How we model the world, and how well we adapt to it

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. John H. Holland. Addison-Wesley, 1995. 176 pages.

This is not a book review. Rather, this is about why I think the ideas in this book are important, and how those ideas apply to what we think and what we do. This is one of the most important books I’ve ever read, so it’s surprising that I’ve never mentioned it here before. That’s probably because it was more than 25 years ago that I first read it. The author is, or was, a professor of computer science, electrical engineering, and psychology at the University of Michigan.

The book is rather technical, but its central ideas are easy to grasp. There are several key concepts:

Complex adaptive systems: We are entirely familiar with complex adaptive systems, because we are surrounded by them. A city is a complex adaptive system, as is a forest, or any ecosystem. In fact each individual human being is a complex adaptive system.

Adaptive agents: An agent is a smaller entity within a complex adaptive system that is able to act on its own. It’s also able to learn. And, as a species, it is able to evolve based on interaction with the environment. For example, an individual human being is an agent within the complex adaptive system of human society. A tree, or a squirrel, or a mouse, is an individual agent within a forest. Each, as a species, evolves.

Tags: Tags are attributes that allow agents to identify other agents or other elements within a system. A human being can recognize a squirrel, or a grizzly bear, because our vision detects the visual tags that denote squirrels and grizzly bears. A squirrel can detect a nearby nut by the nut’s smell. Everything within a system will have some sort of tag, permitting agents to recognize what a thing is or even to register that something new and unfamiliar has been encountered. A flower’s bright color, and its scent, are tags that other agents (bees, hummingbirds) can recognize.

Internal models: Agents will always have some sort of internal model of their environment. A mouse’s internal model will understand that a certain smell is a tag that identifies a mushroom as food. A mouse’s internal model also will understand that other smells are a tag for a predator, and the mouse will hide. Internal models vary in their complexity, according to the abilities of the agent. A human being’s internal model of the environment is more complex than an amoeba’s. Internal models, to a great degree, are inherited as instincts. Yet inherited instincts can become obsolete and dangerous if the environment is changing faster than a species can evolve. But internal models also can learn, including the ability to detect and correct errors, if the agent survives the error. Some agents’ internal models are better than other agents’ internal models. Some human beings, obviously, learn faster than others. Some human beings recognize errors more quickly than others.

Competition: Agents have no choice but to compete with other agents for resources within a complex adaptive system — food, mates, social status, power.

Now we can propose an axiom. The quality of an agent’s adaptation to its environment is only as good as its internal model of that environment. A young squirrel that hasn’t yet learned that roads are dangerous is at risk of dying on a road. Young millennials who perceive the growing role of computers in their environment and who have learned to program computers will get a better job than working in a warehouse. A decision, or an action, is only as good as the factual basis and reasoning that went into that decision or action.

All of this has to do with an area of science which is developing very quickly, a science that can be applied to a great many things — say, to studying the ecology of an ocean, or to programming a computer system for artificial intelligence. My interest though, is pretty specific and limited: What does the science of complex adaptive systems tell us about the quality of our adaptation, as individual human beings, to living in a fast-changing world? How can we use the theory to improve our adaptation and therefore to improve our lives, not only as individuals but as a society? How might the theory help us understand not only the poor performance of some people, but also the destructive tendencies of people whose models of the world are false and twisted? (In human beings, values also are a part of the internal model. I’ve written here in the past about the inferiority of conservative values. The conservative love of authority obviously is a invitation for error, whereas the liberal’s love of fairness is not likely to go wrong.)

Our environment surrounds us with dangers as well as with potential rewards. And we must compete whether we like it or not.

Some agents lie. They lie to exert their own interests against the interests of other agents. For example, mimicry in the animal kingdom:

To a bird, viceroy butterflies are good to eat. But a monarch butterfly will make them throw up. The butterflies look alike. Birds’ internal models learn that monarch butterflies are bad to eat, and so they don’t eat viceroys either.

Now you see where I’m going with this. Millions of human beings are operating with severely defective internal models of the world. For some it’s because they’ve been lied to. That’s the very purpose of propaganda, after all. For others, it’s sadly because they’re just not swift enough to make sense of a fast-changing environment that makes them feel threatened. They get left behind. Believing lies told by others, they get used for others’ purposes.

