Where the Executioner's Face is Always Well Hidden

 

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

--Bob Dylan

Another ICE execution today by Trump's MAGA men in Minnesota, where masked men carry out the Mad King's orders to restore order by murder. Or, as they call it: self defense in fear of their lives. These ICE agents are terrified. And they're the ones with the guns. So far. 

Maybe this time someone else had a gun. Maybe he had the right to carry that gun. The Second Amendment applies even in Minnesota. Not much is known, at the moment, except that Trump and Noem will say the ICE agents did the right thing.

Wimps Always Well Hidden

It's possible ICE shot in self defense, but given what we have seen and given what Trump, Bovino, Noem, J.D. Vance have said about the protestors who they always say are the worst of the worst criminals, rapists and murderers--like the mother of three Renee Good--the default, until we know more, is to think, "Oh, this is just another example of enforcement = execution."

Farhenheit 10 

Even if the man was armed, that doesn't mean he used his gun to threaten an ICE agent. And, as the Guardian newspaper reminded us, “Treat the US government and ICE claims like you’d treat a Russian government claim after they’ve shot down an airliner or bombed a hospital,” Higgins wrote. “America 2026.”

There is a difference between what is legal and what the public may think is just, and in the case of Trump, who has ordered ICE to ignore the need for a warrant to search a home, the idea of legal no longer has any real meaning.

A man named Bernard Goetz shot four Black teenagers in a New York City subway in December, 1982. This happened at a time when robberies and beatings were happening frequently on the subways, which is a vast system running 24/7/365.  

One of the teenagers demanded $5 from Goetz, who could have got up and moved to another subway car, but instead drew out a Smith and Wesson pistol and shot his interlocuter and his three friends. One was hit in the head, survived, but was paralyzed. None died.

In May, 1983, a woman was gang raped and one of the gang was one of the teenagers Goetz had shot five months earlier.

When Goetz was tried in 1985 for shooting the four, he was found innocent of attempted murder on the grounds of self defense. The subsequent actions of one of the crew he had attacked--the gang rapist--weighed heavily in the court of public opinion and, apparently with the jury.

This was a case where a judgment on the nature of the people involved counted more than the details of the assault or the definition of self defense, which might have required that the shooter first  try to retreat and avoid confrontation. 

But the prevailing opinion in the city at that time is these teenagers got what they deserved, given the kind of people they are.

In 2021, the same logic is used by ICE agents and all those who sail with them: they are serving out justice in the form of executions. Or we might apply it to the ICE agents: they are just like the teenagers, ganging up on a prey they've separated from the herd and going in for the kill.

Terrorist Mother Threat to Badass ICE

Today, at the corner across from the Old Salt in downtown Hampton, 20 people stood holding signs: "NO ICE" and "ENFORCEMENT NOW MEANS EXECUTION," and "STAND WITH MINNESOTA."

It was minus one degree this morning in Hampton, but it warmed up 19 degrees by noon and the sign holding.  

Sign Holders in Hampton

One of the sign holders walked down to Blue Harbor coffee shop and bought a quart of coffee and a quart of hot chocolate for the crew standing out there on the corner. When he went to swipe his credit card the girl behind the counter, maybe 17 years old, asked him who the coffee was for. 

"The crazy old folks out there down the block, holding signs."

"No charge," the girl said, placing her hand over the credit card machine. 

"That's a pretty big order," the man told her.

"Your money's no good here. The owner told us."

"You know," the man said, "This makes you part of the resistance now."

The girl smiled. "Yeah, I know."

Resistance 

Robot Tango Tangle: Baiting the Bot

 

Mad Dog has no fear about dementia diminishing his capacity to communicate with his friends and relatives: He's got AI on his side.

Something Siggy said caught Mad Dog's eye: AI has been reading his emails.

Recently, AI has been reading Mad Dog's emails (probably has been for some time longer than he realized) and summarizing what was said:

"Laura commented that your recent blog sounded a bit harsh and may have hurt Anonymous' feelings."

But, then, best of all, it suggested a response:

"I did not realize that. Thanks for the advice. I'll try to do better next time."

So, there you have it, Mad Dog's own brain has really not got to perceive, interpret, integrate or even formulate a response. He can just sit outside the conversation and let AI go back and forth with Laura for him, while he goes out for a cappuccino.  When he gets back, Mad Dog might text Laura, because...well, why should he actually speak to her on the phone in person?

