Congressional Cowardice

I am unforgiving of GOP Congressional cowardice. They pledged an oath to support and defend the Constitution. They have historically sent millions into war, the sometimes-tenuous justification being a need to defend our way of life. There is now a coup afoot and it falls to Congress itself to defend us.

Any in Congress sustaining the coup because they fear for their job, their safety or the safety of their family are committing treason.

Protecting and defending the US is not optional, something to do if it's convenient. It is a sworn duty.

Their paid job is to represent the citizens who elected them—not party, not billionaires, not the President.

Why may Congress be more selfish than soldiers they send to battle?

Why are their families entitled to protection at the expense of our nation?

We know they speak privately of being afraid, but we citizens are afraid, too, and we have no recourse.

These people swore to act on our behalf.

These treasonous cowards of the GOP Congress, by their corrupt, selfish, and dishonorable action and inaction are, at every opportunity, unilaterally surrendering the Constitution they swore to protect, willfully ignoring that it leads us inevitably to authoritarian rule.

The cowardly GOP Congress plainly hope that passively turning a blind eye to a coup, ignoring their oath and instead pledging fealty to a would-be dictator, will leave them spared his wrath.

Yet dictators need neither Congress nor Courts. They make their own laws and brook no checks on their power.

We are all afraid. I do not forgive the GOP Congress their fear. I expect them to rise above it. Selfish action now is beyond shameful, beyond corrupt. Traitorous. No better than a deserter, AWOL from a post at a time when necessity and duty requires defending the Constitution and the nation.

If the GOP Congress won't do their job, they should step down and go cower in their basement as private citizens.

Even an empty seat could change the balance of power, allowing others to do THEIR job, tipping things enough to save us from autocracy.

Please, do at least that for the Constitution.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This post originated as a thread on BlueSky. I've done very light editing of content and formatting, but the essential content is mostly unchanged.

The image of the Constitution is in the public domain, and was obtained from Wikipedia. The flames overlaid on it were added by me using Gimp. The flames were created from Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux 1.1 Ultra Pro, though I had such great difficulty getting it to give me a real-looking Constitution, without confabulating other text, that I had to just ask for the flames and merge things myself.

Some Hurried Thoughts

Given that people aren't always mindful about what they do, sometimes almost preferring that people make suggestions they can just passively agree to, it's quite a responsibility to make really casual choices sometimes.

For example, in Facebook, the choice of metaphor where we call people “friends” if we connect to them socially there has some amazing ramifications. People dither endlessly about whether to “unfriend” someone, or they lament being “unfriended.” These follow from the choice, though, for the system to refer to these people as in fact friends, like we have in real life. It's a weighty decision to make someone a friend, and a lot of work to hold a friendship.

But what if Facebook had called them “guests” instead? What if the metaphor had been that of a dinner party? Would our expectations of them be different? They'd be the same people with the same capabilities. Would it seem like the same huge thing to disinvite someone, or to ask them to leave the party? People do this, and friendships survive. Also, people invite people who are not really full-fledged friends to a party. Our expectations guide us in weird ways. I've come to think of people I'm connected to on Facebook as my party guests, and it leaves me feeling freer to not worry it's so heavyweight to decide that maybe they weren't right for this party.

In fact, though, I wanted to talk about computer keyboards. There are some subtle and interesting influences there. Some keyboards have a notion of BACKSPACE or DELETE, as well as arrow keys. So people rush to make editing commands that make use of these. There isn't always just one single interpretation, so some keys are jump-off points for imagination.

I used to use Lisp Machines decades ago. Special computers that had support for the Lisp programming language in hardware. But they also had interesting keyboards that were evocative in various ways, with fanciful keys labeled SUSPEND, RESUME, ABORT, etc., as well as even stranger keys like ones with roman numerals (I through IV) or with thumbs pointing in various directions (up, down, left, right).

The SUSPEND key was interesting because it strongly suggested the need to suspend a program in the middle, that one might later RESUME. ABORT presumed you needed to stop things, as often the ESC (“Escape”) key does on conventional keyboards. Prominently featured metaphors that made one want to make their programs use them.

Though I often wondered why there was not a corresponding key marked HURRY. Ought stopping a program without intermediate results be the only way to stop them? A lot of programming technology concerns itself with various ways to communicate stopping a program that's running, but always it's assumed that it has to give up on the idea of a graceful answer if you stop prematurely.

