On the 21st-Century Relevance of King Croesus

 

Curmie had an essay started, linking the bellicosity of Dear Leader and the Secretary of Drunkenness Dominionism War to Mark Twain’s brilliant short story, “The War Prayer.”  But he got bogged down in questions of whether to include a note of personal history, and didn’t get it written before a Facebook friend posted this piece by Renée Loth that appeared in the Boston Globe last week. 

Loth says pretty much what Curmie would have said.  There is one omission, however, namely the last line of Twain’s story: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”  That’s what really makes the point: not that “war is hell,” but that those who point out the inevitable effects of warfare are, well, “deranged” seems to be the favored adjective of the right, but “lunatic” will do.  

The foregoing is not to suggest that there is no such thing as a “just war,” but merely to argue that what is happening in Iran doesn’t come close to that standard.  Yet, although even as MAGAs are turning away from supporting the (probably) illegal campaign against Iran, especially since the ludicrous attacks on the Pope, there remain some once-sentient conservatives who seem quite satisfied with a few more tens of billions of dollars spent on creating more dead civilians.  This point is worth a paragraph but not a full post, however, so…

On to a different blast from the past.  It’s about that charming rascal you see portrayed above.  The image is from an amphora painting dating from the early 5th century BCE.  The subject is the Lydian king Croesus, who ruled, according to Herodotus, for 14 years in the middle of the previous century.  Today, Croesus is known primarily for two things: his fabulous wealth and his misinterpretation of a message from the Oracle at Delphi.  There’s more, of course—there’s a good summary here—but these are the two things that have found their way into what’s been called “cultural literacy.”  And it doesn’t matter, in those terms, whether the events described by Herodotus (known as both the “father of history” and the “father of lies”) actually happened: knowing nothing about Zeus or Sherlock Holmes is as problematic as ignorance of Confucius or Eliot Ness.

Curmie hasn’t heard the phrase “as rich as Croesus” in years, but it apparently is still in use.  Croesus’s wealth was indeed legendary throughout the ancient world.  Lydia conquered Phrygia, whose rivers had substantial deposits of gold.  (Is it a coincidence that Midas was a Phrygian king?)  And, in a variation on what happens today, the ultra-rich are in a position to easily increase their prosperity.  Two and a half millennia ago, that meant the ability to enlist the most skilled and well-equipped army.  Today, it’s more the ability to hire the best lawyers and accountants, and perhaps to bribe the occasional cop or judge.  Controlling the largest media outlets is also useful, of course.

But, like his modern-day equivalents, Croesus had two significant failings with respect to his wealth.  First, he was inordinately proud of it, to the point of angering the gods.  Stated otherwise, he was hubristic.  Secondly, he utterly failed to understand that happiness is not solely, or even primarily, a function of one’s financial resources and the lifestyle they afford.  He demonstrates this in conversation with the great Athenian law-giver, Solon, who declares, essentially, that a life well lived gives greater happiness than material possessions ever could, and that such things can only be measured at the end of a life.  Croesus was furious and said Solon was stupid.

(Note to Curmie’s former theatre history students: yes, this is the same Solon who famously told Thespis that “if we allow ourselves to praise and honor make-believe like this, the next thing will be to find it creeping into our serious business.”  Curmie always gave him a Good Ol’ Boy accent, including pronouncing “business” as “bidniz.”)

So… we have leader of a country who used his position to acquire even more personal wealth.  He’s obsessed with gold, and seems to equate prosperity with both happiness and virtue.  He got angry when people didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear.  Does that sound like anyone who might have been in the news more recently, Gentle Reader?

But wait!  That’s not all!

Most people don’t know how Croesus became rich, only that he was rich.  His colossal misreading of the Delphic Oracle is better known.  Croesus was contemplating attacking Persia, but sent to Delphi to assess in advance his chances for success.  The response: if Croesus should send an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire.  Croesus took this as prophesying victory and moved forward with the military expedition.  The Persians under the legendary King Cyrus, were ready.  The kicked the Lydians asses, in part by employing a weapon Croesus and his troops didn’t anticipate: camels.  Yes, camels.  They scared the Lydian horses; if your army relies on its cavalry and your horses don’t cooperate, things aren’t likely to go your way. 

The Oracle got it right, of course.  A great empire was indeed destroyed: Croesus’s.  Supposedly, he sent the ancient equivalent of a sternly worded letter to the Oracle.  Her response, loosely translated, was “Dude.  Did a great empire fall?  Yes.  Do I have a reputation for being cryptic?  Yes.  Don’t blame me if you can’t keep up.”

