hudebnik

I woke up, looked at the front yard, and realized that it had rained overnight. A strange rain, that somehow applied positive feedback to elevation differences, so that wherever there had been an inch or two indentation, there was now a pit two to three feet wide and almost as deep. We had planted several trees and large bushes, and each of them now stood either on top of a substantial hill or in one of these pits. Clearly, we would need to fill in the pits, and soon before there could be another positive-feedback rain! I had already been planning to pick up some garden soil at Home Depot today, but if the positive-feedback rain had hit the whole neighborhood, I could face serious competition for the limited number of bags of garden soil; better get in the car now.

Diagnosis: it feels like a typical anxiety dream about getting behind on household chores until they become utterly unmanageable. And in fact I was planning to pick up garden soil at Home Depot today, not for filling in pits that had formed overnight but for starting seeds indoors. (I'm pretty sure we've had our last frost of the year, but I'd still like to grow things past 1/4" tall before putting them into the garden to face the tender mercies of squirrels and the like.)

Not much specifically planned for this weekend. We took down the last of the Christmas decorations yesterday in honor of the Equinox. shalmestere spent much of yesterday laminating dozens of paper snowflakes for easier mounting and storage until next year, and there are more of them to go. We might go to a Piffaro concert in Philadelphia. We might attend a NAVRS on-line play-in. I should probably get a haircut. I've started a batch of sourdough bread, which should be ready by tonight. We should probably get a new name-and-phone-number tag for Archie, and start the bureaucratic process of replacing his rabies and license tags, because they've all gone missing in the past week.

I want to make some progress on our latest medieval pavilion. I reported here on things that needed to be done to it after last Pennsic, but most of that hasn't happened yet, and we're now closer to next Pennsic than to last Pennsic.

I designed it to be set up either with guy-lines alone, with a spreader hoop, or with hub-and-spoke support, but when we set it up with guy-lines alone (at Pennsic, on sloped ground and with limited room for long rope throw), the shoulders sagged asymmetrically and it both looked ugly and felt claustrophobic. I think the spreader-hoop approach will be easier and quicker to implement than hub-and-spoke, and to that end I mail-ordered some flexible aluminum tent-poles a few days ago (their medieval persona is a willow withy), so all I need to do is sew a sleeve for them to run through. Problem is, there are currently wall-hanging loops where the sleeve needs to be. But the wall-hanging loops need adjusting anyway: each end of the tent has 33 of them, while the walls each have 34 corresponding toggles, so things didn't really match up well last Pennsic. So the plan is to take most of the existing loops off the roof edge, sew on a spreader-hoop sleeve (covering a currently raw-edged seam), and reattach the loops slightly closer together on the inside face of the sleeve. Then we can feed the aluminum poles through the sleeve, and theoretically between their natural desire to be straight and the tent's semicircular shape, we'll get a nice, neat, taut, semicircular shoulder.

We may also need a rope or a rod or something connecting the two ends of the semicircle to keep them the right distance apart (i.e. to keep the poles' desire to be straight from outright winning the contest and turning an oval tent into a rectangular tent). A rod would serve double duty by hanging divider curtains and stuff like that, which we would very much like, so we'll probably need some uprights to hold that up so it can hold (a little) weight. Also need to apply waterproofing to the roof (and ideally walls), and finish waterproofing the wooden floor tiles we mail-ordered after last Pennsic, and perhaps attach another row of webbing stake-loops a foot or so up the walls to accommodate setup on sloped ground, and perhaps attach some short rope stake-loops to the webbing stake-loops on the walls. And it would be nice to have center poles that (a) look more medieval, and/or (b) provide support for the middles of the curtain-rods, or even a hub-and-spoke construction. But that's a larger woodworking project.