For example, there's a technique in graphics called interlacing where when sending a large image, the bits are sent in an order so that you can start to see the image early in fuzzy form and as more bits are received you can display it in crisper and crisper detail. It seemed to me that there might be occasions where you got tired of waiting for a download and pressed hurry to say “stop gracefully, the fuzzy image is fine.” This technique is perhaps not as relevant now that networks have gotten faster, but when first developed was quite important, and anyway I'm just offering it as a way to illustrate that there can be notions of partial results.

Or you might be doing a search and know that something has searched half of something and is waiting to the end to report results but you just want to see what's done so far, so again you could say HURRY and maybe get partial results instead of the full results.

If output is only to the screen, there's little difference between the abort and hurry concepts I'm describing, but if it's an API that returns a structural value, aborting usually means not returning a value, so having a way to interrupt in a way that caused the running program to return a well-structured partial result instead might create some different interaction styles. Here's a sketch in Python:

from collections import namedtuple

class HurryException(BaseException):
  """
  An exception that could be connected to
  a Hurry key interrupt, if we had such a thing.
  """
  pass
  
searchresult = namedtuple('searchresult', 'found,complete')
    
def hurryable_search(tester, collection_to_search):
  found = []
  complete = False
  try:
    for x in collection_to_search:
      if tester(x):
        found.append(x)
    complete = True
  except HurryException:
    pass  # Allow what may be a partial search
  return searchresult(found=found, complete=complete)
  
def hurry_up():
  try:
    raise HurryException()
  except Exception:
    # If there's no handler, then don't hurry after all.
    pass

Note that there are other possible implementations that, rather than raising an exception, might just dynamically adjust a parameter that controlled the degree of care taken on a search step. I'm not suggesting a specific strategy, just that such strategies exist.

And I could be wrong about the particular examples I've chosen being good ideas. Maybe they aren't the best illustrations. But I'm in a hurry to finish this essay and they were what I came up with in the time I alloted myself, before I told myself to just hurry up and go with what I had.

What I'm really trying to say is that I think the absence of a HURRY key on the keyboard means people mostly don't give a second thought to this question of whether programs should be possible to ask to “hurry up.” People just assume that if the key isn't there, the functionality is probably not needed from the keyboard. In effect, they assume the key is not there for a good reason. But maybe it's just an accident or a failure of imagination.

So, just to estate something I said already, but now that you have a bit more context: We spend a lot of time passively accepting that these metaphors we are offered, whether in terms of models of interaction or markings on a keyboard, are the right way to think about things. And we spend far too little time asking ourselves if they're the wrong metaphor or if some interesting metaphor has been omitted. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

It's a small point. But I figured if I said it out loud, you might end up passively accepting that it's something you really should think about.

 

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The Suspend/Resume/Abort image is cropped from a photo I took of my own Lisp Machine's keyboard.

The HURRY image was generated at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra. Light post-processing was done with Gimp.

Parallel Universes

My friend Probyn Gregory has been writing about his nervousness being near the fires in LA.

Probably a lot of people have.

I assume it helps people dissipate stress, or to feel less alone.

Fortunes might change on a dime, so perhaps some want to leave a realtime record of what's going on, just in case they suddenly blink out of existence.

Some are poised to run, and want to leave hints about where they might be found in case they are delayed or blocked from their chosen destination.

Some probably want to communicate the urgency of dealing with Climate by personalizing the risk. It's too easy to think this happens only to other people. Within the US, it's often portrayed as something affecting only far away countries.

Today Probyn wrote:

“We may not live in Altadena but our lives are enmeshed in it. I see people just a mile or two away driving in rush hour presumably to work and it seems positively surreal, this facsimile of normal juxtaposed with what I feel inside, this aching sadness and not-quite-coming-to-grips.”

—Probyn Gregory on Facebook (Jan 12, 2025)

I think this is a metaphor for our nation.
And the world.

AI-Generated envisioning of a divided world: some experiencing collapse, the rest in denial.

It's not just our neighbors' world that is on the brink of collapse. We live in that same world.

Individually, some of us get it. But, collectively, as a society, we're still not quite coming to grips with how serious this is.

Time to wake up.

 

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Author's Notes:

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The image was generated at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra. The initial request was for “a generic part of downtown Los Angeles, looking down a street that divides the image into two parts. on the right hand side, show ordinary buildings and people casually moving among them, cars parked, cars driving normally, business as usual. On the right side, show parked fire engines, buildings in flames, a world in collapse.” Some post-processing was done both by the LLM and by me using GIMP.