But there is no avoiding the bottom line. Those whose internal models of the world are defective, or too slow to keep up, will do badly in the world. Those whose internal models are more accurate and more up to date will do better in the world. When groups of people with defective models of the world act in concert, they are certain to do harm. When those with more accurate models of the world operate in concert, they have a good chance of doing good.

Those of us who have pretty good, or at least adequate, internal models of the world (I don’t hesitate to make that claim for myself) have been living through a period in which people with false models of the world temporarily got the upper hand, through the concerted application of lies and deception. As angry as I once was when Trump first acquired power through the support of those whose models were weak and corruptible, I was more optimistic than many people that, before long, the movement would fail. That optimism derives from the simple proposition that people, and groups of people, with corrupted models of the world are bound to fail, at least eventually, because their corrupt model of the world will cause them to make errors, errors that will build up until those errors become fatal and bring them down, as surely as a young squirrel in the road that hasn’t learned about cars. Now, at last, the failures and errors of Trump world are taking down those who thought that lies and the abuse of others was a winning strategy. Had they known their history, they would have known that that model has been tried before, and that it caused great misery for many before its sponsors were exposed and eliminated. Think of Stuart Rhodes, or Alex Jones, or Steve Bannon, all of whom were major sponsors of a false model of the world meant to cause susceptible people to be conned, fleeced, and manipulated. Rhodes, Jones, and Bannon are now being exposed and eliminated as dangerous agents in the environment. The same fate awaits Donald Trump.

It greatly disturbs me that there are so many forces that actively work to corrupt people’s model of the world — Fox News, the Republican Party, billionaire oligarchs, con men. That’s possible because so many people’s model of the world is faulty and therefore vulnerable to being corrupted. Their lie detectors, so to speak, are broken. They fall for scams. They allow themselves to be used, en masse, for other people’s purposes. They don’t learn. They don’t correct errors. He’s still my president.

This begs the question: What are the things that support accurate internal models of the world? How do we avoid the invitations to deception and falseness that are constantly set before us? I don’t have an easy answer to that, and I’ve already gone on here for too long. But a few things are quickly apparent. Education matters. Reason matters, as in the ability to detect fallacy and therefore the ability to detect attempts to deceive us. Some means of sorting out truth from falsehood, in the way courts work, or in the way responsible journalists work, is essential. Some kind of principle of skepticism and caution must be applied when we recognize that we are obliged to act but don’t have enough information. So-called “faith” is one of the most common traps of all. There must be some mechanism for detecting and correcting errors. And, if those with good models of the world want to make the world better, then there must be a means of comparing notes with others and acting in concert with others.

An aside: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Carlos Castaneda wrote some beautiful books that were supposedly about a Mexican shaman named Don Juan. He sold more than 8 million books. But later it was proven that Castaneda was doing not anthropology but fiction (though good fiction!). The Don Juan character has a well developed theory of what he called “petty tyrants.” We all know petty tyrants. Workplaces are full of petty tyrants. They’re the people who make a little power go a long way and who bring conflict and misery to everyone around them. Don Juan’s theory was about how to take down a petty tyrant. The key was to wait, on the grounds that sooner or later, every petty tyrant makes a fatal mistake, at which point a flick of the finger will take them down. In my working life, I always found that to be true. The petty tyrants who afflict other people and bend the rules eventually go down, vulnerable to their own errors. They make a mistake that requires the HR department or higher management to send them packing.

A good example is James Bennet, who resigned as opinion editor at the New York Times after he made a fatal mistake, which was publishing a piece of right-wing propaganda that the Times should not have published. Bennet’s friends complained that a group of young “woke” staff members at the Times “canceled” Bennet. He certainly wasn’t canceled, because he landed on his feet at the Economist. My suspicions tend otherwise. I’d wager that Bennet was an incompetent, overbearing editor who was hated by his staff. When the staff, with better internal models of the world than Bennet’s, recognized Bennet’s fatal mistake, they made their move. The full story, I would wager, was that Bennet deserved to be fired long before he made his fatal mistake. As for the piece Bennet published, which the publisher of the Times called “a significant breakdown,” Bennet’s approval of the piece was sufficient evidence of his incompetence and his defective internal model of the world.