Curmie was reminded of Croesus when today’s version of a rich, arrogant head of state (certainly a king-wannabe if not an actual monarch) decided to attack Persia (it’s called Iran, now).  He even provided his own prophecy, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”  Yes, that was no doubt posturing, and perhaps was intended as some sort of bargaining chip.  But that’s not what the world heard.  Dear Leader had already destroyed much of what made the US great (if you’ll pardon the expression, Dear Reader): he ignored promises, subverted due process, threatened allies, openly manipulated the stock market, turned the military against innocent citizens… well, the full list would take too long to enumerate.

But prior to that unhinged Truth Social post on April 7, there was the possibility of turning back.  America had already lost its status as the world leader, as a trustworthy ally, as a dominant positive force in world affairs.  But we remained a player, even if no longer the player.  That post, though, in its malevolent braggadocio, became something of a tipping point.  It would be a stretch to say that American civilization was destroyed on that day, but it became more imperiled than at any point since World War II (at least).  Can we find our way back?  Yes, but it will take time—probably decades—to undo the disastrous results of allowing a demented, mean-spirited, narcissist to speak for us all.

There are differences between Dear Leader and Croesus, of course.  The latter, though arrogant and infatuated by riches, was sane and even intelligent.  Not anticipating Persian camels in warfare pales in comparison to not preparing for the literal inevitability of Iranian drone attacks.  And in what seemed to be the last moments of his life, as he was about to be burned alive, Croesus realized the errors of his ways.  He was not only forgiven by Cyrus; he became a trusted advisor.  The chances that Dear Leader will ever admit to his own fallibility are about the same as Venezuela’s dominating the next Winter Olympics. 

Hey, it could happen…

Conservatives, Conservation, and Curmie's Dad

Today, April 22, is Earth Day.  You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, or rather the lack thereof, but here we are on the 56th anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Here’s a memory Curmie put on his Facebook page in 2017, describing a personal experience from 1970:

Curmie's father was a rock-ribbed Republican, an environmentalist, a scientist (PhD in Botany, taught everything from microbiology to genetics), and—on the first Earth Day—a college president. Curmie was in 9th grade, and somehow ended up talking to a group of college students who couldn't understand how anyone could be all those things at once. Today, Curmie couldn't, either. Today's GOP has become the party of anti-intellectualism not merely with respect to the arts and humanities but especially (especially!) towards science. That's what decades of pandering to the lunatic branch of pseudo-Christianity has wrought.

That was certainly true nine years ago, and even more so today.  Dad might have been more amenable than Curmie to some of the priorities of the current administration, but not only would he have railed against the outright corruption of the Exalted Poobahs of Trumpistan, he’d have had a lot to say about the areas he knew far better than the average American.

He graduated with honors with a biology major from Dartmouth, and then earned a Master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire.  Early on in World War II, he enlisted in the Army.  He was a volunteer, although of course he would have been drafted, anyway.  His unit was scheduled to head to the South Pacific.  Then, some idiot Lieutenant decided that loading that massive anti-aircraft gun onto a truck didn’t really need six men; it could be done with four.  Dad screwed up his back badly enough that he received a medical discharge.

That meant he was free to pursue his doctorate at Washington State.  One of the ways he supported himself and his young bride (Curmie’s Mom) was by teaching a course called Aviation Medicine to pilots and other flight personnel heading off to service with the Army Air Force or the Navy.  The course dealt with the effects of altitude, weather, g-forces, and the like.  Years later, he taught upper-level college courses in human anatomy and physiology.  He also worked closely with a local doctor, testing the effectiveness of specific drugs against individual patients’ cough plates.  So whereas he wasn’t an MD, he was pretty close.  Curmie was going to say he was light years more qualified to discuss matters of health than Baby Bobby is, but even suggesting a comparison would be demeaning to Dad.  A fly-swatter is more qualified than that idiot.

Dad was also very much an outdoorsman and an environmentalist.  He became an expert at grafting, an important skill in areas with a lot of fruit trees.  He led trips to the college camps (one in the Catskills, the other in the Adirondacks) of two different colleges.  He raised evergreens as part of a program initiated by the Interior Department.  He could handle an axe better than anyone else I’ve ever known, even after smashing up his shoulder in a skiing accident.  When he was still teaching and therefore had summers free, he’d cut much of the hay in the field with a hand scythe instead of a tractor just so he could be outside in the fresh air getting exercise.  Curmie got pretty good at identifying trees by their leaves; his Dad could do so by their bark.

Curmie could go on, but he suspects you get the point, Dear Reader.  The man was a scientist, and he had great regard for those who were researchers in any of those areas.  He certainly supported me in my career choices, but I think the fact that I always did well in the math and science courses I did take gave him a certain amount of pride.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t do science, or even that I didn’t like it.  I was just better at something else, and happier doing that other thing.  If my Dad was disappointed that I didn’t follow in his footsteps, he never showed it.  I’m forever grateful for that.