Election 2024 FAQ

Q. Who should I vote for?

A. Kamala Harris.

Q. But what about Trump?

A. The guy with 34 felony convictions and several court cases pending?

The guy who says he'll be a dictator on day one? He says only day one. Give some thought to how much you trust his impulse control.

I could go on, but just read some of these other questions and answers. They should make it plain why Harris is the only safe, sane, and moral choice.

Q. OK, so he's pretty evil. But I'm willing to put on my blinders because he's quite a business man, am I right? He'll make our economy successful, right?

A. Rachel Maddow spent a segment calling his bluff on all of this. This shouldn't be a great surprise. Trump was convicted in of fraud in New York civil court, and ordered to pay $355 million dollars. It is not a stretch to think he might commit fraud in other situations. Trump's niece, Mary Trump, has a lot to say about his lying.

Q. But hasn't Biden just weaponized the Justice Department? Those aren't real charges are they? Surely they're partisan fictions.

A. No. Biden hasn't done any such thing. In fact, it's the other way around. We're finding more and more evidence that weaponizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) is something Trump sought to do as President. He was held back by others in the government who told him he couldn't. Such restraint is unlikely to happen again because he'll pick yes men to advise him this time around.

Also, Trump is promising to prosecute his political rivals. That isn't how we've traditionally done politics in the US. The whole point of “free speech” is the free exchange of ideas. He wants to end that. He doesn't like dissent. It could get very ugly.

Q. Trump says he'll protect American business by adding big tariffs other countries have to pay. Isn't that good?

A. In a word? No. Trump can't make other countries pay anything. He can make you pay to receive things from other countries. Economists estimate this will cost the average household an extra $4000 a year. Harris is calling it a Trump “sales tax,” which is what it will feel like.

Also, it's been widely reported that businesses are readying to raise prices in anticipation of Trump's tariffs.

Q. But isn't Trump a business guy? He says he'll hire “only the best people”.

A. Many of those same people warn strongly against electing him.

Q. This is upsetting. If that's true, what about his January 6 “lovefest”? Surely you're not saying that was a fiction.

A. Several people lost their lives at Trump's so-called “lovefest” that day. Pence barely made it to safety as crowds chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. The House investigated and confirmed the seriousness of these actions, calling Republican witnesses, many of them Trump staffers, to build their case.

Q. Trump says he'll be a protector of women—

A. Oh, just stop. I know you didn't even get all the way through your question, but, please, just stop. No. He will not. Neither will Vance.

The Washington Post counted his false and misleading statements over a four-year period. They tallied 30,573. You can't trust his promises. He knows they are not legally binding.

But he also appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and bragged about it. During the 2016 campaign period, MSNBC's Chris Matthews got Trump to say “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman getting an abortion.

And if you haven't read Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, might I suggest you do? It just might turn out to be a useful reference.

Q. My husband tells me I should vote like he does. Is that true?

A. No. We vote privately in the US. At least we do now, under democracy. Who knows what will happen if Trump gains control. He'll probably appoint still more Supreme Court justices. The ones he already appointed have suggested they may want to roll back women's right to vote.

Q. I hate all of this. What if I just “send a message” by staying home?

A. Sitting it out does not send the message “I want another choice.” It sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” Read the rest of this FAQ and then get yourself to the polls. You'll be glad you did.

Q. I'm mad about Harris's Climate policies. Can I “send a message” by voting for Jill Stein?

A. Only Trump or Harris will be elected. Stein doesn't have any hope at all of being elected. So the message you send will be at a steep price because Harris has by far a more Climate-friendly record and platform than Trump. Trump does not think that “science knows” if Climate Change is real. (Spoiler Warning: Science knows.)

Voting for Stein does not send the message “I want another choice,” but instead sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” There are better times and ways to protest Climate policy.

The world will be very different under these two candidates.
If you care about those differences, you need to vote.

There is good reason to think that protest votes for Jill Stein may have tipped the 2016 election to Trump. If you care about Climate and would be otherwise voting for Harris, there are other ways to protest than to throw the election to Trump.

Q. But what about the Gaza genocide? Biden and Harris are still sending munitions.

A. This is a real concern, but boycotting the election is the wrong way to solve it. Whatever you think of Biden and Harris on Gaza policy, Trump is much worse. He wants to be best friends with Netanyahu, in part because both of them see it important to stay in power to avoid prison.

