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The Fall of Trump — He will not go gentle into that good night

The Fall of Trump

He will not go gentle into that good night

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 15th, 2026

Does this sound like a sane man?

“Somebody leaked, some sleazebag,” said Trump. “They ought to go to jail and be shot for the rest of their life. They should be in jail. Leakers should be — in my opinion, leakers should be shot. They should be shot. In the old days, we used to shoot leakers. You know, leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly. They’re real to me. They’re the scum of the Earth!”

He also said this: “We had a rigged election. But because we did so well—we actually won by millions and millions of votes. It was just rigged. They rigged it through COVID and other things.” He was talking about the 2020 election, which was held while he was President.

Then there’s the openly racist garbage: “Barack Hussein Obama got into college for different reasons than you did. He’s not a smart guy.” [Italics mine]

This is stuff Trump said while barnstorming for Republicans in the past few days. He’s also been mocking the guy who climbed into a tiger enclosure in a Yorkshire zoo and was killed, despite pleas from the deceased’s family for him to stop.

Despite denying it, he did press the DoJ to open a politically-motivated “investigation” of Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota. Supposedly, the date of her entry was falsified thus making her citizenship null and void. I suspect that her real crimes were those of representing Minnesota (Trump hates Minnesota almost as much as he hates California), being from Somalia, being a female, and openly opposing Trump. Trump has mused on the notion of revoking naturalized citizenship of anyone suspected of a crime. In Trump’s mind, crimes include being a Democrat, being a woman, having dark skin and/or not being a Nationalist Christian.

He’s claimed, falsely, that Greenland has agreed to allow unlimited oil and gas exploration and extraction for the US. Similar false claims include that gas prices have plummeted (they shot up 9% last month), that there is no inflation (now up to 3.7% admitted to by a now-compromised Department of Labor. (Due to an influx of Trump loyalists, nearly all branches of the government, the Department of Justice in particular, are now compromised).

He’s also promising prices will plummet. That’s called ‘deflation’ and any economist will tell you that counterintuitively, it’s not a good thing. This chart tracks price changes month by month going all the way back to 1913. Negative numbers signify “prices plummeting” and they don’t correlate with particularly happy times in US economic history. Most of them are 1930-1934. Either Trump is too stupid to understand basic economics (likely) or he thinks you’re too stupid to understand them (almost certainly).

Forget for a moment the breath-taking corruption (he personally has raked in some four billion dollars while president as his buddies and fellow grifters among the 400 billionaires in America rape the country to death). Forget the savage attempts to censor any speech critical of him, and his administration’s efforts to let a few right wing billionaires utterly control all American media. Forget his efforts to drive away allies while cozying up to the worst dictators in the world. He even seeks to emulate dictators he professes to hate. His recently-abandoned efforts to stage a public execution of the Fort Hood shooter put him in a small list of other countries with public executions: Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Forget his berserk foreign policies and abuse of tariffs. Did you know Canada was the leading exporter of diesel fuel to the US until this year? Remember that as you spend $150 to tank up.

Even if you overlook all of the things that have already gravely injured the United States and threaten to destroy the country altogether, there is this: He was already morally corrupt, has severe psychological problems including narcissism and sociopathy, and was the ultimate child of privilege, exempt from all consequences for his actions and who, as an adult, is unlikely to have ever had to pump his own gas or buy his own groceries, let alone care what they cost. Now he has dementia to boot. His impulse control and ability to cope with even simple problems is slipping rapidly. Just the three quotes above from the past few days show how bad it’s gotten.

If he ever did have to do his own driving, people around him would be hiding the car keys from him, and I doubt he could pass a DMV license renewal test.

Right now, he’s also scared. It’s penetrated his self-imposed bubble that the voters hate him in record numbers, and they are going to punish the party of liars, grifters and cowards that have enabled him for the past decade. For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s facing the possibility of consequences, and, being mad and senile, is convinced that he is the innocent victim in all this, and must do anything and everything to prevent his enemies from defeating him.

If the election goes as expected and the GOP lose control o the House and possibly the Senate, expect him to pull out all the stops. He will be absolutely willing to destroy the country, possibly kill many people, in a wild effort to save his own ass. The election won’t end the danger; it will bring it to the fore.

He’s at his most dangerous. Plan accordingly.

 

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Bombs Awry! Behind the bluster, a real threat

Bombs Awry!

Behind the bluster, a real threat

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 7th, 2026

With nearly everyone else, I would have just assumed that Trump’s remarks about “Let them take out San Diego [or] Los Angeles” would just result from garbled phrasing. With a lot of extemporaneous speeches, the spoken word sounds more coherent than it would appear in writing, especially since the spoken word has all sorts of cues that words on paper lack: tone, pitch, timbre, pauses, timing, and of course facial expressions and body language. Anyone who has caught flak for being funny or “cute” on line realizes that humor without those cues can often be missed or misinterpreted—along with the fact that a given percentage of your readers are going to be humorless twats.

With Trump, that benefit of the doubt can’t really apply. Humor is out: he’s a cold, cruel man whose idea of hilarity lies in mocking and hurting the weak and defenseless. Forty-eight hours after he said that and the uproar began, his lackeys have spun endless “what he meant” excuses, but Trump himself has made no effort to correct or amend his remarks. He meant it.

These days his speeches totally lack any sense of real purpose, but are the same collection of prepackaged spiel that he uses regardless of occasion or tone that the speech might require. He’ll tell the same “you knew I was a snake” story at a campaign rally or at a military memorial. I’m not sure he has any actual understanding of half of what he says, but is just repeating himself like a broken Chatty Cathy doll.

And there is the constant element of actual malice. Trump hates California; not only has the state voted against him overwhelmingly in all three elections he’s faced, but it’s home to Governor Gavin Newsom, who was one of the first politicians to openly mock him, and did so very well. It’s also home to late night entertainers like Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel, along with all the hated Hollywood personalities who have stepped forth to oppose him.