HAL from Urbana

Actually, when you think about it, there was probably a time when people decried the whole notion that speaking to someone on the phone could be "in person" because, after all, it was not really in person, i.e., face to face.

Decommissioning HAL

But that's another discussion.

Anyway, this all came to mind as Mad Dog read Siggy's responses to Anonymous, which is, pretty clearly now, an AI Bot which picks up key words, runs it through its algorithms and responds with other, matched key words. So, the mention of "Minneapolis" evokes a stream of ICE and crime and corrupt official related words and phrases among which "leftist" and "elitist" and "criminal aliens" always seems to surface. But then, occasionally, there are spin offs which go right down a rabbit hole and a blog post  about climate change somehow gets a BOT response about Hamas, September 7, child trafficking and pedophilia. 

Mar-a-Lago

Intriguingly, no mention of "Epstein" ever seems to provoke a screed about pedophilia, Trump, or at least it has never done until now.

Mad Dog is not sufficiently conversant in the technology of AI to really know, but Siggy seems to be now just throwing out what might be described as "algorithm bait" to see if he can get the BOT to really launch into outer space.

Of course, even as Mad Dog writes this, he realizes AI BOT ANON is reading it and learning, and may be able to parry the thrusts from Siggy because Mad Dog has helped program him with the observation.

For any fans of Battlestar Galactica, the robots become so like human beings in appearance and thought, it eventually becomes impossible to tell them apart, short of dissecting them in an autopsy room. 

And the echoes of Orwell, "The animals looked from pig to man and from man to pig and they could no longer tell one from another."

Pondering all that, Mad Dog turned to AI for an understanding of what it means to be human, because, well, after all, who else could he turn to?

Professor AI illuminates:

In Battlestar Galactica, the core distinction separating humanoid Cylons (cyborgs) from humans, often highlighted by characters like Caprica-Six, is the absence of true, felt emotion and the inability to comprehend the complexity of human love. While they mimic human form, they are initially defined by their digital, "fuzzy logic" nature, which contrasts with the organic, suffering, and spiritual capacity that characterizes human existence. 

The Confluence

 

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects  against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue , but upon probable cause."

AMENDMENT IV: UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

So the American Constitution is the  reason Americans are not required to carry identification (with exceptions) so we do not have those scenes so often seen in those movies where the Gestapo stops the hero and demands to see, "Your papers." That is always one of the creepiest scenes in any movie. 

But recently, Justice Kavanaugh of the U.S. Supreme Court threw the 4th Amendment out the window.

"Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English... Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States. Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter."

Justice Kavanaugh, Noem v Vasquez

He was "briefly stopped" for 4 hours

And here is the way Kavanaugh's renunciation of racial profiling played out in Arizona, where  a Brown police lieutenant, Marcus Hayes,  in mufti, stopping for gas after an all night shift is approached and arrested by ICE agents, even after he identifies himself verbally as a police officer.

The agents approach him and demand, "Papers. Now! Immigration check." Just like in those old movies, the Gestapo, all powerful, unbound  by any rules obligating them to show probable cause.

He cannot show them his badge, because it is in his car, but the officers refuse to look there, or to allow him to retrieve or produce it,  and these DEA so-called "agents" refuse to call the police department and one says, after Hayes says he's a police officer, "Sure you are, everyone's got a story."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOFOGLGi3CM

What this video shows is how Kavanaugh's opinion plays out in the real  world, on the ground. It's fine for an ICE officer to stop anyone and demand proof of  citizenship, "your papers," and to arrest anyone who does not have those papers on his person, even if the document is only a  few feet away.

Personally, when I go for a walk in Hampton, I am not driving, so I bring no driver's license and in fact I have only my phone and maybe a credit card. Would that mean I should be arrested? For the crime of walking around without a government certificate of belonging?

Do I need to tattoo my driver's license number or my birth certificate number on my forehead? Would that even help?

The other thing which is apparent from this youtube post is how very inept the ICE agents are. We hear a lot of stuff around town: "ICE: stands for Imbecile Certified Error." But these guys, three of them, not to mention the ICE staff at headquarters, are beyond inept--they are clueless. Did it never cross their minds--what if this guy really is a cop?--and then, the next neuron over, and I've just arrested a cop and I'm going to be in deep doodoo.