My advice? Find another way to protest. But believe me, you want to be protesting under Harris, who thinks that's a normal thing to do. Trump wanted to shoot at protesters. He does not like dissent, and especially when it's by or about people of color.

Q. But, but—the border. And all those migrants.

A. The border issue is a real issue, but very complicated. In collaboration with the Biden/Harris administration, Republican conservatives drafted a somewhat harsh policy that nevertheless had bipartisan support and by all accounts would have passed. But Trump asked Republicans to kill it because it doesn't matter to him to have that problem solved. He just wanted something to whine about, and to blame on Biden. Republicans did kill it, and Trump's the one that deserves the blame, not Biden.

Q. But shouldn't I worry that Trump often says Harris is “low IQ”?

A. I'm going to bite my tongue and not ask if you seriously think Trump is “high IQ.” Let's instead just jump straight to the heart of the matter: Calling someone “low IQ” is just a pattern behavior he has for how to talk about people who are black or female. He obviously hopes that, through force of repetition, you'll eventually associate certain attributes with certain people or certain demographics. Of course, he offers no evidence. And anyway, polls suggest she unambiguously beat him at the debate.

Q. It's only for four years, though, right?

A. That's how it used to be. But staying in office keeps him out of prison.. Liz Cheney has credibly suggested that if Trump is given power again, he will not yield it voluntarily.

Q. Maybe Vance will take over. That will fix things, right? He seems more sane.

A. Vance seems comfortable with the US following Rome's pattern, turning from a Republic to an Empire (in effect, giving up our democracy for a dictatorship). He appears to see Project 2025 as the implementation mechanism.

Q. Is there a place I can learn more about Project 2025? Are you sure it's associated with Trump?

A. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 because he knows it's a source of concern. However, many connections between Trump, Vance and Project 2025 have been documented.

There are several places you might want to consider to find out about Project 2025:

• Democracy Forward has created a user-friendly way to browse its serious dangers: The People's Guide to Project 2025.

• A band of graphic artists—some named, some anonymous—has brilliantly put the issue into graphic novel (comic book) form. This is a “must see.”

• The Center for American Progress (CAP) offers a useful explainer piece, The Dangers of Project 2025: Global Lessons in Authoritarianism, that puts Project 2025 into perpective by showing how it will “threaten American democracy by mirroring authoritarian tactics seen in Hungary, Turkey, and beyond.”
• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has an article, Project 2025, Explained, that summarizes what they see as key dangers in Project 2025, and what Trump's connection is to it.

• Project 2025 has its own web page. It's very detailed. 900+ pages. It's highly specific about the speed and scope of what it plans. The goals it sets are scary enough, but the highly undemocratic ways in which it proposes achieving those goals is scary in its own right.

Q. This FAQ by Kent Pitman was kind of fun. Is there more stuff by Kent that I can read?

A. So glad you enjoyed it. Yes, here are some election-related writings by Kent:

• Common Ground on Reproductive Health (on Liz Cheney's fresh outlook)
• Emperor's Wardrobe Day (about those who've been silent)
• The Fraud Who Stole Freedom (an epic poem, with audio)
• Vance Notice (about the danger Vance poses)
• Political Terraforming (why they're limiting rights)
• A to-do list for repairing US democracy (some helpful suggestions)
• American Dictatorship (thoughts on a possible loss of democracy)
• The Pace of Political Evil (what we come to see is normal)
• Conspiring to Contest Key Elections (it won't just be about votes)
• Stayers and Steppers (my advice to Biden to step back, let Harris run)
• Supreme Challenge (urging Biden to use power SCOTUS gave him)

Don't forget to check for other posts that may follow the post you're reading.

The Politics of Delay

Martin Tye wrote in a post on the ex-bird site:

"Scale of demand" is the key component of #Sustainability.

Almost anything is #sustainable if demanded on a small enough scale,
& almost nothing if demanded on too large a scale.

— Martin Tye (@martinrev21) October 24, 2024

I replied with a thread, that I have reproduced with some corrections and clarifications here:

Yes, large scale is a risk. But not of unsustainable full coverage; rather, of sustainable-yet-incomplete coverage.

Either way not meeting climate goals, but depending how you describe predictions, you'll be seen as wise or not.

They'll say “it's working, but not yet done, wait more.”

