American history is littered with such practices, one prominent implementor of such practices in our history was John D. Rockefeller, widely considered the primary “robber baron” of the oil industry, having founded and led the Standard Oil Company in 1870 to create a massive monopoly. Through ruthless tactics, vertical integration, and secret railroad deals, he controlled over 90% of US refineries by the 1880s. Rockefeller’s company controlled nearly all oil refining and pipelines by the 1880s, often referred to as “The Octopus.” (Standard Oil was ordered to dissolve by the Supreme Court in 1911 due to antitrust violations.)

Rockefeller was known to build service stations right near existing service stations of competitors, undercut their prices for gas and oil and then when those stations went belly up, bought them for cents on the dollar and converted them to Standard Oil stations.

The first major attempt to regulate such actions was the Sherman Antitrust Act, but applying it to large companies was and is difficult. The Clayton Act was also passed with the aim of promote fair competition and prevent unfair business practices that could harm customers.

So, why am I bringing this up now? Good question, I am glad you asked.

A rude awakening is about to dawn on early adopters of AI instruments. Wowed by these tools, at how they seem to make a company’s workers more productive and efficient as more work gets done for the same money or the same work gets done for less, the actual cost is going to be applied soon. AI companies have been selling their services for free or very low cost and have been losing money hand over fist as they “develop their markets.” We are talking billion dollar losses across the nation as a whole. They cannot keep doing that and stay in business.

You have probably heard of the energy costs, and “data centers” being built to create that industry. So far, those costs were being paid by venture capitalists, who expect a return on their money. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was on track to lose approximately $5 billion in 2024 against $3.7 billion in revenue — with annualized costs running close to $9 billion including computing and staff.

But all the news “that is fit to print” apparent doesn’t extend to stories like these: “In early 2024, a mid-sized legal firm in Chicago laid off eleven paralegals. The partners were proud of the decision. They’d run the numbers carefully. AI was handling document review faster and more accurately than the paralegals had. The math was undeniable. Nine months later, the firm’s AI costs had tripled, the paralegals had found other jobs, and the two senior partners who remained were doing document review themselves at two in the morning — because they could no longer afford the AI or the staff to replace it.” (Source: “Prepare for the End of Cheap AI” by Victor Mong, 2/26/2026 on Medium.com)

AI costs aren’t regulated (or even monitored) and if you have laid off employees (the only way to pay for AI) and changed procedures to utilize the AI, and trained your workers to do their jobs using that AI, you could find yourself, like the law firm above in a world of hurt.

Oh, but competition will save us, right? Those companies can just switch to a different AI, one that is cheaper. The point is that none of them can afford to be cheaper and they are all different enough that switching would be difficult. (How many of you would welcome a completely different platform to post things like this on? Or want to do your taxes using a completely different software package? Or.…)

Welcome to the Brave New World where AI hype and predatory pricing are delivering you into an unknown world <theme from The Twilight Zone plays>.

Postscript For the mathematically challenged: if AI cuts your operating costs in half for some aspect of your business (after the implementation costs, etc.) and you are smiling, if AI costs triple (as they did above), you are now paying 50% more than you were under your old system and the odds of those costs going down are slim to none.

Contrast this with the government the founders of the U.S. Constitution envisioned. They envisioned a society and especially a government in which virtue played a substantial role. They recognized, even with their limited sources of knowledge, that a republic, democratic or not, would not survive if its rulers did not display and espouse virtue, civic virtue.

So, what have the “pursuers of profit” done with the profits they have accumulated? For one they created a theory of economics that supported that pursuit with no limit upon greed. In economic terms they claim that economic growth solves all problems. This is foolishness on a grand scale. If the population of human beings on this planet numbered just a few million, this would function quite nicely … for a while. But if it succeeded, it would create its own problem. A truism of biology is that organisms expand in number to the limits of their niche, especially food supply. A classic example, even taught in economics classes (Oh, the irony!) is what happened when rabbits were imported into Australia. There were no native predators that saw rabbits as prey, so the rabbits “bred like bunnies,” and their population exploded in short order. So many rabbits and Australia being a semi-arid country, there wasn’t unlimited food for those rabbits so they stripped vast acreages of the land of what greenery grew there, then millions of rabbits starved of hunger.

There are always limits to growth … always. It is telling that the economists of the 1950s and 1960s omitted any reference to the natural world in their economic theories, basically stating that nature would never limit our economies.

The answer given by the greedy for any economic difficulty is “More Greed!” This is a recipe for disaster that school children can understand. But to people who define themselves as acquirers of profit, they can do nothing else. So, the game must be changed.