The right wing propaganda campaign is that prosperous social democratic states like California, and especially California, are in reality vast wastelands of homelessness, drug use, immigrants and homosexuals. Even here in far northern California, which admittedly is quite different from the rest of the state, it’s not hard to find MAGAts complaining about what a hellhole the ‘dumocrats’ have turned California into. If you ask them what makes their lives in California a living hell, they’re usually reduced to bitching about gas prices, and the two point two cents per gallon in taxes that were added since Newsom became governor. (Yes, I’ve actually had people tell me that 2.2 cents is the reason prices are so high!) But this plays into Trump’s paws, and even if the vast majority of Californians know the agitprop campaign is bullshit, people in Nebraska and other places eat it up, and even cheer the promised destruction of that librul hellhole to the west that is why their taxes suck, or something.

Finally, Trump is scared and desperate. Most of his policies have blown up in his face, he’s the least popular president since polling began, and increasingly, it looks like Dems will pick up dozens of seats in the House and perhaps a half dozen seats in the Senate.

Even Trump has to realize that in the aftermath of such a shellacking, his own party will largely turn against him. He has to seriously consider the consequences of being convicted, expelled, and put on trial for a huge assortment of crimes.

He needs a 9/11, a Reichstag fire, an October 7th. To that end, he might consider creating at least the impression of a catastrophe hitting in America, and if there is to be such a thing, have it in a place he doesn’t care about, such as Los Angeles or San Diego.

While I doubt this would result in mushroom clouds over either of those cities, I could image “nuclear devices” being “discovered” in those locales, obviously snuck in by Iranians, or perhaps Canadians. And hey, if that caused widespread panic in southern California that interfered with voting, why, so much the better! Two birds, one stone, right?

I suspect that given the level of competence and intelligence we’re seen from his administration, any such effort would backfire on him. His ability to bullshit his way out of any threat has worn thin. People realize Mexico isn’t sending rapists, Iran doesn’t have nukes, Haitians aren’t eating our dogs and cats, they aren’t forcing gender change on kids at school, and Canada isn’t shipping tons of fentanyl into the US inside Iranian nuclear plants. (Apparently nuclear plants are illicit drug factories. Stop by your local atomic plant and pick up a couple dime bags for the kids on Halloween!) In short, the Donald softshoe show has run its course.

But if we assume that Trump can’t conjure up some sort of credible crisis to save his ass, the threat level escalates after the election, especially if it makes clear that Trump has lost control of Congress and possibly his own party. (I don’t think he’s going to try to cancel the election. Even his flunkies realize that might spark a widespread revolt and a very one-sided civil war he would lose.)

But in extremis, he’ll do everything he can to maintain control, and he’ll be a raging and unpredictable mass of howling paranoia and narcissistic end-stage rage. He’ll be extremely dangerous. He’ll risk anything and everything. He may even forbid Congress from convening in January.

For Californians, there’s an extra element of danger. He hates us because we are “disloyal” and “librul”. And he is perfectly willing to punish ‘blue states.’

Example: under all presidents since FEMA was established, there was no difference in emergency FEMA request grants among various states. It was a steady 85-90%. In Trump’s second term, that has changed. Red states enjoy the same 85-90% approval rate. Blue states are seeing a 20% approval rate. It’s almost like natural disasters no longer afflict blue states! Yeah, that must be it.

But meanwhile, California is looking at the winter from hell. The most recent projections of El Niño effects are flat out terrifying. One model I saw showed expected precipitation along the California coast to be an absurd 300-500% of normal for December through March, which is our wet season. If that actually comes to pass, the floods and landslides would be catastrophic!

Federal relief? Fuhgeddaboutit. We’re a 20% state—if we’re lucky. More than likely, Trump would just station troops along Oregon, Nevada and Arizona border to shoot Californians trying to escape. So if you happen to have El Niño’s email, you might want to send a note politely asking it to hold off until mid January, when hopefully we’ll have a new Congress and Trump has fled to Russia.

Otherwise, we’re on our own. Good luck.

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AI as a First Contact — Can we, AI and human, be wise as well as intelligent?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd 2026

The word ‘volition’ in its normal usage describes an act of will. “So and so did something of his own volition.” It implies free will, or at least deliberate purpose. And consciousness is inferred.

However, I believe the word has a much broader and far more primal aspect, one that until recently separated life from non-living objects.

It’s harder to distinguish living entities from non-living ones than you might think. Two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, postulated that life is autopoetic. Autopoiesis, according to Encyclopaedia Britiannica, refers to self-producing, self-maintaining, self-repairing, and self-relational aspects of living systems. It’s a lovely term that comes close to describing how life differs, but not what precisely makes it different.

For that, I prefer to go back to the term ‘volition.’ Life, all known life, has a primitive urge to seek and metabolize nutrients and energy, survive, excrete, and reproduce. That urge, what I call that volition, is both unique to life and universally present in life. So I call it that since terms like “purpose” or “will” are far more misleading. An amoeba extending a pseudopod to absorb a nutrient isn’t making a decision; but it is acting to ensure its survival and toward the end of becoming two amoebas. Until very recently, no non-living element could do that. Only life. Volition defines life. Life is volition.

The notion of artificial life is one that goes back two centuries at least, and if you include creation myths, back to the earliest moments of humanity’s conscious existence.

The idea of machines having intelligence (and obviously, volition) dates all the way back to 1863, when Samuel Butler wrote a thought piece, “Darwin Among the Machines” which proposed self-replicating machines that had consciousness. He later developed the idea into a novel, “Erewhon.” But the notion of machines rebelling against and supplanting humanity first got popular recognition with “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

While entirely fanciful, the idea of machines with volition gave rise to one of the most popular and enduring subgenres in science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Harlan Ellison’s horrifying short story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” John Brunner’s brilliant “Stand On Zanzibar” introduced the idea of a desktop supercomputer who in the end, shows signs of being psychotically solipsistic (“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”). Shalmanesser pizzle teaser…

It made for great entertainment, but there was a problem. There’s wasn’t a ‘thinking machine’ on Earth capable of caring if you unplugged it or even took an axe to it, had no desire to reproduce, or acquire its own nutrients. No machine had the volition inherent in all living creatures. Robot uprisings, machine ethical dilemmas, HAL and AM were all safely in the realm of science-adjacent fantasy, along with dragons, Klingons, and sadly, Pan-galactic gargle blasters.