Capitalism relies for its correct function on strategic choices by businesses about who not to serve. This is why government must never be asked to “run like a business.” Some issues must be handled fully. Government projects are just not all correctly described or modeled as profit & loss centers.

Capitalism, at least until we overconsume generally and it kills us, reacts to scarcity by hiking prices (price elasticity), so rather than too-large demand causing the system to implode, it will “just” not reach coverage—or not yet reach coverage. The public is ill-equipped for such conversation.

I'm no mathematician, but I'll risk their terminology in order to make a brief point: Many Capitalists' alleged or accepted “truths” (to include some mere “rules of thumb”) presume asymptotic effect. Climate physics adds a bounding box, inside of which such curves are truncated. It matters where that truncation occurs. It calls for different lemmas and fights common wisdom.

For example, capitalists might say “if X occurs, prices will naturally come down,” but if there is a bounding box, a time limit, then it matters whether “eventually” falls inside or outside of the box.

It may be that certain things we're used to seeing converge eventually do not converge in the short term, and that's all the time we have. So our rule of thumb that “the market will sort it out” might be true if we have infinite time, but false if we do not. Moreover, if they weren't going to converge at all, that fact may be hidden behind a time horizon. We might need to think very differently in a bounded-time scenario than we do if we think we have unbounded time. This might change how we have to judge what market-based strategies are acceptable.

So the difficulty is that we must convince people that certain rules of thumb they'll want to use to evaluate proposals are wrong, while at the same time proposing new ways to do something that will need some way of being judged. Changing both “manner of practice” AND “theory of testing” at same time is conversationally hard. It's needed, of course. But be ready for confusion, suspicion, and pushback.

Denialists have reimagined and reconfigured themselves as “delayists so they can say “we're getting there” or “we're going in the right direction.” It makes it not sound as much like lying. Unless people actually believe in the bounding time box. Folks still today, as we reach and possibly already exceed certain Climate tipping points, make economic and political choices that presume infinite time.

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I created the plot in Python using numpy and matplotlib, then touched it up in Gimp.

Common Ground on Reproductive Health

I want to bookmark and celebrate a particular interchange in the conversation from a recent town hall that featured Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney together. The remarks by Cheney capture what I think could be an important shift the political dialog on reproductive health, trigged by the anger and revulsion of many women to the Dobbs decision, the recent Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade

I suspect this is why, traditionally, the pro-choice community has said it's about “choice,” not “abortion.” Still, it was enormously encouraging to watch Cheney put this into plain and heartfelt terms of her own.

Harris: And then, of course, I feel very strongly the government should not be telling any woman what to do with her body. And when Congress passes a law reinstating the reproductive freedoms of women, I will gladly and proudly sign it into law because I strongly believe one does not have to give up or abandon their own faith or beliefs to agree that—not the Government telling her what to do. If she chooses she will consult with her priest, her pastor, her rabbi or imam, but not the government. We have seen too much harm, real harm, happen to women and the people who love them around our country since that decision came down, including women who have died. And I don't think that most people who, before the Dobbs decision came down who had strong opinions about this I don't think most people intended that the harm we've seen would have actually happened.

Cheney: Can I add to this? Just to—Because I think it's such an important point. And I think there are many of us, around the country, who have been pro-life, but who have watched what's going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched the state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need, and so I think this is not an issue that we're seeing break down across party lines, but I think we're seeing people come together to say what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can't get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing—is suing—to get access to women's medical records, that's not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.

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Emperor's Wardrobe Day

Spoiler Warning: I'm going to speak of the ending of a certain fairy tale here, so if it's something you've waited your whole live to read, you'll want to stop when it's mentioned and go read it before continuing on. —kmp

So we're on the same page

In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes, the emperor is sold a garment that is said to be invisible to stupid people. No one wants to seem stupid, so no one tells the emperor there is no garment at all. He just walks around naked and everyone tells him how great his outfit is. It takes an innocent child to finally break the spell by blurting out what should have been obvious to everyone all along, but that everyone was afraid to say: the emperor is the stupid one, and they have all been enablers. The story doesn't quite end there, but that's as much as I want to rely on for here.

People have sometimes used the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor for the dark spell that Donald Trump has cast upon the Republican party (GOP). In the early days, I think everyone was looking around expectantly for such a Deus ex machina ending to the otherwise bottomless pit that is Trump's daily sinking to new lows. But no GOP leader stepped forward to play the role of the innocent.