So, would Curmie’s Dad have approved of cuts to the CDC or NOAA or cancer research?  Of course not.  But what would really make his blood boil would be the evisceration of the National Park Service, and above all the recent overturning of the mining ban near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, all to benefit a Chilean (!) mining operation.  Only two GOP Senators voted against that bill, and one of them was Susan Collins, who occasionally pretends not be just another partisan hack, provided, of course, that her vote against the party line doesn’t actually affect the outcome.  Her feigned independence is almost worse than the garden-variety sycophants that make up the majority of the Republican Congresscritter alliance.

Once upon a time, back in the Dark Ages of the 1970s, the etymological link between conservative and conservationist wasn’t ironic.  Now, of course, it is.  Curmie’s Dad was both of those things.  He died in 1999.  Any pretense that the GOP cared about anyone but their campaign donors died about then, too.

Small-Town Cop vs. 1st Amendment. (Sigh.)

Last October 18, at a No Kings protest in Fairhope, Alabama, sexagenarian grandmother Renae Gamble was arrested for wearing the outfit you see here.  In case you can’t see the image (Blogspot has been a little weird lately), she’s wearing an inflatable penis costume she bought at the local Hallowe’en supply store (it was late October, remember) and carrying a sign reading “No Dick Tator.”  That’s only mildly clever and a little vulgar even for Curmie’s taste, but it is unquestionably protected by the 1st Amendment, the same way those “Fuck Joe Biden” chants and signs were a couple years ago. 

Not according to police corporal Andrew Babb, who declared the costume “abusive” (!) and an affront to a “family town.”  The video from Babb’s body cam makes a couple of things clear.  One is that yes, there is an illegal act shown, but it isn’t anything Gamble does.  She clearly asks “Am I being detained?  If not…”  It’s a little difficult to make out the last part, as she’s turned around and is walking away, but the transcript on the YouTube page says “I’m going to go ahead and leave,” and that seems pretty accurate.  Importantly, she wouldn’t be asking if she’s being detained if he’s made it clear that she is.  And it’s not like she’s going to outrun him.  All he has to do is either say “yes” (instead of continuing to yell at her) or simply step around in front of her.  Instead, he tackles her.  That’s assault.

Shortly thereafter, Babb says that “I told her to take it off.”  That demand never appears on the video.  Perhaps he did so before starting the recording, but the simplest and indeed most probable explanation is that he’s lying about that part.  Then, of course, she has to be taken into custody.  And all of a sudden that unconscionably objectionable costume—the one Babb said he insisted Gamble take off—needs to remain on… resulting in a scene that would have fit readily into a bit starring Buster Keaton, Benny Hill, or perhaps Lucille Ball, as the cops try to maneuver Gamble into the squad car while she’s roughly seven feet tall with a waistline of 70 inches or so. 

It was hilarious… except for the whole “this actually happened” part.  Finally, they manage to remove the costume.  Noteworthy here is that she couldn’t take it off by herself, and no one else is under any obligation to help.  (Her fellow protesters would have, of course, at the end of the events, but not at the behest of some self-important cop.)

Somewhere along the line, Babb asks for her name; she replies, “Aunt Tifa.”  He then proceeds to call her that.  Is he really so stupid that he doesn’t know she was being a wise-ass, or did he just pretend so she could later be charged with giving a false name to law enforcement?  Curmie doubts that Babb is smart enough to have adopted the latter strategy, but it’s a possibility.  Gamble was later charged with that particular offense, by the way.

Anyway, after a couple of delays, one of them because a Christian College Fair was booked into the building on the original trial date (Curmie fancies himself reasonably creative, but he couldn’t make this shit up), Gamble will be headed to trial next week, charged also with disorderly conduct (what?) and resisting arrest, which the video shows never happened. 

There is literally no evidence that Gamble committed any crime, but the reactionary and pearl-clutching mayor, city attorney, and city council president seem stuck in the Victorian age, so Curmie isn’t going to try to predict what judge Haymes Snedeker is going to do with this case.  Of course, Mayor Sherry Sullivan went all-in on the straw man arguments, proclaiming that “Protests should remain peaceful and free of profanity and obscene displays.”  There can, of course, be no suggestion that anything Gamble did was anything but peaceful.  Profanity and obscenity, of course, are more in the eye of the beholder, or in the squishier realm of “community standards,” but Curmie notes the perceptive comment of Heidi Veyance on the Fairhope Police Department’s Facebook post about the incident: “Can we assume that all reports of sightings of ‘truck nutz’ will be treated with an equal amount of seriousness & dealt the same punishment?”  Touché.

