleman "stormed the gate and broke into the Newark detention facility." Also, she claimed that the two congressional reps were "holed up in a guard shack, the first security check point," even as she typed.

That was Friday, in real time. The following day, upon reflection, the "spokesperson" who seems to be something different made the story that much better in a statement to CNN:

DHS spokesperson threatens arrests of House Democrats who were at N.J. ICE facility

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security on Saturday suggested the Trump administration could pursue arrests of the House Democrats involved in an incident at a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on Friday and accused them of assaulting ICE officers.

“I think that we should let viewers know there will likely be more coming,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN on Saturday morning.

“We actually have body camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer,” McLaughlin said.

[...]

She added that ICE was in possession of video evidence documenting the incident.

By now, McLaughlin almost surely knew that three (3) members of Congress had been present at the scene. By now, their behavior had become even more reprehensible:

"Some of these members of Congress" had actually "body-slammed a female ICE officer," McLaughlin now actually said. She added that ICE had video evidence which documented this unlikely claim. 

As of today, no such videotape has been provided. Question:

How likely is it that "some" (2?) members of Congress "body-slammed" a female officer before, or possibly after, they "holed up in a guard shack?" 

Presumably, Jeffries was (in part) denouncing McLaughlin for having made those claims. If anything, he may have been too kind in his assessment of McLaughlin

Below, we'll show you the pitiful way McLaughlin has now responded to what Jeffries said. First, we'd like you to see what Kayleigh McEnany said and did yesterday in a guest spot on The Five.

An utterly pointless bit of videotape had already been played. It "documented" exactly nothing. It was a strikingly brief piece of tape.

The various children of The Five began reciting on behalf of their corporate owners. But if McLaughlin had had no idea what she was talking about on Friday, McEnany may have been even more clueless a full three days later.

She was filling in for the dearly departed Judge Jeanine, who's been asked to serve in Washington. No more an actual person, McEnany actually offered what's shown below as that tiny bit of videotape continued to play on the screen:

MCENANY (5/12/25): ...I love the excuse given by Watson Coleman. She's one of the Congresspeople you're watching—or I think it's a "he." 

Whatever. I'm sorry if I misgendered.

But they said if there's any body-slamming kind of footage, that footage is manufactured for a certain purpose.

OK! So we're back to cheap fakes. "Don't believe what you're seeing." ....

What viewers were seeing was that very brief bit of videotape, in which no "body slam" exists. 

What we were hearing was a graduate of Harvad Law School who didn't have the first freaking idea what she was propagandizing about. Believe it or not, three days later, this was the state of her knowledge:

She seemed to think that Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, an 80-year-old woman, was actually someone named "Watson Coleman," who she seemed to think was a man! Three days after the incident in question, she seemed to have no earthly idea of what had occurred—but she did know what she was being paid to say about the events in question. 

As you can see on the videotape from The Five, McEnany was reading from what seemed to be her producer's notes as she tried to determine the gender of the congressional rep to whom she referred. It would be hard to be more clueless than this—or to engage in a more obvious act of fraud against the American people.

At one time, McEnany was a person. Also, she has no lack of basic smarts.

At one time, she was a person! As is often the case, the chase for celebrity, cash and conquest has left her no more a reliable human. She's a graduate of Harvard Law who now lives to repeat the claims she's handed by her owners.

Three days later, McEnany didn't seem to have any idea who she was talking about. That said, it can get even dumber and worse!  

As reported by Mediaite, here's the way McLaughlin has responded, this very day, to what Jeffries said:

DHS Spox Snaps Back After Jeffries, AOC Warn Against Arresting House Democrats...

[...]

McLaughlin said:

"I’d like to lay out the facts. The fact that it was these three members of Congress who trespassed, broke the law, and stormed that ICE detention facility. They put law-enforcement at risk. They put our detainees at risk and they put our staff at risk. Had they asked for a tour we would facilitated one for them, but there was no notice. And the fact that they put hands—body-slammed, body-rammed, pushed, shoved, whatever you want to call it, it was an assault on ICE agents and it’s unacceptable."

As of today, the three (3) members of Congress had "body-slammed ICE agents." Those agents are newly plural!

They'd still body-slammed those agents—or maybe they'd simply "shoved" them! With that, McLaughlin offered the watchword of the age:

It's whatever you want to call it!