The heartache of not having any pubs

I’m always excited when I get a new cookbook, but I found this one particularly exciting. Where I live, I’ve adapted to living in a place dominated by Trump culture, shocked by how the insular suburban attitude has taken over rural America. My adaptation mostly involves staying home here in the woods. I chiefly encounter presentday rural culture when I’m out on the road — heavy, gas-guzzling vehicles driving too fast and always tailgating, running over wildlife without even slowing down, the almost complete, and voluntary, abandonment of what was best about rural America by the very people who want to roll the clock back to the 1950s but wouldn’t have the vaguest idea how to do it. To them I would say (but I don’t): But you abandoned all that. Remember? It’s the Dollar General people who couldn’t make a biscuit if you held a gun to their heads who think they know the recipe for making America great again. I roll my eyes.

Anyway, this cookbook caused me to wonder whether pub food really is this fancy. But I suspect that more and more of it is, as well trained cooks from places such as the Cordon Bleu have moved to places where there is enough tourist traffic to support excellently executed traditional cooking. Good food from good ingredients prepared by good cooks cannot be cheap. Only in places where money flows freely can it be found. I am fondly remembering the pub at Benners Hotel at Dingle in County Kerry, where the tourist money flows freely, though to the irritation of people who have lived there since before Dingle was discovered. My recent trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, showed me that the taverns there do it right — good ale, good eats, and honest (because Williamsburg is so old) 17th Century atmosphere.

Strangely enough, there are two places within 12 miles of me that brew beers and ales. One of them I’ll never go to, because their photos show a metal building lit with fluorescent light, a stark interior, no food served. Sorry. That’s not a pub. The other place, in the little town of Madison, attempts to create some atmosphere, but they don’t serve food. I sampled their ale once and didn’t like it, so I won’t be going back. To my mind, good ale requires at least the option of food to go with it. Good bottled ales are easy to find these days, and for some reason I find myself drinking more ale and less wine.

To the person who ran over the fox yesterday on Highway 772, and to the persons who hit the deer and the three squirrels that I saw on the road yesterday while making a grocery run: Please tell me again how you plan to make America great again. While I wait, I’ll just stay home.

I think I’ll try the bleu cheese and walnut tartlets first.

How is this even possible?

When will we completely rethink our relationship with animals? Can there be any doubt that this horse not only hears and is working with the beat of the music, but that the horse also knows that what it’s doing is beautiful?

Trump has no future other than prison


A Facebook meme

Polls from Quinnipiac University I always take with a grain of salt. And, actually, any single poll always should be taken with a grain of salt. But this particular Quinnipiac poll is so lopsided that I think it’s worth our confidence.

The poll, released November 22, found that only 35 percent of Americans consider themselves supporters of Trump’s MAGA movement. That means that Trumpism is now pretty much down to the irrational authoritarians who are motivated only by their meanness rather than anything that resembles a fact or a principle. There is a percentage below which that number will never go, because that kind of people never change. The number, I would argue, is somewhere between 25 and 35 percent. But the exact percentage doesn’t matter, because they are and always will be a minority. We need to keep in mind that, even in 2016, a majority of voters rejected Trump. It was only because of our archaic Electoral College and its amplification of rural votes that Trump got into the White House.

As I have often said here, there is not a snowball’s chance that Trump will ever again get near the White House. What remains to be seen, though, is whether the Republican Party will find a way to unload Trump to save itself, or whether Republicans (a majority of whom still believe in Trump) will ride Trump all the way down.

It’s past time for rational people to stop being afraid of Trump. Rather, just enjoy the shadenfreude of watching Trump finally taken down and disposed of by the law. When Trumpists strut and threaten, as they still do, just smirk and walk away.

Workouts for the brain

In a few days, I’ll turn 74. And though I don’t feel my memory or logic circuits slipping, I don’t want them to slip. I read an article recently that mentioned something that I should have known but didn’t know. Reading fiction is very good exercise for the memory, because one has to remember at the end of the book what happened at the beginning. The article said that, when older people start to give up on reading fiction, that’s an indicator that memory problems may be developing.

But what about our logic circuits?

Sudoku was a major craze ten or twelve years ago. I didn’t pay much attention, because I’ve never been all that interested in games. But now that I’m no spring chicken I wanted a game that requires logical deduction as a supplement to the memory exercise of reading fiction. Sudoku seemed to be the right choice. I also wanted to spend less time sitting in front of the computer, and Sudoku can be played with old-fashioned pencil and paper. I did a few Sudoku games with the computer just to learn the rules, but playing Sudoku on a computer felt like cheating, because you get immediate feedback on whether you’re right or wrong when you place a number.