The video linked about, from the Intercept YouTube page, is the one that has the more complete transcript.  But Curmie let his inner 12-year-old out for a stroll, and from that perspective, the better comments are on the PoliceActivity page: she was “Only charged with a “misdewiener”; “They couldn't get it to stand up in court”; “Her lawyer is gonna take her case pro bone-o”; “This definitely falls under some type of penal code” which “carries a stiff sentence”; that she’s likely to be acquitted by a “hung jury”…  Oh, and a direct quotation from Babb: “It’s illegal to come in the street.”  Another site suggests that “the three policemen must have been scared stiff.”  You get the idea, Gentle Reader.

So, summing up: The chances that a cop is a self-righteous idiot are already pretty high.  Make him a small-town cop, and the odds increase.  A small-town cop in the south?  We’re perilously close to ontological certitude, and Corporal Babb is pretty clearly not an exception.  Unfortunately, his apparent unfamiliarity with the Constitution isn’t the only criticism that can be lodged against him.  He’s also… well… let’s just say that Curmie agrees with the commenter who suggested that Gamble’s real crime was impersonating a police officer.

Trump Actually Has Some Interesting Ideas... Except...

Curmie was scrolling through the “Memories” function on Facebook earlier this week and came across a post from last year, discussing (OK, bragging about) having a very accurate bracket for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  What’s relevant, however, is the end of that post: “Interestingly, I watched far fewer games than usual. Mercenaries don't interest me as much as students do.”

It’s certainly true that the game is fundamentally different now than it was even a few years ago.  All five starters on this year’s champion Michigan Wolverines were transfers.  Two starters for Curmie’s beloved Kansas Jayhawks were playing for their fourth different college team.  As of this writing, still early in the transfer window, only three players from the dozen Jayhawks players who logged the most minutes this season have not either lost eligibility or entered the transfer portal.  One of them is a certain lottery pick in the NBA draft, so he won’t be back.  The other two totaled a little under 400 minutes in the 2025-26 season between them; seven individual players had over 600.  [EDIT: now one of those two has also entered the portal.]  At least three of the five players in the portal are almost certainly gone.  It’s certainly time to stop pretending that there’s anything “amateur” about any of this.

The first and most obvious of the things that have changed of late is that now it’s all (as opposed to just “mostly”) about money.  Fans can complain all they want how players now care more about the name on the back of the jersey than the name on the front, but if you’re a 20-year-old kid, especially one from a poor family, who gets offered hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars more to play for Spider Breath Ag & Tech than you were getting at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople… aren’t you going to take the money and run?  After all, you know you’re one serious ACL injury away from never making any money as a player, and chances are you weren’t in college to get an education in the first place.

The system certainly privileges teams with lots of money, generally in the form of boosters.  This was already true to some degree—there aren’t a lot of universities that can offer luxury accommodations for athletes or spend several million dollars a year for a head coach—but the brave new world is far worse.  You could hire a half dozen full professors for what some universities are paying for a single good but not even Honorable Mention All-League basketball player.  (This is where you, Gentle Reader, say “and football is even worse,” and Curmie glances skyward and nods ruefully.)

Finally, the development of players is no longer a priority.  Back in the dark ages (the 2010s), teams would recruit a player, help him get better, and reap the rewards in his junior and senior years.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  There are exceptions—Purdue’s Braden Smith became the NCAA’s all-time assist leader this season in large part by also setting the record for most games played in a Boilermaker uniform—but most of the top players will transfer elsewhere or enter the NBA draft.  Getting a player up to the level where he can really help a good team be better is now simply allowing other teams to offer a little more money, or immediate playing time, or whatever.

NIL and the portal may be a considerable short-term benefit to players, but they’re not good for the game, and they’re awful for fans.  At least in the sports leagues that admit to being professional—the NBA, NFL, etc.—players sign long-term contracts, so they’ll stay with the team for a few years; some even insist on no-trade contracts.  The NCAA allows unlimited free agency every year.  It’s insane.

Curmie, of course, is not the only one to notice all this.  Many, if not most, fans agree that the status quo is absurd.  One such person is a guy named Donald J. Trump, and he’s in a position to do something about it.  Or he thinks he, at least.  Curmie acknowledges that Trump’s Executive Order on championship weekend was a). timed to get maximum exposure and b). an opportunity to distract from any story that includes the words “Epstein,” “Iran,” or “inflation.”  Curmie further stipulates that the EO will certainly be challenged in court; even Jack Marshall, who has defended some pretty outrageous activity by Dear Leader, says this one is “flat-out unconstitutional.”