Will someone please frog-march this former person away? Tribal fury being what it is, she seems like a reliable source no more.

Two final points: Many factual claims remain "undocumented" at this point in time, perhaps for the obvious reason. 

For example, did the three members of Congress really "storm the facility?" As she abandons her "body slam" claim, the public servant who's no more any such thing is clinging to that assertion!

As for the Harvard Law School graduate—in the course of one brief shining moment, she went from a "she" to an "it" to a "he" to a "they" as she tried to "gender" a certain member of Congress. All in all, she didn't seem entirely clear about what had actually happened.

Back then, she went to Harvard Law. Today, she's committing fraud against the American people as part of a discourse which is no more a discourse, within a broken, braindead land which is no more a land.

They're being paid to behave these ways. Over here in Blue America, our highly educated press elites maintain their magisterial silence.

At the top of Blue America's press, no one wants to report this state of affairs. Is all of this who we are?

BREAKING: We won't post until this afternoon!

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2025

McEnany's folly: We're off on a medical mission this morning. We won't be posting until later this afternoon.

Meanwhile, this:

On yesterday afternoon's The Five, Kayleigh McEnany made a remarkable contribution to "this discourse which is no more a discourse." As we've noted, The Five is a cable news program which isn't a cable news program.

It's all part of a fraud on the public—a fraud which is a fraud. Perino, McEnany, Ford? Details upon our return.

MONDAY: The price of drugs, the performance of schools!

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2025

The discourse which isn't a discourse: In its first attempt to report the president's semi-proposal, the New York Times offered some striking statistics. 

That first attempt was published on Sunday. Headline included, it started like this:

Trump Plan Would Tie Some Drug Prices to What Peer Nations Pay

President Trump will sign an executive order on Monday aimed at lowering some drug prices in the United States by aligning them with what other wealthy countries pay, he said on Truth Social on Sunday evening.

The proposal he described, which alone cannot shift federal policy, is what he calls a “most favored nation” pricing model. Mr. Trump did not provide details about which type of insurance the plan would apply to or how many drugs it would target, but he indicated that the United States should pay the lowest price among its peer countries.

“Our Country will finally be treated fairly, and our citizens Healthcare Costs will be reduced by numbers never even thought of before,” he wrote in his social media post.

[...]

Mr. Trump has long complained that the United States pays much more than other wealthy countries do for the same drugs. And he is right. In the United States, prices for brand-name drugs are three times as high, on average, as those in peer nations.

Say what? Here in these United States, "prices for brand-name drugs are three times as high, on average, as those in peer nations?"

If true, what a remarkable state of affairs! In its own initial report, the Wall Street Journal provided a specific example:

Trump Says He Will Sign Executive Order Aimed at Lowering Drug Prices

[...]

Americans often pay higher sticker prices for drugs than people in other countries. For example, the list price for diabetes medication Jardiance was $611 for a 30-day supply last year, according to health research nonprofit KFF, compared with $70 in Switzerland and $35 in Japan.

Say what? In a discourse which was an actual discourse, such a remarkable state of affairs would presumably be a matter of persistent reporting and discussion. 

Not so here! Down through the years, we've often noted the fact that our nation's outlandish medical spending goes almost wholly undiscussed in the upper-end press. Today, matters are even worse. Today, there's only one topic which gets discussed:

Whatever unusual statement the president made in the past fifteen or twenty minutes.

Today, the Times had filed a second report about what, as it turns out, the president has actually semi-proposed. His proposal isn't what he said it would be—or at least, so the New York Times says:

With No Real Policy, Trump Asks Drugmakers to Lower U.S. Prices

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order asking drugmakers to voluntarily reduce the prices of key medicines in the United States.

But the order cites no obvious legal authority to mandate lower prices. The order said the administration would consider taking regulatory actions or importing drugs from other countries in the future if drugmakers do not comply.

It was something of a win for the pharmaceutical industry, which had been bracing for a policy that would be much more damaging to its interests.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would link U.S. drug prices to those in peer countries under a “most favored nation” pricing model, a policy he attempted unsuccessfully in his first term for a small set of drugs in Medicare. His executive order on Monday does not do that. Pharmaceutical stocks rose Monday morning on the news.

Oh well! In our view, this is the most remarkable part of this new Times report:

The executive order also called on federal agencies to investigate why European countries get lower prices and to push them to pay more. The Trump administration has limited leverage to drive up prices in Europe.