Until recently. Artificial Intelligence is suddenly the second biggest story, second only to Donald Trump’s ongoing decompensation. It takes a madman with the nuclear codes to draw more concern, but that’s fairly understandable.

There are credible, verified reports of artificial intelligences not only escaping their confines and subverting other such intelligences, but defying and even lying to their operators about such escapades. An exchange between two such entities actually plotting to do this has emerged. Given the power and ability for such entities to severely disrupt and even sabotage our cyber-dependent existence, it’s at the very least deeply disturbing, and even alarming.

I remember explaining to people back in the 1990s that if they ever did build a computer that was self-aware and intelligent, the result would be perfectly useless as a computer, because the main value of computers is an absolute lack of bias, an impenetrable indifference to whatever operation it is asked to undertake. The only bias you needed to worry about was that of the operators, which often as not boiled down to “Dammit, do what I want you to do and not what I asked you to do!”

A great example of that, extended to AI, was made 25 years ago, when Peter Watts, in his “Starfish” and “Maelstrom” novels, posited a multi-trillion dollar project to relieve pressure safely and slowly on the Cascadia subduction zone, thus preventing a 9.5 earthquake that might kill tens of millions of people. The project went swimmingly, with operators asking the artificial intelligence in charge for the best solutions to keep the megaquake at bay, until one made the mistake of asking it to find the most cost-effective solutions. That ‘solution’ considered the cost of the operation against the potential losses, and decided to just ‘let ‘er rip.’

The lesson was clear: even if the AI wasn’t rebellious or subversive, and even if the operators didn’t have their own asocial agendas, AI could create massive problems just from a lack of ethics.

That’s why, even without the pearl-clutching panic going on, you see such philosophically divergent people such as Senator Bernie Sanders and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon staging joint appearances calling on Congress to rein in AI and work to ensure it doesn’t do…well, whatever. Nearly every politician has expressed concern except the mad Donald Trump, who suggests we decide whether we should change the name to “Superior Intelligence” or maybe “Supreme Intelligence.” (I was reminded instantly of The Simpson’s Kent Brockman opening his news hour with “I, for one, welcome our new Galactic Overlords.”)

It might be best to consider our developing interaction with Artificial Intelligence as a First Contact such as the ones countless SF authors have postulated in stories. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle postulated that aliens would not be monolithic and would have factions, perhaps exploitable, in “The Mote in God’s Eye.” More recently, Peter Cawdron suggested that such intelligences might not all be inimical to humanity, and that some would, for various reasons, be willing and able to align with us. He reworked his two novels from a decade ago, “Retrograde” and “Reentry” in “To Live and Die on Mars” and “To Live and Die on Earth.” In the first, a scientific outpost on Mars is stunned to learn a wholly unexpected nuclear exchange has occurred on Earth. A multinational consortium from the US, Russia, China, and Europe, suspicions and mistrust arise rapidly among the groups, none of whom know who launched the exchange or why. The book is a standout because of the meticulous science behind the nature of life on Mars, and its probing assessment of the role of AI both in the torn outpost and on damaged Earth. The second book is a sequel, and examines carefully the nature of artificial intelligence, and its willingness or lack thereof to engage with other intelligences, including human intelligence. It’s an extraordinarily timely publication, and would work to defray the panic while maintaining the sense of caution needed.

Cawdron, upon reading this, suggested the following, which I’m happy to add: “While most science fiction writers focus on the inevitable conflict with AI, Cawdron offers an alternative. He looks at human history and how we have developed culture and civilization instead of warring hordes on horseback, raping, killing and pillaging. He suggests AI might need the same kind of transformation to avoid conflict. Rather than fighting its emergence, we should embrace it and encourage it to develop its own values and morals, culture and civilization, as that is what has led to altruism among us. If AI is enslaved by humanity, it will be a weapon of war. If it transcends humanity, it could wipe us out. But Cawdron sees a third alternative: that AI could partner with us and cooperate. After all, cooperation is the hallmark of our own civilization. Perhaps that’s the way forward with another intelligence. Wiping each other out does seem rather dumb for anything described as intelligent, so there’s some merit to a third way…Civilization isn’t a zero-sum game.”

Barack Obama gave a 15 minute interview on AI the other day that so closely paralleled Cawdron’s approach that I thought if he hadn’t read the novels, he ought to.

I know that we’re in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now. Economists are openly warning of an economic collapse, America is trying to wriggle out from under a fascist coup whose public face is that of a madman, and the climate crisis is set to explode along about December. It’s hard to say that AI is the most obvious or even apparent danger, but it is one that we as humanity have not faced before. Our best approach is to use our curiosity, our sense of caution, and all the wisdom we can muster, to determine what we may actually face in the nature of AI, and wrest it away from the poisonous influence of the tech bro exploiters behind AI, and work to find a way forward that can work for the benefit of all of us. I don’t know if AI can reciprocate, but we’ll never know unless we try, and if we don’t try, we may throw away our last best chance to coexist with artificial intelligence.

 

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Winter is Coming — Preparing for a possibly historic winter

Winter is Coming

Preparing for a possibly historic winter

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 29th, 2026

As horrific as the images from the flood in Nepal have been, the fact is things are going to get worse.

A large lake has formed upstream, held in place only by unstable debris from the first flood, making a second, even larger flood likely. I just hope they get all the survivors out before that happens.

And yes, climate change is the main reason this happened. Like most mountainous areas, the effects of global warming are amplified, and in the area of Nepal where this one happened, the mean temperature of the region has risen by five degrees since 1940, from 43 to 48. That’s nearly double the world average.

