Don't know how this will play in other countries, but the arc is the last bit of this minute and a half video

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/ce8pp9r03z7o

The sign of a modest president

Hopefully, once he leaves, or is forced out, of office, he'll be spending the rest of his life in the D J Trump Correctional Facility.

We thought none of this was possible, that surely our presidents went through psychological testing, and that they were required to divest themselves so they couldn't profit from the position. We thought laws were already in place that would prevent a sitting president from being able to abuse the system the way he has, that surely the SCOTUS would protect the constitutional rights they're charged with interpreting, and that the checks and balances we have in place would continue to serve us well.

We were wrong because most of us were counting on the free press to keep us informed, to ask the right questions, to dig into corruption and unconstitutional actions. They're a joke, all of them, since you end up with more coverage of actual events from social media (which has very little journalistic process, so it's hard to trust). I'm old enough to remember pre-Clinton journalism, where reporters asked the tough questions and nobody walked out of interviews with the press for fear of looking shady.

I'm hoping the next version of the USA corrects the mistakes made, provides the provisions we left out for some reason, and moves ahead keeping all the good stuff while discarding this MAGA trash. It's been over a decade now, and we're heartily tired of how slow the wheels are moving.

Watching formerly solid media outlets bend the knee has been hard. The spouse and I now read a lot of national news in UK media which seem less smoochy at the Arse de Turnip. Glad some US sources like NPR are not caving. If Turnip calls a news company "failing" or "lamestream" or "radical Left" that's usually a good sign they're doing their job as journalists.

2 hours ago, Phi for All said:

I'm hoping the next version of the USA corrects the mistakes made

The national mistakes made by this administration might be fixable.
The international mistakes not so much; too many 'alliance bridges' have been burned, and no one will be willing to take those risks again.

4 hours ago, MigL said:

Hopefully, once he leaves, or is forced out, of office, he'll be spending the rest of his life in the D J Trump Correctional Facility.

Well, but then President Vance under direction of Supreme Leader Thiel can just pardon him, together with the tech insurrectionists of 2028.

3 hours ago, Phi for All said:

We thought none of this was possible, that surely our presidents went through psychological testing, and that they were required to divest themselves so they couldn't profit from the position. We thought laws were already in place that would prevent a sitting president from being able to abuse the system the way he has, that surely the SCOTUS would protect the constitutional rights they're charged with interpreting, and that the checks and balances we have in place would continue to serve us well.

We were wrong because most of us were counting on the free press to keep us informed, to ask the right questions, to dig into corruption and unconstitutional actions. They're a joke, all of them, since you end up with more coverage of actual events from social media (which has very little journalistic process, so it's hard to trust). I'm old enough to remember pre-Clinton journalism, where reporters asked the tough questions and nobody walked out of interviews with the press for fear of looking shady.

I'm hoping the next version of the USA corrects the mistakes made, provides the provisions we left out for some reason, and moves ahead keeping all the good stuff while discarding this MAGA trash. It's been over a decade now, and we're heartily tired of how slow the wheels are moving.

I am not even sure what to fix. Much of what you describe are, in my mind the result of systemic societal changes. The US is not even the sole exception, just a particularly inept one that also managed to offend almost everyone internationally. However, most issues also pop up elsewhere. Journalism is degrading, in large part due to the fact that they are not economically viable anymore. Education is more slowly starting to go a similar route. Anti-establishment resentments are everywhere, some fueled by good reasons, others by utterly crazy stuff. Mechanistically one can add checks, but fundamentally the ultimate check are the voters. And it does seem that their ability to make reasonable decisions is being eroded. And I do not see a quick fix for that on the horizon.

Further to the international damage done by this Administration, here is a commentary on P Hegseth's visit to the American cemetary in Colleville-sur-Mere in Normandy, for the D-day anniversary.

Those dead and buried soldiers would be severely disappointed to have given their lives so that idiots like P Hegseth, and the rest of the Administration, could dishonor them.
They have no idea what those soldiers fought, and died, for.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

Further to the international damage done by this Administration, here is a commentary on P Hegseth's visit to the American cemetary in Colleville-sur-Mere in Normandy, for the D-day anniversary.

Those dead and buried soldiers would be severely disappointed to have given their lives so that idiots like P Hegseth, and the rest of the Administration, could dishonor them.
They have no idea what those soldiers fought, and died, for.

To be fair, Hegseth and his ilk were cheering for the other side to win.

On 6/9/2026 at 2:33 PM, CharonY said:

I am not even sure what to fix. Much of what you describe are, in my mind the result of systemic societal changes. The US is not even the sole exception, just a particularly inept one that also managed to offend almost everyone internationally. However, most issues also pop up elsewhere. Journalism is degrading, in large part due to the fact that they are not economically viable anymore. Education is more slowly starting to go a similar route. Anti-establishment resentments are everywhere, some fueled by good reasons, others by utterly crazy stuff. Mechanistically one can add checks, but fundamentally the ultimate check are the voters. And it does seem that their ability to make reasonable decisions is being eroded. And I do not see a quick fix for that on the horizon.

