Today's Water Cooler 2026-06-02

By lambert –
Topic(s)
Water Cooler

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Cimetière de Laval (Mount Pleasant) Laval, Quebec, Canada. From the map, the white noise is highway noise. But a very pretty song!

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “White House nixes ‘anti-weaponization’ fund panned by GOP and Democrats”

(2) “The Dark Money Network Attacking Graham Platner”

(3) “Sneak Peek into Heretic’s Guide to AI’s Stars Part IV” (Michael Burry)

(4) “Revenge of The Business Idiot” (Ed Zitron)

Look for the Helpers

“Susie Madrak Has Pancreatic Cancer” [GoFundMe]. Madrak is an old-school blogger from Philly, epicenter of the blogosphere. The text was written by Mary Beth Williams, another old-school blogger. I heard about it from Avedon, another old-school blogger. Williams writes: “”My goal is to raise enough for Susie to survive the next year without worrying too much about money. She has championed the helpless for years, and I hope we can do the same for her while goes through this fight.” And Madrak: “I would love to have your help, but I also know how many people are hurting this year. And because I’m a blogger, I know why. But if you can spare a few bucks to help me through this all-too-common American nightmare, I’d really appreciate it.” • So please help if you can, and at a bare minimum share this link. Thank you!

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My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of “Helpers” there. In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).

Politics

Trump Administration

“White House nixes ‘anti-weaponization’ fund panned by GOP and Democrats” [Straight Arrow News]. “The White House is apparently scrapping plans for a nearly $1.8 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund to compensate allies of President Donald Trump after congressional pushback, including from Republicans. The Trump administration declined to comment. However, it pointed to a statement in which the Justice Department agreed to abide by a judge’s ruling that blocked the fund’s creation. In the statement, posted on Monday to X, the department said it ‘disagrees strongly with the decision on the Anti-Weaponization Fund.’ However, the statement said: ‘The Court stated that under no circumstances, may the Department of Justice proceed with the Anti-Weaponization Fund recently established in order to make up for the tremendous abuse, harm, and hate unfairly shown to so many people.’” • A bridge too far, apparently; and the Trump Administration can be defeated.

“The 3 goals of OMB’s rewrite of grants regulations” [Federal News Network]. “OMB released a 400-plus page rewrite on Friday of the Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards that implements many of the changes President Donald Trump outlined in his August executive order, Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking. It also addresses areas that weren’t necessarily called out in the EO.” Importantly: “Dan Ramish, an attorney and parter with Haynes Boone, said one of the most significant changes is ensuring the administration’s policies are followed by giving a bigger role to political appointees or other senior officials in the discretionary grants process. OMB wrote that ‘federal agencies heads must designate one or more senior appointees to conduct a pre-issuance review of all discretionary awards.’ ‘This is ensuring policy alignment,’ Ramish said. ‘By calling for a pre-issuance review, there may be some concern about the involvement of senior appointees, but every administration has ways of influencing awards. The difference here is calling for specific involvement of senior appointees. There are those who have seized on this because they believe it will result in greater political decision making of discretionary awards that may have otherwise driven by science or technical considerations. There is a case to be made in both directions, codifying a political role that may or may not have already existed versus being more explicit to have more political involved in decision making.’” • Hmm.

“Trump Administration Invests in Removing Ocean Research Instruments” [Maritime Executive]. “Moving the objectives of Project 2025 one step closer to completion, the National Science Foundation is removing 900 ocean data collecting buoys that cost more than $370 million to install. If left in place, the buoys would have continued to provide climate-related data to scientific researchers for another 15 years - an outcome that NSF’s plan will prevent, saving taxpayers nearly $50 million per year. It will also unwind the decades of effort by American oceanographers, technicians and professional mariners who have installed and maintained the network.” • Shorter: We could rather not know.

