Shanah Tovah to our Jewish readers!

We regret that you won't be able to finish commemorating the holiday, though, since apparently the rapture and the end of days will commence sometime today. That prediction, made by South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela, has spread like wildfire on social media. We recognize it's technically possible that he's wrong, but... what are the odds?

Trump Is Working Hard to Create His Own Reality...

Donald Trump and his followers have long inhabited a very special world in which Trump wins every election in a landslide, solves every problem with a snap of his fingers, and creates economic prosperity for America with every decision he makes. In the last few days, he and his administration have been working extra hard to try to extend that reality beyond the MAGA bubble.

The biggest news on this front yesterday was the rambling, only semi-coherent press conference in which Trump formally unveiled the "medical insight" that he's been teasing for about a week: pregnant women should not take acetaminophen, because it can lead to autism in their unborn children. Trump struggled to pronounce "acetaminophen," by the way, and he also rambled on about vaccines, seemingly uncertain if they are good or bad.

A number of outlets (looking at you CNN) had sanewashing headlines along the lines of "Trump's claims about Tylenol (the brand name under which acetaminophen is often sold) are unproven" or "the science here is unsettled." This is nonsense and, to their credit, most outlets did not indulge in bothsidesism. The truth is that most studies have found no correlation between acetaminophen use and autism. Those studies that HAVE found a correlation say it's a weak correlation. Further, and let's all return to our approximately seventh-grade school lessons, correlation does not equal causation. Remember, for example, this very important academic analysis:

Similarly, even those studies that have found a link between acetaminophen use and autism have observed that the drug is often used to treat fevers in pregnant women, and it could very well be the fevers (or the underlying condition causing the fevers) that triggers the autism, not the acetaminophen.

Trump's newfound medical wisdom, which brings to mind his ideas for "treating" COVID-19, also fails to stand up to cursory data analysis. The rates at which autism is diagnosed in countries where women do not have access to acetaminophen are the same as those countries in which women do have access. Similarly, the rate at which pregnant women consume acetaminophen has been level for the last quarter-century, but the number of autism diagnoses has quadrupled. None of this makes sense if acetaminophen is a major cause of autism (or even a minor one).

There's also a rather troubling aspect to all of this, besides the whole "making up scientific crap out of thin air" angle. Other over-the-counter painkillers actually do have the potential to harm unborn babies. So, if you take acetaminophen off the table, you are basically telling pregnant women who have a headache or a fever that they just have to suck it up. The notion that "Republicans want to see pregnant women suffer" sure seems like a left-wing talking point, and yet, when one is presented with things like the anti-acetaminophen proclamation...

We must admit, we struggle to see what benefit there is for Trump or for "Health" and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in all of this. We do fully understand that some people find vaccines a little too inscrutable, or a little too invasive, and so they decide they don't like vaccines. We also understand that parents don't like the idea that their own genes might be the cause of junior's autism diagnosis, so it at least makes sense, on some perverse level, to link the vaccines with the autism. That pins the responsibility on something that is a bugaboo for some people, and takes responsibility away from the parents (who, let us be clear, aren't actually "to blame" since they aren't responsible for their own genes).

What we're not getting is why a new "culprit" is needed, as opposed to just repeating the "vaccines cause autism" canard. Is it because a lot of anti-vaxxers are having autistic kids, and something is needed to keep up the notion that autism is primarily/entirely caused by external factors? Is it because Kennedy and Trump fancy themselves to be "disruptors," and want to put their stamp on the whole situation? Is it something else? We just don't understand, sometimes.

In addition to platforming medical quackery, the Trump administration is also trying to reinvent reality by disappearing any WrongThink that runs contrary to its agenda. Everyone knows about Jimmy Kimmel (though see below). Similarly, we wrote last week about how the legally mandated DoJ annual report on sex trafficking, due to Congress on June 30 of each year, has yet to be submitted. We also noted that the report on how most domestic terrorism in the U.S. comes from right-wingers has been scrubbed from the website of the Department of Justice. Since we produced those items, the BLS has delayed the annual release of consumer expenditures data, which helps anticipate inflation. No explanation has been offered, nor has a new deadline been announced. In addition, with the BBB having slashed food stamps and other such aid, the White House has decided that the annual report on hunger in America is no longer needed, because it's become "too politicized."

In short, welcome to life in Oceania. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go, because our clock is striking thirteen, which means it's time for our reeducation class. (Z)

...With a Little Help from His Friends...

There are certainly some things where Donald Trump has excellent instincts. He knows that the greater control he can exert over the Fourth Estate, the easier his life is. And despite the fact that his worldview is mostly stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, he's also managed to figure out that the traditional Fourth Estate is increasingly less relevant, and is being supplanted by social media.