If they cannot see any goal other than profit it is necessary for us to require other goals to be included. Making a profit may be one building block of a company, but it cannot be the only building block. (So adding “shareholder value” is unacceptable as it is just another form of profit, shareholder profit.)

We have many examples of how this can be done and how the pursuers of profit will respond. As a response to the great Depression, as part of his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt did something quite amazing (and which he is vilified by the moneyed elites today for doing). He gathered the captains of industry into the White House and explained that if the federal marginal tax rate on income weren’t near 100%, he couldn’t protect them from what the labor unions or the Socialist Party of American were going to do. They begrudgingly accept a 90+% marginal tax rate. Now this tax rate only applied to income over $100,000, if memory serves me) which was a huge amount of money in the 1940s. (That hundred K would be over two million dollars today.) But companies and corporations realized that if the remunerations of their CEOs were to exceed $100,000 of income, then (90+% of that income would go to the federal government and the CEO would get almost nothing. So, the CEO’s started acquiring remuneration that wasn’t in the form of cash: they got the use of a company car, maybe with a chauffeur, they for fancy offices, with expensive art hung on the walls, they got beautiful secretaries, often more than one, the got to live in company housing, and so on. They didn’t exactly starve.

But all of those restrictions on excessive salaries have been gutted and, well those profit-seekers are in charge, so they arranged for obscene amounts of remuneration to come to them and arranged for a lower tax rate on those mountains of money than “ordinary” citizens paid. Of course they did.

Now here comes Christopher Beha with a book-length lament about the felt deficiencies of atheism. Felt is precisely the right word here because, although Beha ventures some arguments against atheism, when examined they are transparently invalid and operate as nothing more than an expression of his disappointment that atheism did not provide him direction on how to live. (Source: Another Lament About Atheism by Ronald A. Lindsay)

The book length complaints about atheism are mostly about science (which is not part of atheism) and most of the science is got wrong, but allow me to focus on “direction on how to live.”

Most of these “atheists” jumping ship convert to Christianity. So, how does Christianity tell us “how to live?” According to The Google “Christianity teaches a way of life centered on loving God and loving others, modeled after Jesus Christ. Key principles include humility, forgiveness, compassion, and serving others. It focuses on spiritual transformation, following biblical commands to live holy, righteous lives while trusting in God’s grace and relying on the Holy Spirit.”

So, ignoring the fact that the “Holy Spirit” is a ghost and if you ask random Christians if they believe in ghosts, I think you would get the same response if you asked almost any other subset of our society, and the bulk of the respondents would say “no.” So much for relying on a ghost for life guidance.

So, how many Christians do you see who exhibit “humility, forgiveness, compassion, and serving others along with following Biblical commands (Stone those teenagers, stone them!)?” Let’s see … 1, 2, 3, … I am sure there are more, but most Christians are indistinguishable from non-Christians in their lifestyles. And if you would look at Christians for Trump, would you get anything close to that behavior? (Yeah, right!)

If any of you out there are looking for guidance as to how to live, I suggest reading the Humanist Manifesto. This is a document of the American Humanist Association.

If that is just TL/DR for you, how about this:
1. Don’t be an asshole.
2. Don’t be a jerk.
3. Think about others for some time before you act.

That is enough guidance for ordinary people I think, and isn’t close to being followed by the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world.

Note the difference in quantity of files? Welcome to the digital age.

Like the Panama Papers, the Epstein files have all been digitized. What that means is a copy of them could have been had by anyone with a largish thumb drive and access to a computer which has those files already stored on it. Gosh, how many people could have had access to those files? Well at least 1000 … in the form of 1000 FBI agents. While initially reported as 1,000 “agents,” other reports clarify that this number included “1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division” and was supplemented by “hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel”. A later report specified that 934 FBI employees were assigned to the project between March 17 and March 22, 2025.

Now, add to those estimates, the number of DOJ employees (probably in the hundreds) and other government functionaries and I gotta believe that one of them had the foresight to swipe a copy and they are now sitting on it. Possibly they are desperately trying to figure out how to release them without being identified because Trump is notoriously vindictive. The whistleblower would likely be tried for treason.

When those files get released in full, victim’s names will be loosed, which is sad, but also the liars who lied in volumes almost unfathomable will be exposed and legal action can be taken. The victims could sue the miscreants, all of the states could (probably not the so-called red states, but many of them), the DOJ could prosecute (assuming the Repubs lose control of both the Senate and House in the coming fall elections), but at a bare minimum, the sheer volume of “redaction errors” otherwise known as cover-your-ass-cover-ups will be exposed to the public. If that doesn’t cause a backlash against Trump and his cronies, then put a fork in this country, we died but didn’t see the memo.

Why does NPR refer to Marine Le Pen as far right, but doesn’t refer to Bernie Sanders as far left? (Question on Quora.com)

As many people have already said, Bernie Sanders is not far-left.