“CFPB orders return to a new, smaller DC headquarters” [Banking Dive]. “[T]he CFPB’s workforce, which has fallen to about 1,100 employees from around 1,750 at the end of the Biden administration… There is a catch: The new headquarters has space for roughly 550 employees. Incidentally, that lines up with the 556 people the CFPB expects to employ under a workforce reduction plan it shared in March with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.” • Or perhaps the administration contemplates a Darwinian struggle for desks?

Election 2024 Autopsy

“Jill Biden dismisses Democrats’ infighting concerns: ‘Things are going to move forward’ ” [Politico]. “ ‘Democrats have a great future,” [Jill Biden] said in an interview on Monday on NBC’s ‘Today,’ when asked if she was ‘reopening old wounds’ with her tour. We’re looking forward to winning the midterms. Things are going to move forward. … And yes, we’re going to look back and learn from the mistakes we made.’” • No, you’re really not. Or else you already would have.

Election 2026

“Dems’ fight over party future is on Tuesday’s ballots” [Axios]. “The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is on the ballot Tuesday, with at least a half-dozen primaries across the country testing which wing of the party has the most juice heading into the 2026 midterms.” More: “These are the key races to watch: 1. Iowa’s Senate primary: Democrats think the political environment is favorable enough that they have a chance to flip a Senate seat in this deep-red state. Josh Turek, a moderate Democratic state lawmaker and Paralympic gold medalist, is seen as the favorite in their primary against progressive Zach Wahls. 2. California’s open primary for governor: In this state’s “jungle primary,” the top two candidates, regardless of party, will advance to the Nov. 3 election. A leading Democrat is Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who’s being advised by left-wing consultants who helped run New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Another is former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a more traditional Democrat. 3. New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are backing progressive Adam Hamawy in the crowded Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman in this blue seat. 4. California’s 22nd Congressional District: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has thrown its weight behind state Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains in the primary for a battleground seat in the Central Valley. Progressives have lined up behind community college professor Randy Villegas. 5. California’s 11th Congressional District: Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed Connie Chan, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, to fill the seat Pelosi’s vacating. Leftist Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to AOC who notably lacks her endorsement, is proudly anti-establishment.” • Exciting…

Democrats en Déshabillé

Sludge]. “Two shadowy Delaware nonprofits have pumped $750,000 into attack ads against Graham Platner. One faces a federal straw donor complaint, and both are part of a sprawling dark money network with ties to AIPAC, Kristi Noem, and a Hakeem Jeffries-aligned super PAC.”• Wait. You’re telling me Hakeem Jeffries would fund attacks on a fellow Democrat?

“Top Graham Platner adviser threatened former aide over sexting stories” [Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News]. “Morris Katz, a strategist with the Platner campaign, delivered the Friday warning through an intermediary to former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, who left the campaign last fall and spoke to The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The outlets published stories in quick succession on Saturday about the messages that had been flagged by Platner’s wife [uh, Amy Gertner] at the outset of his campaign last summer. ‘Just want to be clear on where we are right now,’ Katz wrote in the message that McDonald shared exclusively with the BDN. ‘If the story goes in its current iteration we’ll communicate directly on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.’” • Hold my pearls while I head for the fainting couch! Politics ain’t beanbag. And so far as I can tell, the basis of the “threat” telling the truth (McDonald is the campaign aide with whom Gertner shared the messages). Obviously, never trust a Democrat regular. My only question is whether McDonald was a mole or a plant from the beginning, or went through some sort of crisis of conscience MR SUBLIMINAL BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! later. It’s interesting to watch the symbol manipulating class do their symbol manipulation thing. Tatoos? Quelle horreur! Genocide? No problem. Workplace abuse in the Oval Office? Stand by your man! Typing on a keyboard? OMG!!!!!! (And so, yes, just as I suspected: The Democrats are feeding Republicans oppo on Platner.)