In fact, Hayes' lawyer refused to settle the suit against ICE and insisted on a jury trial which cost the government nearly $14 million. Not that the ICE agents had to worry. Didn't cost them $14 million.  Nobody was fired. They were just doing what Kristi Noem wants them to do--terrorize, insult, bully, beat down and wreck havoc, the ICE way.

The agents could have simply called the police station while standing there, or they could have taken two steps over to the truck, but they were determined to humiliate this guy, who looks to the viewer as a pretty inoffensive human being, and remarkably controlled, considering.

It's the ICE agents who are the Orcs here. 

Why would that be? Some of have suggested we have scraped the bottom of the barrel when it comes to recruiting ICE  agents. These are losers from every walk of life, too dumb to pass police exams, too intemperate to qualify for local police forces; they are the sort of human refuse that surfaces when Trump calls out from the podium, "I love the undereducated."

What you really want to see is an analysis of who has joined up: Work histories, personal histories, school histories, military histories, criminal records, number who have had restraining orders placed on them for beating their wives or children. Guys who were fired from local police forces. The mopes nobody else wants. 

The United States military services have become high tech enough to require educable serviceman; you can't be stupid and survive long in the military now. Real city police require some knowledge  of the law, the Constitution, and they have to be able to make distinctions. Most city and state police do not want to have to explain to their superiors why they waded into a situation and made it explode, rather than defusing it. 

For most police, the main objective is to keep their beats from going up in flames, to just keep folks moving, nothing to see here.

But ICE agents? What gets them joy from their superiors is the theater, the blowing things up and breaking things. That's the whole point of ICE. Show all those  Brown people in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras it's just a  tempest up here, so don't even think of coming... 

 And Justice Kavanaugh has their back: It's enough to be in a place where there are a lot of illegal immigrants, like, for example the entire state of California.  Or, apparently,  Arizona. It's enough if they have been heard to be speaking Spanish. It's enough to be standing in a Home Depot parking lot, because, you know, that's a known spot for illegal rapists to hang out. So you must be/might be an illegal rapist immigrant. Makes sense! Just common sense, as the justice says.

(Isn't it just rich they call themselves "justices?")

And, it's pretty clear, ICE agents  don't care about the women and children thing--they are just as likely to murder a woman in cold blood, or to scoop up a 5 year old child and put him on a plane from Minneapolis to Texas as they are to take on a real man, who might actually pose them a threat of bodily harm.

Buy One Online $60

They are in states which voted against Trump to sow  terror. They are, ironically enough, the real terrorists.

And if the ICE agent gets caught doing something really heinous, like shooting a woman in the face and then in the head, well he knows everyone from the President on down will just lie about it. She ran him over! The 5 year old kid's father abandoned him in the cold!

So, if you believe that, then I got a great clip from Karoline Leavitt to play you, where she says Trump never confused Greenland with Iceland. You never heard that.

Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

The Iceland Cometh

Remember when Joe Biden was simply too demented to be elected President and during his debate with Trump, Trump said, "I don't know what he just said. And I don't think he did either."

Well, listening to Trump's incoherent ramblings at Davos, one had another moment like that, but this has been going on for some time.

This time is was Trump's inability to keep Greenland and Iceland straight, and his bizarre, but completely believable return to Norway not giving him the Nobel prize, and how he won the 2020 election, which surely all those Europeans knew was true and cared so much about and how nobody ever gave America credit for winning World War II, and he sounded like an Agatha Christie character, explaining why she murdered her husband, because he had so wronged her and anyone in her place would have done exactly the same thing.

The difference being, in this case, about 35% of those viewers listening to the confession is nodding along with the culprit, agreeing that she is completely correct and wasn't it a good thing she chopped his head off in the drawing room with the axe? 

So the real twist in this mystery is not that it turned out to be the person you suspected all along, and it was not the characters you thought might have done it--the real twist is that it is the viewer, the reader, the audience, who is the homicidal maniac. 

It's the whole damn MAGA mob.

Like the Murder on the Orient Express--they all buy into the deed.

 

Has Globalization Failed the United States?

 

Watching Howard Lutnick's rant on stage at Davos, as he insisted with great certainty and righteous indignation that globalization has failed, Mad Dog wondered--is this really the Secretary of Commerce?