It would also be nice to apply some painted decoration to the roof and/or walls, and that should probably be done before we waterproof it, but if we wait for the paint project to happen, the waterproofing will never happen and we'll have a lot of wet, mildewy stuff. OTOH, many of the medieval pictures of tents show elaborate decoration on the valence and/or roof cap, and much less on the walls or the main part of the roof, so it would be plausible to do a smaller decoration project on the valence and leave the walls and roof (which are more critical to waterproof) fairly plain. OTTH, other medieval pictures of tents have elaborate decorations covering the walls and roof as well as the valence and roof-cap. This will need more discussion and consideration.

Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, he's declared an outright war on "DEI", without clearly defining what "DEI" means or why it's a bad thing. That vagueness is probably an intentional tactic: if people don't know exactly what you're forbidding, but you have a reputation for punishing people harshly for doing it, they'll voluntarily stop doing anything that it might conceivably be.

I'm not an expert on DEI as it's traditionally understood, but I gather it includes a couple of different things an organization might do:

• making (racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, gender, etc.) diversity an organizational goal, and measuring progress towards that goal by counting the representation of various races, religions, etc. in the organization as a whole or in its upper ranks;
  


• recognizing the (past or present) existence of discrimination and the achievements of people who have overcome it;


• allowing or supporting voluntary affinity groups within the organization based on membership in historically-discriminated-against demographics;


• favoring members of groups that have historically been disfavored, so as to achieve diversity and equality of results;


• actively soliciting applications (for student positions, internships, jobs, promotions) from groups that traditionally haven't applied, on the theory that adding them to the applicant pool will give the positions to people who are both more-qualified and more-diverse;


• doing research or public outreach on specific racial, religious, socioeconomic, gender, etc. groups for any reason.

People have made a number of good arguments in favor of diversity as an organizational goal: it'll reduce monolithic "groupthink" and enable the organization to consider a wider variety of solutions to problems; it'll enable a company to perceive and meet the needs of a wider variety of potential customers; it'll prepare students to live harmoniously in a diverse real world.

At the same time, there are legitimate arguments against certain implementations of it. We've all seen mandatory DEI trainings that everybody has to take once a year in order to check off a box, everybody forgets about as soon as the box is checked, and there's no evidence that they make any difference, which makes them a waste of everybody's time. More seriously, it's really hard to measure "how disadvantaged" somebody is and therefore how much special consideration someone should get for being a member of a historically-disadvantaged group; miscalculating this runs a real risk of actively causing exactly the discrimination (on an individual level, based on group membership) we're trying to eliminate. And if there's a widespread perception that members of historically-disadvantaged groups are now getting unfairly-favorable treatment, people will assume that they're less-qualified "DEI hires" no matter how good they are at their jobs. (Naturally, the people most likely to perceive historically-disadvantaged groups as getting unfairly-favorable treatment, and to dismiss them as "DEI hires", are members of historically-advantaged groups who sixty years ago would have said openly that blacks and women were incapable of doing certain jobs: the reasoning has changed but the conclusion is the same.)

The Trump administration's actions on the subject conflate all of the above forms of "DEI", and declare them all to be illegal and unacceptable within government, in organizations that contract with the government, and even in private organizations. Most people I know assume that this "anti-DEI backlash" is actually an attempt to reinstate historical discrimination in favor of straight-white-males, thinly disguised as preventing discrimination (just as anybody on the Trump/Musk team espousing "freedom of speech" is probably actively censoring speech).

But let's imagine, hypothetically, that some people in the anti-DEI backlash were acting out of good, noble motives, and sincerely opposed to racism, sexism, religious or political discrimination, etc. What would they be trying to achieve?

The simple answer is "a race-blind society", in which your ethnic (or religious or whatever) background not only makes no difference in your life but literally isn't recognized. We won't give you any special consideration for the fact that you were born to a group that's been historically discriminated against; the clock is reset at birth, so only your individual achievements matter. Those individual achievements are no more noteworthy for having overcome disadvantages of birth, because there are no disadvantages of birth. We won't make any special effort to reach out to historically-disadvantaged groups, because that would acknowledge the existence of historically-disadvantaged groups. Clubs and voluntary organizations cannot exclude people from membership by race, religion, gender, etc. because recognizing those distinctions perpetuates discrimination. Organizations cannot count how many employees or how many managers are of particular historically-disadvantaged groups because recognizing the existence of those groups perpetuates discrimination. In researching problems that appear particularly prevalent in particular ethnic, religious, etc. groups (e.g. AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, teen suicide, wife-burning), we won't specifically reach out to those groups because that would require the organization to recognize the existence of those groups and ask who's a member of one.