“Who is Genevieve McDonald? Former Graham Platner aide shakes up Senate bid” [MSN]. “In a statement to the Journal, Gertner expressed deep hurt over the leaks, adding, ‘I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend. In the months since, I have had to watch as she spread malicious gossip…I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy.’ Gertner noted that the couple has navigated difficulties with infertility alongside the acute pressures of a high-profile Senate campaign, but emphasized that they have utilized professional support, including marriage counseling. ‘It is no secret that Graham and I have struggled on our fertility journey. We did the hard work that marriage requires. We went to counseling. We were honest with each other in ways that weren’t easy,’ Gertner said in a statement provided to the Journal by Platner’s campaign.” • You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog. I will watch McDonald’s future career as a Democrat with great interest.

“Platner tests Democrats’ tolerance for scandal” [Axios]. “Some Democrats say the party shouldn’t adopt the GOP’s tolerance for scandal.” • They’re fine with genocide. So what’s a little scandal?

Festival of Mamdani

Stalin makes nice:


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“New York governor criticises participation of ‘extremist’ Smotrich in city event” [MiddleEastEye]. “New York Governor Kathy Hochul has ‘strongly condemned’ the participation of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in the city’s annual pro-Israel parade. In a post on X, Hochul said: ‘Bezalel Smotrich is a far-right extremist whose hateful and divisive rhetoric is fundamentally at odds with the values we hold dear in New York.’ Hochul added: ‘Yesterday’s parade was a celebration of Jewish pride, community, and unity. I strongly condemn his participation.’” • The difficulty here, is that Smotich may be a “far-right extremist” on the American spectrum. But he’s a cabinet minister in Israel.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“What Are Words For?” [Laurence Peterson, 3 Quarks Daily]. “I have recently heard at least twice, I can’t remember exactly where, different commentators expressing a sentiment very much like the following: we require nothing short of an entirely new vocabulary to describe the otherworldly corruption of the Trump regime…. Trump engaged in more than 3,600 buy and sell orders in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That is more than all 535 members of the rightly-maligned Congress put together…. And then it was reported that Trump’s personal fortune has increased 165% during his time in office in the second term alone.” I’m not good enough with figures to work out a direct comparison between Trump’s 165% over two years and Pelosi’s gains over her career: “Nancy Pelosi’s ‘True Legacy’: Turning $785K Into $130M Through Smart Stock Picks Over 37 Years In Congress.” But it is clear that Trump’s not the only elected in Washington to profit from a career in public service. Now, you can argue that the scale and nature of Trump’s accumulation is different. But that’s a structural issue, and a case of Trump catalyzing structural weakness (as he does so very well). But the moral posturing is weak politically and analytically. More: “Now I don’t really believe, going back to the question I cited to begin this piece, that the Trump gang’s mega-abuses of what passes for law in this clearly declining land require a different vocabulary of corruption to render their scale and scope to hit home.” And: “All these actors and the forces structuring the phenomena that have caused the decline we see everywhere in front of us must be resisted and removed immediately. Every one of us must do everything possible to ensure this happens. The words are more than adequate here.” • Only a passing reference to “essentially silent Democrat leaders,” ffs. And then there’s “The very same man who actively presided over a genocide in Gaza,” meaning Trump. Even assuming Israel tipped over into genocide after Saturday, October 7, 2023, Joe Biden was then President (in name, at least) and had shovelled as much weaponry out the door to Israel as he could for his entire term. Exactly like Krugman here, the otherwise impressive Peterson would like to rise above and think in systems, but Trump so addles his brain that he can’t think straight, or get the basics like dates right.

Business Sentiment

“Global profits: an upward turn?” [The Next Recesssion]. “The rate of profit on corporate capital is defined in Marxian terms as total profit (surplus value) divided by the stock of capital (fixed and circulating assets) held by companies plus the cost of employing labour in production. The overall rate of profit in the US economy has been modestly declining since the end of neo-liberal recovery period in the late 1990s. But if you isolate the productive sector of the US economy (ie exclude real estate, finance, insurance and government), then the rate of profit on productive assets fell sharply through the 2010s to the end of the pandemic slump in 2020. This explains the Great Recession of 2008-9 and the pandemic slump of 2020. But since then, the profitability of productive assets has risen.” And: “Does investment drive profits and does government ‘dissaving’ (deficits) drive up profits? In my view, that causal direction is back to front. In capitalism, profits drive investment. And if we start from that direction, then the rise in profits is not due to government spending, but can only be due to a rise in the rate of exploitation of workers, as expressed in a rise in the share of profits in the US economy relative to wages. Corporate profits as a share of US GDP are at record highs.” • Hence “affordability.” Handy chart:

gp4.png

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 57 Greed (previous close: 60 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 62 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • First time below 60 in awhile….