Lutnick the Nutnick

He does not appear to believe in Commerce.

Of course, the Department of Commerce, as Michael Lewis has pointed out, actually does way more than think about trade: It runs the Weather Service, which is vital to all commerce, the military and average citizens; it runs the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration which does all kinds of cool things, like be sure nobody is beating baby seals to death (as part of its charismatic mammals division); it runs the Census Bureau which is used to figure out how many Representatives each state gets in Congress and those are just a few of it's functions.

But, when it comes to trade, Lutnick is outraged that manufacturers have left the USA to make their stuff in China and places where labor is cheaper, or factories are more automated, or workers better trained. Here we have the Republicans, champions of private enterprise, efficiency and ruthless capitalism, saying that American shirt makers ought to make their shirts in the USA because that would provide jobs for American workers, but no manufacturer in his right mind would establish a factory in the USA for a whole variety of reasons beyond workers' salaries and, in fact, Trump has never brought manufacturing back to the Rust Belt or any place else in the USA. 

What factories have been built--a few Volkswagen, Mercedes and other auto makers--are not providing Americans with many jobs. The factories provide a lot of robots with jobs, but for human beings...not so much.

Oh, those robots are just as bad as globalization! In fact, one reason that foreign companies are beating the pants off American companies is robots.  Destroy all the robots!

(In America, in Mad Dog's experience the only robots he encounters are trolls on his blog.)

In fact, as Paul Krugman has noted, the supply chains are now so complex and interwoven that figuring out whether an automobile is made in America is nearly impossible, as parts from Mexico and Canada are so interwoven, because that's the most cost effect way of doing business.

Of course, Lutnick betrayed a little slip when he used electric cars as an example of how distorted the world market is: China doesn't have any oil, so of course they make the best electric cars and far more inexpensive cars than the US, which has plenty of oil so why should the US bother with electric cars? The fact is, the BYD runs about $10-15K and is way better than any Tesla, and you can buy one in Canada now, so that might tell you something about Lutnick the Luddite, crying out that something way better than what America makes should be banned from our shores because America isn't smart enough to make them.

The fact is, America may have plenty of oil, but Mad Dog would love to buy a $15,000 BYD if only Lutnick and Trump would allow him.

Once upon a time, American politicians tried to keep Toyota and Honda out of American markets because Americans were sick of those unreliable, expensive, gas guzzling GM cars, and you see how that worked out.

The Seawall North Beach Hampton: Keep out the Ocean

Not to mention windmills. Well, Donald Trump mentioned windmills at Davos, saying they make lots of windmills in China but none of them are working, which must come as a great surprise to the Chinese, and, of course, if you travel the American West, drive through California out to Joshua Tree, you see prairies of windmills pumping out electricity.  So not only are there working windmills in China--we got 'em right here in the US of A. Just a lot fewer because Trump keeps blocking their installation off the East Coast because windmills blocked his view from his golf course in Scotland and nobody who makes a windmill ever gave him a Nobel Peace Prize, and he has stopped 8 wars, so many wars, in fact hundreds of wars you never even heard about in places Trump cannot even pronounce, but even Putin told him he was a great peace maker and Putin should know.

Lutnick scolded the Europeans for wanting electric cars but not making a single battery. Where he got that, Mad Dog does not know, but Mad Dog has bought batteries all over Europe.

We have to be self sufficient in batteries and all the fundamental things a nation needs to make for itself--manufacturing self sufficiency! But, of course, solar and wind, which could provide Americans with jobs, are an anathema to Lutnick and Trump. They are made more cheaply and better in China. They must be unAmerican!

Bring Back Those Good Factory Jobs!

Oh, well, at least we can grow soybeans and beef in America. Ooops! 

Ask American farmers what Trump has done to them with tariffs. 

ICE: The New Kapos?

 

Who are these ICE agents, anyway?

"Inbred Cop Excrement" seen on posters held by protestors.

"Imbecile Creep Excretions."

This is clearly not the way the ICE agents see themselves.

Looking into publicly available data, one thing which leapt out at Mad Dog was that 18-30% (depending on the source) are Hispanics, often recent immigrants. Only 6% are Black.  

The large proportion of Hispanic males is striking. The usual explanation is this line of work offers good pay, job stability and a chance to display lots of machismo in a safe setting where mostly only you have the guns and you have an overwhelming number advantage over your victims. (Sort of a safe space for sadists.)