It's an attractive dream: eliminate racism and discrimination at a stroke by decreeing that they don't exist and never have existed. Indeed, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, and gender groups themselves don't exist and never have existed; only individuals exist, and any other kind of grouping of people is artificial and harmful. We need to treat each individual purely based on that individual's complex of characteristics, not as part of one identity group or another.

Except gender: there are exactly two genders, two sexes (and those terms are synonymous); there are no anatomically or chromosomally ambiguous cases, and believing oneself to be in the wrong bucket is simply a mental illness, a delusion, like believing oneself to be the reincarnation of King Louis XIV. And since this one congenital difference is real and natural, it would be silly and unrealistic to try to achieve "equality" across it, because men and women really are different. There's no reason to assume men and women are equally capable of certain things -- indeed, we know for a fact that they're not -- so if there are an equal number of men and women in a particular organization, a particular rank, or a particular field, it probably took unfair discrimination to achieve that artificial outcome. Some jobs are just inherently male or inherently female; that's the way Nature made us, and refusing to accept that fact is again a delusion or mental illness. (You see the slippery slope we just slid down....)

Now, everybody reading this knows that gender and sex really are more complicated than that. First, almost every difference between men and women is a difference-of-means between overlapping bell curves, not a qualitative and absolute difference: yes, "the average man" has more peak muscular power than "the average woman", but you'll never meet the average man or the average woman, only individuals who can and should be judged on the individual characteristics relevant to the job. Second, maybe 99% of people can be unambiguously categorized as male or female, but the other 1% still exist, despite laws and executive orders saying they don't. And people with gender dysphoria really exist: I've never experienced it first-hand, so I'm not in a position to say what it's like, much less what treatments work for it, but I'm willing to believe that it's a real condition, and that treating it is different from treating the belief that you're Louis XIV.

And everybody reading this knows that no, the clock doesn't reset at birth. Even if society became race-blind tomorrow, your parents' finances, education, religion, politics, citizenship, and home address would still have been affected by their ethnicity, and would all measurably affect your chances of "making it in the world". The people pushing "race-blind" policies are themselves almost all congenitally rich, white US citizens with individual records of active racism and sexism.

So what would work better? Simple answers and wishful thinking don't work. By all means, let's try not to actively perpetuate racist and sexist prejudices, but without pretending that they never existed and don't still affect us. We can try to make schools in poor neighborhoods as good as those in rich neighborhoods, without pretending that they already are. We can acknowledge that some medical problems really are specific to (or manifest differently in) particular races or sexes, and use that fact to deliver medical care to everyone rather than mostly studying and treating straight-white-men's problems. Race and sex differences really do exist, and they really do have fuzzy boundaries: somebody really can be black by one definition and Asian by another, male by one definition and female by another, etc. Clubs and affinity groups (all-female, all-male, all-black, all-white, all-gay, all-left-handed, all-divorced, all-ex-convict, all-Catholic, all-abducted-by-aliens, etc.) serve a useful role, and they can decide for themselves how to handle the fuzzy boundaries, as long as they're honest about their criteria and role.

... in a movie theater in the East Village. OMG.

For many years, it's been a challenge for computer graphics people to get water looking right. This movie is largely about water, and they did an amazing job of it, while staying clearly on the "animation" side of the uncanny valley. The animation, whether water, scenery, or living characters, is lush and gorgeous.

The characters are all non-human: a house cat, several domestic dogs of various breeds, a bunch of lemurs, a bunch of secretary-birds, a capybara, etc. There's no dialogue, beyond the sorts of noises you would expect those species to produce. They aren't overly anthropomorphized: they move and behave in ways you could believe that species moving and behaving, with the exception of a few who figure out how to use a boat's rudder. The individual personalities and inter-species relationships develop plausibly, if you've seen any of the YouTube videos about bonding between actual animals of different species.