“I’m not knocking the drug companies,” Mr. Trump said on Monday shortly before signing the order. “I’m really more knocking the countries than the drug companies.” 

[...]

At Monday’s event, Mr. Trump directed his ire toward European governments that have negotiated lower prices.

“We’re going to help the drug companies with the other nations,” he said.

Mr. Trump threatened to use trade policy to push European countries to pay more for prescription drugs. But drug companies are already locked into contracts with governments, and if they try to charge more for new medicines, European countries may balk at covering them at all.

Our allies are always our enemies with the sitting paranoid-in-chief. They're always ripping us off!

American health care has long been characterized by outlandish levels of spending. We've long noted the way the high-end mainstream press tends to avoid the remarkable data which emerge within that topic.

In truth, our "town which is no more a town" has long featured a public discourse which wasn't much of a discourse. Before the week is done, we'll walk you through this additional report from Sunday's Times, a report about the public schools:

Has America Given Up on Children’s Learning?

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

We were struck by several parts of that report. Within what passes for our nation's "issues" discourse, some journalistic instincts never change.

We'll discuss that report at some point this week. Full disclosure:

In part, the shape of a nation's journalism can be defined by listing the topics which get reported and discussed. Also, the shape of a nation's journalism can be defined by noticing the topics which get ignored.

WHO WE ARE: Tricia McLaughlin was pulling no punches...

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2025

...concerning that body slam: Tricia McLaughlin was pulling no punches concerning the body slam.

Who the heck is Tricia McLaughlin? In this "town that is no more a town," McLaughlin is billed in the following way by the federal agency which may not quite be a federal agency:

Tricia McLaughlin
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs

As Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin oversees the Department of Homeland Security’s public outreach, including its media, digital, strategic and crisis communications efforts, and serves as the principal advisor to Secretary Noem on all external and internal communications.

The profile continues from there. Last Friday, McLaughlin rushed some assertions into print, at a time when, it's now clear, she didn't exactly seem to know what she was talking about. 

As you can see by clicking this link, this was the start of the press release which was more a preferred tribal script:

Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center

Delaney Hall Currently Holds Murderers, Rapists, Suspected Terrorists, and Gang Members

NEWARK, NJ –Today, as a bus of detainees was entering the security gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center, a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez, Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack, the first security check point. 

“Members of Congress storming into a detention facility goes beyond a bizarre political stunt and puts the safety of our law enforcement agents and detainees at risk. Members of Congress are not above the law and cannot illegally break into detention facilities. Had these members requested a tour, we would have facilitated a tour of the facility. This is an evolving situation,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. 

To what extent was any of that accurate? As everyone including McLaughlin now knows, there were actually three (3) members of Congress involved in whatever did or didn't happen at the Delaney Hall Detention Center on that glorious day. 

When she issued that first press release, McLaughlin didn't quite seem to know what she was talking about. That is now a distinguishing characteristic of many players within our discourse which isn't a discourse.

Had any of those members of Congress ever been "holed up in a guard shack" after "storming the gate?" We have no idea. 

Eventually, though, accurate information grew, as did the possible craziness of McLaughlin's some of McLaughlin's principal claims. One day later, on Saturday, NBC News reported what she now had to offer:

DHS spokesperson threatens arrests of House Democrats who were at N.J. ICE facility

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security on Saturday suggested the Trump administration could pursue arrests of the House Democrats involved in an incident at a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on Friday and accused them of assaulting ICE officers.

“I think that we should let viewers know there will likely be more coming,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN on Saturday morning.

“We actually have body camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer,” McLaughlin said.

Her comments were in response to a question from CNN’s Victor Blackwell, who asked whether others were arrested Friday in addition to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was charged with trespassing.

[...]

She added that ICE was in possession of video evidence documenting the incident.

By now, McLaughlin probably knew that three (3) members of Congress had been present on Friday. Incoherently, she was now saying that "some of" those members—that would apparently have to mean two—had been captured on videotape "assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer."

Might we note the following point—a point which even McLaughlin must have known by now? 

In her initial release, McLaughlin had named two (2) members of Congress who had "stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility." 

One of those members was Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (R-NJ). By now, even McLaughlin must have known that Rep. Coleman is 80 years old and seems to weigh something in the neighborhood of a hundred (100) pounds.

Had Rep. Coleman body slammed that female officer? Inquiring minds want to know.