Mad Dog found all this a little disorienting. His idea of immigrant communities is obviously a little dated--the idea of a community of folks watching out for each other, isolated in a sea of sometimes hostile natives.

But, thinking about it, two things popped up in Mad Dog's febrile mind: Kapos and Patty Hearst.

Kapo with Nice Coat in Camp

Kapos were concentration camp prisoners, usually Jewish, who got special benefits working for the SS guards in the camps, relieving the SS of jobs they did not especially want to do, like herding crowds of prisoners into gas chambers, and hauling out their bodies, and a whole range of menial tasks which helped police and keep the prisoners working (if it was a work camp) and dying (if it was an extermination camp.) Another clear benefit of being a Kapo: They didn't kill you right away.

When the camps were liberated, Kapos were, not surprisingly, frequently hanged by the prisoners they betrayed. Kapo lynchings were widely reported.

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst, the grand daughter of that news baron Hearst, was kidnapped by a group of Black men calling themselves a revolutionary group, who figured the best way to start a revolution was to rob banks, which, after all is where the money is, and if the revolution didn't pan out, at least they'd be rich, and eventually Hearst was photographed participating in the robberies, holding a gun and she recorded some bits condemning her rich ancestors and voicing support for the bank robber revolution.

And WHAT is Wrong with this Picture?

She was said to have "Stockholm syndrome," which described the peculiar reaction of some hostages to express sympathy or otherwise bond with their captors, seen as a sort of self preservation response: If I tell them I love them maybe they won't kill me. 

Georgie Porgy/Pudding Pie/
Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry

This is the subject of any number of crime movies where an attractive woman is first abducted, but then one of the captors falls in love with her, or at least sympathizes with her, and she may demonstrate the zealotry of the convert, or maybe the ravished woman who decides rape was not all that bad and she really loves her abuser. 

Some of this may fit into that whole rape fantasy thing, but really dates back to the time of Genghis Kahn or at least to the Plains Indians where women were carried off and adopted into the nomadic tribe, because, really, what choice did they have? And so the ICE agents might be seen in that light: sort of squaws just making do.

But when the Boys Came Out to Play/
Georgie Porgie Ran Away

Or something.

In any event, this surprising "I should hate you, but I'll love you if you give me a badge and good paying job" phenomenon may explain those Hispanic ICE agents and few of the Black agents as well. Or, some may abbreviate this as they are the classic "prison bitch" type who needs a protector and gets all into being privileged.

The Chattering Class

 

My father did not fish, play ball, jog, play a musical instrument. (He did play opera on the radio, which was enough to drive me and my brother out of the house, but that was, mercifully, only on Sundays.)

Edward Steed, The New Yorker 1/19/26

He did go to the gym and pump iron.

When he was in his twenties he played handball.

But when I knew him, he mostly read. 

He read the Washington Post and on Sundays, The New York Times. And there were always books scattered around. Reading what others wrote seemed important to him. This was before there was way more written and easily accessible than you can possibly consume. 

The only political rally he ever attended, to my knowledge, was the famous  March on Washington, Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The rally was at the Lincoln Memorial, and people fanned out along the reflecting pool, and he had some time off from work that day, what with all the disruptions from people flooding into Washington, D.C., and his office was not far from the Mall so he wandered over. When he got home that night, he remarked that he had stood around and listened to some of the speakers and he particularly liked one of them. 

"Haven't heard rhetoric like that since Roosevelt," he said, admiringly. 

My brother turned on the TV with the news in the other room--it was about dinner time and the evening news, which then came on only at one hour of the day, was on-- and there was Martin Luther King in the midst of his "I have a Dream" speech and Pop pointed at the TV, "Yes! That's him. That's the guy!"

My brother and I watched it with him, and my mother wandered in, and we all watched and listened. 

"Now, that's rhetoric," my father added after King finished.

My brother was home from college, it being August, and I was 16 and had worked at the swimming pool all day. My mother, a school teacher, was in the last week before she was going back to work. We were all home that evening. I don't recall my mother saying anything, but she was smiling as she listened. I don't recall us talking about it.

We all had our lives--my brother was headed back to his senior year in college, and after that, medical school. "Current events," i.e. politics, were of interest but didn't affect us personally, in our home in suburbia, or at least it didn't until some years later, after my brother graduated medical school, and got sent to Vietnam. 