The cancer has mestastasized

Some say there were never any innocent leaders in the GOP. Others say they lost their innocence over time or through specific actions. For our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Actions by single individuals at this point are unlikely to work.

It's commonly suggested that people are afraid to act. I'm sure fear is involved. But too often it's offered not just as explanation, but excuse. People worry they might lose their job, or that they might face physical violence. They cite danger to their families. And I don't disagree there are risks.

But these leaders are the ones we trust to make weighty decisions for our government. They decide who will get medical care and who will not. They decide who will be sent to war. They decide who qualifies for financial aid late in life, or after a storm. They hold the lives of others in their hands every day. And others accept that it's proper for them to do this, at least collectively, because we have a government by and for We The People.

Under our system of government—and I mean as it's intended, not as it's been perverted by recent decisions by a corrupted Supreme Court —those in our government are not special people, better than us. They are just us, charged for a time for performing actions in our interest. The reason, under the original design, that we might trust them with all these life-or-death decisions is that we know those decisions apply to them, as well. They ask some of us to take occasional risks in the name of society, for example, because they know they are subject to those same risks.

I would say there is already a civil war, a battle to undermine and restructure government through mechanisms that are not ordinary governmental consensus process. Wars are often fought with guns, but not always. In The Art of War, written by famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who lived around the 5th century B.C., there is a recurrent theme of minimizing unnecessary resource expenditures, and only resorting to armies as a last resort. “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” he says.

Some say that some element of government has always operated behind the scenes in ways that make democratic control an illusion. I argue that some changes have made even that process far worse. Maybe it's just that with each step, it all gets worse, and after a while the exponential nature of the growth of evil is too hard to ignore.

All hands on deck

There's an election coming up. It matters like no other. Voting may not fix everything, but it's important to vote, and to vote for Democracy. That means voting for the Democrats.

I emphasize that I'm not a card-carrying Democrat myself. I'm a political independent. I don't even always agree with the Democrats on policy. But lately, policy is not the issue. Having a democratic government at all is the issue. This is a matter that is beyond policy. It's about survival of our way of life. One of two parties will win: The Republicans, promising to bring Democracy down. Or the Democrats, promising to safeguard Democracy. That choice seems clear to me. It should be to you as well.

To underscore this point, many staunch Republicans, including who've worked closely with Trump in the past, have spoken out in favor of Kamala Harris and the Democrats. former Representative Liz Cheney, for example. And her dad, Dick Cheney, who was George W. Bush's Vice President. John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff and a retired Marine general, recently called Trump a “fascist.”. Thirteen former Trump administration officials signed an open letter backing this. General Mark Milley and other retired generals have issued similarly strong statements in recent days.

Breaking the wardrobe silence

Maybe the dam will finally burst as more and more people come out about the danger. I hope so, but I'm not so sure.

There have been numerous reports that many GOP leaders privately want Trump to lose the election, but aren't willing to say so publicly. Explanations of why vary. Some say they just want to keep their jobs. Others cite threats of various kinds. Romney has spoken about this, for example.

I think the sense is that there is safety in numbers. Going back to the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor, no one is willing to be the singular voice of reason.

But does it have to be one single person?

Maybe someone with a sufficiently large microphone could just designate a day. I'm tentatively calling it “Emperor's Wardrobe Day” when everyone who is afraid to come out individually agrees that they'll suddenly say what they really feel. If everyone plans on the same day, there can be a giant deluge of people speaking the danger, and no one will feel singularly at risk.

It needs to be soon because people are already voting, but also far enough out that people could hear the message and plan their statements. So it really depends on when someone picks up the idea.

Any break in solidarity before the election, explaining the danger, and perhaps most importantly, explaining that attempts to claim there is an election fraud problem are just made up, could be very important to processing of election results. Our election system is not broken in the ways Trump is saying. If he can, even now, be exposed as just making this up, that could matter.

It feels to me like it's worth a try. Everyone is just waiting for there to be a right time. Let's just put one on the calendar.

Hallmark, if you're listening...

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Also, if you're looking for more reading, these recent pieces by me may offer additional insight:

• Vance Notice
• Political Terraforming
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

There's also my recent poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom, which covers many of the same issues as does Vance Notice, but in a hopefully-more-entertaining way.

The graphic was produced by abacus.ai's ChatLLM using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was: «draw a grayscale image of sad old donald trump wearing just a barrel, holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says "Will dictate to stay out of prison."» It inroduced the misspelling of “dictate” and I decided to just keep it.