From a Firehose

 

 

If you feel like you've been drinking from a firehose, join the club.  

Just this month alone, the US is now bragging about bombing a 5000 year old civilization back to the stone age, and in so doing has caused the almost closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rocking energy prices and fertilizer shipments to the West.  Eight million or so have demonstrated in the NO Kings protest against the most corrupt, vile, undemocratic administration in the 250 year history of our Republic. It just goes on and on.

But last night, we  saw the AI Doc.

This from Wikipedia:

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. It is produced by the Academy Award–winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker)."

So this is no fly by night outfit. And despite the firehose of gluttony and ignorance we see in our daily political existence, this movie might very be the scariest movie you'll see this year.  (or any year)

This from KQED, 

"Roher gathers the interviewees into three broad groups: the terrifyingly pessimistic ones, the naively optimistic ones and the CEOs who are casually working on something that may or may not spark humanity’s demise. (Well, three out of five of them, anyway: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei all appear. Mark Zuckerberg declined to participate and Elon Musk apparently backed out at the last minute.)

The worst AI predictions are presented first. Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, calmly talks of the “abrupt extermination” of humanity. Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari calls AI “a deadly threat.”

Center for Humane Technology President Tristan Harris — one of the most measured commentators in the movie — also shares some truly sobering views, the worst of which is that he knows active AI researchers who “don’t expect their children to make it to high school.” It doesn’t help matters that machine learning researcher Shane Legg follows this with the assertion, “The really powerful systems are coming and they’re coming soon. (clip)

In his conversations with Roher, Sam Altman talks a good game about the safety protocols that OpenAI has in place. Given his company’s highly controversial new contract with the Department of Defense, his words will either ring hollow or serve as comfort, depending on your viewpoint. For his part in The AI Doc, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei simply says, “Am I confident that everything’s going to work out? No, I’m not.” Hassabis is even more vague: “If something is possible to do, humanity is going to do it,” he says.

The feeling I left The AI Doc with is that the future of AI is overwhelmingly — and unfortunately — out of the hands of everyday people. "

That's just not just scary,  that's undemocratic.   

After the movie, we went down to our favorite italian restaurant and bar on the corner.  There we ordered our usual meal of Kale Salad and Meatballs on Polenta.  We were still  working on digesting the movie when the food arrived.   Next to us at the corner of the bar were two 40ish males  One of them was in High Tech and the other was in Property Management.  The conversation went on long enough for me get a couple of doubles in.  But they were moved by the movie.  My partner was moved.  And my hair went from being on fire to whatever the plasma version of that is. 

I told my story about how I have spent most of my adult years (after my Armadillo daze) working in Renewables trying to deal with the existential challenge that humanity faces with Climate Change.  How I built the first commercial wind farm in Texas, how I served as Chairman of the Electric Utility to adopt renewable energy goals that far exceeded the tepid goals of most organizations, how I lobbied the PUC for an energy only payment protocol ultimately creating an economic environment such that rosy red Texas has more Wind, more Solar, and more Storage than any other state.  And even with the R's trying to stop the train, the tracks are laid.

I didn't mention that I had been blogging about it for 22 years now. 

But I did tell them that I no longer think that Climate Change is  the primary existential challenge of humankind.  Oh it is, but it's like a meteor that  is way out in deep space but clearly heading our way.  The AI meteor is in our solar system.  And there are billions and billions of dollars and other currencies being spent right now as the race for  artificial general intelligence (AGI) dominance goes into overdrive.

According to  Google AI, 

As of early 2026, true AGI does not exist. Current research focuses on improving large language models (LLMs) to handle more generalized reasoning, though they still fail at complex, novel tasks that humans easily solve. It also says,  Development of AGI brings significant risks, including ethical issues regarding AI safety, job displacement, and alignment with human values.

Global investment in artificial intelligence is currently witnessing an unprecedented surge, with projections indicating that it will reach roughly

$1.5 trillion in 2025 and exceed $2 trillion in 2026. This massive influx of capital is driven by a global race to build AI infrastructure, specifically data centers and hardware, with total annual investment expected to grow by over 40% annually.

 

Global military expenditures reached a record high of approximately $2.7 trillion in 2024.

At 40% annual growth, AI investments will eclipse our war investments by next year.