Business: Banking and Finance

“5 takeaways from Jerome Powell’s award speech” [Banking Dive]. “Here are five other crucial quotes from the ceremony: 1. “Like many other institutions, the Fed has been undergoing a stress test.”… 2. “If any administration finds a way to remove Fed officials over policy differences, then future administrations will do so as well.” … 3. “Partisan political differences are normal – indeed essential – in a thriving democracy.” … 4. “Democratic institutions take much time, effort, and patience to build but can be torn down all too quickly.” … 5. “What the public has every right to expect is that we will make our decisions based only on our best economic analysis of what would most benefit the people we serve.”” • Alrighty then.

Business: AI

“Sneak Peek into Heretic’s Guide to AI’s Stars Part IV” [Michael Burry, Cassandra Unchained]. Yes, that Michael Burry. Burry comments:

Seems obfuscated. Notice “US retiree,” top left.

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“How Anthropic used AI ethics slop to play the pope and eclipse OpenAI” [Blood in the Machine]. “By differentiating itself from OpenAI’s bloodshot-eyed, inject-AI-onto-every-available-surface approach and Sam Altman’s reputation as an untrustworthy operator prone to saying unsettling things like “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” and focusing on its enterprise software business and building automation products like Claude Code—all at a time when investors may have noticed people are increasingly outspoken about their dislike of AI and its corporate standard-bearers—Anthropic essentially convinced the media and the VC money that it, not OpenAI, is deserving of the throne. It has done this partly by building a popular product, partly by correctly recognizing which way the winds of public sentiment were blowing, partly out of luck, and also by being unabashedly full of shit. If you look back over the last few months, you’ll see a carefully plotted and heavily narrativized ascent built atop the corny and mostly untrue idea that Anthropic is made of sterner moral stuff than its rivals. The road to its triumph was paved on AI ethics slop. (AI ethicslop??)” • Incroyable! Fun to read….

“Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked” [404 Media]. “Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account. The news shows the extreme risk associated with offloading support or critical functions to an AI chatbot. Users who have had their accounts stolen say that there is no way to escalate their problem to a human.” • In other words, they’ve been dicked; see my post on this very topic today.

“Amazon Shuts Down Internal AI Leaderboard After Employees Cheated” [404 Media (who are really on fire)]. “One Amazon employee said they ‘cheated’ their way up Amazon’s internal AI usage leaderboard after they were told in a performance review that they’re not using AI enough at work. They told me it was trivial to do so. I’m not providing exact details of how this employee cheated in order to protect their anonymity, but essentially employees can automatically prompt the AI tools with an endless series of tasks that have nothing to do with their job.” And: “ ‘Tokenmaxxing,’ the idea held by some tech company executives that if employees are not maximizing their use of AI tools at work they are not being productive enough, has become common in the industry, with some bosses bragging about how they are spending more money on AI tool usage costs than actual human employees. This has resulted in a situation where some employees are running scripts that make it seem like they are using AI tools a lot to game metrics and appease their bosses, but the AI tools are not doing anything productive and are burning money and resources with no benefit to productivity.” • These executives are all fools. Have they never heard of Goodhart’s Law? And their squillionaire owners are loonies. Why are they making any capital investments decisions at all? To be fair, the AI industry or rather business was built on expropriation and fraud, so there’s little wonder cheating is pervasive in AI firms.