The setting is intentionally ambiguous: the fauna are a mix of South American, European, and African, the flora seem to be subtropical, and the night skies have visible aurora, which makes it subpolar. Remnants of human civilization are everywhere -- some ruins thousands of years old, other human constructions that seem to have been abandoned only months ago, but no actual humans. There's no explanation of why the humans are gone, or where they went, and that's fine: the nonhuman characters don't care about those abstract questions, only "how do I survive in the world I'm in right now?" Likewise, the flood that motivates the whole movie happens for no particular reason: when you're a house cat, things like that just happen, you don't wonder why, you just deal with it.

And there's a lot of "it" to deal with: the characters face life-threatening peril every day, mixed with existential traumas like the loss of a toy overboard, and moral crises like whether to rescue other characters whom you don't particularly like. These crises are deeply involving and moving, and you'll find yourself wincing in sympathy. Highly recommended.

Next up: "The Wild Robot", also nominated for "best animated feature". Not showing in theaters any more, so we'll have to stream it.

From this NY Times article ,

“Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a call with reporters Friday that “disastrous” timber and lumber policies “drive up construction and housing costs and impoverish America through large trade deficits that results from exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil dumping lumber” into the U.S. market.”

Wait: if Canada, Germany, and Brazil are “dumping” lumber on the US market, wouldn’t that drive construction and housing prices down, not up? It might cost some US lumberjack jobs, in exchange for creating more US construction jobs. (Not to mention jobs making things that we export to Canada, Germany, and Brazil.)

Do you...

(a) ask whether the person is hurt, and offer a hand to help the person stand up,

(b) walk by on the other side of the street, not getting involved, or

(c) kneel on the person's back and whisper "How much will you pay me to let you up?"

For the past month, the United States has been loudly and conspicuously in the (b) category.

As of yesterday's show by the President and Vice President, the United States of America has officially moved on to (c). When we see someone in trouble, whom we could help at trivial cost, it's not an opportunity to help a fellow-creature, it's an opportunity to exploit weakness. The weaker someone is, the more we can extort.

President Zelensky has been offered two related deals in recent days. One says he should "make peace" with Russia by allowing Russia to keep all the land it's captured, with no guarantee that Russia won't invade again next year to capture some more. The other says he should give the United States a bunch of mineral rights, with no guarantee that the United States will help it defend itself, now or ever. To put it in terms Donald Trump would understand, "What's in it for me? Why would I take either of those deals?"

I guess the answer is "If you don't take the deal with Russia, they promise to keep killing your people and destroying your country. If you don't take the deal with me, I promise to cut off your military aid and make it easier for Russia."


I suspect that if Donald Trump read the above, he would agree completely that the United States has moved on to (c), and there's nothing wrong with that: what's the point of having power if you're not going to use it for your own benefit? Why would I help somebody who's not helping me? Trump sees himself as a Mafia Don, negotiating with his equals (mostly Putin and Xi) to carve up the rest of the world among them; why would he bother involving the NPC's in his negotiations, or help someone who's inevitably going to end up in Putin's slice of the pie anyway? Much smarter to extract as much as he can from a weak country before handing it over to Putin, just as he always extracts as much money as he can from a failing business before having it declare bankruptcy.

Traditional (20th-century) US foreign policy would say, instead, that we and all of our allies benefit from a rules-based international order, in which wars of territorial acquisition have been mostly consigned to history. So when somebody violates that rules-based international order by invading a neighbor, it's in the interest of us and all of our allies to punish the violator.

And most individuals would like to think of themselves as good, kind people in category (a); it's only at the national level that we're apparently willing to be Mafia-types offering protection rackets. What we want in a leader doesn't always match what we want in ourselves.

Which leads us back to different models of leadership. Confucius distinguished several kinds of kings: in order of desirability, the king who is respected, the king who is loved, the king who is feared, and the king who is pitied. Donald Trump has never aspired to be respected or loved, only feared.