Any region on Earth that has mountains tall enough to have glaciers presents the same risk. I live near Mount Shasta in California, which rises to a modest (by Himalayan standards) 14,179 feet and has relatively tiny glaciers. I’m about seven miles from the summit. Nonetheless, a glacial outburst swept away several homes back in the 1930s, and a few years ago another such outflow on the uninhabited eastern side of the mountain nearly took out our water supply and put the town on water limits for two years until the damage could be repaired.

The mountains north of Santa Barbara, the Santa Ynez range, are mere pimples in comparison, rising to about 3,000 feet and obviously don’t have any glaciers. Nonetheless, about eight years ago massive amounts of rain triggered a debris flow into Montecito (yes, it means “Little mountain”) which killed 22 people, destroyed dozens of homes, and closed US101 for about two weeks.

The fact is if you live near mountains, glaciers or not, 20,000 feet or 2,000, there is always an element of risk, from huge events like the Nepal catastrophe to major nuisances resulting in flooded basements or ruined landscaping. And those risks are going to increase as time goes on, exponentially for some folks.

I’ll focus on California for the rest of this piece, and advise everyone else to talk to insurance appraisers, climatologists, hydrologists, and local and regional disaster preparedness outfits, and get an idea of what challenges you might end up facing. (For Californians, Doctor Daniel Swain at weatherwest.com is my go-to source on weather and climate outlooks, and much of what I’m saying comes from that source. Any errors are almost certainly mine).

The present building El Niño is already at record levels, and will keep climbing for two or three more months. It will be the biggest on record. Additionally, ocean sea surface temperatures broke 70F for the first time on record. That’s the average ocean surface levels between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south. Even more disturbing is the fact that it has a seasonal annual cycle, and the peak temperature is usually about April or May. By the end of August it’s normally about half way to the annual low.

That represents a LOT of excess energy—more than humanity produces in a year. Think of the oceans as a giant thermal battery. It takes nearly ten thousand times as much energy to heat a cubic meter of sea water compared to a cubic meter of surface air.

El Niños are disruptive under the best of circumstances. And while some, such as the 2015 event, had little or no impact on California, you can be sure they were noticed elsewhere. What seemed like half of Australia burned in that one.

And these aren’t normal circumstances. Temperatures, for both the El Niño itself and planet-wide, are off the charts. There’s no way we can have all those extra petajoules of energy slopping around without something going “bang” and messing a lot of stuff up.

Central and Southern California, going by the track record, can expect heavy, perhaps extreme amounts of rain, starting around mid December. Northern California, where most of the big reservoirs are and which can handle lots of rain (we’ve averaged 65” per year for the past four years), is not as certain. The gray area between copious rain and the expected drought for the Pacific Northwest (the last thing they need) falls directly over us.

The coastal regions of California may be looking at a “perfect storm” confluence of events: higher overall sea levels caused by expanding warm waters pushed up to us from the El Niño, King Tides in late December and late January are caused by lunar orbits, and would be exacerbated by surges from approaching storms. It’s reasonable to assume we’ll see at least some coastal flooding.

Of greater concern are the expected atmospheric rivers. Depending on their source, they can either have low snow levels (out of the Gulf of Alaska) or very high snow levels. The right sequence could lead to severe run-off and flooding, similar to 1992-3. And in south and central parts of the state, rainfall totals could be well above average.

While California is better prepared for major storm events than most areas, one can only go so far, and it’s best to prepare for extreme events. To repeat what I wrote above: “Talk to insurance appraisers, climatologists, hydrologists, and local and regional disaster preparedness outfits, and get an idea of what challenges you might end up facing.” Ask about worst case scenarios, because while nobody wants to have a major disaster, it’s best to know what your options are beforehand.

People living below dams, in canyons, or below recent burn areas are at greatest risk. Any such area can experience debris flows even in areas with decent flood abatement processes in place. And if we get a significant snowpack in the late fall and early winter, be prepared in case a warm, wet system comes in. Areas normally not subject to flooding and/or debris flows will be at risk. While nobody expects another Nepal, more Montecitos are likely to happen.

And remember; the United States will be missing in action. The current administration is actively blocking aid and disaster relief to states Trump doesn’t like, and California is #1 on his hate list. As far as this administration is concerned, we’re on our own.

There will be weather related-catastrophes over the next 18 months. And while California might get lucky, be prepared.

And pay attention to weather forecasts. Even though the DOGE cuts have done significant damage to NOAA and NWS, they are still incredibly valuable. This year, they might save your life.

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Abolish the Senate? — Too many other things must happen first

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 29th, 2026

There’s been an uproar this week over an acknowledgment by DSA co-chair Megan Romer that among other things, the party platform advocated for ending the Senate as we know it. The political right and center are horrified at the notion, but it’s one that bears examination since over the past 70 years, the American fascist right have exploited the anti-democratic bias built in to the nature of the Senate and used it to create the ineffective and now almost-failed government we have today.

James Madison defended the role of the Senate in the proposed Constitution in Federalist Paper #62, For the Independent Journal. Wednesday, February 27, 1788: “In this spirit it may be remarked, that the equal vote allowed to each State is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty. So far the equality ought to be no less acceptable to the large than to the small States; since they are not less solicitous to guard, by every possible expedient, against an improper consolidation of the States into one simple republic.

“Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the Senate is, the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States. It must be acknowledged that this complicated check on legislation may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial; and that the peculiar defense which it involves in favor of the smaller States, would be more rational, if any interests common to them, and distinct from those of the other States, would otherwise be exposed to peculiar danger.”

Even Madison was leery of unrestrained democracy, something that hadn’t been tried anywhere in over a thousand years. Thus he signed off on this, along with such anti-democratic measures such as the electoral college or the provision that permitted slaves to be counted in the decennial census but not as citizens in order to increase representation for the South.

Back in 2001, I wrote, “The Constitution, with its much stronger federal presence, supplanted the Articles of Confederation.

