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Open Mike 08/02/2026

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, February 8th, 2026 - 14 comments
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14 comments on “Open Mike 08/02/2026 ”

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  1. Dennis Frank 1
    8 February 2026 at 8:57 am

    Looks like Trumpism "has revealed a schism between two distinct factions within the administration." https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/07/politics/todd-blanche-ed-martin-schism-broader-maga-divide-administration

    A rift between two of President Donald Trump’s favorite prosecutors came to a head at the start of the year, when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, removed MAGA firebrand Ed Martin from a key post investigating the president’s political enemies.

    Martin is expected to depart from the Justice Department in the coming weeks, CNN previously reported. His ouster represented the culmination of a months-long campaign by Blanche to keep Martin operating within the bounds of the law… Blanche’s office swiftly initiated a review of the incident in December, ultimately finding that Martin had committed misconduct, two sources familiar with the review previously told CNN.

    Martin was stripped of his title of leading the weaponization group in early December and sent to work out of a separate building across town from DOJ headquarters. He is now considering leaving the department entirely. “The fact that this keeps happening on our side tells you a lot,” the person said. “They’re competing for who is more MAGA.” “The GOP keeps doing this, we do this to ourselves and we can’t get sh*t done,” the person added.

    That such rightist legal heavies opposed each other within Trumpism suggests a cowboy/sheriff scenario applies. Better late than never.

  2. Dennis Frank 2
    8 February 2026 at 11:23 am

    The career of teaching seems in jeopardy: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/586024/digital-ghosts-are-ai-replicas-of-the-dead-an-innovative-medical-tool-or-an-ethical-nightmare

    Now, digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping education and we can imagine a future where AI-generated representations of dead people – chatbots specifically developed as "thanabots" – are used to support students' learning. The term thanabot is derived from thanatology, the study of death. Such AI replicas are already used to assist people during bereavement and could be integrated into medical education.

    Freud called the ancient deity a death instinct but I go for the contemporary framing of optionality, in which it doesn't lurk over your shoulder but within the adjacent possible.

    In Greek mythology, death was seen as a presence named Thanatos. https://www.centreofexcellence.com/thanatos-in-greek-mythology/

    Any good centre of excellence ought to be up to speed on the best way to incorporate potential death into collective thought, eh? For resilience optimisation…

    though thanabots of famous people are also available.

    Need instruction on how to be wise? Just get your pet gizmo to simulate Socrates for an hour before bed, and sleep on it. Designers ought to go for archetypal role models instead of celebs. For politics, you could ask it to simulate a politician advocating the best way forward on a common-interest basis – then compare the performance with those of the politicians we actually have. Specify the length of the speech to minimise tedium.

  3. gsays 3
    8 February 2026 at 12:27 pm

    LIf you are irony deficient, check out Jim Mora and his discussion on homelessness.

    His final guest is some rentier who owns the block next to MacArthur Park.

    This parasite proceeds to bang on, unchecked, about drugs, out of state folk, and non profits.

    Imagine if his privilege was challenged by being asked how much money, land and wealth does one man need?

  4. Incognito 4
    8 February 2026 at 1:09 pm

    The thought of the [my] day comes from a Booker Prize-winning writer after he had a perceived near-death experience.

    "Life was very rich after that for about four or five days. I was in bliss just to still be around, you know. The weird thing is, I found I couldn't live like that. It was a little too much. Within a week or two, I was full of it again and knew I was eternal."

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/george-saunders-animosity-on-social-media-is-not-entirely-genuine

  5. Dennis Frank 5
    8 February 2026 at 2:19 pm

    I had no idea this Epstein creep was pulling top-level strings: https://unherd.com/2026/02/what-the-russians-taught-epstein/

    The real story is more systemic. It rests on the emergence, from the ashes of the Soviet Union, of a transnational kleptocratic class that has grown to encompass Western elites too – many of whom are only too happy to collude with the Russians, the Saudis, the Israelis, whoever, in undermining democratic institutions. The Epstein Files need to be reframed: this is a story about modern geopolitics… it wasn’t just Trump cronies. Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to the White House under Barack Obama, wrote that she “adored” Epstein. Bill Gates met with Epstein repeatedly after his conviction for paedophilia. Bill Clinton flew on his plane. Noam Chomsky offered him advice. Larry Summers took his money. The Russian collusion story was never about shadowy foreign forces assaulting an innocent democracy. As Casey Michel has documented in American Kleptocracy, the US was not a victim of this corruption. Rather, it built the frameworks that enabled it.