We cannot drink from the Firehose.

We must point our efforts elsewhere. 

My brother Frank would say: 

You can't worry about your Dandriff,

When you are dying of Cancer.

Something else got him. 

 

 

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Where the Future Is

 

Most of my immediate family goes to Idaho to ski about this time of year leaving me at home to piddle around and stay up late reading or writing early into the morning.  My current mind challenge is trying to get my hands around the spectacular growth in Artificial Intelligence in the last  year and the resource and political  implications of it all. 

But last night, I was watching (actually binging) a new civil war series called the Gray House.  At around 3:00 having had enough of the spymaster story of the Confederate White House apparently named Gray House, I did my oral care and hopped into my solitary, super comfy bed.  Often, when I sleep alone, I like to leave NPR on as company and as an aural filler.  I lit the essential oil candle and turned off the bed lights behind the headboard, laid my head down, and then heard something about Drumph having just made a statement on his Truth Social account that he and Bebe just bombed Iran. 

I jumped up, flipped open my mini, and watched my normal center left news networks and yup, right there from Mar a Lago, was the POTUS in a white USA baseball cap telling the Iranians and the rest of the world that he is giving them a chance to be free; but for now to stay in doors because there is going to be a lot of bombs out there. 

And now, that's all there is on our media and will be for a while.  Most of the actual pictures come from Al Jazzerra right now.  The Fairmount in Dubai got whacked by a drone, and the Navy took some shots on their 5th fleet.  But we got our man, or at least the Israeli Air Force did.  And Khamenei, their supreme leader is now officially a martyr. We apparently also got a school full of young girls.

And now the Revolutionary Guards are warning of an intense offensive to come.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is trying to force the creators of Claude to allow their AI to not be restricted by their terms of service regarding AI homicide.  The Justice Department excluded FBI reports that Drumph forced a teenager's head onto his mushroom which she bit, and then he socks her with his fist. And we can't forget that the EPA just rescinded the endangerment finding regarding CO2 and its regulatory foundation for climate change policy.

All of this while the warnings regarding AI go unheeded:

Industry warnings regarding AI have escalated significantly as of February 2026, ranging from immediate economic disruption to long-term existential threats. High-profile executives and researchers from

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have reached a consensus that AI risks should be treated with the same urgency as pandemics or nuclear war.

Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei,  warned in May 2025 that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, potentially spiking unemployment to 10–20% within five years.

In late February 2026, Jack Dorsey’s Block announced plans to cut over 4,000 jobs—nearly half its staff—citing AI-driven productivity gains.

 Financial institutions like Citigroup have cautioned that AI implementation may lead to higher unemployment and deflation. Some analysts warn of a "vibe coding" shift that could render traditional software roles obsolete.    

 This from Wikipedia:

Experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction. Debates center on AGI's technical feasibility, the speed of self-improvement,^[7] and the effectiveness of alignment strategies.^[8] 

Concerns about superintelligence have been voiced by researchers including Geoffrey Hinton,^[9] Yoshua Bengio,^[10] Demis Hassabis,^[11] and Alan Turing,^[a] and AI company CEOs such as Dario Amodei (Anthropic),^[14] Sam Altman (OpenAI),^[15] and Elon Musk (xAI).^[16] 

 In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that human inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe.^[17][18] 

In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement declaring, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".^[19] 

Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak^[20] and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres^[21] called for an increased focus on global AI regulation.  

Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control.

Something tells me that Drumph and his DoW boy wonder have a plan for Iran.  And it probably came from Claude. ( or one of his brothers)

And sooner than you think, our boots on the ground may not be leather.

I told my grandson that all my life I've wondered where the future is.

And now it's here. 

And it's just like the movies. 

 

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Il Duche

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were at a memorial for a friend of a friend yesterday.  It was held in a west Austin country club right on Lake Austin with a great lap pool and work out facilities. It had survived the long freeze well.  Gene Anne, the woman who had passed, was married to John the Oncologist.  

So as you might imagine, there were a lot of Doctors there including my partner. It was a Civil affair, not a Priest or a robe in site. Doctors, lots of Doctors.  

We were talking to David, one of my favorites because he actually was on the basketball team at UCLA in the late sixties during those glory days.  Coach Wooten told him to get a good education and he did.  As we chatted, we talked about retirement, but he couldn't imagine it, not right now, not while we have this dictator in our country.   