The problem with paper, though, is that one’s worksheet can get cluttered and messy. Sudoku is not really a board game, but I quickly found that a board helps keep order. Part of the challenge is to keep one’s paper worksheet and the board in sync. Another part of the challenge is to never make a mistake. Double-checking one’s work and getting it right the first time is much easier than finding and backing out of a mistake.

Much has been written about the theory of Sudoku, and one question in particular interests me. That question is: Is it ever necessary to guess, or to apply probabilities, in Sudoku? Most sources says no, that Sudoku puzzles can always be solved using only logical deduction. I would like to be convinced that that is true. And so far, though I’m a Sudoku novice, I have found that it is true. That’s excellent, because guessing would very quickly make a mess of things because of the necessity of backing out of a wrong guess — easy to do on a computer, not easy with pencil and paper.

As for reading fiction, knowing that it’s an excellent exercise for the memory is a tremendous bonus. And my focus of late on the novels of Sir Walter Scott is probably as good as it gets, because the novels are long and very dense. Details that seem unimportant in the first part of the novel are discovered to be critically important when Scott finally unwinds everything at the end.

There are many sources online for Sudoku puzzles. I used the OpenSky Sudoku Generator to create a PDF file with a bunch of hard puzzles. You also can generate easy puzzles and “very hard” puzzles. The puzzles are meant to printed out on letter size paper and solved with pencil and paper.

I need one more tool: Colored pencils to help keep order on the worksheet.

Scott-Land

Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. Stuart Kelly, Polygon (Edinburgh), 2010. 328 pages.

First, a disclaimer. I did not read the entire book. By the time I was halfway through, so much of the book seemed only obliquely relevant to the subject of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that I scanned the remainder of the book for the bits that seemed relevant and ignored the rest. Others, I grant, may see this book differently, if they’re interested in such matters as how Diana Gabaldon, Tony Blair, or Dr Who may relate to Walter Scott. I wasn’t particularly interested.

However, I greatly commend the author for writing a book about Walter Scott, given that Scott is hardly ever mentioned anymore, except maybe by travelers who emerge from Waverley Station in Edinburgh and see the enormous Scott memorial for the first time. The author, in fact, seems to assume that the readers of Scott-Land have not read any Scott, since few people read Scott anymore.

It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Walter Scott as a cultural phenomenon is deemed to be worth writing books about. But few people are willing to go out on a limb and make the case that Scott is still worth reading and taking seriously, or that Scott’s books are still worth talking about the way we still talk about Jane Austen or George Eliot, or even Charles Dickens.

This is not an academic book. It’s meant to be entertaining. It’s often flippant and even snarky. Kelly seems to think that if he — or even we — took Walter Scott too seriously, that would be embarrassing, like liking the Pet Shop Boys. Kelly’s connection with Scott isn’t even particularly literary. Kelly grew up in the Borders area of Scotland near Scott’s baronial home at Abbotsford, so Kelly’s connection to Scott has a cultural rather than a literary origin, though Kelly studied English at Oxford. This is purely a guess on my part, but I’d guess that Kelly writes about Scott the same way that one would have to talk about Scott today at Oxford — with a knowing smile or even a touch of smirk.

But I’m probably an odd duck of a reader, because I have read Scott. I also take Scott seriously. A part of my personal view, though, is that we probably wouldn’t want to read Scott today because of an interest in the history of Scotland but rather because of an interest in the history of the English novel, with the bonus that in reading Scott we also get a great deal of the Scots language as well as English. A friend asked whether I’d agree that Scott’s themes are less relevant today than, say, Jane Austen’s or Charles Dickens’. I would agree. I’m certainly not arguing that Scott should be at the top of our reading list in 19th Century novels; only that he should be on it, for dedicated readers, anyway.

The first question one might ask if one is considering reading Scott is, “What should I read?” My suggestion would be — anything but Ivanhoe. Scott is at his best, I think, when he is writing not about his beloved kings and heroes but when he
is writing about ordinary people in ordinary places. I’d suggest The Heart of Mid-Lothian or The Antiquary as a good place to start.

I’m still looking for a recent academic book about Sir Walter Scott. Meanwhile, I very much agree with what the academic says in the short video below, in which she answers a question after a lecture.

Miso broth

One of my winter resolutions is to drink more warm drinks. Miso broth is a good choice.