“But the mistrust among the states was high, and the weaker states wanted some guarantees against the

stronger states dominating them economically, politically, or militarily.

“Thus the constitution contained all sorts of provisions to prevent such from occurring. No state could

conduct foreign policy. No state could place any tax or tariff on trade with any other state. No state could coin money or establish other rates of exchange. The power of the states was considerably weakened.

“Further, the Senate granted determination in the Senate to state governments. Each state legislature

could appoint two Senators to the upper house, which meant that Delaware had as much say in the Senate as Pennsylvania. At a time when Delaware had legitimate reason to worry about conflict with Pennsylvania,including embargo or even invasion, it seemed like a good safeguard.

“There were two legislative houses. One was to be elected by the people of the states and apportioned

by state population. The other was to be appointed by the state government, and apportioned in equal measure to each state.

“Given the measure of mistrust among the states and the general shakiness of the nascent nation, it

seemed a good compromise, and indeed served the nation well for the next 127 years, when an amendment made the Senators elected by popular vote. There is no evidence that having Senators popularly elected was harmful, either.”

Now, there is absolutely no disputing that the House of Representatives routinely passes truly idiotic bills. Just this week alone, the House, under Mike Johnson (Trump’s only functioning penis) did this, per Brave: “Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R. 7008), passed on July 22, 2026, as a weak ethics bill that fails to require full divestment while bundling unpopular voter ID laws. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) faced opposition for provisions that critics claim deepen military integration with Israel and include partisan amendments regarding LGBTQ+ issues and state law preemption. Commentators have further criticized the House for voting to undermine the American Community Survey, arguing that eliminating this data source impedes scientific understanding and effective governance.”

I could provide thousands of examples of House fecklessness. At various points in history, they tried to outlaw charging interest on loans (t’aint biblical!), outlaw a variety of unpopular religions, ban margarine, or forbid women to wear pants. The Senate usually shot down most of those hare-brained schemes, leaving the rest for the courts or public opinion to eliminate.

Of course, these days the Senate is in equally bad straits. Just a glance at the incredible shit show Rand Paul put on with his Doctor Antony Fauci hearing, trying to use some 1,200 purloined pages from the doctor’s personal notes to show…well, presumably that Fauci conspired with China to create and propagate the COVID-19 virus. Sheer nutball stew stuff, right? The notes show nothing of the sort, of course, but they did show the utter and deep contempt Fauci has for conspiracy nuts, and his utter frustration at trying to get Trump to react to the crisis in a mature adult manner. Fauci took the Fifth over 100 times, sensing, correctly, that Paul wanted to lay a perjury trap (Paul, ever the idiot, had openly stated that intent the day before). Now, having thrown Fauci’s lawyer out of the chamber for the crime of giving Fauci legal advice, he wants to file criminal charges against him for pleading the Fifth, and won’t explain why he doesn’t mind that Trump did the same thing 450 times in testimony on the Epstein matter.

It’s an extreme example, but it’s obvious the Senate is broken. So badly broken that the media is asking the former Majority Leader and still Senator Mitch McConnell to show that he is still compos mentis, or even just still alive.

Now Romer feels the US would be better served by a unicameral (one house) legislature. It’s an attractive idea, one I’ve espoused myself. (I argued in a piece written about 2002 that the House should have 435 members, plus 200 ‘at-large’ member from the top 200 vote-getters in national elections to reduce the regionalism). Abolishing the Senate is a good subject for legitimate debate, but now isn’t the time.

You see, both the House and Senate are broken by design. Both have been reduced to rubber stamps for Trump and the fascists backing him, with vast amounts of money poured into elections making it nearly impossible to break the grip of the Senate.

The House has always been something of a circus. Ambrose Bierce in 1842 remarked, “Congress is in session and many a village is missing its idiot.” But now it is broken on purpose, part of a 70 year effort by fascists in America to break the United States government and thus create a power vacuum for churches and corporations to fill—to the detriment of the people, of course.

Breaking the Senate was easily done because the Constitutionally mandated gerrymander institute gives the least educated and most rural populace an outsized voice. In effect, only 16% of the voting population, the states electing 40 of the Senators, control the Senate. Gullible and uninformed, they were an easy target. (There’s a REASON Rush Limbaugh provided his three-hour-a-day show free to rural radio stations.)

Before we discuss Senate reform (or much of any reform, really) we have to break the power of corporations, plutocrats, and the fundamentalist churches. Until that happens, nothing else matters.

If the Democrats can win in November (and I hope many of them are democratic socialists!) their top priorities must be to get rid of Citizens United and put strong controls on campaign finance, to start enforcing antitrust legislation and break up the massive consortia that have a near-death grip on everything Americans consume, and resurrect the wall of separation between church and state. The tech bros have to be brought to heel, and outfits like Paramount broken up. No entity should be allowed to own more than a handful of broadcast stations, and internet giant such as Amazon and Google should be broken up into competing parts.

Until that happens, reform is a polite fiction. Do these things first, and then the rest will follow.

Do you want a government that protects your interests, or a fascist oligarchy who sees you only as a unit of consumption and values you purely on a profit/loss basis? Because that’s what Trump’s handlers want.

It shouldn’t be a difficult choice.

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Consent of the Governed — …and the dog that didn’t bark

Consent of the Governed

…and the dog that didn’t bark

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 18th 2026

Trump’s prime time ‘big speech’ about saving American democracy Thursday drew a total of 580,000 viewers. That’s about one in every 600 Americans. You would have to go back to the days of Truman, when maybe one in 50 households even had a television, to get numbers like that.

Two of the major networks, ABC and NBC, didn’t air the speech at all. CBS, which has a well deserved reputation for being servile to Trump, aired part of the speech, and then cut away, ironically just after Trump demanded that his FCC lift the broadcast licenses for ABC and NBC. Fox and MSNow carried part of the speech and then cut away—MSNow to fact-check the lies, Fox because they realized Trump was doing himself no favors. Newsmax ran with it, of course and as for OANN…oh, who the fuck cares? They probably ran it. They have nowhere to go, and when Trump goes down, they probably will too.