Yes, there you have it.  If a aging Doctor in a swanky West Austin Tennis Club knows, I guess most of us know it. Like David, We probably try to avoid thinking about it.  

This North Carolina professor knows it too.

Donald the First: Trump the dictator has arrived 

We have launched a war against Venezuela — apparently because we can. We have provided no justification, no rationale, no candor. Their oil, we claim, is now ours. We’ll sell it and, Donald Trump explains, the “money will be controlled” by him. If the Venezuelans don’t bend quickly enough to our command, we’ll kill more of them. It’s like a video game to us. You know, like blowing up the boats. The U.S. military has proven its mastery — in an illegal and blatantly unconstitutional and brutal cause. 

Next, Trump explains, “we’re going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” If we “don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” Cuba and Mexico are, perhaps, after that. As Stephen Miller oozes — who is going to stop us? It’s a real world out there. “You can talk about international niceties, but we live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power,” Miller says. The strong, apparently, take what they want and the weak, in turn, bear what they must. (I think the ancient Greeks said that.) The Western Hemisphere is reportedly ours. So is any other nation that has anything we want. The only limit is Trump’s moral compass. Imagine, if you can.

ICE continues to terrorize Democratic cities — killing a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, because, in this new era, that’s how you look manly, lethal. (a ICU nurse would follow her) We advertise for agents on TV. Give ‘em signing bonuses. Le mercenaire. 

The president of the United States extorts like Al Capone. 

Universities, law firms, corporations, media folks, researchers, artists, nonprofits, cities (Democratic ones), states (blue ones) and countries (weak ones). If you don’t do what he wants, he’ll bring bombers and gunships to your shore to see if that changes your mind. Maybe he’ll take the money, or maybe he’ll give it to his family. 

The corruption is so outlandish, we’ve quit keeping track. A surpassingly gutless House and Senate bless the effort. Their only apparent actual oath is to Donald J. Trump. A supine Supreme Court utters immunity. There is, literally, nothing beyond his power. And if there was, he could hire goons to do it and then pardon them.

We have fretted, as a nation, over whether Trump would become a dictator. 

He has. 

Donald The First. 

Anyone who thinks he and his crew will surrender power is three shades past delusional. At least the mystery is gone. The only question is whether he will be cabined, suppressed, rejected — legally — by the constitutional democracy he seeks to undo. That will require an actual Congress, resolute state governments, faithful and independent federal courts, but, most of all, a massively engaged, courageous and patriotic citizenry. It’s not yet clear whether we can manage to deliver these undoubted and foundational requisites. I wish I knew the answer. I do know it’s the most important question we face. 

Maybe that we’ll ever face.

Surveying my home — a state that I love and that counts for the nation — the North Carolina Republican Party must now denounce President Trump. If they don’t, all Tar Heels, citizens and officeholders, must abandon the party. This day. 

There could be no stronger proof that an institution is unfit to govern than the continued embrace of Donald Trump — the gravest single threat to constitutional democracy in American history. No patriot can support dictatorship. And no honest human can any longer pretend that’s not what is happening here.

* Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Last night at dinner, we talked about it.  We talked about the horrible movie made for Il Duce's wife. We talked about how the Europeans don't like us anymore.  We talked about how screwed up we are with Canada and Mexico.  I said we now have a dictator and everyone just simply agreed and we went on about our holidays.

The Atlantic says:

President Drumph prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.

So, a question: What do you call this form of government? Authoritarian? Kleptocratic? Totalitarian? Fascist?

A Dictatorship 

Read it from the man who lived it. 

“The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state ” Il Duce said.

It is the core concept of

corporatism, where the state and large private entities form a symbiotic partnership to control the economy and society. 

And the best of us demonstrate against it. 

But we are like indoor cats chasing a laser beam

that came from space to change our elections. 

And we eat our canned gourmet meals.

And play on our high rise kitty condos.

And crap in our self cleaning internet connected sandbox.

And in the distance I hear drumming.

and Minnesota is on my mind. 