Miso, of course, is live and fermented, made mostly from soybeans. Miso broth is pretty salty, but no saltier than soup. To get the probiotic benefits of miso, it mustn’t be heated too much. Some sources say less than 140F is OK. I keep it below 120F (49C) just to be sure.

Miso broth cries out for some fresh winter herbs. I’d better get to work on that.

By the way, I got that bowl yesterday at an annual event sponsored by the local arts council. It’s a fundraiser for county food banks. They call it “Soup and a Bowl.” For a $25 donation, you get a handmade bowl and your choice of soup, served outdoors. The event yesterday was so well attended that the available bowls were gone in the first hour, and some of the soups started running out. The bowls, in many different shapes and colors, are all made by local potters. Most of the work that comes from small potteries seems to be in a hippy style that doesn’t really appeal to me. I got there early enough to get a bowl before the bowls (and the chili) ran out. One classic bowl with a cream-colored glaze, the only one with a handle, stood out from the others. Why don’t more soup bowls have handles? The potter lives a few miles north of me.

Mushroom Wellington


Click here for high-resolution version.

Last week, the Washington Post’s food section had a recipe for vegetarian mushroom Wellington. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Today was a cold day, a good day for making puff pastry and for using the oven. So I did it.

As always with recipes, I borrowed the concept and modified it to suit my own taste. Chestnuts didn’t sound nearly as good to me as walnuts. The Post’s recipe calls for bread crumbs in the filling, which I thought was a poor idea because there already are enough carbs in the crust. I made up the difference with peas and carrots. And I seasoned it with a touch of sage and mace rather than the herbs that the Post’s recipe calls for. The Post’s recipe uses large slices of portobello mushrooms, I assume to resemble slices of beef. Instead, I chopped the roasted mushrooms coarsely and mixed them in with the rest of the filling.

The Post’s recipe also calls for store-bought puff pastry. What would be the fun in that, even if I could find it? Adventure in the kitchen means making puff pastry every now and then. I used half butter and half olive oil, which works great. As long as you keep the dough cold and there are some butter bits in it, the pastry will turn out fine.

I’ve written here before about how all forms of pie are magical. I thought a lot about that while I was making mushroom Wellington. Partly, pies are comfort food. Pies are ancient, going back to the Middle Ages and no doubt beyond. And covered pies, or pies enclosed in a crust, have the same kind of appeal as a nicely wrapped present. You get to open it to see what’s inside.

You’ll probably need to make some thin brown gravy to moisten this dish. And you’ll need some ale.

Western Union, now just an elegant ghost

Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845-1893. Joshua D. Wolff. Cambridge University Press, 2013. 306 pages.

There probably are not many people who think about Western Union today, but I do. In many ways, the disruptive creation of Western Union in the middle of the 19th Century resembles the creation of the Internet in our era. The radical improvements in the speed and cost of communication changed everything. Before telegraphy, communication relied on the U.S. Post Office Department. And the 19th Century U.S. Post Office was no slouch. By the time telegraph companies were getting started, the Post Office had shortened the time to move mail between New York and New Orleans from two weeks to five days, even before railroads. The Post Office also was cheap. Telegrams never were.

Telegraphy in America started as a motley and unstable group of unprofitable and technologically unsophisticated small and local companies, using technology invented by Samuel Morse, or variations that evaded Morse’s patents. It was consolidation and monopoly that, whether we approve of monopolies or not, allowed a new company named Western Union to buy up small, unsuccessful, and poorly connected local companies and convert them into a united monopoly network that connected distant parts of the United States. Before long, telegraph cables reached across the Atlantic as well.

This is a book about Western Union as a corporation and business. I wish I could find a book about Western Union’s technology and how it changed over the next one hundred years. I’ve mentioned here recently that my first job was as a newspaper copy boy in 1966, when Western Union very much still existed. Sometimes, reporters who were on the road would file their stories by Western Union telegram, and it was part of my job to walk down the street about five blocks to pick up the telegram from the Western Union office. A bit later, most newspapers had a Telex machine for such purposes. That was a later stage of Western Union technology that allowed companies that could afford it to have their own Telex teleprinter at their office, which did not require a dedicated phone line to operate. Telex was like a dial-up system for delivering telegrams that used the long-distance circuits only when needed. It was the Telex system that, in Western Union’s last years, linked the farflung offices of multinational corporations.

