Trump amplifies the stupid

Maybe this wasn't the smartest move?

Most people watching around the world recognizes foolish pride mixed with incompetence when they see it. 

And any woman who has competed with a particular sort of oblivious man for a job knows the special stupidity unqualified guys bring to tasks in which they are pretending to expertise they don't possess. (Few women get to try that dodge.) Here's journalist Jill Filipovic:

I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. 

Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. 

Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

... Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

What more are these fools broadcasting to a listening world?

A bunch of toddler oligarchs are, temporarily, riding high

Paul Krugman set loose from the NYT onto Substack is a delight. He's got our oligarchs' numbers.

... ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires. ...

... many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

... So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration.... What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation [the tech bros] miss..., so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.

... for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”

Here I must insert an aside (gift) from NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. 

We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.

Krugman goes on:

... they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.

The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires. 

Empty, ignorant men doing ignorant things. What a time!

Be very afraid ...

According to the Department of Heimat Security (I prefer the original Nazi term for this misnomer), on December 6, "this public service announcement will air in all Walmart stores equipped with checkout screens."

More than 230 Walmart stores nationwide launched the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign today, with a total of 588 Walmart stores in 27 states joining in the coming weeks. A short video message will play at select checkout locations to remind shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

At a time when the country would benefit from scaling back unreal fears and confronting actual problems, we get the Feds ramping up the scare stuff. If President Obama wants to be adult-in-chief as he seems to assert in his distress with "the left" objecting to his "deal" with Republicans aiming to kill our social services, he could put his Cabinet secretaries to work reassuring people that this is a powerful, strong country that can't be destroyed by a few nasty cranks in caves.

Instead we get this.