And Il Duce is alive. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On our Doorstep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magritte 

 

 

 

 

We had four out of five of my partner's brothers for Thanksgiving this year. Besides the usual boisterous cacophony of Idaho testosterone which I have learned to accept if not genuinely enjoy, a new meme has arrived in these circles. For the  American right has embraced the idea that to go forward with our current pace towards artificial intelligence, society must give up on removing carbon from our civilization and instead embrace whatever we must to power the new technological race for superiority in cyberspace. In short, electric power must be nuclear, or coal, or perhaps batteries.

Powering chips with chips powered by the sun, although elegant, is seen as unrealistic.

It was 21 years ago that I posted about the Singularity. 

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."  Vinge wrote that thirty three years ago.  Now hold that thought while I gently change the channel.

In Texas, we have demonstrated that Renewable Energy and electronic stationary storage coupled with electric vehicle mobile storage supported with  modest amounts of legacy energy can meet the needs of an advanced society at a price that we can afford. To prove it, AI factories are popping up everywhere and putting pressure on our 90 GW grid.  And they are impressive consumers of our low prices.

But no Texan voted to bring these behemoths in to suck our affordable power.

This from Oil Price. (yes, Oil Price)

"The Cloud" might be the greatest branding trick in history. It sounds fluffy, ethereal, and notably light.

It implies that our digital lives…our emails, our crypto wallets, our endless scrolling…exist in some vaporous layer of the atmosphere, detached from earthly constraints. But if you actually drive out to Loudoun County, Virginia, or stare at the arid plains of Altoona, Iowa, you realize the Cloud is actually just a very big, very loud, and very hot factory.

We’ve been telling ourselves a lovely story about the energy transition. We were retiring coal plants, building wind farms, and decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. It was all going according to plan."

But in comes Nvidia and its H100 GPU which uses 100 kW instead of 10 kW 

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global electricity demand from data centers is projected to more than double by 2030. This is the same as the entire annual electricity use of a country like Japan.

The invisible hand is hitting a concrete wall.

We have effectively moved from powering a toaster to powering a neighborhood, all inside the same metal box. Air cooling…fans blowing over hot metal…doesn't work anymore. Air just isn't physically dense enough to move that much heat away.

We are now plumbing data centers like chemical refineries, running liquid coolant loops directly to the silicon die.

The irony is palpable. We spent billions trying to kill coal, only to have the most futuristic technology on earth, AI, throw it a lifeline. In places like Virginia or Kansas, utilities are delaying the retirement of coal plants. They simply cannot risk the grid instability when a gigawatt-scale data center comes online.

The "future" is being powered by the "past."

Amazingly, this is the view of an Oil and Gas Website.

Experts stress that the effects of climate change are not a distant future problem, but a present crisis that requires urgent and wide-ranging measures. And moving to a future where Climate Change management becomes subordinate  is a recipe for not only calamity, but authoritarianism. 

But AI must still be managed. And not all of AI's prophets see the future the same way.  The now defrocked Elon Musk has concerns.

He has repeatedly called AI “humanity’s biggest existential threat.”  He likens unchecked AI development to “summoning the demon,” emphasizing that once a super-intelligent entity exists, controlling it might be impossible if its goals diverge from ours. 

Key points from Musk’s cautionary outlook include:

1. AI Alignment: Ensuring AI goals match human values — no small task.
2. Regulatory Oversight: Musk urges proactive laws and guidelines akin to nuclear safety measures.
3. Human-AI Symbiosis: Through ventures like Neuralink, Musk aims to merge human intellect with AI, perhaps mitigating the risk of obsolescence.

The future is uncertain but undeniably fast-approaching. By investing in education, ethical governance, scenario planning, and collaborative innovation, we can guide these explosive developments toward a future that enhances human life without undermining it. Whether or not the singularity arrives in 2045 (or next Tuesday), the decisions we make today will shape how these technologies intersect with economics, society, and — ultimately — the core of our humanity. 

The recent ugly bill by the Rs made it illegal for states to regulate AI. We can thank the Plutocrats for that. 

AI must be required to comply with  Global Climate Change Agreements now and in the years ahead.

Our leaders must respond or be replaced.

Just listen to Bernie Sanders. 

Because the Singularity is on our doorstep. 

And a different World is on the other side. 

The winds of fate await. 

 

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Our Place of the Heart

  

 

 

It's like the very definition of visceral.

A wannabe tyrant destroys a national landmark in a matter of days.

