A federal judge has ruled that the President of the United States cannot give his own appointees access to Treasury Department information systems, even though Trump has publicly maintained that during his first term he was denied access to information he needed to do his job effectively by insiders working to neutralize him. The ruling was so broad that another judge had to clarify that the Secretary of the Treasury can access the Treasury Department's data. How can the head of the executive branch be barred from accessing executive branch information through people he trusts? If the President believes the bureaucracy is malfunctioning, how can he reform it without first understanding how it works, if the bureaucracy persistently denies him or his advisors the information they need to evaluate it?

This is certainly not how the government of the United States of America was originally constituted in 1787, nor does it correspond to any of the Constitution document's formally written and ratified amendments. Rather, it demonstrates that since the drafting of the written Constitution, the government has in some other way been reconstituted to create a fourth substantive branch of government, alongside the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Yassine Meskhout asked for an explanation of the recent emergence of anti-Zionism as a left-wing litmus test, especially salient in the aftermath of the October 7th attack in late 2023. In an unrelated conversation, a friend asked me what recourse ordinary people are likely to adopt as the state breaks various promises to them. My answer to the latter developed a surprising answer to the former.

Our system of government has two interlocking features: it refuses to hear an individual making a reasonable argument, and it systematically disrupts collective threats that fall outside mainstream coalition politics. The result is that reasonable arguments about individual circumstances get drowned out by a competition between acceptable collective identities threatening their rivals.

You, the viewer, are the secret illegitimate child of a Presbyterian minister, who, being otherwise conscientious and aspiring to a high standard of decency and kindness, takes time out of his day, every weekday, to spend with you. He uses that time to talk with you about life, and feelings, to show you how things are made, to introduce you to different sorts of people, to play pretend and make handicrafts, and to tell you that he loves you just the way you are.

He meets you in a house that is not his house, but hangs up his jacket and wears a sweater he borrows from the closet. Likewise for shoes.

He speaks freely of families, of divorce, of all manner of difficulties. The only subject that is off limits is the nature of his particular relation to you. If he loves you so much, how come you don't live with him? Why do you only get half an hour, five days a week? Where does he live, if not here? Who feeds the fish on the weekend?

A predator's success depends on exploiting specific flaws in prey - poor awareness, slow reactions, weak social coordination. Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness. A cheetah doesn't catch just any gazelle, but the one that fails to notice and react effectively. Prey get better at evading, predators get better at predicting, each side has to model the other's thoughts more accurately - an arms race that eventually rewards both sides for explicitly modeling the other's perspective, the basis for cognitive empathy. If you're glad you're conscious, no need to thank a predator - somebody else already did - by being eaten.

The main points for ethical veganism as I understand it are:

1. Killing other animals is unjust aggression; you wouldn't like to be killed and eaten, so don't kill and eat them.

2. Factory farming causes animals to have bad lives.

My answer to these arguments:

I hit a communication wall with a crypto-Cathar. The encounter exposed how an ancient heresy's worldview still blocks trust and cooperation. Here's lemonade.

While Calvinism proposed a mechanism by which agency could be recovered from corruption through the intervention of divine grace (Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency), Catharism took the more radical position that material existence itself was inherently corrupting, which means that fully embodied people simply cannot be trustworthy agents.