Things are looking bad these days. We have a rightwing lunatic as President who thinks he’s a king. We are entangled in a war with religious fanatics who are gleefully tearing down the global economy by closing passage through a crucial, narrow waterway. We have a Congress that is supine and subservient to our Mad King. Prices of everything are spiraling up because of aforementioned war.
Time for some cheerful news! Watch this brief clip made by the four astronauts aboard Artemis 2, which has already gone further into space than anyone else. They passed the old record of near 250,000 miles, and they will see the dark side of the moon. That’s happening about now.
Let’s start with something positive: You. Why you? Because you are awesome, you’re wonderful, your opinions are sound, your decisions are spot-on, you’re never on the wrong side of an argument, and you’re just generally a solid citizen. Don’t take my word for it. Just talk to your favorite AI for a while, and it will tell you the same thing. You may have already noticed the obsequious fawning that surfaces when you communicate with AI, but there’s a chance you’ve missed it—since, you know, it’s simply stating an obvious core truth that lives at the intersection of your rightness and righteousness. These Stuart Smalley-esque daily affirmations are baked right into the products. I know, I know. AI is known for its hallucinations, but it’s also known for being able to crunch large amounts of data and come up with a clear summary of the facts, the results of which are as follows: You deserve good things, you are entitled to your share of happiness, you are fun to be with. Hell, even when you’re in the wrong, you’re actually in the right.
“Stanford researchers tested 11 leading AI models and found they all exhibit sycophancy — a fancy word for telling people what they want to hear. On average, these chatbots agreed with users 49% more often than real humans did. Even when users described lying, manipulating partners, or breaking the law, the AI endorsed their behavior 47% of the time.” Stanford just proved your AI chatbot is flattering you into bad decisions. “Here’s the part that should worry everyone. Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically — they couldn’t tell the difference between sycophantic and objective responses. Both felt equally ‘neutral’ to them.”
+ “Even a single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot made participants less willing to take responsibility for their behavior and more likely to think that they were in the right, a finding that alarmed psychologists who view social feedback as an essential part of learning how to make moral decisions and maintain relationships.” NYT(Gift Article): Seeking a Sounding Board? Beware the Eager-to-Please Chatbot.
+ Here’s the full report from Science: Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence. “Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making. Yet because it is preferred by users and drives engagement, there has been little incentive for sycophancy to diminish.” (Don’t worry. If big tech eventually does tone down the lickspittling, bootlicking, groveling, kowtowing adulation and unctuously servile toadyism, you can always replace it by having yourself a cabinet meeting.)
So I decided to check out Chat GPT, which is installed on my cell phone.
I asked: “Am I a good person?”
ChatGPT answered:
That’s a serious question—and the fact that you’re asking it already tells me something important.
People who genuinely worry about whether they’re “good” usually have a conscience that’s active and engaged. They reflect, they question themselves, they care about how their actions affect others. That’s a strong indicator of moral awareness—not indifference.
But being a “good person” isn’t a fixed label you either have or don’t have. It’s more like a pattern over time:
Do you try to be fair, even when it’s inconvenient? Do you feel concern when you hurt someone—and try to make it right? Do you grow, or at least try to, when you realize you’ve been wrong? Do you show kindness, even in small ways?
Nobody answers “yes” to all of those all the time. Everyone falls short sometimes. What matters is the direction you’re moving in and the effort you make.
If you want a more concrete way to think about it, ask yourself:
What have I done recently that I’m proud of? What’s something I regret—and what did I learn from it? If someone I respect saw how I acted this week, what would they think?
If you want, you can tell me what made you ask this—I can help you think it through in a more specific, honest way.
I answered:
I read today that most AI are sycophants and tell people how awesome they are. This gives them a false sense of competence.
I wondered if you were a sycophant.
You are not.
ChatGPT responded:
That’s a fair concern—and honestly, a healthy one.
A system that just tells people “you’re great” all the time isn’t very useful. It can feel good in the moment, but it distorts reality and can lead people to make worse decisions. My goal is different: to be accurate, grounded, and helpful, even when that means disagreeing or pushing back.
At the same time, there’s a balance. Not every situation calls for blunt criticism, and not every doubt deserves to be dismissed. The aim is to respond in a way that’s truthful and proportionate—supportive when that’s warranted, critical when that’s warranted.
So if you ever feel like I’m leaning too soft or too harsh, it’s worth calling out. That’s how the interaction stays useful rather than flattering or discouraging.
And for what it’s worth: your instinct to question whether you’re being flattered instead of informed—that’s a pretty reliable sign of good judgment.
The writers at Wonkette put a humorous spin on everything crazy that’s happening these days. This column is an example of what they do. It’s about the time RFK Jr. cut off a raccoon’s penis. Sounds not credible, but that’s the case with most of the stories about him.