Still, to quote The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo and Justin Williams, “multiple sources who have contributed to the document told The Athletic before the order was released that its goal was to spur legislative action,” presumably rather than going into effect per se. There is at least one bill, the so-called SCORE Act (that’s the cutesy acronym for the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act… somebody spent weeks coming up with that title, no doubt) which does some of the things the administration wants, but it’s not assured of passing the House and apparently stands no chance in the Senate.

The major problem, of course, is that the NCAA can’t really function without some level of antitrust exemption, but, to be frank, the NCAA can’t be trusted to operate in the best interests of anyone but, well, the NCAA: not the athletes, not the universities, not the sports, and certainly not the fans. 

OK, but let’s look at what the EO says.  The introduction includes the following argument, about which there is little dispute:

The convergence of enormous pressure to win in football and basketball and the loosening, both by litigation and by State legislation, of consistent rules or limits concerning eligibility, transfers, and pay-for-play schemes has created an out-of-control financial arms race in these sports that is driving universities into debt, threatening to siphon resources from other sports, and damaging student-athletes’ educational and graduation opportunities.  The athletics-related financial threats these crucial universities face are substantial: Already, one major athletic program closed fiscal year 2025 with $535 million in athletics-related debt, and another has $437 million in such debt, while others face enormous annual athletics-related deficits.  These financial perils will inevitably siphon funds from universities’ educational and research purposes, which could impact their capabilities and responsibilities as Federal contractors and grantees.  

It’s worth noting in this regard that only a handful of universities were actually making money from their athletics programs even prior to the surge in NIL spending.  Yes, they make pots of money from TV contracts and the like, but the costs are enormous: salaries for coaches, trainers, and other staff; facilities, including absurdly lavish living facilities for athletes; travel—not just to games, but to bring prospects to campus and to send coaches to scout high school players; training meals; the list goes on and on.  And whereas it’s true that athletics programs often generate donations, more often than not such largesse is bestowed only on athletics: the wealthy alum who might otherwise have funded much-needed renovations to the library or the chemistry lab decides to buy a fancy new scoreboard for the basketball court instead.

Revenons à nos moutons…  The highlights of the Executive Order are as follows:

    Outlawing payments to athletes above “fair market value” for “goods and services” provided by the athlete.  If Curmie is reading this correctly, it means that a fat-cat booster can’t pay a star player $5 million for doing a radio ad.  The intention is great, but this is almost impossible to enforce without putting a dollar limit on NIL, and that’s problematic both ethically and, one suspects, constitutionally.

    Age-based eligibility limits.  It’s difficult to determine the rationale here.  Preventing young girls from entering college early to help the gymnastics team?  Preventing more physically mature players in their mid-20s from playing sports where bulk matters?  (There were a half dozen college football players aged 25 or older last year; Kansas hoopster Gee Ngala was 26, and was, if Curmie remembers correctly, the second-oldest player this season.)

    “Participation in college athletics is permitted for no more than a five-year period, with limited exceptions for military service, missionary service, and other periods of absence from participation that are in the public interest.”  What’s noteworthy here is that whereas voluntary missionary service qualifies for an exemption, injury doesn’t.  This is especially significant in light of the ruling by a state court judge that Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss should be granted an extra year of eligibility because the NCAA improperly denied his petition for a medical redshirt.  (Guess where that judge’s law degree is from… oh, and he got his law degree before septuagenarian Curmie graduated from high school.)

    “Professional athletes cannot return to college athletics.”  A couple of questions here.  First, what’s meant by “professional”?  There are a number of foreign-born basketball players who played professionally in their homelands.  Baylor’s James Nnagi not only played professionally in Europe, he was drafted by the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and played for their summer league team.  The second question is whether the key word here is “return.”  (Curmie’s mind wanders to the ancient Greek word ἀποδίδωμι, which sometimes but not always means “return.”  He won’t bore you with the relevance to theatre history, Gentle Reader.)  Nnagi didn’t return to college because he’d never been there, and he never signed a NBA contract per se.  Oh, and guess what… he’s now in the transfer portal. 

    Allowing only one transfer within that five-year window per athlete with immediate eligibility, with a second available if the athlete earns a four-year degree.  This is a reasonable restriction if it applies only to future transfers, and players who have already transferred more than once retain their eligibility.  Ex post facto, and all that…

    “A national student-athlete agent registry and reasonable protections for student-athletes from excessive  agent commissions.”  A little creepily Big Brother-ish, but perhaps sufficiently warranted so as not as to be bad as Curmie fears.

    And a bunch of logistical stuff.

On the whole, not a bad set of proposals.  A place to start, at least.  If only it were… you know… legal, and stuff.