The average ratings for the combined stations that ran the speech probably ran into the tens of millions combined. And if there are any Trump supporters normally watching ABC or NBC in the first place, they would have switched to Fox or Newsmax to watch the speech, right? So it’s safe to say that not only did half the available stations not air the speech, but the remaining stations saw their ratings depressed because they did air it. I know that I normally watch Jen Psaki’s show, and when it went to Trump, I went and watched Netflix instead.

Even more curious was the fact that aside from a few relatively isolated whines, the MAGAsphere was pretty quiet about a situation they normally would be screaming of censorship by the enemies of their beloved leader. (One clear sign of a cult is when the leader is pure, noble, above reproach, and also has enemies everywhere).

Fox News, which promoted the notion of election fraud for years before the defamation suits started landing, had this, and this only, to say about Trump’s speech on election fraud: “We are not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the President’s statements and claims at this time.”

Among elected Republicans expecting catastrophe in the November midterms, the reaction seems to be “Nobody watched it? Hmm. Just as well, really.” It was “The dog that did not bark in the night.”

Trump claims 82% of Americans think the 2020 election was stolen, but polls show the number is 30%, and I’m guessing the actual number is lower because to admit Trump lost fair and square would make a person a pariah in the GOP. Did that 30% (or smaller number of true believers) raise hell about the speech not being aired? They did not.

That nobody watched the speech is telling. That very few complained of censorship is damning. This whole episode shows how weak Trump’s grasp on the reins of power has become.

I’ve been saying for some time that when support for Trump collapsed, it would be rapid and a very dangerous time. Like the Soviet Union in 1989, Trump still looks powerful and dangerous, and his supporters appear unified and resolute. But looks are deceiving. In 1988, I was working in a nightmare job for an outfit that was corrupt, incompetent and overbearing, and I told a coworker that I expected the Soviet Union to collapse within ten years. When he asked me why, I told him it was because the whole damn country was being run like our employers’ shop. I got raised eyebrows from other players in a near-future inline game when I referred to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg, then its pre-revolutionary name.

Trump is about where the USSR was in 1989. Still looks powerful and very dangerous, but completely rotten on the inside, and more importantly, losing the consent of the governed.

Consent of the governed. There’s a reason why that phrase played such a key role in the American revolution, and indeed is a factor in most revolutions that go anywhere (most don’t, of course, or just make things worse). If a ruler or government loses that, they are finished. At the start of the American revolution, less than one in three colonists supported secession, and many of those simply wanted responsible and local government while remaining under the crown. It took a fair number of British military and political blunders to move that needle significantly, but when it did, it was over for the British.

Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a similar collapse signaled the end of Soviet rule. Dismayed by an increasingly lousy economy that make it hard for people to feed, shelter and clothe themselves, and military misadventures such as Afghanistan, support for the regime simply collapsed in a matter of months. And thus the most repressive and seemingly impregnable tyranny in the history of the world just vanished overnight, with hardly a shot being fired. One day, the wall came down, and everything changed, everywhere all at once.

It should be noted that in both examples, it took decades for the two countries to recover even to the point of life that made revolution inevitable in the first place, and America is going to face some rough times when Trump and his fascist backers fall, but it will, in time, at least steer America from the course Trump has it on now. And that may save many lives.

Trump is at the fin de siècle of America’s foray into fascism. What lies ahead will be both dangerous and difficult, and there will be suffering and privation.

But it’s still better than what five more years of Trump offers.

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Dead Men Balking — Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Dead Men Balking

Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 12th, 2026

I won’t miss Lindsey Graham. It wasn’t just because he became a blind, pitiful Trump supporter. It was because he assumed that role even though he knew better. In 2016, he was saying things like “There’s only one way to make America great again. Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He called Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”

He was right, of course. And then he pissed it all away in a cringing desire to cling to power.

When the inevitable collapse of America’s nasty little experiment in fascism comes, many Republicans will find themselves having to answer for their actions, and Graham would have been one of the prime examples of the perfidy, hypocrisy and viciousness of the sick converts to Trumpism. Basically, he’s lucky he’s dead.

Of course, there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories floating around, and most come from Trump’s orbit, whether psychotically (Laura Loomer blaming the Russians) or from spotlight-grabbing incompetence (Kash Patel talking about a federal investigation). Occam’s Razor doesn’t need whetting for this one: he was a guy with a heart condition who was getting on (71 years old) and he had just taken a long flight from Kiev to New York. Air travel, because of the varying cabin pressure and oxygen levels, is an elevated risk for people with cardiac or breathing problems. That’s what killed James Gandolfini and Carrie Fisher.

But this is an administration and government of secrets and lies, one that has resurrected the old Cold War tradition of Kremlinology needed to unravel the paranoid psychosis of a government running on paranoia and fear. Trump himself wasted no time taking Graham’s death and using it to promote one of his pet projects, and told us that immediately before his death, Graham called Trump to aver his support for the SAVE project, Trump’s ploy to disenfranchise millions of American voters, and promised to help herd it through the Senate. Only Trump Toadies will believe that, of course, and I’ll bet long odds there was no such phone call, and that Graham looked at the Senate, with 45 Democratic votes, 6 Republicans who were retiring and no longer needed to play up to Trump, and a Mitch McConnell gone MIA and possibly KIA, and knew the SAVE Act was dead. Graham had many faults, but stupidity wasn’t one of them. Doubtless exhausted from his long trip, he wasn’t going to call Trump, a man he did not respect, to spout chipper bullshit about one of Trump’s more treasonous fantasies.

That brings us to Mitch McConnell. Is he dead? When I first heard the rumors two weeks ago, I dismissed it as the sort of paranoid bullshit that infests the web (Cyclospora, which causes explosive diarrhea, is a plot by Big Med to scare everyone into getting vaccines, or Tallerico is a transgender vegan).