These things being the case, nobody can be surprised by the details of the TikTok divestment, which have begun to come out. Trump made a mockery of the law passed by Congress, extending the negotiation window several times, despite having no authority to do so. Now, it is clear why; he was setting it up so his ultra-MAGA techie friends and allies would be able to assume primary ownership of the American portion of the service, and its more-precious-than-gold-pressed-latinum algorithm.

The new ownership of 80% of the site, reportedly, is a consortium that includes Trumpy tech magnates Larry and David Ellison and Marc Andreesen, as well as media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Trump also managed to wangle a multi-billion-dollar fee for the U.S. Government, which will undoubtedly end up going to something like the Trump ballroom fund, or the Qatar Force One maintenance fund.

The thinking here could not be more plain. TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S. and, in particular, has wide currency among younger users. Trump and his MAGA minions plan to use that access to propagandize their political views, and to try to use resentment and rage to get as many young people voting Republican/MAGA as is possible.

Could it work? Maybe. While the Chinese have been running it, TikTok has been a very effective vehicle for that government's... messaging. The most famous/infamous recent example involves Israel. Whether there has been genocide there or not (and we have a piece planned on that subject for tomorrow), the deployment of the word "genocide" by mostly younger Americans began very nearly at the same time as the conflict between Israel and Hamas did, before "genocide" could possibly be accurate. There is abundant evidence that came from those individuals' TikTok feeds. And the Chinese government, which is able to control what is shown on TikTok, had enormous interest in sowing dissension in the U.S., and among the nations of the West.

So, Trump & Co. are clearly hoping to replicate the "success," such as it is, of the Chinese government. There are, however, a couple of flies in the ointment. The first is that the Chinese are master propagandists, who seized upon a nearly ideal situation for getting people's blood boiling. It's not clear that the Ellisons, Andreesen, the Murdochs, etc. have that particular skill (especially since Ellison is the one who will reportedly be running the show). Beyond that, young people tend to use a particular platform right up until the time they... move on to a different platform. Head over to the ghost town that is MySpace these days for an illustration of this dynamic. Or even Facebook, where the average user's age must have increased by 20 years in the last 5 years. (Z)

...Perhaps Because His War on the Media Isn't Going Well...

Donald Trump has, of course, tried very hard to silence media outlets that he believes to be unfriendly. And while he had some success, in past months, in getting some outlets to pay protection money settlements, he suffered two high-profile setbacks in the last 72 hours or so.

The first of those, in chronological order, involved his utterly absurd $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, basically because he thinks the paper's staff is a bunch of big meanies who have been extra mean to him for many years. You don't need to be a law school graduate to know that the suit is preposterous on its face. Heck, you don't even need to be a graduate of sixth grade. There is, first of all, the fact that the bar for defaming a public figure, particularly if they hold elective office, is VERY high. There's also a little thing called a statute of limitations.

Perhaps most importantly, it's nearly impossible to imagine how much defaming it would take to do $15 billion in damages. In fact, there's only one way we can think of to get there. Imagine you defame someone by saying they lied about being sexually assaulted by you, and you get hit with a $5 million judgment. Then, you respond to that by defaming them again, in exactly the same way, and you get hit with an $83.3 million judgment because you clearly haven't learned your lesson. If you play that stupid game for enough rounds, your idiot tax liability might get up to $15 billion. But you'd probably have to repeat the behavior six or seven times, rather than just stopping at two.

As it turns out, the lawsuit was not only meritless, but the filing made by Trump's "attorneys" reads like the work of someone who... well, hasn't graduated sixth grade. It is a rambling manifesto that spends its first 80 pages lionizing Trump and/or carping about his grievances. For example, there's this, from Page 28:

President Trump's late father, Fred C. Trump, was a legendary businessman and a patriot, who built over 27,000 apartments in New York City. He likewise was responsible for building one of New York City's first modern supermarkets, called Trump Market, in Woodhaven, Queens; building Shore Haven in Bensonhurst, which included thirty-two six-story buildings and a shopping center covering some thirty acres; constructing the twenty-three building Beach Haven Apartments over 40 acres near Coney Island; building barracks and garden apartments for the U.S. Navy along the East Coast during World War II; and building middle-income housing for the returning veterans and their families after the war had ended. For his efforts and accomplishments, in 1985, Fred Trump received the Horatio Alger Award for distinguished Americans.

That may seem to be lionizing Trump's father, and it is, but it's there because it's the prelude to something like 15 pages laying out the son's accomplishments in great detail, including a listing of all the properties he owns or manages, all the books he's written, and all the movies and TV shows he's appeared in. The Apprentice alone gets mentioned 48 times in the document, with multiple passages, many pages apart, recounting the same basic story of what a trailblazing and popular and record-breaking show it was.