“After the AI binge, companies balk at soaring bills” [Agence France Presse]. “Playing by a well-worn Silicon Valley playbook [enshittification], AI companies charged rock-bottom prices to hook customers after ChatGPT burst onto the scene. Kevin Simback of startup incubator Delphi Labs calls it the era of ‘subsidized intelligence’ — meaning investors were basically footing the bill so companies could offer AI on the cheap…. Prices are rising across the board, and one big reason is AI agents. Unlike a chatbot that just answers questions, agents actually do things — book appointments, write code, manage files. And they’re expensive to run, because one task can spin up dozens of agents all working at once, each racking up charges. Those charges are measured in tokens — the basic unit AI companies use to bill customers. A single agent-powered task can burn through dozens of times’ more tokens than a simple chat message…. ‘In some cases people are seeing the cost of tokens exceed the cost of the employee within a month or two of use, just because they’re using it too much,’ says analyst Jack Gold of J.Gold Associates.” • Oooh, I like the way agents multiply costs exponentially. Hyperscaling, baby!

Business: Tech

“Meta Has Entered Its Death Spiral” [Futurism]. “By 2026, after a failed pivot to the Metaverse — oh yeah, it changed its name to Meta back in 2021 — scrolling Facebook feels like an infinite timeline of AI slop, ads, and lazy misinformation, none of which the company seems to have an iota of interest in cleaning up. Add it all up, and you start to wonder whether the behemoth venture has entered the long decline that eventually killed other former stars of the web like Yahoo and AOL. That’s the case that acclaimed investigative journalist Julia Angwin made today in the New York Times: ‘Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.’” • That’s a damn shame.

“The future of robot armies is here – and it’s not what you think” [New Scientist]. “At the University of California, San Diego, Wang’s lab worked closely with chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang’s research group to create what are basically swarms of algae cyborgs that deliver medicine. They began with C. reinhardtii, which can swim with its powerful flagellum, or tail. It also happens to love blue light, so it is relatively simple to guide this single-celled critter by shining a blue light on its target region. Wang and Zhang can even get massive swarms of the algae into formation: by shining the blue light through a screen with a shape cut out of it, they herded thousands of algae cells into forming a circle, square and even more complex designs.” • All this sounds great, but if these people think I’m letting robots inside my body they’re out of my minds. Leaving hackers aside, my first worry would be the robot’s owner, probably an insurance company, whose incentives aren’t necessarily “aligned” with mine. After that, the government.

Business: Shipping

“How Robots-to-Goods (R2G) Will Define the Next Era of Warehouse Automation” [Supply Chain Brain]. “A robots-to-goods (R2G) approach, by contrast, is designed to address all of those issues and almost entirely eliminate the need for human labor, at the lowest cost per pick, with more flexible density. Instead of bringing goods to people, or people to goods, robots go directly to warehouse inventory, pick items autonomously, and place them precisely into destination totes, with no human involvement. When you remove humans from the picking and putaway workflow, the operation becomes machine-like. Throughput is predictable, performance is consistent and reliable, and variability drops out of the equation. You know exactly how many units per hour the system will deliver, and it will do that every hour of every shift. And in the meantime, you no longer have to account for human employees missing workdays, showing up late, or missing crucial benchmarks. Most importantly, robots-to-goods doesn’t require the same tradeoffs as traditional goods-to-person systems. It doesn’t demand massive construction projects, nor does it force operators into rigid layouts. It can also be deployed in brand new buildings, or integrated into existing systems, and can be adapted over time to account for shifts in capacity and demand.” • So we’re building a new economy where there are no workers, and goods will flow seamlessly to consumers who have no money, because they can’t sell their labor power to survive any more.

Business: Energy

“As Big Tech’s power demand surges, data centers bring utilities a huge new profit center” [MarketWatch]. “In California, 49,000 households next to Lake Tahoe are about to learn what it means to be on the wrong side of a power-allocation decision. NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied roughly 75% of Liberty Utilities’ electricity for the Tahoe region for decades, announced that it will end the arrangement after May 2027. NV Energy says the transition reflects its own resource needs. Reporting across multiple outlets puts those resource needs in context: Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft are building data centers around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno, Nev., and data-center growth now accounts for the dominant share of new load on the regional grid.” • Looks like the only way forward is off the grid, Chinese solar panels or no. Too bad the Trump Administration attacked solar.