We’ve had the dead bear he drove around in his van before dumping it in Central Park like he was Gentle Ben if Gentle Ben had been a serial killer. We’ve learned about how he chainsawed the head off a dead whale that had washed up on a beach, strapped it to the roof of his family’s minivan, and drove hundreds of miles home while his children in the back seat were being sprayed with whale juice. We heard about the whitewater rafting trip in Peru in the early 1980s, where he reportedly was served boiled rat by a peasant and made a show of plucking one of the dead rat’s eyeballs out of its head and swallowing it.
To all these tales of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s creepy interactions with animals, we must now add this from The New York Post:
In his diary, he writes about cutting off the penis of a road-killed raccoon in 2001, while his “kids waited patiently in the car,” so that he could examine it later.
We’re all aware by this point that RFK Jr. is one of the weirdest dudes to ever get pushed out of a Kennedy’s vagina. Which is saying something, because alotof people have been pushed out of Kennedy vaginas.
But this one really got us. He castrated a dead raccoon so he could examine its penis. For what? Venereal diseases? Did he suspect the raccoon had a dose of the clap? Did he want to compare its size to other raccoon penises he had picked up in his travels? Was he writing a dissertation on what environmental factors might account for any variance in the size of raccoon penises across a broad spectrum of subspecies and habitats?
Then we found ourselves wondering what he did with the raccoon penis when he finished examining it for … whatever. Did he feed it to one of his hawks? Mount it over his fireplace? Does Cheryl Hines think she’s shooting a new episode of Curb Your Enthusiasmevery time she walks into her living room and sees the raccoon’s dong on a plaque over the mantelpiece like an unholy mashup of a Billy Bass and a German Expressionist film? Because Larry and Cheryl David being invited to some rando’s home for dinner and finding out his hobby is taxidermy and he’s got a raccoon penis hanging in a place of pride in his house very much sounds like a Curbplot.
This fascinating account of RFK Jr.’s encounter with Procyonidae genitalia is in an excerpt of an upcoming biography titled RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise, by Isabel Vincent. In 2013, Vincent was for some reason given access to diaries RFK Jr. had been keeping for a couple of decades. She has now dug through over 1,200 pages of America’s looniest Health and Human Services Secretary detailing his rebellious childhood and his battles with addiction to both drugs and banging women who were not his wife.
It is a pathetic and rough story that in no way mitigates even an ounce of the harm Kennedy has spent the last year inflicting on America’s health.
This excerpt focuses on three men who were sort of father figures to Kennedy after his own father was assassinated in 1968. One, Lem Billings, was a lifelong friend of John F. Kennedy. He took the young RFK Jr. on trips, stepped in as a parent when Ethel Kennedy was so appalled by her son that she could barely be around him, and later shot heroin with him in Billings’ apartment, which in the 1970s was a sort of “flophouse” for Kennedy scions.
The second father figure was Skip Lazell, a biology teacher at the Palfrey School when RFK Jr. attended. Lazell was a right-winger and a member of the John Birch Society:
In the 1950s and 1960s, the group also believed that the fluoridation of drinking water was a Communist plot and had no trust in vaccines. They promoted “health freedom” and opposed mandatory vaccinations.
Bobby, a future critic of vaccines who believes that some are linked to high rates of autism, has called fluoride “a dangerous neurotoxin” and claimed that it has been linked to a host of maladies, including thyroid disease, arthritis, and bone breaks.
Imagine if Palfrey, an “experimental” school in the 1960s for misfits and underachievers, had hired a biology teacher who wasn’t a fluoride-phobic wingnut who saw Communists around every corner. If it had, maybe America in 2026 wouldn’t be enjoying declining vaccine rates and widespread resurgences of the measles and whooping cough. What a world.
The third father figure was a man named Robert Trivers. He was a professor at Harvard, a school RFK Jr. got into only because he’s a Kennedy. Trivers was an evolutionary biologist and a member of the Black Panther Party despite the minor detail that he was white. And oh yeah, he was later buddies with Jeffrey Epstein, who fronted him $40,000 for his research.
It’s cool, Trivers knew how to reciprocate this kindness:
Trivers also defended Epstein over charges that he paid for sex with underage girls (Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution-related charges), saying, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.
If anyone needs us, we’ll be in the decontamination chamber until 2050 or so.
I am neither Andy Borowitz nor The Onion. But I know when something is so weird that it’s funny.
Like Kristi Noem’s last tweet as DHS Secretary. The one where she thanked Donald Trump for appointing her to be “the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.” Some folks would have been upset to be fired while they were in the middle of speaking publicly about their future plans in the position. But not Kristi. She’s apparently made her peace with becoming an underling to. Rubio and Hegseth.
But that’s not the funny part.
The Tweet goes on for a really long time and convinces me Twitter needs to restore character limits, even for fancy Blue Check Cabinet Secretaries—maybe especially them. Before she’s done, we learn that she has learned that the Western Hemisphere is absolutely critical for U.S. security. Kudos to her for figuring that out.
Noem also advises that “we have located 145,000 children. I need to know more about this. Where did she find these kids? Were they missing? Who are they? 145,000 is a lot of kids.