As you might imagine, the judge who drew the case—Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee—was neither amused nor impressed. He quickly bounced the case, noting that it did not follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and further observing that it is not appropriate to have 80 pages of boilerplate blather as the setup for 4 pages of actual complaint.

Merryday allowed 28 days for Trump's team to re-file, and made clear that if the President takes advantage of that opportunity, the next filing damn well better be less than 40 pages. Team Trump says they'll be back with a new filing, but we'll see if that actually happens. The whole thing was just a cheap PR stunt anyhow, and since the claim has no merit, it's likely to get bounced again, which means another poke in the eye for Trump. And if the case somehow survives and moves forward, then the discovery phase will loom, and Trump definitely does not want the highly skilled lawyers and investigative reporters who work for the Times to have a hall pass to dig into his life, looking for dirt. These things being the case, he could just quietly drop it.

Meanwhile, the considerably bigger defeat came yesterday, as ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel will return to the air, starting tonight. That was ultimately a rather short "indefinite suspension," especially since the Trump administration has not backed down on its threat to potentially suspend ABC's broadcast license. The show's going to do very good ratings tonight, as everyone tunes in to see whether Kimmel offers some sort of apology, or he goes in the other direction and pokes the bear a bit more. We don't imagine he would say anything more about Charlie Kirk, but he could certainly have some pointed remarks about, say, government censorship. Having his show canceled definitely did not cause Stephen Colbert to take the edge off. See here.

What changed Disney's mind here? The corporate brass isn't saying, but a few explanations suggest themselves. To start, the boycott and cancellation of Disney content was apparently quite substantial. On top of that, 400 Hollywood notables, with Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro particularly notable among them, signed an open letter lambasting the suspension. There was also much talk about some/many of these people refusing to work on Disney projects going forward.

Presumably in response to these developments, Disney stock took a hit, starting the day after Kimmel's suspension was announced, and continuing through yesterday (it's already bounced back a bit in futures trading). Here's the graph:

The drop is about 3 points, which isn't enormous, but when a company has 1.8 billion shares outstanding, that's over $5 billion in market value lost. To put that in context, that's about 3 years' revenue for Disneyland, so it's nothing to sneeze at.

Sinclair-owned affiliates will not be bringing Kimmel back, incidentally, at least not right now, because Sinclair is a staunchly right-wing corporation, owned by staunchly right-wing people, and broadcasting to an audience that is substantially right-wing and/or MAGA. Maybe Sinclair will eventually back down but, in any case, Kimmel will be back on in the rest of the country. And even if he's mildly contrite tonight (no sure thing), he's surely going to join Stephen Colbert in giving it to Trump with both barrels going forward. So, once again, Trump has almost certainly done himself more harm than good with one of his stunts. (Z)

...Nor Is His War Against Other Entities

Donald Trump's recent setbacks are not limited to his efforts to repeal the First Amendment by presidential fiat. He's also losing plenty of battles on other fronts. He promised his followers so much winning they would get tired of it. We're not sure what his position is on so much losing.

First up, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin (Joe Biden appointee) had already issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the Trump administration from withholding $500 million in research funds from UCLA. Yesterday, she issued her final ruling, and said the withholding of the money was likely "arbitrary and capricious" and a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. So, the money definitely has to be sent to UCLA, per previous federal commitments.

Presumably, the administration will appeal. However, there is something that doesn't add up here, and we have not been able to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle. For the administration to restore the $500 million in funding voluntarily, it demanded $1 billion from UCLA, plus a bunch of other concessions, mostly having to do with admitting more white people to the school. Why in the world would anyone pay $1 billion (plus bow to a bunch of procedural blackmail) to get... far less than $1 billion in research funds restored?

There's a second part of the equation which may, or may not, resolve this dilemma. As we have noted before, UCLA is under the governance of the UC Board of Regents. It's actually the Regents (which include Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-CA, as an ex officio member) who would have to approve any settlement with Trump. And the difference here is that when Harvard yields, or does not yield, to Trump, it is only making a decision for Harvard. Same thing for Columbia, or Brown, or Penn, or Duke, or most of the other schools the administration has targeted. But with UCLA, the decision-makers are ALSO the decision makers for several other schools that get large amounts of research funding, most obviously Berkeley, UCSD and UCSF. When Harvard gives in, it's hoping that Trump won't be back for another shakedown. But if the Regents give in on UCLA, it's practically an engraved invitation for Trump to come back in a month and hit another UC, and another, and another. Put another way, there has been a suggestion that, say, all the Ivies should form a consortium and pool their financial and other legal resources. Well, the UCs are already a consortium of that sort, which makes any one UC a particularly risky target for Trump.