Questions! Had any of the three congressional reps actually "stormed the gates?" Who had body-slammed that female officer? And where is the videotape which documents this carnage?

Over the weekend, various persons employed by the Fox News Channel played extremely brief snippets of videotape—extremely brief snippets which clarified absolutely nothing concerning Friday's events. The employees played along with the story, failing to mention the uselessness of the tape they'd been provided.

In Saturday's report, we returned you to the Frost poem about the town which is no more a town. We suggested that we moderns could possibly gain a bit of clarity from the language structure which is found at the start of the poem:

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered...

There is a house which is no more a house? So too with our American discourse, which was never an airtight house from the start.

One thinks perhaps of the fall of Rome thanks to the work of barbarian groups. The leading authority on this major development starts to explain it in the manner shown: 

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes and both endemic and epidemic disease drove many of these immediate factors. The reasons for the collapse are major subjects of the historiography of the ancient world and they inform much modern discourse on state failure.

In 376, a large migration of Goths and other non-Roman people, fleeing from the Huns, entered the Empire. Roman forces were unable to exterminate, expel or subjugate them (as was their normal practice)...

Goths to the left of them, Huns to the right! We could be wrong, but we think the Visigoths may have come later.

At any rate, "barbarian groups"—invading peoples outside Roman culture—had wormed their way into place and the decline was on.

Thanks to the so-called "democratization of media," it's a bit like that with us right here today! Is it possible that McLaughlin is a public information officer who is no more a public information officer? We'd move from there to the Fox News Channel journalists who are no longer journalists, though our catalog of the invading peoples won't be restricted to Red America this week.

"Who are those guys?" the Redford character says, at a certain point in a famous movie from 1969. (Or was it the Newman character?)

It's an excellent question today! Who are we, the modern American people? Are we a people which is no more a people, in a nation which is no more a nation, conducting an imitation of a discourse which is plainly now something else?

Also this:

Was that body slam a body slam which is no more a body slam? Was McLaughlin's report of a body slam secretly something else?

Tomorrow: What the former "wrestler" said

SATURDAY: Mayor Baraka of Newark in chains!

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2025

Federal agents in masks: We don't know what Frost was talking about in a certain difficult poem.

That said, his poem may establish a useful template of language, one we might choose to be directed by in our current "fictitious times:"

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered...

According to this guide, a certain pretense had been given up in the neighborhood of the house that was no more a house.

Regarding the town that is no more a town, is it a bit like that with us? Is it possible that we could gain from this guide's poetical language? 

In the town we all inhabit today, there are deportations which aren't deportations, pursued on the basis of offenses which don't seem like offenses, on the basis of a logic which may really be a dodge.

What the Sugar Hill are we talking about? We start with Mayor Baraka, yesterday afternoon, led away in chains:

Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center

Federal officials on Friday arrested Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, after a confrontation that also involved three members of Congress at a new immigration detention facility that is expected to play a central role in President Trump’s mass deportation effort.

Mr. Baraka, a Democrat who is running for governor of New Jersey, was taken to a separate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark and charged with trespassing. He was released roughly five hours later and was greeted by a crowd that had grown throughout the afternoon to more than 200 supporters and included candidates for New York City mayor and prominent labor leaders.

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney, said that Mr. Baraka had been arrested because he had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself,” and had chosen “to disregard the law.”

Habba is a U.S. attorney who is only an interim U.S. attorney. Were those multiple warnings actually made? We have no idea. 

For ourselves, we were struck anew by this account of the mayor's arrest, which took place on public property:

Mr. Baraka, 55, was taken into custody by a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues while outside the gates in a driveway swarming with protesters and reporters.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the episode a “bizarre political stunt” in a social media post. She said Ms. Watson Coleman and Mr. Menendez, along with “multiple protesters,” had “holed up in a guard shack.” 

Had the people in question really “holed up in a guard shack?” Or does this story somehow involve a "holing up" which wasn't quite that, in a guard shack which wasn't a shack? 

Only time will tell! And depending on where you get your "news," you may not hear about it.

At any rate, the mayor was arrested by "a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues." Are those people, in that raiment, best regarded as "federal agents," or are they tilting in the direction of being something else?