I have many curiosities about how the old telegraph network worked. I know from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, that it could take hours or even a day or two for a telegram to travel between Berlin and Moscow. Though electricity, of course, moves at the speed of light, the old telegram network did not have wires that directly connected every place on earth with every other place on earth. You’d be able to send a telegram from New York to Philadelphia in one hop. But some telegrams had to be forwarded from one city hub to another, with multiple stops before reaching the final destination. The message had to be transcribed and then rekeyed at every stop.

These days, it’s only novels — particularly detective novels and spy novels — that remind us that Western Union ever even existed. Western Union’s history is very closely connected with the railroads, though of course railroads survived in a diminished form and Western Union didn’t survive at all. (Western Union still exists as some sort of vague financial entity.)

If you’ve ever held a fresh telegram in your hand, though, as I have, you can’t help but remember their beautiful typography. The format changed over the years, but there basically were two forms. The first form was a pad on which the customer wrote, by hand, the text of the telegram and checked off some choices about how it was to be sent. The second form was the telegram after it was received at the destination, on a yellow sheet of paper 8 inches by 5.5 inches with the classic and beautiful Western Union logo at the top. The font used for the text “Western Union” is a variation on the Goudy font named Goudy hand-tooled. I’ve included two examples below. The first is a scan of an actual Western Union pad for outgoing messages, bought on eBay. The second is my own reproduction of an incoming telegram as they looked in the 1940s.

The Trump show’s last season, canceled for bad ratings


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Is the Trump nightmare over? I would say no, not quite. There’s more craziness where that came from in the packed clown car of Trump wannabes and QAnon whack jobs. But I would argue that, now that the 2022 midterm election is over, we’ll be watching Trump through the rearview mirror. He’ll keep trying to scare us, and he’ll keep trying to get into the spotlight and pretend that he’s got us right where he wants us. But even Republicans now know that Trump is a loser. For the rest of us, it’s popcorn time. No matter what happens in the next presidential election in 2024, we now have two good years of deliciously crunchy fresh-popped schadenfreude to look forward to, watching Trump whimper and whine as he is financially ruined, exposed as weak, exposed as a loser, indicted for serious crimes, and put on trial for charges that may well include espionage. As his business crimes and tax returns come to light, we’ll find out who owns him — Russians and some nasty oil people in the Middle East would be a good guess.

If Republicans take the House, then we’ll have to listen to a series of barking-mad “hearings” featuring the likes of Jim Jordan. Even if those hearings become the three-ring circus that Maga Republicans want, the circus will succeed at confusing only the sort of people who watch Fox News. We mustn’t forget that that’s barely four million people at primetime. The craziness that we can expect from a post-Trump Maga House probably would do Republicans more harm than good, because most Americans now know what Trump is. A Republican House would keep reminding decent Americans why they hate Trump. It’s also possible that “establishment” Republicans and even Fox News will try to move on, to something that actually has a chance of working in 2024.

This morning, two days after the election, it’s amazing to me how quickly the media, as foolish and fickle as always, pivoted from pumping the Republican “red wave” to heaping humiliation on Republicans because the red wave didn’t happen — puff them up, then kick them when they’re down. We should always keep in mind that the last thing the media want is competent and therefore boring government. The media, like the Republican Party, now need something new. What will it be?

What are HBO, Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime video, etc., for after all. That’s where our entertainment should come from, not from Washington, or Mar-a-Lago, or sadistic right-wing circus tricks in places like Florida, Texas, or Arizona. One way of interpreting this election, I think, is that Americans are very tired of the circus. The Trump show has had a run of five or six seasons, same plot, same crappy characters. I’d bet a dollar, plus an 8.2 cent adjustment for inflation, that at this very moment, the grandees of the Republican Party and the media’s best creative geniuses are in meetings behind closed mahogany doors trying to come up with two new blockbuster seasons of — something, something new — to preserve their profits through 2024.

Meanwhile the White House is safe, the courts are still in working order, there’s toilet paper on the shelves, and Republican dreams of everlasting domination just took a big hit. President Biden will continue to focus on things that actually matter. Wouldn’t it be nice if the media would, too. In any case, we don’t have to be afraid of Donald Trump anymore. In the season finale, Trump will go to prison. Then he’ll be history, over in the trash heap section.

Update:

The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, heaped scorn on Trump in today’s edition with a “Trumpty Dumpty” cover.

Another Murdoch property, the Wall Street Journal, called Trump “The Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”