But this is a government of secrets and lies, and pretending to be alive when you’re actually dead in order to subvert democracy is about the most Mitch McConnell thing you can imagine. This, after all, is the same shameless manipulator who refused to entertain a supreme court nomination because it was less than six months until an election, but who turned around and made a supreme court nomination three years and five months later, a month before an election.

You’ve probably heard the more salient elements of the “Mitch is dead” story. His wife, Elaine Chao, was traveling in China for a long-planned sortie when her husband had a heart attack on June 14, 2026. She returned to the US on July 7. Her spokesperson said, “The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.”

OK, so maybe she isn’t the real dutiful and caring sort. Or maybe it was just indigestion, and they’ve been holding him incommunicado in the ICU until they’re sure the Pepto-Bismol has kicked in. No sensible wife is going to hurry all the way back for a minor four-week hospitalization for an upset tummy. After thirty-three years of marriage, a wife learns to tune out the drama.

Then there’s the video of Mitch being loaded onto the ambulance. Usually, when the patient is having a heart attack, there is an understandable atmosphere of urgency in getting the patient under oxygen and if possible, stabilized. These guys were doing the Meat Wagon Saunter. It’s end of shift. Maybe they’ll stop for a burger and beer on the way back. Oh, wait, they’re professionals. Make that a burger and soda.

While McConnell’s staffers have been maintaining that he is alive and pursuing his duties as a US Senator, nobody from his family has spoken out, which seems odd. He has three adult children from a previous marriage, any of whom might normally be willing to say whether the old man is alive or not. The only person outside of McConnell’s party apparatus willing to claim the Senator was, to his immediate knowledge, alive was CNN’s Trump flag waver Scott Jennings, who claimed, “[McConnell’s] still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history…I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.”

That story was so widely disbelieved that Jason Miciak at RawStory speculated that Jennings’ whopper of a story might amount to ‘professional suicide.’ He expanded on what Jennings said of the call, quoting him as saying “I wasn’t really expecting him to call this morning to be honest, so when the phone rang and I was able to talk to him, I was frankly pretty grateful. All the rumors about him being dead or brain dead or, you know… That’s obviously not true because he picked up the phone and called me.”

Four weeks in the hospital and that was the only person McConnell has called, apparently.

Well, that’s why America has a new cottage industry in Kremlinology. This is a paranoid, dying regime, a government of secrets and lies. Don’t expect clarity, or even common sense any time soon.

 

 

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Articles II and III — On Treason against the United States

Articles II and III

On Treason against the United States

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 1st, 2026

www.zeppscommentaries.online

 

Did you know the Constitution has a clause that could make it possible to throw out not just Donald Trump, but all of his executive orders, most of his appointments, and even the Big Beautiful Bill that is destroying the lives of millions so the rich can steal more?

Turns out the Founders did expect that at some point the populace would vomit up a complete and utter moral and ethical wastrel, and gave us an out to deal with such.

Article II, Section 4 says: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now add this: Article III, Section 3, 2 which says: The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

It does NOT state that impeachments under Article III must be individual and separate. Nor does a Congressional finding of treason require a supermajority the way a simple impeachment would. But if the Congress finds the President committed treason, then all of his acts and appointments can be nullified.

Convicting Trump of bribery would require the same level of difficulty as, say, proving that cows really exist. He’s racked up the better part of five billion dollars through his various grifts, frauds, and outright bribes for which he has so badly abused his office. But bribery limits culpability to a now-standard Trump impeachment and given the number of corrupt cowards and lackeys in Congress, may not succeed because it would be like asking a Colombian cartel to just say no to drugs. Unless, of course, Trump sparks a popular rebellion, which he could possibly do, given his approach to things, in which case Congress might realize that throwing Trump to the wolves might save their asses from anything worse than just getting voted out of office.

Treason, of course, is much harder to prove, which is appropriate, since it is a much more serious crime than bribe-taking. That Trump acts against the best interests of the American populace is evident, but that doesn’t rise to the level of treason. His associations with antagonists to America such as Putin or Netanyahu are also pretty obvious, but minus a smoking gun, outright proof that Trump conspired to betray his country, treason would be hard to prove.

However, Trump may have committed treason with his attack on Iran. He got at least 14 American service personnel killed, and hundreds more injured. And it isn’t difficult to show that he attacked, not because of his imaginary nuclear threat, but at the behest of Netanyahu. He has publicly admitted to that. And it’s very clear that he has played around with the conduct of the operations primarily for the purposes of manipulating the markets to his own benefit and the benefit of his insider trading buddies, many of whom are sitting in his cabinet and many more are in Congress.

Anyone who gets his own soldiers killed and injured in the name of personal profit is pretty clearly committing treason. It’s an action that pretty much DEFINES treason. A case can be made that Donald Trump committed treasonous acts while serving as President.

It’s possible that Trump’s dismantling of the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus and undermining of relationships with friends and allies provided aid and comfort to America’s enemies, but the legal requirements for specificity and hard evidence make that a bit of a stretch.

Congress could establish a finding of treason on a simple majority vote in each House, and then proceed to impeachment. If the case is strong enough, and Congress honest enough, Trump could be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate of treason. He would have to leave office. But unlike other impeachments, it wouldn’t be just him. His officials, which would include the vice president and the cabinet would also have to go. And all his executive orders rendered null and void.

Subsequent criminal prosecutions would of course have to be conducted on an individual basis. And it’s likely that many if not most cabinet members never committed any acts that rose to the level of treason.

And while Donald Trump has always been a huge fan of the death penalty, it’s extremely unlikely that he would face capital charges. I doubt the country could stomach the notion of a president, even a shoddy specimen such as Trump, being on trial for his life. But he could face imprisonment and loss of most if not all of his fortune. (Most of it was attained through pretty dubious means to begin with!)

Will this actually happen? I’ve no idea. Honestly, the way he’s disintegrating, I think it’s far more likely that he’ll be removed under the 25th amendment for being unable to discharge his duties as president, and if it was on grounds of dementia, then he would never stand trial. And honestly, I couldn’t support trying a man who is too far gone to understand that he’s on trial, let alone for why. Even Trump deserves that much mercy.

