Documenting Life

“If Trump was out to Bolster The Republican Party, he would only be slashing budgets in blue states and protecting red ones. Instead he is lashing out at everything, ignoring every rule. The humiliating ritual of forcing Republican allies to come and beg him to restore cuts he has already made is the point. This process reflects the success of the system that Trump wants: All control of all things in his own hands. Rules and laws—even the ones that Republicans traditionally like!—are impediments to his own control of all decisions. Therefore rules and laws must be smashed, discarded at a whim, openly violated, ignored. Do not search for some archaic form of ideological conservatism at work here. The goal of all this is not “remaking the government in a conservative image”—it is “if you want anything, you have to ask me for it”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/gangster-party

“Seriously, when he decided: “I’m going to help elect Donald Trump President if he agrees to then let me loose on all the governmental department systems, because I really really want to __”; what goes into that blank? Was he motivated by a desire to prove that a drastically smaller government is possible? Or to demonstrate some other super-genius theory of government? Was it because he’d always wanted political as well as financial power? Did he want to punish all the wokeness and taste librul tears? Was he after competitive advantage, or outright fraud, for his companies?

I don’t know. I’m not s[u]re anybody does, which seems like a flaw when you’re basically letting a guy run amok with the federal government”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/what-is-musk-up-to

“What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them on how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are due to those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences among the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent — that is, they decide some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important”

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/democrats-need-their-own-dei-purge

“OMB Director Russ Vought said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-personalist-presidency

“And if you’ve noticed your electric bill recently, it’s getting worse. And this worsening dynamic isn’t a result of higher cost levels, but financial engineering of men like McKenzie. How do we know? Well, as it turns out, there is a useful natural experiment. Only 70% of electric utilities are investor-owned, the other 30% are publicly owned, either by cities or cooperatives or some other public ownership model. And we can compare rates across ownership structures. As utility expert Mark Ellis noted in an important new paper on which this BIG piece is based, in the past three years, investor-owned utility rates went up 49% more than inflation, whereas publicly owned ones have gone up 44% less than inflation”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/power-moves-how-electric-utility

“Novelists (forgive me if you’re a novelist who disagrees with this) seem not to give much of a shit about story structure. On my shelves right now I see Rachel Cusk, David Mitchell, Mark Danielewski… Even more mainstream authors think little of introducing a character, then jumping back in time in the next chapter to fill in some relevant detail, then jumping sideways to bring in a new person etc etc. There’s no reason why a movie can’t do this (plenty of movies already do). There’s no reason why a movie HAS to start with the status quo, then introduce a complication, then have a debate, then cross some stupid threshold…”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/on-authenticity

“What’s going on here is the construction of a very interesting emotional accountability sink which might be nicknamed “Tell Me More About This Not Our Fault Theory, I Find It Strangely Compelling”. If you create an image of the planning system as so ridiculous that it’s literally impossible to build anything, then nobody can criticise you for failing to build the specific thing that was your job. If you proliferate anecdotes about underwater fish discos and words with no vowels in them hahaha, then you avoid awkward questions about what actually went wrong. In general, the aim is to encourage a complete resignation that the whole planning system is broken, so as to avoid consideration of what specific things are actually broken”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-only-growth-industry-is-excuses

“Once upon a time the norm was a kind of musical detente, a spirit of mutual disinterest across fans of different genres; saying “I’m a metalhead” would have been sufficient for most people to simply nod and understand that Lamar was not an object of particular interest for me. But alas, here again we live in a world of musical appreciation that the poptimists have made, and simply not having an opinion on popular artists is not an option. (To suggest indifference towards Swift is no different from directly insulting her; go on TikTok and try it.)”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/kendrick-lamar-talented-musician