To put it another way, people follow a leader voluntarily because the leader has a reputation for making good decisions that benefit the followers. For much of the 20th century, other countries followed the United States because it seemed to be doing mostly-good things, mostly-successfully, and its people seemed to be mostly happy and prosperous. By contrast, people obey a ruler because they'll be punished if they don't. Countries in the Russian orbit obey the Kremlin because if you step out of line, your infrastructure gets destroyed and your people slaughtered like Ukraine's.

The "rule by fear" approach is fragile: it makes people hate you, so if you stop punishing them for a moment, they start to doubt that you will, and they stop obeying you. So you have to find things to punish people for continually, even if most of them are obeying you; you have to constantly escalate the level of obedience and obeisance you demand, in order to justify maintaining your rule of fear.

By contrast, the "lead by example and competence" approach only requires that you do what was in your and your people's best interest anyway: have a decent, happy society and make decisions for it that actually work. (Not that that's easy, but it's a worthy challenge.)

Do you want your President to lead a country that leads much of the world, or rule a country that rules much of the world?

On Valentine's Day, I was walking the dogs and spotted this on our front lawn:


After two days of rain and warm-ish temperatures, I spotted this on a lawn a block away:


So even though everything is going to hell in Washington, DC, and bird flu is killing pet cats and infecting humans, and five commercial US airplanes have crashed in a month, and thousands of government employees have been fired by people who have no idea what those employees were doing, and the President says as long as he "saves his Country", he hasn't broken any laws, and he doesn't need to abide by laws or court orders.... still, spring seems to be coming.

My brother did a tour of duty with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and reported (among other things) on the politics: there were apparently free and fair elections, among candidates from multiple political parties, none of which had any distinct policy positions to run on. The only reason to work for, or vote for, one party over another was which one had promised you a government job. Which offered a steady, if small, paycheck -- and something more.

In modern Russia, and the old Soviet Union, and sometimes Mexico, and many other "developing" countries noted for endemic corruption, it's been taken for granted that government officials can be, and indeed must be, bribed -- not only to overlook the law, but even to apply the law or to do their jobs as the law demands. If you have any kind of complex interaction with the government, you need to show up with lots of cash in order to grease the palm of each successive official along the way. Indeed, in such countries a government job pays you not primarily in wages, but in the authority over ordinary people that enables you to extort bribes and kickbacks from them.

Such a regime, of course, impoverishes ordinary people, except those already too poor to afford bribes, who can expect no help at all from government or the law. The system drives home, every day, the lesson that government serves the rich; indeed, why would anyone expect government to serve all the people? That's not what it's for.

It could reasonably be argued that most nations throughout history have been like that: almost everyone was desperately poor, including government officials, and the most obvious way for the latter to make money was to use their government authority to extort bribes and kickbacks. And of course government serves the interests of the rich; that's the way it's always been and always will be.

In such nations, it's also taken for granted that elections are rigged, predetermined to favor the incumbent. If you have governmental power, and one of government's functions is to hold elections, of course you're going to use your power to make sure your side wins; why would anybody expect otherwise?

The United States prided itself on being different. From the start, the authors of the Declaration and Constitution expected at least its elected officials to be public servants, accountable to all the people (a category which gradually expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), and removable peacefully from their posts when they failed to serve the people. The Constitution mentions two specific crimes for which a high judicial or executive official can be impeached, and one of them is bribery: a public official taking bribes, or otherwise using his official powers to enrich himself, was not doing his job and shouldn't continue to hold it. And for many years the fairness and honesty of elections was the closest thing we had to a national religion: the most un-American, un-patriotic things you can do are cheat on an election, or refuse to leave peacefully when you lose.