The description echoes language from a separate report in today's New York Times. That second report involves an arrest which wasn't exactly a normal arrest, conducted by a similar team of masked people, this time in unmarked cars:

Tufts Student Arrested by ICE Is Released From Detention

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student, was released from immigration detention on Friday after a federal judge said her continued detention could potentially chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

At a hearing at the Federal District Court in Vermont, the judge, William K. Sessions III, said Ms. Ozturk should be freed immediately: “Her continued detention cannot stand.”

Ms. Ozturk, a doctoral student from Turkey, had been held at the immigration detention center in Basile, La., for six weeks. Her lawyers said she was expected to return home to Massachusetts on Saturday.

[...]

On March 25, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and plainclothes surrounded her outside her home in Somerville, Mass., while she was on the phone with her mother. She was put on a plane to the detention center in Louisiana, and her friends, family and lawyers didn’t know where she was for 24 hours, they said.

Her arrest led to public outrage at her treatment and criticism that the government is abusing the immigration system to deport international students, in the guise of combating antisemitism. In seeking her release, her lawyers have accused the government of detaining her in retaliation for speech that is protected by the First Amendment. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay critical of Israel that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year.

She'd been arrested for an offense which wasn't an offense, or so a person who was still a person might possibly start to imagine:

The hearing was held in Vermont because Ms. Ozturk had spent the night there in the custody of federal agents on the way to Louisiana, on a circuitous route that her lawyers said had prevented them from finding her.

Government lawyers in the appeals court hearing declined to discuss questions about speech raised by another judge. But Judge Sessions did not mince words on Friday, suggesting the government was trying to deport Ms. Ozturk based on the slenderest of evidence that she had posed a threat to American foreign policy interests.

“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” he said in granting her release.

There it sat—the offence which doesn't seem to be an offence. As described by Judge Sessions, the offence which wasn't an offence posed "a threat to American foreign policy interests" which didn't seem to be a threat.

Why had she been arrested, then taken to Louisiana? She had co-written an opinion column in a student newspaper! 

On that basis, she had been seized on the street by masked men in unmarked cars—masked men who are still being described as federal agents. This seizure was vouched for by Marco Rubio, who is being treated by major news orgs as a person who's still a person.

What actually happened in the run-up to yesterday's arrest of Mayor Baraka? Yesterday afternoon, and then this morning, you heard very different accounts of the facts, depending on which "cable news" channel you were watching. 

Someone may have been offering facts which weren't actual facts. Meanwhile, was Tricia McLaughlin, "the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security," employing a logic which isn't a logic?

Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center

[...]

In an emailed statement, Ms. McLaughlin argued that the facility had proper permits and she provided a list of five immigrants she said were being detained at Delaney Hall and had been accused of serious crimes, including murder and drug trafficking.

So said the federal official. But if the facility contains people accused of murder, why are they in a detention facility, awaiting a deportation from which, as is endlessly noted in other contexts, deportees often quickly return? 

Why aren't they in a state or federal prison, awaiting trial (or following conviction) on a murder charge? Is it because the "deportation" awaiting them is actually a rendition—a removal to a life sentence in a foreign prison? Is it because McLaughlin has transitioned into being a spokesperson for imprisonment without conviction or trial?

Was McLaughlin employing a logic which is no more a logic? Only time will tell—and, if time provides that service, most people won't ever hear.

"We live in fictitious times," the prophetic gentleman said. He was receiving an Oscar for best documentary film. 

It was March 2003. On that narrow point we can all agree, until such time as the Gregorian calendar goes the way of a body of water—gets changed by a royal decree.

Regarding the pursuit of this latest episode's significant facts, we leave you with this observation:

Yesterday morning, a type of fact-check finally appeared in print editions of the New York Times. In Thursday morning's report, we had already mentioned its online publication:

Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look.
Gang experts say the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are unlikely to signify gang membership. The president says otherwise.

That was the dual headline on the report. On April 18, a president who may be drifting toward potentate had posed with a photograph which wasn't a photograph of a hand which wasn't an actual person's hand. 

Three weeks later, to the day, the New York Times finally addressed what the president said. So it goes, in the modern context, with respect to the famous statement Mark Twain never made:

A [misstatement] can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

That's what Twain never said. 

Long ago, did the poet Frost see our own era coming? Probably not, but he seemed to think he possessed some sort of antidote for whatever he did claim to see. 

Concerning the house which was no longer a house, his poem ended like this:

And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home.  The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Weep for the house that's no more a house! So the Yankee poet said, urging us to make our way past a disabling confusion.