Being the inveterate liar he is, we should have known that the promise to not touch it would be just as true as his statement to sailors in the Far East that 94% of the Gulf of Mexico borders US soil.

The number is closer to 40% depending on whether you think Cuba exist.

Mexico is just over 50%. 

This from Wikipedia and others:

The East Wing Colonnade of the Peoples House was not built 120 years ago, it was built  by President Thomas Jefferson when he added colonnaded terraces to the east and west sides of the White House.

Under President Andrew Jackson in 1834, running water was piped in from a spring and pumped up into the east terrace in metal tubes. These ran through the walls and protruded into the rooms, controlled by spigots. Initially, the water was for washing items, but soon the first bathing rooms were created, in the ground-level east colonnade. President Martin Van Buren had shower baths installed here. 

The East Wing of the White House complex was built in 1902 by Teddy Roosevelt and significantly expanded in 1942 by Franklyn Roosevelt.  It was then that the the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the building was buried deep below the office space for the first lady and her staff, including the White House social secretary, correspondence staff, and the White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office.

The first small East Wing built in 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt renovation served as an entrance for formal and public visitors during large social gatherings when it was necessary to accommodate many cars and carriages. Its primary feature was the long cloak room with spots for coats and hats of the ladies and gentlemen.

The two-story East Wing was designed by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow and Teddy's coatroom was integrated into the new building becoming the White House Family Theater. 

But it was Eleanor Roosevelt who made it a place for women. 

"It has long been a space of female power and a female niche in the White House," said Elizabeth Rees, a historian and research fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "With the West Wing being a traditionally male-dominated space, the East Wing was a unique physical space for women to work…and provided them with their own environment in which to flourish." 

In the 1960s, during the Kennedy administration, the first lady's staff expanded rapidly. 

"As mass media is on the rise and there's enormous press interest in this young, glamorous first lady and her small children, that interest necessitates that there is a press arm for the first lady to cover her activities and to spread all this information to the press," said Rees. 

"Betty Ford and earlier First Ladies were pretty much working out of their bedrooms, literally," said MaryAnne Borrelli, author of The Politics of the President's Wife. 

But Betty Ford understood that "If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart" 

During this time, Ford, a proponent of women's rights, argued for equal pay for her female staff and an end to sex-based discrimination in the East Wing, according to the White House Historical Association. 

However, it was First Lady Rosalynn Carter who in 1977 was the first to establish the Office of the First Lady in the East Wing. 

Modern first ladies have used the East Wing as a base to lead a number of initiatives aimed at improving the country.  Laura Bush led nationwide literacy campaigns out of the East Wing during her tenure as first lady in the early 2000s, while Michelle Obama ran her "Let’s Move" program to bolster public health under her husband's administration.

When the Electoral College cast their votes in 2016 for the candidate who came in 2nd place, many of us knew that he was unfit for the job. I told my partner that the Nation had succumbed to the lower centers of fear and hatred and that misogyny and racism had raised its ugly head from the dark waters of our national psyche. 

When he was removed 4 years later with 7 million more votes, I posted that the Wicked Witch was dead.  And that his memory would forever be scorned as he failed in the attempt to upend our 245 year history of the peaceful transfer of power.

I remember all those R's saying that this was it.

That they have had enough. 

But in his second impeachment,

We needed 10 more of them to put this scourge behind us

Because 57 Ayes against 43 No's was not enough,

And the Scourge returned with a vengeance 

And now he has demolished our Place of the Heart in less than a week.

In its place will stand a 90,000 square foot monument

to greed and wealth.

and Corruption. 

He says it will cost 300 million for 90,000 square feet.

That's 3,333 a  square foot. 

Nothing square about it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It Happened Here

One of my favorite expressions when I want to describe a situation that is really creepy or haunting in a very real sense is to say that the moment feels like the beginning of a Stephen King movie. (And I generally don't like or even watch his movies or read his books.) You know what I'm saying though. The scene might seem somewhat normal to some but to the trained eye, it's the beginning of something really horrible.  

Well, in fact we in the US and in the World are living such a movie.

It's the Dead Zone. 

The theory that Stephen King's 1979 novel

The Dead Zone predicted the rise of Donald Trump centers on the book's populist politician character, Greg Stillson. The comparison is based on Stillson's manipulative personality, his "outsider" appeal, and the way he uses public perception to gain power.  