Now, the semi-mystery we outline above could be resolved if it were the case that, behind the scenes, the Trump administration is promising (for what that's worth) that if it gets what it wants from UCLA, it won't go after any other UCs. In that case, the protection money settlement paid out by the Los Angeles campus would ostensibly protect the multiple billions in federal research funds that have been doled out to the UC campuses collectively. But we've not heard anything that suggests this is the case, nor have we even heard anything that suggests the Trump administration understands how the governance of the UCs is very different from that of the Ivies.

Moving on to the other big loss of the day for the administration, Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Royce Lamberth (appointed to the bench by St. Ronnie of Reagan) granted a preliminary injunction to Danish offshore wind developer Ørsted, saying that the company is likely to prevail on the merits of its case, and therefore that it can go back to work building the nearly complete Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island. It is the Judge's view that "the president is butt-hurt that someone built some wind turbines next to his golf course" is not justification for ignoring federal law regarding the issuance of stop-work orders. Ørsted, for its part, said it would make sure to work with the administration to make sure its concerns are met (Translation: "We'll pucker up and kiss some orange hindquarters, if that is what we have to do"). The Trump administration has not said whether it will appeal, or will just cut its losses and drop the matter.

Trump did get one win yesterday. The Supreme Court, using the shadow docket (naturally), and in defiance of a precedent set in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, voted 6-3 to allow Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to move forward for now. The Justices also said they would hear the actual case, and render a final ruling, on an expedited basis. The Supremes continue to be very, very deferential to Trump in their emergency-docket decisions; we will see if that continues when they have to make an actual decision, with precedent-setting (and, potentially, precedent-destroying) consequences. (Z)

We Are in the Burner Phone Era

When (Z) was in high school, there was a dangerous/rebellious work of... maybe fact, maybe fiction called The Anarchist Cookbook. Undoubtedly, many readers have heard of it, because its initial publication predates his high school graduation by 20 years. For those readers who are not familiar, it is full of information about things like how to make LSD, how to make a cattle prod into a lethal weapon, and how to throw a Molotov cocktail the proper way.

The author was a self-proclaimed radical leftist named William Powell who said he wrote the book to give "the silent majority" the tools to fight back against "fascist, capitalist, and communist threats." Later, he repudiated the book, declaring:

During the years that followed [the book's] publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in his name and therefore such a decision was his to make - not the author's. In the early 1980's, the rights for the book were sold to another publisher. I have had no contact with that publisher (other than to request that the book be taken out of print) and I receive no royalties.

Unfortunately, the book continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.

How much of that verbiage, either before Powell's epiphany or after, was legitimate and how much of it was clever marketing is an excellent question. What (Z) can certainly say is that everyone at his high school who had a copy was not making war against any such threats, and almost certainly didn't actually attempt to execute any of the recipes or designs in the book. It was just a "cool" and "rebellious" thing to have, particularly in a time when acquiring a copy was no easy task. Today, they sell it for Amazon Kindle for eight bucks, so it's not so cool or rebellious anymore.

We write this as prelude to a recent article from WIRED magazine headlined "How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone." There are a fair number of people who adopt a variation on the burner phone concept, often while traveling, by acquiring a disposable phone with pre-paid minutes, and using that in place of their regular phone. That significantly reduces the pain if the phone is stolen, and also means there's nothing on the phone that could antagonize customs officials if they happen to take a look-see.

The WIRED piece is obviously much more detailed, and talks about how to create an actual burner phone. This is not so much a technical challenge as it is a behavioral one. Of course you will want to buy a disposable, pre-paid phone with a non-traceable medium of exchange (presumably cash), but you also have to commit to using the phone for a limited duration, and to not using it anywhere close to where you actually live or work or socialize. The whole point here is to reduce to zero the amount of identifying information you provide to anyone who might get wind of the phone.

There was a time when such an article would have been "for entertainment purposes" just like The Anarchist Cookbook was for most (all?) readers. (Z) has read hundreds of pieces like this, about how to pick locks, or how to cheat at slot machines, or how to evade red-light cameras because they're interesting and are sort of like reading a real-world spy novel. But Americans currently live in a world where some of these things, like the burner phone, aren't just interesting things to read about; there could be a legitimate need.

We bring this up, in particular, because we had a question this weekend from an American ex-pat who was wondering how safe it is to return to the U.S./Southern California for a visit. We wrote that it's not that risky, but several readers pointed out—rightly—that we forgot to say anything about phone hygiene. Visitors to the U.S. have already been pinched because their phones had, for example, memes on them that might give J.D. Vance a case of the sads. So while a full-on burner phone is probably not needed, a burner-lite, where you purchase a temporary phone for use while traveling, is a wise idea. Failing that, at least go through your saved pictures and text messages, and make sure there's nothing there that might cause an over-zealous customs agent to target you.

And in case you are wondering, (Z) did (and does) own a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. He did not acquire it himself, however; it was a birthday gift from a friend in high school who, like the character Red in The Shawshank Redemption, was known for being able to "get things." (Z)

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