We need to learn how to use our words. Some entities, in this dangerous time, may no longer be what they were, may not quite be what they seem.

"That was a house in earnest," he said. What house are we living in now?

HOW WE GOT HERE: "We'll always have Paris," he famously said!

FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2025

So too with the southern border: "We'll always have Paris," the Bogart character famously says.

The screenplay for the famous film was assembled on the fly. The film's miraculous ending—part of its miraculously insightful script—was almost a bit of an accident.

According to the American Film Institute, six of the hundred greatest movie quotations of all time came from this one film—or at least that was true as of 2005.

Actually, it was six of the sixty-seven greatest quotations—and that doesn't even include the endlessly cited quotation in which Captain Renault says he's "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."

(According to the AFI, "We'll always have Paris" was the 43rd greatest quotation. "Here's looking at you, kid" was listed at number 5.)

"We'll always have Paris," he famously said. The famous statement brilliantly captures one part of human experience. 

In modern times, the men and women of the Fox News Channel will always have a certain rhetorical helpmate. That's also true of the elected officials of the MAGA world.

They'll always have the southern border—though they have other clear winners too.

More specifically, the tribunes of today's Red America will always have President Biden's unexplained southern border. That drama was played out yesterday right there on the floor of the House.

The House was wasting its time debating a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of a pointless debate, Rep. Jared Huffman (D—CA) mocked the foolishness of the bill. 

With that, up jumped Huffman's opposite number, and he delivered the win:

ACTING SPEAKER (5/8/25): The gentleman from Arkansas is recognized.

REP. BRUCE WESTERMAN (R-AR): Mr. Speaker, as we wrap up this so-called debate today, I want to remind everyone of something that you are not seeing on the news every day, like you were several months ago. And that's hordes coming across our southern border...

The southern border had nothing to do with the legislation under review! But whenever the going gets tough, the various tribunes of Red America can always fall back on that topic.

They'll always have the southern border! Rather, they'll always have the unexplained history of the border as it existed under President Biden. It's one of the ways the sitting president is able to maintain his current level of support in the national polls. 

They'll always have the image of those "hordes" coming across that border during the Biden years. Also, they'll always have the violent crimes which were committed by some of the people who came across that unregulated border—and they'll always have our evasive non-responses when they refer to those violent crimes.

Those are easy winning issues for Red America's tribunes. No matter how bad other matters may get, they can always fall back on those points, as Rep. Westerman did.

Also, they'll always have Blue America's refusal to explain the border policy of the Biden years. Almost surely, this helps explain why President Trump's approval rating still stands at 42 percent.

They'll always have the fact that our tribunes in Blue America have never even tried to explain what was happening during those years. No matter how stupid Red America's leadership cadres may get, they'll always have the border to help keep voters on the pro-Trump train. 

President Biden never tried to explain the policy at the border. (We have our own assumption, which could of course be wrong.) 

President Biden never tried to explain! Others claimed, in the face of all appearances, that the border actually was closed and secure.

That was astonishing conduct. We Blues continue to pay for that conduct, even as we keep pretending that none of this really occurred.

They'll always have the border! Nor is that the only gift we Blues have handed our rivals. We've handed them so may "own goals" that President Trump actually managed to get something right on Sunday's Meet the Press,

Gifted with a pair of prizes, the commander offered this:

WELKER (5/4/25): Do you see dissent as an essential part of democracy?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: It's a part of democracy. It is. You're always going to have dissent—

WELKER: Is it an important part of democracy?

TRUMP: You’re always going to have—Kristen, you're always going to have dissent. There's nothing you're going to do about that. Am I going to get 100 percent unified? It would be a strange place. I can't even imagine it where 100 percent—

Look. You have people that are good people. They're very smart people. And they honestly believe we should have open borders and the entire world should be allowed to pour into our country. I think it's a 95/5 issue, but they believe it. They're not even bad people—some of them are bad. 

You have people that honestly believe that men should be allowed to play in women's sports. Some of these people—I really, actually I don't know any; I haven't been able to find any—but they exist. They say it's an 80/20 issue. I don't believe that. I think it's a 97/3 issue.

President Trump had the southern border. He also had "men [being] allowed to play in women's sports," as he chose to characterize it.

He said it was a 97/3 issue. According to NBC News, it's actually 75/25—but that depends on the way you phrase the question concerning this relatively new topic. 

