South Park trolls Kristi Noem and ICE

In a recent episode, the animated comedy show South Park severely trolled puppy murderer Kristi Noem, the head of the department of homeland security.

Two weeks ago, South Park kicked off its 27th season with one of its angriest, most politically daring episodes. The animated sitcom, long a magnet for controversy, incurred the wrath of the current US administration for its brutal and graphic send-up of Donald Trump as a petty, micro-penised dictator, as well as parent company Paramount’s cowardly capitulations to him.
…

All of this is to say that the new episode, titled Got a Nut, is coming in hot. And for the most part, it lives up to the hype.

The episode follows two different stories: in one, the show’s resident bigot, Eric Cartman, is outraged to learn that fellow fourth grader Clyde has risen to prominence as a white nationalist podcaster who makes offensive claims about women, Jewish people, Black people and other minority groups to goad them into debating him in exploitative viral videos (“WOKE STUDENT TOTALLY PWNED”). Of course, Cartman isn’t angry on behalf of any of those groups; he’s mad that Clyde is ripping off his gimmick and reaping all the rewards. He decides to muscle in on the act, styling his hair after Kirk’s signature coif (“the stupidest haircut I’ve ever seen,” says one character), trolling college girls on social media and proclaiming himself a “master-debater”.
[Read more…]

Cooking next month’s jobs numbers is not going to be easy

Following the dismal jobs numbers that were released last Friday, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer, accusing her (without any evidence of course) of cooking the books to get low growth numbers in order to make him look bad.

These jobs numbers are used by the Federal Reserve as one measure in its efforts to control inflation, and are also used by the broader business and investment communities to gauge the state of the economy and make appropriate decisions. Hence it is important that they see these numbers as credible as otherwise they are useless. Up until now, the BLS has been seen as credible. Following McEntarfer’s firing, the BLS is temporarily being run by Bill Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, who is a career professional with the agency, until Trump appoints a new commissioner. But Trump’s action has resulted in the credibility of the BLS being seriously undermined, irrespective of whatever the new permanent head does or however sterling their reputation, because that person will have the taint of being seen as being ordered by Trump to get good numbers in the future. The only way that person will be able to gain some credibility is if the August jobs numbers (that will be released on Friday, September 5) are really terrible. If they are middling or good, people will strongly suspect that the numbers have been fudged, unless it can be shown to the contrary.

But manipulating the numbers of such a massive operation without it being obvious that you are doing so is not at all easy and Trump is stupid if he thinks that whatever lackey he appoints to that position can simply replace one set of numbers in the final report and replace them with new ones. It is going to be a very tricky process.
[Read more…]

Trump will send the economy into a tailspin

The US economy is huge and like anything huge, it has a lot of inertia which makes it slow to respond to external forces. Since Trump has come into office, he has made sweeping and reckless economic moves that are not based on reality-based analyses but more on his pet theories, revenge against perceived wrongs, and sheer capriciousness, all designed to satisfy his need to be a bully. The tariffs have been his primary vehicle for the last feature and it has thrown global markets and trade relationships into turmoil. It was inevitable that this would lead to negative impacts on the economy but until this month, those consequences had not manifested themselves.

The July jobs report may be the first indicator. What was alarming was not the numbers for July itself but the steep downward revisions for May and June, which reduced the job growth to almost zero, usually a sign of an impending recession. Trump has responded angrily, as usual denying any fact that shows him in a bad light, claiming that the numbers were rigged against him, and firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Needless to say, this has alarmed pretty much everyone outside the Trump cult because whatever crackpot economic theory you may be using, you still need accurate data to make decisions. If you appoint someone who will only give you numbers you want to hear, you enter a very vicious spiral indeed. Trump’s team has fanned out with a media blitz to try and minimize the damage of the jobs report but pretty much everyone in the reality-based world is alarmed by these moves, including some Republicans.
[Read more…]

Confabulation, dementia, and Trump

Those of us in the reality-based world face a challenge in the current US political climate. Trump and his cult followers can say anything they like without feeling the need to provide a shred of evidence in support. On the other hand, we feel that we need to provide at least some evidence for any claim.