As this NY Times piece explains, the 1881 assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled campaign worker who hadn't gotten the government job he expected triggered a backlash against the then-accepted "spoils system" by which elected officials routinely gave lots of government jobs to their supporters, regardless of qualifications, competence, or interest in the specific job. Congress passed laws requiring some, and eventually most, Federal civil servants to be hired on the basis of competence, and forbidding them to be fired or demoted for political reasons. The new expectation was that Federal employees at all levels were there to do their jobs for the benefit of the American people regardless of their personal political leanings, and would continue to serve, and develop role-relevant expertise, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That expectation has lasted us for well over a century, but Donald Trump is intent on ending it.

In the 20th century, the United States developed a new self-appointed role in the world: the shining city on the hill, the exemplar of how a nation should work, with free speech and association for all its people, free and fair elections, law and justice impartially applied to all, and a government that honestly tried to serve the needs of all its people. The US cast itself as the honest, upstanding hero in a morality play in which Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, and other "un-democratic" nations were the enemy. Naturally, the US didn't always live up to those ideals, and it frequently compromised with one un-democratic nation in order to fight another or to gain access to natural resources... but even so, it often acted in the interest of "spreading democracy", and not only Americans but downtrodden people around the world saw the US as on the right side of history. Pro-democracy activists around the world fought and died for the right to have what Americans had.

After World War II, General MacArthur occupied Japan for seven years, with half a million US and allied troops. The Japanese people prepared to be treated as vanquished enemies -- abused, crushed, humiliated. But for the most part, that didn't happen: high-ranking Japanese military officers were tried for war crimes and forbidden to enter politics, but the occupying forces were strictly forbidden to abuse the locals, and punished when they did. Instead, they concentrated on distributing food to the starving Japanese people and rebuilding a functioning economy and government. They legalized trade unions, redistributed land ownership from a few quasi-feudal lords to their multitude of tenants, guaranteed labor standards, and wrote a new Constitution in which women could vote and the Emperor continued as the ceremonial head of a parliamentary democracy with self-defense forces but no offensive military. All of this was forced on Japan, but it produced, peacefully, a sustainable system that over the next fifty years thrived and grew into a major world economy.

In 1977, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, forbidding US-based companies from bribing government officials even in foreign countries where such bribery was a common, accepted practice. The affected companies chafed under this constraint, but since American companies were so awesome they figured they could still compete for foreign business while upholding Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

This sort of self-consciously-virtuous government requires a massive act of faith: the people have to believe that their government is accountable and will generally act in the public interest, that elections are free and fair and honest, and that government officials are there to do their jobs well rather than to extort bribes. These ideals, once instilled, form a positive feedback loop: if most people honestly believe in them, officials who violate them are likely to actually be punished, which reinforces public belief in the ideals, and so on.

Conversely, in a country without public belief in these ideals, it's difficult to instill them: if people expect most government officials to be corrupt, they won't expect corrupt officials to be punished, so officials will see no reason not to be corrupt, and the people's expectation will be fulfilled. Nations can be divided into those with a widespread belief in accountable, honest government, and those with widespread cynicism about government corruption and self-interest, and it's difficult to cross from one category to the other.

Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the US Republican Party began a decades-long program to dismantle people's faith in government. It was necessary to convince the American people that government could not, and should not, make ordinary people's lives better, and could never be accountable enough to be trusted with power. Whenever government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, Republicans were obligated to sabotage it, lest people come to expect government to make their lives better. Once Donald Trump came on the scene, he concentrated his efforts on dividing Americans against one another and telling them that elections were not free and fair, but rigged against him (and therefore against his supporters, the "real" Americans). Today, in 2025, this program is bearing fruit: recent generations pride themselves on being cynical about government and democracy, and have seldom experienced a public-interest government program that worked smoothly, so (the theory goes) they won't lift a finger to stop government and democracy from being dismantled.

Which brings us to the substantial minority of Americans who are passionate, dedicated Trump-supporters. As Timothy Burke pointed out in 2020, Trump's die-hard supporters aren't blind to his autocratic, un-democratic tendencies; they're in favor of them. "Fundamentally they think power is a zero-sum game. You hold it or you are held by it. You are the boot on someone’s neck or there will be a boot on yours. They agree that what they have was taken from others; they think that’s the way of all things. You take or are taken from.... That what can be taken must be taken.... Authority is cruel and without mercy because it must be. They simply expect authority to be far more cruel to others than it is to them. And they expect to be cruel with the authority they possess." I made a similar point about Trump himself here.

Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to reinstate the 19th-century "spoils system" in which government workers are hired and fired for their political allegiance, not their qualifications or competence. If you seek a job in the Trump administration, you'll be asked "Was the 2020 Presidential election stolen from Donald Trump?", and if you can't answer "yes" with a straight face, you don't get the job.

On the issue of bribery and other financial crimes, he explained nine years ago on the campaign trail how he routinely donated lots of money to political candidates so they would do him favors once in office, with the implication that that was entirely right and proper. He's recently "halted enforcement" of the aforementioned FCPA, ordered IRS agents repurposed from catching tax evaders to catching illegal aliens, ordered Justice Department prosecutors reallocated from financial crimes and election interference to international drug cartels, pardoned numerous politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) convicted of bribery or tax evasion, and ordered the dropping of bribery charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, explicitly so that Adams could help him catch illegal aliens. In short, he's trying to legalize and normalize bribery and corruption, to turn the US into something more like Russia. After all, everybody in the President's circles commits financial crimes routinely, so it seems unfair to prosecute them as though they were "real" crimes.

Now add Elon Musk to the mix. He appears (based on the past few weeks) to be engaged in a holy war of wanton destruction. His strategy seems to be to destroy government agencies, their knowledgeable staff, and their data so quickly that he can irreversibly change the facts on the ground before the law and the courts can catch up to him. Because of this need for speed, he can't waste time analyzing individual programs to see whether they're actually wasteful or serve a useful purpose (Congressional staff typically spend months doing that); it's much easier and more fun to burn everything to the ground and rebuild from scratch (or leave the latter job for somebody who cares).

So the President is trying to turn the United States into a Russian-style kleptocracy in which bribery, nepotism, political patronage, election-rigging, and silencing of dissenters are taken for granted as normal and acceptable. Meanwhile, the co-President-without-portfolio is playing a videogame whose side effect is turning the United States into a nation without a civil service: there's an all-powerful President, his extremely manly military, a purely advisory Congress, an irrelevant and toothless hierarchy of courts, and nothing else.

The word "nothing" there is important. A more recent Timothy Burke post makes the interesting point that Elon Musk, and a handful of others in his bracket (Trump isn't rich enough for this club), are so mind-bogglingly wealthy that they couldn't lose or spend it if they tried. The annual interest on Musk's wealth is what 10,000 average Americans will earn in their combined lifetimes.

Such people have transcended the usual entrepreneur "take risks with other people's money" success story and reached "take risks because even if I lose every bet, I'm still unimaginably rich". Musk theoretically lost $30 billion buying and mismanaging Twitter, and it doesn't matter: he got control of a major social-media network, and if it no longer produces revenue, who cares? He can afford to "move fast and break things" because it doesn't matter to him if he breaks everything. He isn't acting irrationally or irresponsibly; he's a rational nihilist. He needs to find bigger and bigger risks to take, bigger and bigger things to break, just to stave off boredom and keep the adrenaline flowing. The US government is a big enough target that destroying it is actually a bit of a challenge, and therefore worth doing.

The reader may have noticed that the cynic and the nihilist aren't entirely on the same wavelength. If the nihilist succeeds, there will be almost no US government authority left that the cynic can milk for bribes and kickbacks. In the most charitable, optimistic reading, the latter is the culmination of Reagan's dream: reduce the US government to the point that it's not worth capturing, so "regulatory capture" disappears. As yet another Timothy Burke post points out, Musk is rapidly dismantling exactly the infrastructure and expertise that Trump (or any other would-be dictator) needs to enforce his will. But that comes at a cost: with the rule of law gone, your security depends on what you personally can enforce, and you'll have to spend a good deal of your time enforcing it rather than building anything new. If you're not a strongman, your best hope is to find one and throw yourself on his mercy.