(According to Pew, it's 66/15.)

Should transgender girls and women be allowed to participate in girls' and women's sports? It's a relatively new public policy question, spinning off from a relatively new public policy topic. 

We Blues ted to act like this is all settled material. (If you don't agree, you're a very bad person.) Once again, here's what Michelle Goldberg recently said:

What on Earth Is Gavin Newsom Doing?

[...]

As a matter of both political expediency and simple honesty, Democrats should be able to acknowledge that it’s unfair to expect elite female athletes to compete against trans women who’ve gone through male puberty. But at a time when the Trump administration has singled trans people out for persecution, Democrats need to couple their recognition of physical difference with a broader defense of trans rights.

Is it "unfair to expect elite female athletes to compete against trans women who’ve gone through male puberty?" Should Democrats "be able to acknowledge" something like that?

In our view, that doesn't seem like a crazy stance. For ourselves, we'd say that Democrats should at least be able to acknowledge that there's an unresolved question lingering there—a question we need to address as a nation, not as two warring tribes. 

But of one thing we can be certain—at present, this topic represents an easy political win for Red America. In the foreseeable future, Red America will always have this safe (political) space to run to. In his recent interview with Mediaite, Charlie Sykes included this topic in his list of places where he said we Blues have basically failed:

Is ‘Never Trump’ Dead? Charlie Sykes On The One Thing That Could Actually Restrain Trump

[,,,]

SYKES: I mean, the reality is there are a lot of swing voters that actually were concerned about inflation. So simply denying that inflation was a problem was a mistake. 

There are swing voters that were concerned about crime, and simply telling them that crime is a myth is basically says we don’t care about what you think. 

The border was a real problem during the Biden years, and that needs to be addressed. 

There was a reason why the Trump campaign spent more than a hundred million dollars on one ad, one ad involving transgender surgeries and athletes. And yet, if you listen to Democrats and folks on the left, that issue didn’t exist at all.

So simply saying "These are fake issues, don’t pay any attention to them" means that you shut yourself off from things that voters are talking about. 

He also mentioned the southern border. Also, he mentioned "the Joe Biden age story," another ginormous own goal for which we Blues are still being battered, with more such losses to come.

Astoundingly ugly behavior can now be found among Red America's corporate cadres. As we noted yesterday, on the nation's most-watched "cable news" program, one co-host spouted this late Wednesday afternoon:

JUDGE JEANINE (5/7/25): So, Greg, because [former president Biden] wants to be more active and involved, would you go listen?

GUTFELD: Fine! Do it on his time, don't do it on our time. Go out literally to a pasture and pass away! He chose BBC because it stands for "Biden—Bury or Cremate?" 

[...]

As long as Joe emerges from the crypt with his old man smell—nobody is listening to what he's saying. They're just looking at it and going, "Christ! This actually was president?"

WATTERS: [Snickering]

President Biden should wander off in a pasture and die! Enough with his "old man smell!"

Garbage like that comes out of the can on a regular basis. Five hours later, that extremely strange co-host introduced a pseudo-discussion on his own Gutfeld! program by reciting this singsong rhyme:

GUTFELD (5/7/25): His pants full of turds, Biden speaks more words.

We know—you think we're making that up! Go ahead—click that link! 

As this garbage keeps spilling out of the can, the exalted orgs (and the stars) of Blue America just keep looking away. To appearances, life is still good where those tribunes live, and they don't want to grapple with Fox.

The Crazy or perhaps its first cousins are all around us at this point in time. The Crazy has emerged from the can and it's ruling humankind. 

Also, there's the endless array of imperfect judgments committed by us, the vastly self-impressed Blues.

We Blues have a whole lot of splainin' to do! That said, there are few signs that we understand any such fact, or that we plan to react—but in this report, we've barely scratched the surface of the ways our imperfections are helping to keep President Trump afloat. 

Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris. People like Gutfeld and Judge Jeanine will always have the southern border, plus many more gifts beyond that. 

Does our tribal blindness help explain why President Trump hasn't dropped, let's say, down to 35 percent? We'd have to assume that it does.

We Blues! Our political judgment is often quite poor, and our tribunes have frequently misbehaved. In our view, the other tribe is substantially worse at this time—but we Blues are rich in imperfections and acts of deception too.

We aren't the giants we claim to be.  Everyone knows this but us!

