CNN data guru Harry Enten calls the Epstein story a "nothingburger" because Google searches have fallen off in the past week, says Trump's approval rating is "pretty gosh-darn good" right now, and commends Trump for having "some of the best political instincts of any politician I‘ve seen."
There are two intelligence-insulting hack moves here:
1)Note that in order to imply that Trump is very popular the only baseline Enten uses to compare Trump’s current approval rating is Trump’s even less popular first term.
2)Enten’s cited 45% approval rating is an outlier — aggregate approval ratings (which any serious analyst would use) suggest he’s south of 43%.
If he’s not popular with the public, though, he’s apparently very popular with the management at CNN.
I get about a half dozen texts like this every day, although the volume goes down when I remember to reply STOP to them:
sobbing . . . HAPPY TEARS! Barack Obama just changed EVERYTHING. You have to see this: [Link to a quote from Obama, followed by a plea for donations to help pass the No Kings Act].
Where is the money to pay for this constant blizzard of messages coming from, and where does the revenue generated go?
The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. . . .
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
How does this structure end up working exactly?
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined.
But the firm’s direct cut is only part of the story. The “churn and burn” fundraising model is immensely expensive to operate. Sending millions of texts and emails requires massive spending on digital infrastructure. For instance, FEC filings show this network paid $22.5 million to a single vendor, Message Digital LLC, a firm that specializes in text message delivery.
The remaining hundreds of millions disappeared into a maze of self-reported categories: $150 million to consulting/fundraising, $70 million to salaries and payroll. There are some disbursements to what seem to be legitimate advocacy and organizing–for instance Progressive Turnout Project reports paying Shawmut Services $19 million for canvassing. However, most of the unclassifiable expenditures appear to be administrative costs or media buys that feed back into the fundraising machine itself.
After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns
And why would the Democratic party “leadership” tolerate this cozy little arrangement?
This parasitic ecosystem could not thrive without the tacit approval of the Democratic establishment. The relationship between the Mothership network and the official party is not adversarial; it is deeply symbiotic.
The firm’s founders are, as noted, alumni of the DCCC. They didn’t just bring their contacts; they brought the “churn and burn” playbook, which was developed and honed inside the party’s own campaign arm. They simply privatized the party’s dirtiest tactics. This is not a rogue operation; it is an outgrowth.
Trump’s astounding personal corruption is both cause and symptom, like some sort of contagious cultural cancer.
If the Nazis or Dutch police caught the sisters, they might have killed them. However, the fact that they were both young girls—and Freddie looked even younger when she wore braids—meant that officials were less likely to suspect them of working for the resistance. This might be one of the reasons why, in 1941, a commander with the Haarlem Resistance Group visited their house to ask their mother if he could recruit Freddie and Truus.
Their mother consented and the sisters’ agreed to join. “Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus told Jonker. “‘And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,’ he added. I remember my sister saying: ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’”
In at least one instance, Truus seduced an SS officer into the woods so that someone from the resistance could shoot him. As the commander who recruited them had said, Freddie and Truus learned to shoot Nazis too, and the sisters began to go on assassination missions by themselves. Later on, they focused on killing Dutch collaborators who arrested or endangered Jewish refugees and resistance members.
I have to admire the Oversteegen sisters. They were doing good work. We should be more like Freddie and Truus.
On these missions, Freddie was especially good at following a target or keeping a lookout during missions since she looked so young and unsuspecting. Both sisters shot to kill, but they never revealed how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated. According to Pliester, Freddie would tell people who asked that she and her sister were soldiers, and soldiers don’t say.
Consequently, we don’t have too many details about how their “liquidations,” as they called them, played out. Benda-Beckmann says that sometimes they would follow a target to his house to kill him or ambush them on their bikes.
Their other duties in the Haarlem Resistance Group included “bringing Jewish [refugees] to a new hiding place, working in the emergency hospital in Enschede… [and] blowing up the railway line between Ijmuiden and Haarlem,” writes Jonker.
You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see my latest video, “An Un-Deconstructed Atheist”.
Unless you’re a Patreon subscriber, in which case you can watch it right now.