I'd start with how corporations are taxed. No more sitting on piles of cash, we have to tax wealth over a certain amount to force investment. Set a standard for living wages that allows people to participate in their own economy, and only give tax breaks to corporations who meet that standard. Something needs to be done to stop turning American workers into crude labor units that are ultimately replaceable; we have value beyond that, and employers need to start recognizing it.

I'm not sure what to do with journalism, honestly. I don't know anyone who trusts what they hear from news shows. Raw data/just the facts may seem fair and without prejudice, but not everyone can form a perspective from that. We have a great local reporter in my area named Kyle Clark who's been moderating some gubernatorial debates recently, and I love his style of asking very hard-hitting questions based on things politicians have said in the past. It's amazing how many, Republican and Democrat, have a hard time defending something they said just a few weeks ago. Lying is like breathing to so many of these folks. Do we bring back the Fairness Doctrine, where broadcasters are required to air opposing views? Would people appreciate this with all the choices available today?

Sooner or later even the corporations are going to feel the pain. The average car in the US is 13 years old now, up from 9.1 years in 2000. When enough people can't afford to buy your products, can you afford to keep raising your prices and lowering your quality? I think many corporations might welcome the right kinds of regulation, something that at least slows down this mad race to keep gobbling up more for your stockholders as your own people suffer working full time PLUS several side gigs to make ends meet. It's my thought that they wouldn't mind treating their people more humanely if everyone was required to do it, so the competition is even.

These Billionaires make their money from investments.
That's why D Trump keeps insisting the 'economy' is good; the stock market keeps going up.
Their economy is doing great.

The rest of us are subject to a different economy, where we have to work, at low wages, to buy food, housing and gasoline at the inflated prices that are fueling the stock market.

The rich get richer, and the poor get screwed ... again.

37 minutes ago, MigL said:

These Billionaires make their money from investments.
That's why D Trump keeps insisting the 'economy' is good; the stock market keeps going up.
Their economy is doing great.

The rest of us are subject to a different economy, where we have to work, at low wages, to buy food, housing and gasoline at the inflated prices that are fueling the stock market.

The rich get richer, and the poor get screwed ... again.

Everyone near him thinks the economy is just fine. The most out of touch POTUS ever.

This push to put his name on everything, besides feeding his narcissism, seems designed to make it harder for people to accept his guilt when it comes out. It reminds me of how many of the men we've memorialized by naming lakes and streets and mountains after them, erected monuments to them, and taught about their accomplishments in school, later turn out to have been horrible humans. We had to rename a local mountain recently because the former governor who got the honor was also responsible for the massacre of an indigenous population at the time. With TFG, I hope we can keep removing his tacky self-aggrandizements as fast as he puts them up. What a waste.

11 hours ago, Phi for All said:

We had to rename a local mountain recently because the former governor who got the honor was also responsible for the massacre of an indigenous population at the time.

Evans, right? Same up here. The highest bump in SD was renamed ten years ago for the same exact reason.

If they build that idiotic arch, I hope they can later bill Turnip or his estate for the demolition costs.

22 hours ago, Phi for All said:

We had to rename a local mountain recently because the former governor who got the honor was also responsible for the massacre of an indigenous population

Yeah, I guess Phi and I had been agreeing too much lately; that's gotta stop.
( and this is meandering a bit off track )

Nobody is 100% good or 100% bad.
We admire people for certain things they do, because those things are important to us at certain periods in time, and we ignore unsavory actions they may take, because they are not important to us ... at that point in time.
As our sensibilities evolve and change over time so do our priorities, and things we may have ignored hundreds of years ago have now become despicable acts.
I don't judge the past with today's viewpoint and sensibilities.
And the acts for which they were admired, still deserve admiration.

I don't want to get religious, but someone once said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

It's highly unlikely, but, who knows, maybe someday even D Trump will be remembered for one good thing he did.
( although I can't think of anything )

23 hours ago, Phi for All said:

Everyone near him thinks the economy is just fine. The most out of touch POTUS ever.

For them the economy IS just fine. When corporate profits have more than quadrupled since 2000 and average people's wages are not or are barely keeping up with inflation, is it any wonder why there are two nearly diametrically opposed views on the state of the economy?