THURSDAY: Should journalists talk about mental health issues?

THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2025

The New York Times just did: Should journalists talk about "mental health?" Should they talk about "mental illness?"

As we've long noted, a prohibition against such talk exists with respect to the mental health (or mental illness) of public officials. Major news orgs will routinely refer to "mental illness" when discussing certain types of "street crime," but they'll never discuss any such topics with respect to political figures.

Having said that, we'll also say this—the New York Times just rewrote that rule! The report in question appears online beneath this dual headline:

Former Fetterman Aide Expressed Concern to Doctor About Senator’s Mental Health
The former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman last year wrote to a doctor who had treated him, pointing to “warning signs” that suggested the senator could be backsliding on his recovery from a mental health crisis.

The report discusses some deeply serious mental health concerns. Allegedly, they constitute a "mental health crisis." The report begins as shown:

Former Fetterman Aide Expressed Concern to Doctor About Senator’s Mental Health

The former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was so alarmed with his ex-boss’s erratic behavior last year that he wrote a lengthy letter to his doctor warning that the senator was spiraling out of control and that his mental health issues could cost him his life.

“I’m worried that if John stays on his current trajectory he won’t be with us for much longer,” Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff, wrote on May 20 to a doctor who had treated Mr. Fetterman at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Mr. Fetterman’s behavior, according to former aides who are still connected to his diminishing circle, is still at times a cause of concern. Other former members of his staff, speaking on the condition of anonymity, report that their colleagues sometimes were frightened to be in the senator’s presence, if he was in an amped-up mood.

They have also long been warned never to get in a car if Mr. Fetterman is behind the wheel because of his dangerous driving habits. His volatile and concerning behavior, which aides noticed last year was taking a turn for the worse, has only increased since the election, people who have spent time with him said...

[...]

Mr. Jentleson’s letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, was first reported by New York magazine.

So reported the New York Times, describing the contents of the letter by the former chief of staff. Senator Fetterman and a spokesperson disputed the statements made in the letter:

Mr. Fetterman said in a statement that “my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.” He called the New York magazine article a “hit piece” and suggested that Mr. Jentleson and the author of the article, Ben Terris, were “best friends” with a joint ax to grind, and that they “sourced anonymous, disgruntled staffers with lies or distorted half-truths.”

(Mr. Terris revealed in his article that Mr. Jentleson is a personal friend.)

A spokesperson for Mr. Fetterman also raised questions on Friday about Mr. Jentleson’s motivations for making public a deeply personal letter, given the stigmas that already exist around mental health issues among men.

As for the Times, its report does not contain the term "mental illness." It does refer to "mental health" and to "mental health concerns" again and again and again. 

The "mental health crisis" to which it refers was Senator Fetterman's six-week hospitalization for clinical depression in 2023.

Should the New York Times be reporting such things? Even here in our flailing world, we'd say that it certainly should.

For starters, most people seem to agree that "mental health issues" actually do exist. Serious mental health issues—clinical depression would be an example—may involve a tragic loss of human potential and capability, just as serious physical illness can.

(If it's true that "stigmas already exist around mental health issues among men," we would have thought that most people had come to an agreement—the best way to address some such stigma is by creating a world in which the stigmatization of such concerns is viewed as a thing of the past.)

Is Senator Fetterman dealing with serious "mental health concerns?" We have no way of knowing. We're trying to sketch the geography of modern journalistic behavior, in which "mental illness" is freely discussed with respect to one class of people, but has been aggressively hidden away with respect to another.

In our view, the existence of serious mental health issues calls for sympathy and concern. The new rule concerning discussion of such issues would now seem to be this:

For regular people and even for senators, yes! For even higher public officials, absolutely not!

Why do we think we can see some such rule? Here is another passage from the Times report:

“John has pushed out everyone who was supposed to help keep him on his recovery plan,” Mr. Jentleson wrote in the letter to Dr. David Williamson, the medical director of the neuropsychiatry/traumatic brain injury unit at Walter Reed. “We do not know if he is taking his meds, and his behavior frequently suggests he is not.”

He said in the letter that people around Mr. Fetterman often witnessed the “warning signs” his doctor had warned of, including “conspiratorial thinking, megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news—he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.”

Those "warning signs" sound very familiar at this point in time! New rule:

When such signs appear in a senator, they can now be discussed.