Thoughts on Polling Data

The latest figures from RealClear Polling suggest, unsurprisingly, that President Trump is underwater on literally every issue.  Obviously, these numbers are continuously in flux, so you’ll have to trust Curmie that these were the figures when he was writing this piece.  (Statistics are accurate as of the early evening of April 4, he promises.)  Overall, he’s at -16.  On the issues: -23 on the economy; -17.1 on foreign policy; -8.7 on immigration; -31 on inflation; -4.2 on crime; -15.7 on Iran; -18.6 on Russia/Ukraine; and -5.9 on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

RealClear Polling draws its numbers from a host of different polls, then averages them.  Curmie is skeptical of polls in general, so these numbers may or may not mean literally anything.  Moreover, some of the poll results are now months old.  This can, of course, lead to a wide divergence in results.  There’s a difference of 59 points (!) between the Marquette (+34) and Gallup (-25) polls on Israel/Palestine, for example (that Marquette number is literally 30 points higher than any other poll on the same topic).  Also, both those surveys were taken over four months ago, so they don’t necessarily reflect anyone’s current thinking.  Among polls taken in the last two months, Trump fares best (+4) in Morning Consult on immigration and worst (-45) in Reuters/Ipsos on inflation; both those polls were taken in late March.

Another factor in all this is that it’s difficult to come to a consensus on the taxonomies themselves.  Take tariffs, for instance.  Are they foreign policy, or the economy, or more specifically inflation, since that’s the way most of us experience their effects?   What Curmie wants to concentrate on today, Gentle Reader, is not the overall numbers (Trump is a terrible President.  Duh.), but the responses to specific issues relative to each other.

It will come as no surprise that Curmie would be in the “disapprove” category both overall and on most issues.  He’d have to choose between negativity and neutrality on crime, perhaps.  Otherwise, it’s disapproval straight down the line.  More to the point here, the other issue that concerns him the least is inflation, which certainly is a cause for concern, but, except in terms of the contrast between campaign promises and reality, isn’t awful.  Yes, it will get worse unless someone considerably smarter than Trump—the average platypus, for example—finds a way out of the diversion war excursion in Iran, but we’re not there yet, at least officially. 

Curmie does understand why other people prioritize inflation as a negative, however: they see it first-hand.  We all do.  One of Curmie’s more GOP-leaning friends recently described food prices as “skyrocketing,” which is an accurate description for some but not all groceries.  By contrast, the fact that all the major stock market indices are down for the calendar year and we’re currently in a “correction” (down 10% from the previous high) doesn’t hit home unless you’re directly affected. 

Curmie’s retirement nest egg dropped almost 5% (not even counting the loss of buying power caused by inflation) just in March, but if you don’t have investments or you’re young enough that retirement funds aren’t an immediate concern, then it’s the fact that gasoline is a dollar or more a gallon more expensive than it was even a month ago, or that Netflix just raised their rates (again) that catches your attention. 

Plus, those price hikes are happening now, not a few months ago.  So we’re all attuned to those increases: they affect us all, and they’re on our minds right now.  The relationship between reduced buying power and the conflict with Iran is clear, but it’s more complex, and unless we have someone we care about who’s going to be shipped out, we’re (relatively speaking) unaffected in the short term, or at least we think we are.  So what’s happening in Iran isn’t as important to the average American now as, Curmie fears, it will be.

Those Israel/Palestine numbers are intriguing, too.  Perhaps it’s worth noting that whereas the page and the URL both reference “Palestine,” the link to the page says “Hamas,” instead.  That’s kind of a tell, don’t you think, Gentle Reader?  The survey results are going to depend a lot on how the questions are asked.  Ask Curmie whether he supports Israel against Hamas, and the answer will be unequivocally affirmative.  But if the “other side” becomes the Palestinian people, then Curmie’s response will change—maybe not 180˚, but certainly more than 90, enough to not be on Israel’s side, in other words. 

So Trump’s unconditional support for all things Israeli (or simply anti-Muslim) becomes more problematic.  Still, at least until relatively recently, that assistance was manifested primarily in financial and rhetorical terms; how many respondents will have changed their minds (in either direction) when military action started happening (not in Palestine, but you know what I mean, Gentle Reader) is difficult to determine.

Trump’s strongest area in the polls is crime, and the fact is that there’s little either positive or negative that comes to mind immediately.  Folks generally don’t have a lot of time to think about their responses to survey questions.  Given time to consider the boatload of pardons to drug lords, sex offenders, and those who actually attacked cops on January 6, Curmie has got to go with a negative rating, although still not as vehemently so as in other areas.

The topic Curmie finds most intriguing is the war between Russia and Ukraine.  Once again, the data is a little old, with only the Big Data Poll (-20) conducted in the last month, but the results have stayed pretty consistent over time: approval rates range between 34 and 41, disapprovals between 51 and 59.  What’s interesting here is that this is an “oh, yeah” topic.  That is, it’s no longer at or even near the top of many people’s lists of the most important issues.  When reminded, though, the majority of people responded with a version of “yeah, he fucked that up, too.”  Note, too, that the disapprovals are always not merely a plurality, but a majority.

