Stop Reading This and Throw Away Your iPhone

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We are truly in the future now. I just saw a Waymo and a Zoox, both driverless taxis, pass each other on the street. They were the only moving traffic at that moment. And now additional brands are taking to the streets. 

I myself have been taking Waymos a good bit, though only when they’re priced lower than the human alternatives, which is rare, as they command a premium most of the time. That’s partially because of their novelty and attraction to tourists and newbies, and partially because — this may be hard to swallow — they feel safer than trusting a human driver. 

When you get in the car, they greet you with your name; you can choose music and other amenities; they’re comfortable and spotless. I sometimes engage in a brief bit of self-amusing chitchat even if “they” don’t respond — but I admit to wondering if humans somewhere might be listening in. 

Meanwhile, I stayed at a friend’s and was startled when his robot vacuum fired up and essentially chased me out of a room. It came through three times over the next couple hours, interrupting Zoom calls and generally rattling me. I’ll bet the floor is really clean! 

From High Tech, to Low Tech, to No Tech — to IRL

Those of us accidental hypocrites who rely so heavily on technology but wish we didn’t may take heart in a report that “cool kids” are shunning their phones and going for pure IRL (in real life) encounters.  

They were inspired by a comedian named Dan Fox, who is behind the Summer of Ludd, a festival designed to separate people from their smartphones, and to celebrate a “burgeoning Luddite renaissance in New York, the result of an amorphous community of phone-free event organizers, self-described ‘attention activists,’ aligned nonprofits, and a few not-smart phone companies.”

Fox says he’s running for president and his platform is no platform. “Everything is IRL. I intend to be the first IRL president of all time.” His epiphany came in 2015 as he watched a concert where, instead of seeing a rapt audience experiencing the moment, he saw a sea of devices, and walked away full of determination to spread the word: Smartphones are ruining lives. 

The ultimate message seems to be: Instead of spending hours on your smartphone, spend that time on activities you love, involving both your mind and your body, and be with people face-to-face — in real time.

The Once-Great Liberals Who Now Embrace Trump

One of my “favorite” people, Tulsi Gabbard, is revealed as being a puppet of a cult leader in a superb Washington Post investigation. 

Let me repeat that revelation: The person overseeing intelligence for the US was the puppet of a cult leader. Now, you may consider Donald Trump himself a cult leader, but he was at least elected. This is about something every bit as bizarre and dangerous. 

Among the main points from this incredibly complicated story: 

The Post went through hundreds of confidential memos — from unnamed persons — containing detailed policy guidance for Gabbard during her years in Congress, and eventually identified the author of those memos: A man Gabbard calls her “guru,” Chris Butler. 

Butler does not use a computer, but communicated with Gabbard by telephone, or through her parents, or through memos written by his secretaries. And, he insisted, they were never to add his name.

Butler, along with both of Gabbard’s parents, belongs to a breakaway Hare Krishna group that former members say is a cult, run by Butler, who is “akin to a god” and demands total obedience and secrecy. He is also anti-Islam, anti-homosexual, anti-gun control, and anti-science.

Butler’s invisible puppetry is made clear in small ways. After describing the details of a particular policy, an unnamed person (assumed to be Butler) wrote “time for TG to come up with this idea.”  

He dictated policy on a variety of issues, many of which concerned the Middle East: partition war-torn Iraq into three states; penalize countries with citizens who had fought for the Islamic State; prevent the US from ousting then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; oppose intervention in Syria’s civil war.  

One of the memos contained this phrase: “The CIA is the one that started this thing.” Three years later, Gabbard made that same claim publicly.

Informed that the article was about to be released, Gabbard abruptly announced her resignation. She said she was leaving to take care of her husband, who has cancer. 

How could such a story essentially come and go without a major storm of outrage? How does Trump get away with saying nothing about it? Why are he and the Republican leadership not called to account? How is something this hugely embarrassing and deeply harmful to the country overshadowed by things like a senatorial candidate’s dating behavior long ago?  

***

Another of my “favorite” people — Bobby Kennedy Jr., who, unlike Gabbard, isn’t controlled by a cult, but may be controlled by a brain worm, or Satan — lied about what he was doing on a trip to Samoa, and whether he was there to push the anti-vax line. He told Congress that wasn’t the reason for the trip, but a recent report in The Guardian says he blatantly lied — and provides solid evidence.  

Kennedy apparently hasn’t reined in his bad behavior since being confirmed by the Senate. Recently, he has been calling third-party candidates and lobbying them to drop out of close congressional races to ensure the GOP holds its House majority. 

He has been dropping hints of some kind of rewards if the candidates comply. Now, if he is offering them benefits from the Trump administration, that’s not only unethical, it’s illegal. Details on this have been emerging bit by bit as more news organizations look into it. 

If there’s any doubt that Kennedy knew he wasn’t supposed to be even making those calls — which presumably were ordered up by Trump — his specific statements, some of them recorded, belie that. 

“I can’t go into specifics because there’s legal prohibitions about that,” Kennedy told Rick Stewart, a Libertarian candidate running in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, in a June 11 call. “If it’s something that you want to talk about, you know, you and I can talk about specifics.” 