Hey, friends:
I’ve been watching some atheist youtubers, and I’ve noticed a trend — an obvious trend that leaves me out in the cold. I feel like the most popular atheist youtubers are people who have considerable knowledge of the specifics of a religion. You know what I mean: a person sits and fields questions from believers, or responds to theistic videos, and they use their deep knowledge of a holy book to point out their contradictions with their own beliefs or the purported words of their god. It’s all very entertaining. It’s also frustrating, because the religious fools are consistently beaten down, but they don’t realize it; they use their poor logic to contrive rationalizations, and they run away whining.
I’ve also learned a new word: deconstruction. Well, an old word. I thought I knew what it meant, but it seems to have been shifting a bit.
A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings.
In the world of youtube theology, though, it seems to be more about the process of losing one’s religion, becoming aware of the failings of holy texts, and applying more critical interpretations to hermeneutics. There’s hardly ever a mention of Derrida or other aspects of literary criticism, and that’s fine. People are conscious of how their faith is falling away, and that’s a good thing.
But I feel like a Martian when I listen to these fascinating videos. I never “deconstructed”. I was brought up in a nominally Christian home, but everything I learned about religion repelled me. My grandparents tried to teach me prayers. This is the first one I was taught.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep
If I should die before I ‘wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.
What kind of monsters were these people? I didn’t want to be “taken” at all. Are you telling me I could die in my sleep and some ghost would swoop in and snatch me?
I don’t think I’ve ever prayed. Not once. I thought of prayer as reciting horrible stories.
They taught me the Lord’s Prayer, too. I asked too many questions.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Who is this father? Where does he live? He delivers bread?
I realized years later that I was probably somewhere on the spectrum and was taking everything too literally, but the damage was done. I have a strong aversion to prayer — it would feel like I’m talking to myself and asking favors for myself, and I know I don’t have magical powers.
I went to church and Sunday school, and was also a member of the church choir, which you might say meant I was pretty deep in the culture of Christianity. I wasn’t. I was the oldest in a family of six kids, and figured out early on that the reason I was going to church and escorting a flock of little kids there was to protect my mother’s sanity. Church was a free babysitter.
My parents did not go to church at all, which does kind of undermine the whole idea that attendance was for the purposes of salvation. My grandparents were even worse — I don’t recall ever seeing them in church, but they were also the ones who gifted me an engraved Bible and made me read Bible verses aloud every Christmas. As soon as I learned to read, they’d prop me up in front of my brothers and sisters, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and I had to read aloud. Luke 2. 364 days a year, I would never crack open a bible, but this one day I was a performing monkey. I hated it, but I loved my grandparents, so I’d do it for them.
It was indoctrination. I could see that from the first day I was dropped off at Sunday School, and indoctrination doesn’t work if you’re well aware that it is indoctrination, were repulsed by the clumsiness of it all, and spent your spare time working on subverting the effort. It all came to a head when I turned 12 and was expected to attend confirmation classes every week, for two years. This is where religion became overt, and I was expected to testify to my belief in the dogma of the faith.
At the end of my first year, I had a one-on-one meeting with the pastor, who asked me to recite the Nicene Creed, which I’d memorized. I was very good at memorization.
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
Then he made a mistake. He asked me if I BELIEVED in the creed.
“No,” I said, “I don’t believe in god.”
He looked mildly surprised. He said, “If you don’t accept that, then you aren’t a Christian.”
I was happy to be told that. I thought he was saying I didn’t have to go to church anymore.
“Do you believe any of it?” He asked.
“No.”
“Then you aren’t a Lutheran.”
At the time, I thought he was letting me off the hook, affirming what I already knew. Looking back on it, though, I’m thinking now that it was more of a passive-aggressive rebuke. This was a church full of Scandinavian-Americans from Minnesota who had emigrated to Washington state, so maybe this was my first exposure to Minnesota Nice, and I was so naive I didn’t notice.
Anyway, I took it as being recognized as an atheist, and receiving permission to never go to church again. And I didn’t! The result of my Lutheran confirmation was that I failed the Christianity test and was instead officially confirmed as an atheist.
Unfortunately, that means that, unlike so many well-educated atheist youtubers, you can totally stump me with Bible quotes. I won’t be able to hurl Biblical contradictions back at you, or wrestle with your sophisticated theology. I’ve got no grounding in religious hermeneutics or apologetics — I’m as helpless as a baby before your verses and quotes from church fathers and Bible college philosophy.