Somewhat surprising but hardly shocking is another simple fact: while the American people don’t like Trump’s performance by a margin of 56.9-40.9, and the generic congressional vote favors the Democrats by 47.6-41.6, opinions on the Democratic Party are unfavorable by 20 points (55.6-35.6): worse than the GOP’s -15.4, and worse still than Trump’s favorable/unfavorable rating (not the same as his job approval, listed above) of -13.4.  Democratic smugness is explicitly contra-indicated.

Curmie dislikes the Democrats, too, although he’ll still probably vote for them for the same reason he’s voted for them more often than not in recent years: they’re not Republicans, and they’re especially Not Trump.  There comes a point when being Not Trump will no longer be sufficient.  Unfortunately, Dear Leader is so aggressively narcissistic, belligerent, and downright stupid (or treasonous; that might be an option, too), that virtually anything the likes of Newsom, Pritzker, AOC, et al. do will inevitably be seen as reactive. 

Curmie has read all the doomsday scenaria about stock market crashes, runaway inflation, international food shortages, etc., which are projected to happen before the end of the calendar year.  He’s not buying that rhetoric—not yet, at least.  But the only hope we have to avoid a collapse of epic proportions is that enough Republican Congresscritters will exercise a little concern for the nation and indeed the world instead of for their own standing with Dear Leader.  Replacing Mike Johnson with someone with both a brain and a backbone would be an excellent place to start.

That could happen.  So could the Rapture.  (Hey, it’s Easter.  Gotta be thinking about all the possibilities.)

On the Disappearance of "Issa"

Thomas Massie
Because no one should have to look at
Stephen Miller

This piece is a little different, because what Curmie had literally already written and was about to post turned out to be… redundant? outdated? Something.  Issa’s Facebook page disappeared before Curmie could get his essay up online.  Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is unclear, but it is certainly a thing.  

So here’s what’s going to happen here: what Curmie originally wrote is indented below; the only changes are the removal of links that no longer work.  (Links to sources other than Issa’s FB page still work, and are included.)  New commentary appears with regular margins.  The photo and its cutline were about to be added, but hadn’t yet been attached; we’ll pretend they had been, though.

One of Curmie’s Facebook friends posted this link from the Issa FB page, describing Rep. Thomas Massie’s questioning of the despicable Stephen Miller.  It describes Massie’s demand to know what happened to $1.4 billion, supposedly spent on building a 230-mile stretch of border wall that (wait for it) doesn’t actually exist.  There’s a link to a video describing a huge conspiracy: everyone from companies contracted to provide the special concrete used for the wall to supervisors who signed for shipments that never happened or the confirmed the completion of construction that was never even started is implicated.  So is Miller himself, at least for incompetence if not for grift.  And when Massie pressed Miller, the response was 143 seconds of silence.  143 seconds!  A record!

Except.

There was something  little hinky (to use Curmie’s mom’s term) about that story.  For one thing, it was already three or four days old when Curmie saw it.  Curmie won’t claim to be absolutely au courant with everything happening in the world, but it did seem odd that he hadn’t seen anything about a story this big within the first day or two.  He suspected something was amiss, so he fired up the Google machine to see what other sources had said.  Trouble was, they hadn’t.  Not CNN.  Not NBC, or PBS, or NPR, or ABC.  Not the Washington Post or The Guardian, or even the North Platte Weekly Pennysaver.  No one, other than a couple of places that essentially cited the story Curmie had already seen.  Not looking good in the authenticity department.

There’s also a link in that takes you to a site at with a URL that includes the sequence “jervisfamily.com.”  Now, that’s a reliable news outlet!  Note: this blog isn’t a news source, either.  It’s an opinion/analysis site, but at least it links to news sites, and doesn’t pretend to objectivity.

Somewhere along the line, Curmie also came across a “video” of those alleged events.  Curiously, we never hear Congressman Massie or Mr. Miller, only a narrator.  (The version Curmie first encountered has a female narrator but he can’t seem to re-trace his steps to find it now; here’s a variation on the theme with a male narrator.)  More significantly, we never see Miller when he’s not talking.  Maybe Curmie is relying too much on his theatre background here, but it would seem to him that if what you’re touting is silence, maybe we ought to see that moment, huh?