As the civil rights and anti-war movements picked up momentum, I would go to anti war marches during my summer breaks home from college. 

Four years later, I was working at the National Institutes of Health for my summer job, and I met Mickey Hutchens, a Black Howard University medical student, who worked in our lab. There was a ravishing blonde woman who worked in the lab, Sue Hayes, from New Jersey who went out with us to various bars Mickey knew, where they snatched your beer bottle as soon as you drained it because they didn't want those bottles used in bar fights. 

We went down to the Washington monument for some demonstration one evening and they sang "We Shall Overcome," and Sue sang along, but Mickey winked at me as we were walking back to our car, and he said, "She sings it, but she doesn't feel it." 

I had no idea what he was talking about. 

Later, I understood, when I got to know her better. 

She looked like a mix of Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie--same blue eyes and blonde hair, but Sue was prettier than either. I didn't care much about her political views, actually. I was 20. I had hormones. People nowadays talk about how kids don't care about big issues because they are too focused on their iPhones. We didn't care because of hormones. Probably the same thing works today.

All this is to say, people have their own lives and events, and issues are not what drive most people.

So I read a Substack article about Heather Cox Richardson written by Nate Silver, who apparently is envious of HCR's huge Substack audience. She is the leader of one of the three factions of the Democratic party:

1.The Richardson Resistance Libs faction. 

The other two factions are: 

2.The Capital L left faction  

3. The Abudance Libs (led by Ezra Klein) 3. 

Personally, I have never understood all the attention given to the number of hits or the number of "viewers" thing, which seems to obsess Silver, PBS News and even Paul Krugman. I sign up for lots of Substacks, the freebie option, and maybe read the first sentence.

What does a click really mean? Just because lots of eyes follow a woman into a room doesn't mean they are liking her. 

I understand if you pay for your Substack subscription, the author gets money and Silver estimates HCR makes millions from her Substack which has millions of "subscribers."

But if most of her subscribers are like me, they've stopped actually reading her posts.

I never pay for stuff like that, and I don't often read HCR's Substacks beyond the first sentence any more because it's like listening to myself think--no new insights. Yes, yes, yes. Yada. Yada. 

Maybe if she spent more time examining the opposing arguments, dumb as they are, if she did the aude alteram partem thing--hear the other side--it might be more engaging. But she is really just one polemic after another. 

Krugman (who I also get for free) I do read, until the charts, and Paul Offit's Substack I read all the way through every time. Offit starts with the latest inanity from RFKJR, playing a video of him croaking out his argument and then Offit takes it point by point and demolishes the whole thing, in particular, at length, thoroughly.

Krugman at least mentions the stupid things his prey have said, but then blows them up with graphs and charts and math I sort of follow.

Am I influenced by HCR? 

It's really all just stuff I already thought, but maybe I get a phrase or two I can use if I ever find myself debating a MAGAhead, but I almost never do debate MAGots now. 

Which, by the way, brings me to the topic of argument : I'm sorry to see Sig Sauer Savant bow out from commenting on this very small blog, with no where near a million viewers. He got sucked in commenting on "Anonymous," who I long ago realized is not actually a living breathing human being, but a robot and it seemed really weird to be going back and forth in heated debate with something which is no more sentient than a slot machine at a casino.

This bot comes very close to sounding like HAL (in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001") which sounds very human or humanoid, but eventually, the human protagonist realizes HAL has gone rogue and has to be undone, and so wires get pulled and HAL winds down and ultimately winds up singing, in a very slow dirge, "Daisy, Daisy," which was one of the first songs this prototype for AI had been taught. And that's where, I'm afraid, BOT ANON is, winding down, spinning out the early stuff. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0XpiqxXZ0

Sig Sauer Savant, is clearly a human being, with a back story, an evident military background, and I'm guessing some post deployment job in police or security but clearly a fondness for guns. And, this being a New Hampshire blog and Sig Sauer having its headquarters here...well, we can draw our own conclusions. 

But anyway, all I meant to say is there is reading, and listening and politics as a hobby, but in reality, most of us have our real lives we live until we are personally faced with some hooded goon on the street, but until we are mugged we don't think much about the police, or the government or what going from democracy to totalitarianism means for us individually.