I regret to report that everything has gotten even stupider

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.

— Charles Darwin, letter to Charles Lyell, Oct 1 1861

I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly keep up with the news These Days without either driving themselves insane, giving up on the human race completely, or both. I almost want to shout at people who try, but then I remember that we've established some serious social engineering for the problem, a sort of news hierarchy or caste system that keeps any one person from having to bear the brunt of it, and I have to admit it is a bit clever.

It goes like this: Those of us with strong expertise in a given area watch over their designated acre of current events, where we slowly go mad as we watch that particular acre turn strange and feral before our eyes. When something happens that is particularly grim, they bring it to the attention of news generalists, abstracting out the horrible niche details that a generalist doesn't need to be aware of while leaving the gist of the horrors intact (somewhat like putting a just-grilled hot dog on a bun before handing it to someone else, rather than dropping it into their hands still-sizzling.)

The generalist then packages up all those smaller horrors and turns it into a nightly newscast or new print edition, handing it off to news consumers who will then be exposed to each individual horror for, at best, only a few scant minutes of their day; enough to understand that there are new catastrophes in the pipeline, but with reduced enough exposure that they do not all immediately become Russian novelists.

Thus, we all get at least a broad overview of the horrors, and can all talk about it panic about it only as much as our own stomachs compare. But that is still too much for most people, and so you get things like TikTok and Facebook and podcasts. If we were to continue that hot dog analogy, the griller passes it off to the preparer who passes it off to the customer, in true capitalist efficiency, and then someone from TikTok shows up saying "I found this dead rat on my sidewalk, does anyone want a bite?"

What I'm trying to say here is that the news right now is very poorly and very stupid and God help us I do not know whether the human brain can, even with all of society's built-in protections, handle all of this without steaming itself into rubber.

There are several things wrong with this, and that's setting aside the original sin of giving longtime Fox News online race-baiter Todd Starnes his own "news" show. But we will only gently point out that Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Narnia) is asserting that a military ground operation to seize and occupy missile-flinging Iran's just-offshore Kharg Island would be "very easy," based on what happened "in Vietnam" up until operation "Rolling Thunder 2," which was not in fact an American military campaign but a 1991 Namco arcade game also available on the Sega Genesis, Playstation and the Nintendo Switch.

So there you go. You now have the essential gist of it, which is that a House Republican is advising Trump to launch a "very easy" ground war in the Middle East based on his memories of a Sega Genesis game in which you shoot terrorists inside an Egyptian pyramid—which is, at least in his mind, a close enough version of how we won the Vietnam War.

If you're an issue expert, whether your expertise is on the Vietnam War, or on modern-day amphibious assaults, or on old cartridge games that people of a certain age might still have tucked away in a box in their bedroom closet, you might be able to list a hundred different ways this is all Very Very Stupid, the sort of stupid that both fells empires and can easily bankrupt an Arby's, and those people are probably all passed out on the floor right now and unavailable for comment.

The rest of us? We can survive it, if only barely. But we are still cursed with the knowledge that our nation is led not by the best and brightest we can muster, but by a catalogue of people whose ignorance is so broad and covers so many individual fields of study that it becomes impossible to untangle.

I hate myself I hate clover & I hate Bees

— Charles Darwin, letter to John Lubbock, Sept 3, 1862

Tonight, the seditious omnifelon Donald Trump will be giving an all-networks speech about his plainly illegal not-war on Iran, and it will be impossible to know what he's about to announce until the usual big-money insider trading hits the markets and/or betting sites. He could declare victory, leaving Iran semi-permanently able and eager to choke off much of the global oil supply as retaliation for Trump's gormless adventures while he himself flits off to again focus on ballroom design. He could announce a new ground assault meant to seize the entire Iranian coastline. He could announce that he has ordered Namco to develop and release Rolling Thunder 47, and nobody would bat an eye.

We're used to it. We are used the notion that the man with the nuclear codes is a delusional and impossibly corrupt lunatic who cannot hold a non-real-estate premised thought in his head for any longer than it takes him to write his signature.

But we're not used to it, either, because there is no escape—for any of us—from this one man's hallucinations and ever-more-bizarre obsessions. It is like having the wrinkles of our brains sanded down with 40-grit.

Oh sure, of course. The Trump Presidential Library will be a hotel now, because of course it will be. And it will have a 747 in the lobby. And this is all happening because Trump says he doesn't build libraries, which makes perfect sense top-to-bottom when you realize that this slouching half-centaur has never, not even once, considered the presidency to be anything larger than his own momentary whims.