One is steering the ship towards dictatorship, the other towards anarchy. Where will we actually end up?

I'm a f**ing billionaire who's never had anything to do with foreign aid or agriculture or lots of other things, and never worked in, much less ran, a government agency of any kind, but I know better how to run a foreign aid agency, an agriculture department, or any government agency than people who have actually done it for decades. In fact, it's such child's play that my college-aged interns can do a better job of it than people who have done it for decades.

It's really quite simple, something called "zero-based budgeting". You start by setting the budget for everything to zero, and then the people who really care about what the agency does can try to justify every penny they want it to spend. Sure, they already spent months making those arguments to Congress, when Congress passed their appropriations into law, but Congress is corrupt and rule-bound; it takes somebody like me, not biased by rules and regulations and domain knowledge, to decide what really deserves funding. It'll take more months to make those arguments to me, and then I'll decide unilaterally whether to accept them, depending on how I feel that day. It's not like anybody's life or livelihood depends on these programs, right?

And while we're waiting for me to make my decisions about which programs survive and which don't, I'm busily deleting data files and shredding documents, to make it as difficult as possible for the opposing team to get their pwecious agency running again.

The plan is to destroy as much of the Federal government as possible, so quickly that by the time the courts or Congress or other such fuddy-duddies can try to stop me, it'll be a fait accompli. And since I'm in a hurry, I don't have time to make distinctions like "which programs are actually valuable?"; if it turns out we really do need them, we'll build them from scratch. That can't be hard, for somebody as smart as me.

UPDATE: TechDirt makes a similar point. Musk charged into Twitter, destroyed most of it without understanding what it did, then found he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought. Now he's charged into the US government, destroyed various agencies without understanding what they did (specifically USAID), then found that he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought.

I read in the Times an interview with Steve Bannon (by Ross Douthat, one of the resident “thinking conservatives”). Bannon actually says a few things that make sense to me, before letting loose a howler like “[DJT is] actually an incredible, kindhearted, empathetic individual” and praising his “moral clarity”. But let’s leave that aside for now.

Bannon is very concerned about making life better for “ordinary workers”, which sounds good to me. (Although both Bannon and I are “the elite”, in that we have degrees from respected universities.) But then he adds “I’m anti- any immigration. I want a moratorium on all immigration right now because I want American citizens to get a shot at the brass ring.” I immediately wondered “Why do people who aren’t currently US citizens (but may want to be) not count as ‘ordinary people’ for populism purposes? Why can’t you be populist without also being racist and jingoistic? And what makes you think shutting down immigration is good for anybody, even current US citizens?”

Yes, illegal immigrants are probably pulling down wages in some places (although a lot of them are doing jobs that you can't get US citizens to do at all), and in theory you could solve that by getting them out of the country, but you could also solve it by making them legal -- they would suddenly be able to demand minimum wage, and safe workplaces, and not getting raped by their bosses, and police protection when they're the victims of crimes, and they'd be able to join unions, all that kind of stuff. They wouldn't be undercutting American workers, they would be American workers.

Bannon and Douthat also talk about the split within MAGAland between, as Bannon puts it, “nationalist populists” (his team) and “globalist technofeudalists” (Musk, Andreesen, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, et al). And I thought “aha! So am I a globalist populist?”

Maybe not, since “populism” is also associated with a deep suspicion of expertise, while I have great respect for expertise. But I recognize that expertise doesn’t only come from graduate school: I can respect the expertise of a really good building contractor or auto mechanic or sheep farmer or basketball player as much as that of a really good epidemiologist or mathematician. The world is better off with people doing those things really well, and I’m better off because I don’t know how to do those things myself. If I’m concerned about avian flu, I’ll ask the experts — epidemiologists, virologists, zoologists, and poultry farmers, each of whom probably knows aspects of the problem that the others don’t know. So does that make me a “populist”?

Back to the nationalism thing. If I were to frame this in religious terms, I might say “humans and other living beings are God’s creations, while nation-states and their borders are human inventions. Why should the latter determine which of the former deserve respect and consideration?”