From the question, you sound like an American. More than that, you sound like an American who has never left the United States.

By world standards, the United States is a radical, ultra-right-wing, batshit crazy country. Not only is the US an extreme ultra-right nation, far to the right of every other developed country without exception, the US is extreme right even by the standards of many developing nations. You have to go to the Middle East in order to find a country more right-wing than the US.

By world standards, the Democrats are right-wing, and Republicans are reactionary ultra-right. Bernie Sanders is a very, very mildly left centrist; Hillary Clinton is hard right; George Bush is extreme right, and Donald Trump is neofascist.

When you’re raised in the US and you don’t have any experience elsewhere, it feels like the US is “normal,” because that’s all you know. And if you’re accustomed to extreme radical right as your baseline, merely being hard right can look liberal, and being centrist can look far-left.

It’s difficult to overstate how extremely right-wing all of US politics is by the standards of the rest of the industrialized world, and the fact that people seriously consider Bernie Sanders “far left” with a straight face shows just how skewed American politics are.

Postscript Re the Title
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” (Oh, would some Power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us!) in full is:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.

The poet, Robert Burns, has been described as being “profoundly Scottish.” The poem, if I recall correctly, was about a woman who thought way too much of herself. Please correct me if I am wrong.

So, why did we elect a dictator?

First Point We have a two-party system (by default) and both major parties betrayed their constituents by selling out to the wealthiest Americans. Yes, yes, I know that the Democrats aren’t as bad as the Republicans, but they haven’t exactly put up much of an opposition to the Tin Pot Dictator, have they?

The abandonment of the poor and middle class has caused a large disillusionment in the various governments, which cause a lot of Dems to stay at home during Trump’s second election, which means they are responsible, the whole damned party, for Trump.

Of course, the sycophantish worship of the Felonious Orange, POTUS (Piece of Totally Useless Shit), Trumplethinskin, puts Republicans at the top of the list of causes.

Second Point The Republican Party’s capture of the Evangelical movement. By sucking up to these fundamentalist Christians, the Republicans locked in a large number of votes (many would have gone that way anyway, but …) the result is that Christian Nationalists are now running around the White House. These people recognize only one Supreme Leader (their god), think Trump was sent by Jesus, and recognize only one source of authority (their bible, the KJV, the one that Jesus wrote), and fuck the Constitution.

Third Point The Republicans have packed the federal courts, including SCOTUS, and many of the state courts with sycophants like themselves. (The Democrats allowed this by imitating a rug upon which Republicans wipe their feet.) As a consequence we have had federal judicial theory turned on its head. How they ended up making presidents immune from prosecution is beyond me, as well as beyond many constitutional scholars.

This is part of the collapse of the “checks and balances” drafted into the Constitution by the Founders. (Many people seemingly are unaware that the “Founders” (being the drafters of the Constitution) voted to not have a Bill of Rights. Their argument was that they couldn’t do a good enough job and important things would be left out and unwanted things included. This resulted in the Bill of Rights being the first ten amendments to the Constitution because “the people” agreed with the “Founders” who got outvoted in committee.)

Sorry for that long aside.

The Constitution made the three branches of the federal government “co-equal” by them being independent (to a degree) and interlocked but they never expected the three branches to be equally powerful. The Congress members it around and dream up rules, ratify treaties, and create regulations but they don’t have an enforcement arm or investigative arm. The courts settle disputes on the rules so passed by the Congress. They, too, don’t have an enforcement arm or investigative arm. The executive branch is the one that does shit: that’s where the army and navy were placed, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, etc.

But there are “checks and balances” built in, for example, the Congress need to ratify certain appointments (so how were abjectly unqualified people get confirmed to important positions in the Trump Administration (his latest appointee, to be Surgeon General, not only does not have a license to practice medicine but never has had a license to practice medicine)? And Congress controls the purse, except that the President has decided he just doesn’t want to spend the money the way Congress authorized so he is doing as he wishes and Congress won’t stop him.

The “checks” aren’t checking and the “balances” aren’t balancing. So, America’s Mad King, Mr. Whiny Pissant, Old Bone Spurs, the Racist in Chief is running rampant, disrupting the world economy, the world political order, American society, and partially destroying the White House while decorating it like a bordello.

Fourth Point Ordinary voters, like me, felt it was enough to just vote against the guy … it wasn’t. We needed to organize better (thanks Democrats) and make sure all of us got out to vote. For the Democrats that involved, at least temporarily, stopping kissing the asses of the wealthy and representing the whole country for a change. Since the Executive Branch is charged with implementing federal law we cannot count on them to correct themselves, it has to come from the outside.