His name is off of the Kennedy Center

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/06/13/trump-name-removed-kennedy-center/90524528007/

They started on Friday but missed the midnight deadline; I’m not sure if the delay was because of last-minute legal shenanigans or safety issues stemming from thunderstorms (or something else)

Maybe Trump just didn’t want a crowd cheering while it happened on camera

edit: they put up a tarp to hide the removal, so that’s probably it. Gotta protect his ego as much as possible

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/13/trump-name-removed-kennedy-center-facade

11 hours ago, MigL said:

who knows, maybe someday even D Trump will be remembered for one good thing he did

Reminding otherwise unengaged people of the importance of enforcing guardrails around power and the need to pay attention, to show up and speak out, and to be counted when it matters most.

Edited Saturday at 02:32 PM1 day by iNow

2 hours ago, swansont said:

edit: they put up a tarp to hide the removal, so that’s probably it. Gotta protect his ego as much as possible

I noticed that. At first I thought it was something to do with the rainy weather, but no they had an overhang to work under. They could have waited till tomorrow, however - that's Turnip's birthday.

12 hours ago, MigL said:

Yeah, I guess Phi and I had been agreeing too much lately; that's gotta stop.
( and this is meandering a bit off track )

Nobody is 100% good or 100% bad.

You could look up Sand Creek Massacre and see if you're still okay with keeping that peak as Mt. Evans. Even by the standards of the white community in that time, his actions were considered disgraceful. After a congressional investigation condemned the actions of involved parties, Evans was forced to resign from his governorship in disgrace in 1865. Really doesn't strike me as a mountain name candidate, no matter how far you extend your moral relativism. This name change was a good call.

On 6/11/2026 at 12:08 PM, Phi for All said:

I'd start with how corporations are taxed. No more sitting on piles of cash, we have to tax wealth over a certain amount to force investment. Set a standard for living wages that allows people to participate in their own economy, and only give tax breaks to corporations who meet that standard. Something needs to be done to stop turning American workers into crude labor units that are ultimately replaceable; we have value beyond that, and employers need to start recognizing it.

I think that is a good way to move towards a more equitable economic system. The idea of our mixed economy was always to balance out the flow of capital to the top and devaluing labor, which is pretty much how capitalism works (and which Adam Smith considered a virtuous cycle, but where folks like Marx recognized that it does not in fact create an expanding pie where everyone gets richer).

The issue is that the balance is increasingly perceived to be off, especially in the service economy, where products are increasingly intangible and wealth seems to increasingly move independent of production. That being said, wealth and with that, power, has accumulated so massively in few hands, it seems now to be almost impossible to move the needle towards redistributing. Especially as folks almost reflexively fear some sort of market breakdown (but conveniently forgetting that for some reasons the major market crashes again made the richest even richer).

But that, in my mind does not touch the fundamental societal issues. What baffles me is that especially social media companies are not only a thing, but that they are so massive. It is somewhat dystopian that a system can make money bytaking away your attention, and spoon-feed you content. Together with addictive hardware (cell phone), it has massively re-engineered human society world-wide. As we have discussed before, other major events (books, radio, TV) had similar wide-scale effects. But at least in modern times, these technologies have, I believe for the first time, systematically degraded human abilities across the spectrum, at scale. Folks focus a lot on the decline in various scoring domains (e.g. maths, reading, writing, etc.), but I think beyond just the skills it also has eroded reasoning abilities in a very strange way in younger folks. I think that is almost immediately connected the next part.

On 6/11/2026 at 12:08 PM, Phi for All said:

I don't know anyone who trusts what they hear from news shows. Raw data/just the facts may seem fair and without prejudice, but not everyone can form a perspective from that.

With a decline of basic reasoning skills, we have reverted to an almost exclusive in-group based trust system. Someone who is considered to be part of the group is endlessly trust worthy, regardless of facts. My work has drifted ever more into the public health area and the one thing I increasingly believe is at fault is the internet, where the virtual has become more real than the real world. Emotions have increasingly become the currency of trust, not facts or reasoning.

The interesting thing that happens, if you engage with folks in person and demonstrate goodwill, many are at least more willing to listen. But the format is very important and decoupling reality with what they heard online is often hard and inconvenient work. No system currently likes to do that, and because news (and the fact that you call it a news show sort of already outlines the problem) want to make money, and they are basically just competing with content creators into an endless downward spiral. Even if folks listen to analyses, what they really want to hear is that the analysis reaffirms their feelings. And again we enable that by degrading basic reasoning skills among the next generation(s).

On 6/11/2026 at 12:08 PM, Phi for All said:

Sooner or later even the corporations are going to feel the pain. The average car in the US is 13 years old now, up from 9.1 years in 2000. When enough people can't afford to buy your products, can you afford to keep raising your prices and lowering your quality? I think many corporations might welcome the right kinds of regulation, something that at least slows down this mad race to keep gobbling up more for your stockholders as your own people suffer working full time PLUS several side gigs to make ends meet. It's my thought that they wouldn't mind treating their people more humanely if everyone was required to do it, so the competition is even.