Writing Is Easy

Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up? Only after ingesition:


Sports Desk

Maybe feed it chewing gum?


Class Warfare

“Revenge of The Business Idiot” [Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?]. “Today I’m going to speak from the heart, and tell you that we’re ruled by f*cking imbeciles. AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot, an epoch where we’re ruled by people so thoroughly disconnected from the actual workforce that it was inevitable that a technology would be created specifically to grift them. LLMs are dangerous for many, many reasons, but the under-discussed one is how well they play to a certain kind of executive imbecile. Generative AI is — to quote Mo Bitar — really good at doing an impression of work, much like most managers and c-suite executives, and even if it’s completely incapable of doing something, it’ll absolutely say it can and tell you you’re amazing for suggesting it. And that’s why Business Idiots love it. Where regular human beings would say annoying things like ‘that’s not possible within that timeline’ or ‘we don’t have the resources to do it,’ AI will say ‘of course, right away!’ and burn as many tokens as possible. When it makes mistakes, it’ll apologize — as it should because it failed you — but then promise to do better next time, all while costing so much less, at least in theory, than a regular, stinky human being.” • The Managerial fraction of the Professional-Managerial Class have lost their minds. Why are they allowed to make capital allocation decisions? Can’t somebody lead them gently away?

“They Want Us Dead” [Welcome to Hellworld]. A good rant, so a long quote:

Perhaps surprisingly, the most clarifying thing for me has been the uncritical embrace of AI by the entire ruling and elite class. Seemingly overnight, everyone—the White House, billionaire tech CEOs, scammy crypto bros, stuffy corporations, Republican power brokers, establishment Democrats, progressive Democrats, elite universities, even major Hollywood figures—began parroting the same message: AI is here, it’s inevitable, we will force it into absolutely everything, and it will replace all your jobs. 

Even if the promises of AI technology were true (they’re not), this seems like an ominous alignment of the power structure. What is it about AI that they all agree on? And why now, at this particular moment, while everything seems to be falling apart? There’s a nihilism about it, isn’t there? Forget climate change, we can’t stop it now. Forget water shortages, we need the data centers more than we need people. Forget consent, we’ll just take whatever we need. Forget creative work and the humanities, those people were all mean to us anyway.

When you put this together with everything else we’re seeing—the abandonment of marginalized populations, the attack on all forms of social welfare—something doesn’t add up. As Trump’s approval numbers drop lower and lower, I keep having this thought: They don’t think they need to win elections anymore. What’s more, Democratic leadership doesn’t seem to be panicking about this. The familiar American methods of dissent and resistance—elections, pressuring public officials, boycotts, protests, strikes—do any of these things have currency against a power structure that’s decided it doesn’t need us? 

Finally, another thought occurred to me, one that I think crystallizes the threat of the moment in ways that “fascism” cannot. It’s not that we don’t need to keep pushing each other to care about other people—we do. And I think far more of us do care than we are led to believe. What we need to let go of is the idea that we will make the people in power care. They do not, and they will not. They cannot be convinced, they must be overthrown. Because the crystallizing truth is: They want us dead.

These are the stakes, and I don’t believe it’s doomerism to say so.

As I have often said, the two rules of neoliberalism are:

Rule #1: Because markets.

Rule #2: Go die!

And here we are!

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

Plantidote of the Day

Via TH:

cactus.png

TH writes: This one (according to Pl@ntNet) is a “Chalk dudleya.” It’s from the James & Rosemary Nix Nature Center, Part of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park.” • Pl@ntNet is citizen science!

Kind readers, I am running short! Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardens are fine. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast! Fungi are honorary plants.

Comments

By MarkGisleson – Tue, 2 Jun 2026 - 15:27 | Permalink

Zitron is also describing almost exactly what happened to the Democrat party. They’re always copying from someone else’s strategy from the previous cycle because they lack neither the wit or acumen to deal with the real world in real time.