Who is Greg Stillson?

 

In The Dead Zone, Stillson is a political candidate who presents himself as a man of the people, wearing a hard hat to appeal to blue-collar workers. Behind the scenes, he is a ruthless, corrupt, and murderous psychopath. 

  

Those who see similarities between the fictional Stillson and Drumph point to the following characteristics: 

• The outsider persona: Stillson, like Drumph, positions himself as an unconventional politician who is "outside the mainstream" and willing to say anything to captivate voters.
• Populist appeal: Both characters tap into public frustration by pandering to the "everyman" with promises to fix a corrupt system.
• Manipulation of the media: The novel questions the power of journalism to hold such figures accountable, a theme that has been heavily discussed in the context of Drumph's rise.
• The infamous photo: In the book, a photographer captures a damning image of Stillson using a baby as a human shield, which destroys his political career. However, some observers note that a similar photograph of a real-life public figure might not have the same effect in the current, highly polarized media landscape.  

Where is the photo or image that will bring Drumph down? Is it his many pictures with the serial molester of children and best friend Epstein?  Or his picture with the Porn Star he paid before the 2016 election?  No, the picture that probably elected him in 2024, was his blooded face rising with his clenched fist below a giant flag hoisted by a crane quickly orchestrated and produced by an opportunistic campaign flack.

  

Novelists have long imagined, and warned of, the threat to liberal places from totalitarian rule. British writers of the 20th century, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Harris, won mass audiences for their depictions of anti-democratic dystopias. 

 

All owed a debt, in turn, to a disillusioned Russian revolutionary, Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel “We” described a dictatorial “OneState” of the 26th century, in which humans become mere “Numbers”—automatons who prioritise efficiency over freedom. 

 

His book, published in the early 1920s, provided an inspiration for Orwell’s “1984”. Authors across the Atlantic have fretted no less than Europeans about threats to democracy. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, imagined America becoming a repressive religious republic, Gilead. 

 

Sinclair Lewis, who wrote soon after the Nazis were elected to power in Germany, told a story of the rise of populist, fascist government and the failures of ordinary American citizens to resist it. His book "It can't happen here" could now be renamed it happened here. 

 

Now, except for the those house media sources that are part of the ruling junta, the administration is now called a regime.

 

The question is moving quickly from one of condition to one of what can be done.

 

This from the Globe and Mail:

 

To call what is happening a “slide” into authoritarianism, as if it were something anarchic and uncontrolled, would not be apt. It is more like a cementing. Having slipped back into power by the narrowest of margins, Mr. Trump and his acolytes have been steadily expanding from that beachhead, each new power serving as the means to acquire still more.  

  

Often these powers have been acquired illegally, in brazen defiance of the Constitution. But so long as no one holds them to account for it, and so long as the administration refuses to be held to account, they become ratified by convention, or practice, or sheer nerve, the de facto rapidly congealing into the de jure.

At some point, American democracy will find it is caught, immovably, a colossus in quicksand. 

The examples pile up by the day. In recent days, weeks and months, Mr. Trump and his officials have:

• Installed National Guard troops and other military forces in the centre of major American cities, first Los Angeles, then Washington, and soon (if Mr. Trump’s threats are to be believed) Chicago, Baltimore and New York. 
• Seized thousands of suspected illegal immigrants off the streets, the snatchings carried out by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents without badges, their victims bundled into cars without markings, to be sent in some cases to barbaric foreign prison camps, in some cases to their domestic counterparts, without trial, without even charges. ICE is increasingly seen as Mr. Trump’s personal police force.
• Initiated criminal investigations into various of Mr. Trump’s antagonists, from Letitia James, the Attorney-General of New York who prosecuted him for fraud, to Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted him for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, to John Bolton, his own former national security adviser who has since become one of his severest critics, to Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senator and lead manager on his first impeachment. more

 

It has happened here.

 

Chicago is responding,  

 

California and New York are crafting their own executive orders,

 

the Appeals Court finds his tariffs illegal,

 

And it's time for Americans to begin talking about a Soft Secession. 

 

And it's time for the Plutocrats to  step off the train.

 

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King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war

 

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

tus quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted

tus quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They want

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war thr

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war th