Note that the victim, called a “bitch” and “little girl” by the Pedo-in-Chief, King Pedophile, Spaced Invade Her Trump (Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA)) has her pronouns redacted elsewhere. For example <blank>, bit the shit out of it.” Presumably what got redacted was “She” or possibly the initials of the complainant. Then “TRUMP struck <blank> and said words to the effect of, “get this little bitch the hell out of here.”

So, since the subject of the interview has outed herself, why were these things redacted? Instead of “She” could it possibly been “He”? That would certainly be something TRUMP would not want to be on record.

Note also that the all caps “TRUMP” is an indicator that he is the principal focus of the investigation, not just some incidental bystander.

And really, “<blank>, bit the shit out of it.” If you fill in the blank with her initials or “She” or “He” why is that comma there? I guess they don’t teach syntax at the FBI.

But then the writer continued with: “Only (Hakeem) Olajuwon has had a line like that (39 points, 16 rebounds, seven blocks, five assists and zero turnovers) in NBA history.

Hello? Maybe he was fixated on the zero turnovers number, but that would make the stat lie a quirk, not a very notable event. (Turnovers are not just something one does but something that happens to one, too.)

And of course, I have a somewhat older comparator: Wilt Chamberlain’s most absurd stat line is a 53-point, 32-rebound, 14-assist, 24-block, 11-steal performance against the Lakers on March 18, 1968. Blocks were not an official statistic in the NBA at the time, but reliable recorders logged many games by Wilt (and Bill Russell) to verify they had monster block games (15+) and both averaged 8+ blocks per game for considerable stretches.

When Wilt Chamberlain played basketball, the NBA didn’t record blocked shots, but a news archive and game films reveal blocked shot data from 112 of Wilt’s 1305 NBA games. In his 112 games where blocked shot data were recorded, Wilt averaged 8.8 BPG (the most official recorded BPG in a season is 5.6 BPG by Mark Eaton). If Wilt Chamberlain only averaged 4 BPG for his career, he would have 5220 total blocks and be the all-time leader in blocked shots (Hakeem Olajuwon holds that record with 3830). (Source: The Lead)

And Wilt’s quintuple double game (above) is not sullied by the 24 block stat. Even if it were even somewhat unreliable, getting from 24 to below 10 to make the performance “only” a quadruple double is beyond the pale.

Don’t these sportswriters have access to the Internet? I found those stat lines with minimum effort, so why don’t they?

Regular readers of this blog already know I get exciting about a book and cannot wait to finish it to recommend it to you. In this case I am only through the first few chapters, some of which are a bit of a slog, but let me giive you a few quotations, mostly drawn from the introduction, explaining who Ricahrd Carrier is and how he got to where he is now. He began as a church goer, a fairly liberal Methodist church, then was enthralled with Taoism as a youth, for example.

Here are the quotes:

Philosophy is the Answer to every Big Question, and the ground we stand on when finding answers to every small one. Our values, our morals, our goals, our identities, who we are, where we are, and above all how we know any of these things, it all comes from our philosophy of life—whether we know it or not. Since this makes philosophy fundamental to everything in our lives, it is odd that people give it so little attention. Philosophers are largely to blame. They have reduced their craft to the very thing it should not be: a jargonized verbal dance around largely useless minutiae.

I sat down to read it all through, every word, front to back, Old Testament and New (I have since read the entire New Testament in the original Greek). I figured now, with my greater understanding and maturity, I might receive more from it than I did as a child. Instead, now that I could understand it, I was able to see far worse things in it than I ever did before. I saw a terrible, sinful God by the standards of the simple, kind wisdom of Taoism—a jealous, violent, short-tempered, vengeful being whose behavior is nonsensical and overly meddlesome and unenlightening.

In all I can say that the Old Testament disgusted me, while the New Testament disappointed me. In general, no divinely inspired text would be so long and rambling and hard to understand. Wise men speak clearly, brilliantly, their ability at communication is measured by their success at making themselves readily understood.

What was most pungent was the immorality of the Bible. Though called a wise father, there is not a single example in the Old Testament of God sitting down and kindly teaching anyone, and when asked by Job, the best of men, to explain why He went out of His way to hurt a good man by every possible means, including killing Job’s loved ones, this “wise father” spews arrogant rhetorical questions, ultimately implying nothing more than “might makes right” as his only excuse. I looked in horror at the demonic monster being portrayed here. He was worthy of universal condemnation, not worship. He who thinks he can do whatever he wants because he can is as loathsome and untrustworthy as any psychopath.

If you get bogged down in the explanation of terms chapter (he avoids jargon and is a good writer), just skip it. You can always go back for definitions if you need to.

Highly recommended … and I expect that appraisal to go up as I continue to read.