So he can’t talk specifics. But… hey, let’s talk specifics. Presumably on a “walk and talk” with no microphones within range. Just ask the Mob: They’re experts at this.  

I know plenty of people who believed, before RFK Jr. took office, that he was a righteous and fiercely honest man who would take on the powerful. I respect their opinion. But I wonder, as one revelation after another proves him to be a shameless opportunist and hypocrite, at what point they’ll have the presence of mind to admit they were misled. 

The Situation in the Situation Room 

I am continually amazed by the important stories that come and go with little notice. The ones above, especially the Gabbard story, would, in a less chaotic age, have dominated headlines and public discussion.

Another matter that went entirely under the radar is the news of how Trump has been using the White House Situation Room. 

As usual, everything is topsy-turvy. Although Trump and his team sometimes discuss important national security matters in that room and on open signal chats, they also discuss these issues in the open, including over dinners at Mar-a-Lago. 

Meanwhile, the Epstein matter was apparently so sensitive that it warranted the super private Situation Room. From The New York Times:

As the calls for transparency grew louder, the top ranks of the Trump administration spent even more time in the bunker. By now, the Situation Room itself had become inseparable from the crisis — a guarded space where Trump’s inner circle worked to steer the president around a scandal that would soon taint or consume careers at the highest levels of business, science, and politics.

We know that Trump’s inner circle held closely guarded damage-control meetings in that room, as detailed in the book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Top officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, used the classified space to build a PR strategy. 

This may be the first time that sexual misbehavior and related improprieties warranted such strict measures. 

Located in the West Wing basement, the Situation Room is fortified with acoustic sealant and soundproofing, and reinforced with mesh and plywood; the CIA and Department of Defense have engineered countermeasures against electronic surveillance; they regularly sweep the room for listening devices; and cells phones and other electronic devices are strictly prohibited.

So how in the world did Haberman and Swan get all those juicy details about what was said in that room? 

JD Vance Positions Himself 

Haberman and Swan’s recounting of Situation Room meetings in their book “is so detailed — and undisputed by the participants — that it has Trump aides fearing a ‘shocking breach,’” Axios reported over the weekend. Axios cited anonymous sources, but Vance confirmed it during an interview with Megyn Kelly on June 16.

He claimed last week’s Regime Change excerpt about the White House “freakout” over the Epstein files was mostly a “nothingburger,” but also said, “There were certain things in there that legitimately made me worried that people were, like, taping.”

“Yeah, in the Situation Room!” Kelly said.

“Which, by the way, is like a felony,” Vance said.

After reading this, I wondered why Vance brought up, in public, the subject of someone recording those secret meetings. On one level, it seems he’s backing Trump and trying to stay in his good graces by noting the felony. However, bringing up the matter itself might also be interpreted as Vance seeking to subtly distance himself from the entire Trump debacle — the one that led to those Situation Room meetings in the first place.

I thought that Vance confessing to being a “conspiracy theorist” on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein was a brilliant bit of politics, since most Americans believe there is an ongoing cover-up.

On the other hand, Vance defends Trump in a way that is stunningly deceptive. Recently, on The View, when co-host Ana Navarro asked him about Trump’s friendship with Epstein, Vance said:

I know you guys don’t always appreciate this, but you know one of the things you see in the Epstein emails is that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump literally reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police. That’s one of the things that came out.

When others pointed out the long and deep friendship between Trump and Epstein, Vance quickly drowned them out with words that re-characterized their relationship: that Trump merely “knew” him. And Vance said twice that they knew each other in the ’80s — as if only in the ’80s.

Yes. Donald Trump has said this. He knew Jeffrey Epstein back in the 1980s. He also threw   Jeffrey Epstein out of his club when he found out he was a creep, and reported him to the police. That’s something the media often misses… They tell the fact that they knew each other in the ’80s, which the president admits, but they ignore the fact that he narked on him to the police…

When others tried to point out Trump’s deeper association with Epstein, Vance interrupted again and again, hammering home that Trump reported him to the police, leading to Epstein’s downfall.  

It was as if Vance thought he could substitute that image of Trump contributing to Epstein’s downfall for a very different image: Trump and Epstein together, on numerous occasions, hunting women. 

Vance’s latest memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is No. 1 on Amazon’s list of best-selling new releases. I have not read the book, but enjoyed this edgy review of it from reader Scott D. Brummundt:

[T]he story of a man who has found God roughly the way other men find a parking spot near the entrance: through persistence, good timing, and a sincere belief that it was meant for him. Vance walks us from a loosely evangelical Appalachian boyhood, through a collegiate atheism he assembled, movingly, out of Ayn Rand, and finally into the arms of the Catholic Church. A journey he credits in part to his benefactor Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and noted devotional figure who has more recently been reported describing the current pope as a tool of the Antichrist.

The other day, Vance went to the Nixon Library and sought to minimize Watergate as overblown. The net effect was to somehow tie Trump in people’s minds to Watergate. Just sayin’! Then again, Vance also compared himself to Nixon. So who knows what his calculation is? Could Vance be just as bizarre as Trump, Gabbard, RFK Jr., and the lot?