He got confused about what the White House was supposed to be, so he decided it was a posh club for elites—one with a grand ballroom for hosting events, and patio seating for hosting brunches where the Rose Garden used to be, and fancy lettering hung outside the Oval Office so that every guest will know where T h e / O v a l / O f f i c e is, when wandering the grounds.

So of course the theoretical library is not a library, now it is a theoretical hotel. A massive hotel that towers above the rest of Miami, built on the swiss cheese of Florida limestone and not far from the ever-encroaching coast.

What else is a library, after all, but a hotel for books? Books get checked in; books get checked out. There is a front desk; sometimes you can rent a room out for events. But books are cheap bastards, notoriously so, and Donald doesn't like to surround himself with anything that doesn't carry a wallet to steal from.

While Trump was revealing that he was going to be distancing himself from the common understanding of the word library, he also announced that he would be attending the Supreme Court's Wednesday oral arguments in the case of Trump v The Plain Text Of The 14th Amendment, the case that the Court chose to take on because a majority of the justices thought it might be funny to invent some new racism-based carveouts to the presumed rights and citizenship enjoyed by every person born in this country by constitutional decree.

No sitting president has ever attended the arguments of a Supreme Court case, much less one with their own name on it, because it was seen as vaguely unseemly to be butting in so conspicuously on the Judicial Branch's business. But Trump said he was going to, presumably because he wanted the Court to know face-to-face that he intended to butt in on their business.

Reader, he lasted 13 minutes. He showed up at the Court, was seated in the front row, listened to his government flunky make "his" arguments—but made it through just 13 minutes of opposing oral arguments before he got bored and wandered back out of the room.

Was it intimidating? No. No, it was not. He apparently thought there was going to be a musical number, not judicial jargon. So he fled, and what might conceivably been an ominous sign of the executive branch's intent to stifle the independence of both competing constitutional bodies turned instead into a reminder that this addled buffoon cannot stomach any interaction, event, book, pamphlet, or television program that does not center himself, not even for a mere quarter of an hour.

Which we already knew, and which only adds to the pile of the Exceedingly Stupid that are now drowning in, every minute of every day.

The day is raining torrents, the children are ennuied - so I have not heart to write-

— Charles Darwin, letter to W.E. Darwin, Nov 30 1861

It is the kind of news cycle that no mortal can really absorb, not without going at least a little mad and suddenly popping up with new opinions on bees they didn't have before. But if there is a larger question, I suppose it might be this:

Is it possible for a nation, or an empire, to humiliate itself to death?

No, I mean it. I want to know from the historians out there, and from the other related fields. Has it ever been the case that a nation's leadership has become so Stupid, so obviously and transcendentally Stupid, that before the nation could even collapse from the economic, military, and social consequences of their Stupid, the whole of the populace simply keeled over and died from the embarrassment of it all.

I think it should be a field of study, if it isn't one already. And I would hope that the question is probed with some sense of urgency, because it feels like it is about to become very, very pertinent.

That was the Secretary of Defense, former Fox News daytime host Pete Hegseth, overriding the military investigation into how it came to happen that two U.S. Army pilots did a close flyby of B-list celebrity Kid Rock's Tennessee mansion after buzzing a No Kings protest in the area and if that sentence hasn't completely sapped your will to live you can now count yourself a survivor.

If we're going to be honest, nobody in a competent military would ever know where Kid Rock's house was. It would not come up. There is no circumstances under which most people would admit "I know where Kid Rock lives" because one, most of us thought before now that he simply crawled into an empty Pabst Blue Ribbon can each night, and two, admitting to having any knowledge about Kid Rock whatsoever pegs you as a particular kind of person of a particular age and most people are not comfortable with those implications.

But it is our lives now, because the same people who think a 1991 video game was the reason America won the Vietnam War are in charge of whether Army pilots are allowed to take military assault helicopters to pay tribute to the poolside, person-sized Statue of Liberty knock-off at Kid Rock's house. And they are the reason that oil now has a very good chance to hit $200 a barrel and $300 a barrel is no longer an impossible-to-envision number.

And they are the reason America doesn't need libraries anymore, God help us. There is no point; we are all going to finally receive the one news story that will make us keel over and die of pure shame, sooner or later. Possibly tonight; possibly tomorrow. And the living will envy the dead, and the stupid beast, its stupid hour come round at last, will continue its stupid slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.