But wait!  That’s not all!  (Please insert he usual apologies for the late-night infomercial reference here, Gentle Reader.)  This story has a few cousins out there.  There’s the one about an $890 million wire transfer through the Caymans; this one was shot down by Scopes two days later. One presumes they’ll do the same with a bunch of others when they have the time.  Oh, and you thought that 143 seconds of silence were significant?  Well, in other Things That Never Happened, Representative Jared Moskowitz got Miller to shut up for 167 seconds about $2.7 billion in missing disaster relief money, and Representative Jasmine Crockett achieved 271 seconds (!) of silence in questioning about 9.8 million missing people. 

It’s a freaking auction out there, Gentle Reader!  And it’s not just the silences that keep getting bigger.  Now there’s a $6.2 billion wire transfer, ferreted out by Representative Ted Lieu.

There were links to those other hallucinatory stories, of course.  Curmie chooses that adjective intentionally, as it has come to be the standard term for “Shit AI Made Up,” and the chances that at least a good deal of this crap is AI-generated approach ontological certitude.

At first glance, these bogus stories (and there are plenty others, featuring different Congresscritters and different minions of the Trump Regime) seem plausible.  Stephen Miller is probably the closest this country has seen to Evil Incarnate in a very long time.  (He’s scarier than Dear Leader, who is obviously mentally incompetent.)  That he would be involved in something illegal as well as morally indefensible isn’t much of a stretch.  Moscowitz, Crockett, and Lieu are among the most aggressive Democratic Congresscritters; Massie is as close to an independent thinker as the GOP can muster.  So we can understand why even an intelligent person like Curmie’s friend could be fooled at first.

But the key words are “at first.”  Even a cursory analysis reveals the flaws in these “stories.”  But confirmation bias is a real and powerful force.  We’re tempted to believe anything negative about Miller (or Hegseth or Vance or Patel…) because they’re corrupt assholes.  Thing is, though, we don’t need to make stuff up; the reality is bad enough.  Moreover, this kind of crap hurts “our side” considerably more than it helps.  It provides whataboutism ammunition for the MAGA world when we point out one of the manifold prevarications emanating from Trumpistan.  More importantly, it’s dishonest, and we shouldn’t be trafficking in that shit.  We just shouldn’t.

A dozen or so years ago, the Curmie Award went to the person deemed by Curmie’s readership to be the educator who most embarrasses the profession.  (Curmie would supply a list of nominees and readers who vote for their… erm… favorites.)  That award wasn’t created because Curmie, a professor, hates educators or education.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  He just doesn’t want to be associated with teachers or administrators who abuse students, punish them for being heroic, etc.  Similarly, he wants nothing to do with liars who happen to agree with him on some political matters.

Issa—whoever he, she, or they may be—needs to disappear.  So does Stephen Miller, but for different reasons.

Issa did, apparently, disappear.  Or was disappeared, which would be a different phenomenon.  Unlike Issa, Curmie doesn’t want to present as fact that which is even speculative, let alone demonstrably false, so he’ll just suggest that there is a reasonable likelihood that Zuck’s minions, rather than Issa, took down those posts.  If so, we’re in a more complex ethical landscape.

Obviously, there should be no censorship of opinions, even—or perhaps especially—of those that run counter to Conventional Wisdom.  Most of us think that guy Galileo may have been onto something, for example.  And we can object to the obvious double standards employed by, say, Elon Musk in forbidding certain words and not others that are more problematic; nor can we be certain that there isn’t a little selective enforcement afoot here.  Still, even the question of allowing or disallowing something that’s clearly objectively false may not be an easy call.

Even those posts can be divided into two categories, for example.  Curmie has another FB friend, actually the spouse of a friend, who posts “human interest” stories regularly.  Some of them are plausible; others are puff pieces that show some celebrity as a covert humanitarian, and are almost certainly, well, hallucinatory.  Other than increasing the reader’s susceptibility to diabetes, however, these posts are harmless.  Curmie wishes they’d disappear, but it’s clear that there was no ill will involved, just perhaps an insufficiency of skepticism.

Issa’s posts were different.  They were malicious, intended to defame individuals, and frankly it doesn’t matter whether the victim of these false allegations was a good person or an abhorrent jackass.  Curmie remembers the one time he served on a jury: it was clear the defendant was what his grandmother would call a “wrong ‘un,” but was he guilty of this particular crime?  As a host of previous posts indicate, Curmie is an avowed free speech advocate.  But libel isn’t protected by the 1st Amendment, and that’s what Issa’s posts were, even if the injured party was a public figure (and loathsome creature) like Stephen Miller.  Perhaps the “community notes” approach might be preferable, but Curmie can’t object too much to the cancellation of Issa… if, indeed, that’s what even happened.

Curmie thanks Curmiphiles Kirsten, Eric, Cheryl, and Harold for their suggestions as to how to proceed, and hopes this was a reasonable solution.