    Kleptocracy as paradigm spanning the globe may not catch on due to the inertial effect of normalcy: people are reluctant to admit being suckered or shafted by their betters.

    Jeffrey Epstein appeared to understand this intuitively. He brokered connections across the worlds of Israeli intelligence, Gulf royals, European politicians, and the Russian state. One of his most frequent contacts was Sergey Belyakov, an FSB officer. Epstein helped Belyakov to locate tax havens and to evade sanctions; he also assisted in laundering the reputations of Russian intelligence officers, introducing them as legitimate businessmen to high-profile Americans to help them operate in the US without raising suspicion… The liberal epistemic style has a strong allergy to connecting the dots, partly as a reasonable response to growing paranoid thinking on the Right – but also as a class marker. Baroque patterns of elite coordination became associated with Glenn Beck’s chalkboard. As Thiel wrote to Curtis Yarvin in 2014, “one of our hidden advantages is that these people” – he meant the progressive Left – “wouldn’t believe a conspiracy if it hit them over the head…Linkages make them sound crazy, and they kinda know it.”

    Focus on the geopolitical context of Epstein's modus operandi illuminates establishment culture, and reveals the left/right glove-puppet default mode it has long used in politics.

    • greywarshark 5.1
      8 February 2026 at 2:50 pm

      Thanks Dennis Frank – you have trod on my dreams and that needs to happen millions of times with each person seeing, pausing and recovering themselves ready to think of a new dream.

      Those who have seen the flaming fiesta of kleptocracy must find new simpler, less contrived ones that enable them and their compatriots to move together into a practical and kindly human future.

  6. Dennis Frank 6
    8 February 2026 at 4:11 pm

    I'm still reluctant to give up on him, but Britain has slid into a twilight zone:

    Keir Starmer’s leadership is “hanging by a thread”, one backbencher texts me. As it is, Starmer owes his survival so far to the generally bovine nature of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Almost everyone in the PLP agrees that “it’s over”, that the authority of the Prime Minister is irrecoverable.

    But in the absence of a standout alternative, the MPs lumber on, zombie-like. Many are unsure of how or when to trigger the inevitable, too scared to take the initiative, afraid for their own careers as well as for the unknown trajectories of a leadership contest that would be fraught with dangers and would plunge the country into a deep uncertainty…

    In lieu of a real vision, Starmer and McSweeney had promised quiet competence and a steady hand. Their alliance with the old guard delivered neither…Downing Street has floundered, and will go on floundering, whipped around like a plastic bag in a storm, until it ejects a Prime Minister who is palpably unsuited to the job, and who has become a national hate figure with polling as dismal as Liz Truss’s at her nadir. https://unherd.com/2026/02/the-end-of-starmerism/

    Jeepers! Seems like the Irish fella is too contaminated now. Perhaps Starmer can find another mastermind, but prospects seem bleak and Labour's malaise deepens daily.

  7. alwyn 7
    8 February 2026 at 7:52 pm

    Is there any chance we can persuade the Wellington City Council to feed Trump's ego and name something after him?

    The Donald J Trump Memorial Sewage Treatment Station at Moa Point perhaps.

    It is currently just about as smelly as his financial dealings.

    • Dennis Frank 7.1
      8 February 2026 at 8:13 pm

      The poor bugger needs a boost, eh? This here public approval tracker compares his with Biden's dramatic slump, which he has struggled to match: https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

      The 3 graph lines show he's not that far behind Biden at this stage of the term and is matching his first term slide rather well. Ending all them wars doesn't seem to have impressed the yanks much…