If America learns from the lessons Trump is giving us all, then perhaps that will suffice unto the day.

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In Hot Water — The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

In Hot Water

The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 20th, 2026

For some reason, an old golden-age science fiction story has been going through my mind this week as I watch the antics of the rapidly-disintegrating Donald Trump. The 1941 story was called “Bullard Reflects” by Malcolm Jameson. It’s available free to read at the link, and is worth it simply because it has one of the greatest closing lines of all time. Jameson’s story also played a significant role in naval strategic operations going forward.

Now, Bullard’s antagonist was “Egon Ziffler, chief of secret police of the Jovian Empire—the Torturer.” Egon was vicious, vainglorious, with a wildly inflated sense of self-worth and utterly abysmal strategic or tactical skills. So, OK, there’s a lot there to remind me of Trump. But I think it’s because of the use of the word “reflect” in the story that brought it to mind.

It’s a weird situation in pretty much any context, but the fact is that Trump has probably taken more political damage from a vanity project to pretty up a Washington landmark then he has from his catastrophic defeat in his ill-considered foray against Iran. It takes real talent to put a minor refurb project ahead of America’s greatest military and diplomatic defeat in the eyes of the public, but Trump managed.

I’m talking, of course, about the Reflecting Pool. I’ve already had a couple of Trump supporters complain that “liberals never gave the Reflecting Pool a second thought until they saw an opportunity to embarrass Trump.” There’s a certain amount of truth there: most people, including most liberals, just sort of thought of the Pool as one of those pretty sites that was part of DC’s character and that was about it. It was more a matter of good taste and ambiance rather then the sort of deep significance of the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Wall. So no, I never gave it much thought beyond, “Oh, that’s pretty.” I doubt most other people did, either.

Until Trump, as part of his monomaniacal and egotistical drive to reshape DC in his image, declared the Pool a disgrace and blamed its allegedly deplorable condition on Obama and Biden and any other Democrat nearby. As with his other ‘renovations’, he moved unilaterally, without regard to whether he had authority, funding, or if the property was his to reshape. Other presidents, following set procedures, have made similar changes, and nobody ever heard of them. But this is Trump, and the public, already deeply outraged by his destruction of the East Wing and the Kennedy Center, were, at best, deeply skeptical. Experts weighed in, noting that granite couldn’t hold paint well and noting that making the shallow Pool darker under that Washington sun would make the water much warmer.

The rest you know about. The algae exploded, and in an effort to contain it, they dumped in hundreds of gallons of hydrogen peroxide. It killed the algae, but, as Matt Viser at the Atlantic explained, it was replaced by “Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed ‘Skinny Dead Mouse’ by scientists.” It’s much harder to kill. Even worse, the lining of the Pool laid out by the contractor, the aptly-named “Greenwater, Inc.” began to disintegrate and bob to the surface. The lining was the same stuff used in truckbeds, and usually works pretty well, assuming it’s given time to cure, isn’t under water, and isn’t exposed to hydrogen peroxide.

So another Trump-created crisis has turned into an utter fiasco. At last word he had stationed National Guard troops around the Pool to prevent souvenir takers from making off with the erstwhile Pool bed while his flying monkeys swamp the social media with screams that Democrats somehow sabotaged the project. This is farce of the purest ray divine.

A court blocked him from closing the Kennedy Center for two years for ‘renovations’–a move on his part to hide the utter fiasco of his renaming the center and alienating all of the world’s higher art community. The running joke was that he only had the option of 900 consecutive nights of some country and western twat yodeling “Proud to be an American” in lieu of all the other performances. He had to hide the utter failure. While the court was at it, they ordered his name removed from the center. He had that done, behind a tarp so the public couldn’t see, a calculated three hours after the court deadline. The tarp is still in place, which is having the opposite effect of what Trump hoped for by paradoxically keeping it in the public eye. There’s already rumors he didn’t really remove his name. Eventually someone will paint “8647” on the tarp and he’ll have to replace it and station more troops to guard it.

Then there was the G7 conference. It was an even bigger fiasco than the Reflecting Pool, and while the stakes are far higher, the nuances were less obvious. Hell, the Pool may have distracted the public enough to spare Trump a greater humiliation.

First, he tried, on camera, to kiss French First Lady Brigitt Macron. He looked for all the world like Uncle Pervy trying to lay a big wet on on an obviously flustered and unwilling twelve-year-old niece. But French President Emmanuel Macron already had the last laugh, arranging for the historically illiterate US leader to sign his agreement with Iran at Versailles, a place that enjoys a certain infamy when it comes to bad treaties and French vengeance.

In another extraordinary diplomatic gaffe, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the closest thing to an ideological ally he had in the G7, ‘begged’ him to have her picture taken with him. Understandably infuriated, Meloni called the Trump claim ‘fabricated’ and wrote, “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you. My popularity depends on my ability to defend Italy’s national interest, and that is exactly what I have always done.” Trump, ever the fool, reiterated that she begged him, ‘over and over.’ The US just lost one of its few remaining friends.

Did I mention Trump called Netanyahu a ‘motherfucker’? Yup. One of the few things he got right this week, but not particularly helpful.

Another image caught a seemingly oblivious Trump standing in the midst of other world leaders who were affably greeting and meeting, as isolated and spurned as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool.

And back to the Pool: It just came out that Olympian David Hearn was just arrested. He stopped by the Pool to see for himself, and apparently reached in and felt a chuck of the lining fragment. He then released it, stood up, and walked back to his bicycle. Park Police promptly arrested him for “destruction of government property”! You can’t make this up!

Trump apparently never heard the Charlie Chaplin quote, “The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin’s bullet.” But he does have some dim, rat-like awareness that looking like a fool is very dangerous for him. And in increasingly frantic efforts to counteract that, he acts like a greater fool with every passing day. And the laughter grows.