That’s not permission for the Bible-thumpers to declare open season on this one weird godless person. It also means I’m totally, blissfully impervious to their arguments. Since I don’t recognize the existence of their deity and don’t care about the authority of their holy book, they might as well be yelling at me in Greek.
It does not mean I know nothing about their religion, though. It just means I was exposed to the antigens early, and lack the ability to empathize with their foolishness. I’m still fascinated by how people can fall for such obvious nonsense.
When I turned 18 and went off to college, I attended a small liberal arts college in the heart of Indiana, DePauw University. It was a good school, in a conservative area, and it was also the first time I was hit with a love bomb. I was alone, and the Christian group in my dorm were talking to me and dealing out all kinds of flattery, telling me about good books I should read and loaning me music. It was coming up on Spring Break, and they suggested I could go with them — they had a bus and were all going to help restore an old barn for some nice folks even deeper in the Indiana heartland. I had nothing better to do, so I spent a week on this farm.
It was actually a Bible camp, a commercial retreat for the true believers. I was drafted to work on repainting and repairing the buildings, so I spent my days with a brush and a bucket of paint — long days, most memorably painting the rafters and getting painfully sore. The evenings were spent around a campfire, reading bible verses (I didn’t know any) and everyone giving their Testimony (mine was telling them I was brought up Lutheran, but didn’t believe any of it). Then I’d get hours of being told Jesus loves me and that everyone there loved me, with more fervent singing and bible-quotin’. Yeah, they sang Kumbaya at me.
I just smiled and vibed with the group. Trust me, I am immune. I had a good time with some nice people and worked on a church camp, and that was it.
When we got back to college, I could tell the group leader was somewhat frustrated that I was so oblivious, and I think he decided to take an intellectual approach. He gave me an album to listen to: it was Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Most people haven’t heard of it; it’s a musical theater piece, in the genre of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (but very different), composed by an American Jew and recounting the doubts and ultimate acceptance by the Celebrant in the context of the Catholic Mass. I guess he thought the nerd might appreciate it, and besides, Catholic, Lutheran, they’re kind of the same thing, aren’t they?
Surprise, I liked it. I’ve listened to it off and on again over the years, and it’s eclecticism is exactly what appeals to me. The religious message, though…whooosh, right past me, didn’t care. There is one bit, though, that did make a life-long impression, in a negative sense. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it musically, but man, the lyrics struck me as total nonsense.
Sing God a simple song
Lauda laude
Make it up, as you go along
Lauda laude
Sing, like you like to sing
God loves all simple things
For God, is the simplest of all
I’m going to have to credit Leonard Bernstein as setting me on the track of being against design and complexity arguments. I thought hard about that claim — I’d been hearing that “god is love” most of my life, and it was silly and a reductionist evasion of the magnitude of the claims believers were making. Love is a profound and complex emotion, so how can you say it’s simple? How can you claim this pan-galactic overlord who created all the complexity of the universe is simultaneously just a “simple” feeling? Now I’m no authority, but I rather doubt that the Bible makes such a ridiculous claim that their deity is “simple” or just “love”, so I have to approach this claim as a godless empiricist and reject it as an unfounded and contradictory claim that has no relationship to reality.
So that’s the kind of atheist I’ve become: dismissive of theistic arguments and contemptuous of the Abrahamic religions. I am not a “cultural Christian”. I am, at best, a “cultural un-Christian”, familiar enough with the Christian perspective to be heartily sick of it. The worth of my culture comes from those who were progressive and scientific in spite of the taint of this nonsense that soaks our civilization.
Now, please, if you disagree with me, don’t bother trying to bludgeon me with your Bible. I’m impervious to that. Try using material evidence, since that’s the language I speak. If you claim to have a big fish, I expect you to show me that fish.
SpaceX successfully launched its Starship on May 27, but the rocket lost control mid-flight and eventually fell apart.
They failed to recover the reusable booster, which exploded, and the second stage was tumbling out of control, and exploded. SUCCESS!
This was the ninth Starship launch, and none of them have “succeeded” by any reasonable meaning of the word. Maybe someone needs to teach the editors at the WaPo the word “failed”? Somehow, I think they’re going to need to use that word a lot in the next few years, in lots of contexts.
Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.
You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.
SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions. Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.
If you have even a passing knowledge of engineering, you know this is what iterative design looks like. So, why hasn’t Musk done this?
Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why?
Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; they might as well keep shoving money at the beast.
This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
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