This is again an economic argument, and it is equally baffling, but perhaps also understandable that corporations don't understand/care for that. Economy has always been short-sighted, looking at immediate improvements of productivity, efficiency and profit, rather than long-term vision. Almost by design capitalism is reactive (which is its big strength) but resilient to long-term planning. The right regulations might be able to change the course, but I have not yet seen a convincing framework of what needs to be done, or even what vision we have for the future. And I do think that the societal changes that we have, will make those visions ever more blurry.

16 hours ago, MigL said:

Nobody is 100% good or 100% bad.
We admire people for certain things they do, because those things are important to us at certain periods in time, and we ignore unsavory actions they may take, because they are not important to us ... at that point in time.
As our sensibilities evolve and change over time so do our priorities, and things we may have ignored hundreds of years ago have now become despicable acts.
I don't judge the past with today's viewpoint and sensibilities.
And the acts for which they were admired, still deserve admiration.

I don't want to get religious, but someone once said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

It makes me wonder if the villains don't end up being memorialized officially as a way to soothe our own consciences. Forget about what got them kicked out of office and reviled by all, point out something benign and build them a monument to it. We did the same with Columbus and Woodrow Wilson.

There’s a certain amount of a “they were bad to the right people” attitude that holds up with fewer and fewer people, but as we’re seeing (in the US these days, at least) that if you want to rectify the situation it very much matters who’s in charge, since they can hamstring efforts to change things.

3 hours ago, Phi for All said:

It makes me wonder if the villains don't end up being memorialized officially as a way to soothe our own consciences. Forget about what got them kicked out of office and reviled by all, point out something benign and build them a monument to it. We did the same with Columbus and Woodrow Wilson.

I suspect it depends a lot on context. I.e. who initiated it and to what purpose. During the Jim Crow era, a lot of confederate statues were built in direct rebuke to equal rights, for example.

In other cases it might also be just naivete where the folks celebrate a particular achievement, but were just not aware of the issues, just by general lack of education in this area. Though in these cases it can be bit difficult to disentangle it from soothing the conscience.

In my mind worshipping any person comes with issues as MigL pointed out, humans are faulty creatures. And while it might be fine to celebrate certain achievements, by worshipping persons you inadvertently tend to minimize those faults. That in turn make it easier to dismiss victims of their actions. I wished we would treat folks as humans, rather than idols.

11 hours ago, TheVat said:

You could look up Sand Creek Massacre and see if you're still okay with keeping that peak as Mt. Evans.

4 hours ago, CharonY said:

I wished we would treat folks as humans, rather than idols.

Idolize is too strong a word, but I do admire R Oppenheimer, E Fermi, L Szilard, H Bethe, R Feynman, E Teller, E Lawrence, J Chadwick, G Seaborg, and others who took part in the development of the American atomic bombs that killed over 200000 people on two separate days in 1945.
A number of deaths that is 1000 times larger than the Sand Creek Massacre.

Can you see my point now, or do I need to elaborate ?

8 hours ago, CharonY said:

I think that is a good way to move towards a more equitable economic system.

I don't think that particular system is the main fault.

The bigger problem is that our elected representatives are bought by wealthy individuals and corporations ( who are now 'individuals' in the eyes of the Supreme Court.
These permissive laws put another tool in the hand of the corporations who add to the toolbox that enables them to generate massive profits.
Neither the politicians or the wealthy ( corporations/individuals ) have any incentive to change the situation, as they both profit at taxpayer/workers expense.

My apologies if I say 'our', as I'm not American, but until Jan 2025 when you guys lost your way, I considered myself almost American. Unfortunately Canada is only slightly better, but we are still vulnerable to American economic pressure.
I guess we'll just have to join the EU.

Edited yesterday at 03:04 AM1 day by MigL

10 hours ago, MigL said:

The bigger problem is that our elected representatives are bought by wealthy individuals and corporations ( who are now 'individuals' in the eyes of the Supreme Court.
These permissive laws put another tool in the hand of the corporations who add to the toolbox that enables them to generate massive profits.
Neither the politicians or the wealthy ( corporations/individuals ) have any incentive to change the situation, as they both profit at taxpayer/workers expense.

Capitalism unchained... The rich get richer and the poor stay that way while more and more of us join the their ranks. What happened to antitrust laws? I remember what the gov freaked out over Ma Bell and broke it up, now days no one seems to mind companies so big the engilf everything like a giant amoeba, or maybe "The Blob".

10 hours ago, MigL said:

I don't think that particular system is the main fault.

I guess technically the main fault is human nature, but since that’s not going to change any time soon you have to adapt the system to rein that in. One might say that the problem is the “unfettered” in unfettered capitalism. We need fetters.