The most recent example of this is Trump’s claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has rigged the latest appalling jobs numbers report to make him and Republicans look bad. Not only that, he said that the head of the bureau had faked the numbers even last year to make the economy under Joe Biden look good.

Contrast this with the increasing suspicion that Trump is suffering from severe cognitive deterioration, that he might already be in the throes of dementia. Most people will hesitate to openly say this because dementia is a medical condition that needs to be diagnosed by a professional.

But a conservative Republican attorney by the name of Chris Truax says that the evidence of Trump’s dementia has become so obvious that pretty much anyone, and definitely those who have had loved ones suffer from it, should be able to recognize it easily, especially the confabulation. He says that the kind of confabulation that Trump is demonstrating goes well beyond the more common problems of misremembering past events or conflating distinct events into one.
[Read more…]

Time to fire the Bureau of Labor statisticians?

The title of this blog post was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the latest terrible jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The US economy added 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Donald Trump’s escalating trade war.

Forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted the July jobs report would show a drop in added jobs to around 109,000. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1% in June.

The Bureau of Labor also slashed the number of jobs added in recent months. May’s jobs figure was revised down by 125,000, from 144,000 to 19,000, and June was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

Guardian graphicSource: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note: Seasonally adjusted nonfarm jobs.

[Read more…]

How Brazil came so close to a coup

Brazil is a good example of how Trump thinks that he can use the power of the US government to pursue his personal vendettas. In this case, he is imposing tariffs on that country because it is prosecuting the former president Jair Bolsonaro for fomenting a coup in that country following his defeat in the 2022 presidential election to Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro and his family have been assiduously cultivating close ties with Trump and hope that it will pay off with him using the US to get him released.

Allies of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have accused Donald Trump of launching “a direct attack on Brazilian democracy” after the US treasury slapped sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the supreme court judge widely credited with helping save Brazilian democracy from a 2022 rightwing coup.

The highly controversial US move was announced on Wednesday by the secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, shortly before Trump followed through on a threat to hit Brazilian imports with 50% tariffs by signing an executive order “to deal with the recent policies, practices, and actions by the government of Brazil”.

Trump has partly attributed those tariffs to his outrage at the supposed political “witch-hunt” against his far-right ally the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial for allegedly seeking to seize power after losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula.

Moraes is presiding over the trial, which is widely expected to result in Bolsonaro being convicted and sentenced to up to 43 years in jail, as well as several other criminal investigations into Bolsonaro and his family.

[Read more…]

“What’d he say? Blessed are the cheesemakers?”

The Scots know how to amusingly mock Trump during his impromptu press conference in Scotland.

“The enshittification of American power”

There is no question that the last century, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the world has been characterized by US hegemony exercised through its military and economic power, and control over financial institutions. But in a long article in Wired with the above title, Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman argue that under the Trump regime, the US is starting to follow the pattern of big tech entities like Google and Facebook and that this is eventually going to lead to a decline in US power and influence in the world.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.
[Read more…]

Just the facts

That seems to be this Scottish newspaper’s motto for headlines.

Here is the background to the story.

For those who are offended by the news headline, the paper asks a good question.

“We can’t look away from what is happening in Gaza”

In her Saturday newsletter sent out to Guardian subscribers that has the above heading, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner lays out a powerful indictment of Israel’s horrifying crimes in Gaza and the complicity of the US and other western countries that have allowed this to continue for so long. I am reproducing it in full, along with accompanying photographs. These were some of the photographs coming out that show small children with skeletal bodies as a result of Israel’s deliberate policy of starving the entire population. The first image is evocative of the Madonna and child of Christian iconography.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, an 18-month old child in Gaza who faces life-threatening malnutrition. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Mohammed, seven, and Zeina, 10. Their mother says the family has been ‘silencing our hunger with water’. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

[Read more…]