Kansas is us

One of the perennial questions that people on the liberal end of the political spectrum discuss is the one about why so many people seem to vote against their own interests. These questions are variations on the themes in the 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank where he explores why his once left-wing populist home state of Kansas now espouses right wing economic policies that do not benefit the majority of people in the state. I have not read this influential book but its main themes have percolated widely in political discourse and the reason given is that economic concerns have been driven by the rise of hot-button culture war issues that have driven economic concerns into the background, even as their personal economic situation becomes more dire.

Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers – when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists’ furthest imaginings – when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work – you could be damned sure about what would follow. Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower. (p. 67-68)

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Great moments in policing

Suppose you are a police officer and you and a fellow officer are called to a nursing home that specializes in residents with higher care needs including dementia because staff reported that a resident had taken a steak knife from the kitchen. When you get there you see a diminutive 95-year old woman coming slowly towards you using a walker and carrying a knife. How do you deal with the situation?

My guess is that you do not take out your Taser and zap her. And yet that is what one officer did. As a result, the woman fell and hit her head on the ground and is now in hospital in a critical condition.
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The Satanic Temple holds a convention

I have been aware of the Satanic Temple as largely a group that seeks to dethrone religion’s dominance in US culture by demanding that the same privileges that are given to traditional religions, such as monuments in public lands, also be allowed to them. I knew that they use Satanic rituals and regalia even though they do not believe in Satan or the afterlife. It is political activism mixed in with cosplaying and performance art. They are in fact secular and supporters of a science-based worldview and fight racism and homophobia.

However they seem to be much larger than I had thought as evidenced by their convention currently underway at a Marriott hotel in Boston.

The Satanic Temple is recognised as a religion by the US government, and has ministers and congregations in America, Europe and Australia.

More than 830 people snapped up tickets for its late April convention, dubbed SatanCon.

Members say they don’t actually believe in a literal Lucifer or Hell. Instead, they say Satan is a metaphor for questioning authority, and grounding your beliefs in science. The sense of community around these shared values makes it a religion, they say.

They do use the symbols of Satan for rituals – for example when celebrating a wedding or adopting a new name. That might include having an upside-down neon cross on your altar while shouting: “Hail Satan!”

For many Christians, this is serious blasphemy.

“That’s not wrong,” agrees Dex Desjardins, a spokesperson for The Satanic Temple. “A lot of our imagery is inherently blasphemous.
…

The event takes up the whole fourth floor of the hotel. The Satanists fill it with androgynous goth chic, flamboyant robes, hand-painted horns, diabolical tattoos, and high-maintenance moustache choices. Most people here are old enough to be parents, and several are. I spot at least one pushchair.

Presentations are given, including one called “Hellbillies: Visible Satanism in Rural America”, and a seminar on Satanism and self-pleasure.

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The government’s cash balance drops further

The cash balance in the governments account dropped again on Thursday. It started the day with $68.332 billion, had revenues of $210.781 billion and expenditures of $221.773 billion, ending the day with $57.341 billion.

This number is becoming more significant as news emerges that talks on raising the debt ceiling have reached an impasse and discussions have been suspended. Sex offender Donald Trump is not helping.

Negotiations for a deal to raise the US debt ceiling and thereby avoid a default with potentially catastrophic consequences for the world economy reached a worrying impasse on Friday.
…

Republican leaders outside the talks sought to apply pressure. Not long before Graves spoke to reporters, Trump said his party should not give ground.

Republicans, the presidential frontrunner wrote on his Truth Social platform, “should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want (including the ‘kitchen sink’). That’s the way the Democrats have always dealt with us. Do not fold!”

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, aimed fire at Biden, accusing the president of “wait[ing] months before agreeing to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy on a spending deal.

“They are the only two who can reach an agreement,” McConnell said. “It is past time for the White House to get serious. Time is of the essence.”

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, countered: “We are in a crisis, for ONE REASON – House Republicans threat to burn down the entire economy if they don’t get their way.”

This is no way to run the world’s largest economy.

The trials and convictions of extremists

The leaders of the extremists groups behind the attacks on January 6th have had some serious setbacks in the courts. Last week saw the leaders of the Proud Boys get convicted of seditious conspiracy

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the far-right extremist group were convicted Thursday of a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.

A jury in Washington, D.C., found Tarrio and three lieutenants guilty of seditious conspiracy after hearing from dozens of witnesses over more than three months in one of the most serious cases brought in the stunning attack that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, as the world watched on live TV.

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The government’s cash balance dips sharply again

The cash balance in the governments account dropped sharply on Wednesday. It started the day with $94.629 billion, had revenues of only $16.310 billion and expenditures of $42.6226 billion, ending the day with $68.332 billion.

This graph shows the steady decline in the cash balance over the past year.

In May of last year, the balance was close to $800 billion and kept steadily dropping with just a few upticks until it reached the current value, which is less than one-tenth of the starting value.

The puzzling appeal of Nazism in the US today

We know that Hitler and the Nazis were impressed by racist and eugenics ideas in the US and that they coopted many of those ideas in their theory and program of Aryan supremacy that led to the mass killings of Jews, the Romani people, and others. We now have the reverse phenomenon, where some Americans are taking inspiration from those Nazi ideas and express admiration for Nazis. As a result, we have had various groups of white nationalists and anti-Semites recruiting people to their cause using neo-Nazi rhetoric..

I have been struggling to figure out what exactly is the contemporary appeal of Nazism in the US. Let me be clear about what puzzles me. The appeals to quasi-eugenics ideas such as the ‘great replacement theory’ according to which there is a deliberate plan to displace white Christians from their dominant position by immigrants and people of color and Jews and other religions, have been around in the US long before the Nazis came to power in Germany.
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The government cash countdown and novel solutions to the crisis

The debt ceiling has always been a tool for Republicans to force through measures that would otherwise never get legislative approval.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book describes how conservatives in this country and abroad use a crisis — natural disasters and other unexpected calamities — to push through policies that would never win legislative support. What happened was, in the Obama administration, his Republican adversaries realized they could actually plan a crisis by refusing to increase the debt ceiling and then use the shock doctrine to push through their desired policy (spending cuts and, if they can get away with it, tax cuts too).

At the end of day on Thursday, May 11, the amount that the government had in its operating cash account to pay its bills was $143.314 billion. On Friday May 12th, the income was $15.982 billion and the outflow was $19.352 billion, leaving a reduced cash balance at the end of that day of $139.944 billion. As the days go by, the trend line for the closing balance is to keep dropping, though on some days the balance might rise.

The current debt ceiling limit was last raised on December 16, 2021 to $31.4 trillion. If you want to know the value of the US debt down to the last cent, as of May 12th, it was $31,458,532,169,329.81. How can it be larger than the limit by about $58 billion? It is because “under current law, [the Treasury] can take well-established “extraordinary measures” to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling.” But there is a limit to such extraordinary measures. The nominal limit of $31.4 trillion was reached back in January.

I am not sure how low the cash balance has to sink before it becomes a full-fledged crisis. Such a date is known as the ‘X-date’. This article discusses some of the known expenditures to come and who might get paid if the debt ceiling is not raised. But the Biden administration has ruled out paying some bills and not others.
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