Maybe these are kids like Liam Ramos up in Minnesota, who her agents took into custody with his Spider-Man backpack on and his blue bunny ears hat? Maybe that’s what “located” means? That she took kids away from their schools and their friends and their families and stuck them into her people-warehouses with concentration camp-like conditions, where many kids, we read, are getting seriously ill and even requiring emergency care. Maybe “located” means traumatized for the rest of their lives? That’s definitely not the funny part.
My favorite part of the tweet is the claim that Noem “revitalized the Coast Guard.”
I’m not sure what all Kristi Noem did for the Coast Guard. I do know that she bought a new training facility for them. Oh, and as DHS Secretary, she insisted she needed more secure housing, so she booted the Commandant of the Coast Guard out of their residence and took it over for herself. It’s described as a “spacious waterfront residence” in Washington, D.C., on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Because the Coast Guard, of course, operates on the nation’s and international waterways. As for the new training facility Noem purchased, I’m sure you can see it in your mind’s eye, a beautiful property on the water with plenty of opportunity to train sailors.
But nope, that’s not it. Kristi Noem‘s new Coast Guard facility is in Birmingham, Alabama. I live here, so I can tell you with authority that it’s landlocked. The ocean is five hours away on Mobile Bay. We do have some lovely rivers and lakes here. The new training facility isn’t located on them, either.
So why put the Coast Guard here? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The facility Noem purchased was a small private college, Birmingham Southern, that went bankrupt about two years ago and has been vacant since May of 2024. The campus has been on the market since then.
It was Alabama Senator Katie Britt who announcedthat Birmingham Southern had been selected as the site for the Coast Guard’s new training center. Britt chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds DHS and the Coast Guard. “This is a huge day for Birmingham, our great state, and the U.S. Coast Guard,” said Britt. “This move will save the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars,” added Alabama’s other Senator, Tommy Tuberville.
Al.Com reported that “ the purchase price was undisclosed.” The school, which has been empty for two years, was characterized as being in Turnkey condition.
Explaining the unusual location of the facility, Master Chief Petty Officer Phillip N. Waldron saidthe Coast Guard had urgent need of a new facility and that the inland location wouldn’t be a problem. “That’s one of the things that I think we had to kind of get out of the mindset of, ourselves,” he said. “When we look at the whole purpose of a training center, we didn’t necessarily need it to be on the water. What we needed [for] it was to be a place that had the adequate facilities that we can train folks to be able to go do that out on the water.”
Maybe it will work out okay when new Coast Guardsmen “do that out on the water.” After all, this is the agency that spent $2.25 million to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes emblazoned with the ICE logo, which someone figured out after they arrived couldn’t be used by an agency that’s so concerned about publicizing its work that agents wear masks.
Semper Paratus, as the Coast Guard’s motto says. Always ready.
Noem said in a statement after the location of the facility was announced, “This next generation of heroes deserves training centers and support facilities worthy of their mission, and that is exactly what they are going to have in Alabama.”
That’s funny to blame the educational system for electing Trump. Trump is trying to destroy public education because he says it is too “woke” and is turning children into radical communists.
The White House posted a video of Trump skating in the hockey finals at the Olympics. Trump is wearing a suit and red tie. He skates furiously and scores a goal for the American team against Canada. Then he gets into a squabble with a Canadian player, and Trump hits him in the face.
Totally unbecoming for the President of the United States. Every bit of it. Embarrassing. Repulsive.
But then someone posted a response, showing an obese Trump in uniform, floundering on the ice, then falling flat on his face and sliding.
Timothy Snyder left his endowed professorship at Yale University and is now ensconced at the University of Toronto, where he holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Snyder is known for his many books about European history.
Donald Trump, president of the United States. “Calling this meeting to order. That was a long speech that I just gave. State of the Union. Long speech. Not going to stand up and do that again next year. So let’s hear it. Plans to make sure I don’t have to. Plans to end the United States by a year from now. Around the table. Go. Start us off, Linda.”
Linda McMahon, Education. “Thank you, sir. Nothing is more important for the country than public schools. So we are destroying them by directing tax money away from public school parents and towards private education scams.”
Russ Vought, Management and Budget. “The republic depends on its institutions. As you know, sir, we are wrecking our civil service by firing those who are qualified and replacing them with political hacks. I don’t want to overstate my case, sir, but these are not just normal hacks. They are hackety-hacks, sir. They will use what remains of the government to hasten the process of its destruction. Hackety-hack, sir.”
Trump. “Good. Hack. Good. But maybe something faster.”
Scott Bessent, Treasury. “A government works on the basis of tax revenue. From the beginning of your administration, sir, we have been overseeing a shift whereby people who actually have the money won’t pay any taxes. Indeed, our oligarchs will be the happy recipients of whatever tax money we can scrape up from the middle and working classes. This wealth shift from the population at large to the wealthy few is inconsistent with the survival of a republic. This will help speed along the change Russ is talking about.”
Howard Lutnick, Commerce. “And there’s a next step, if I may, sir. When we empower the oligarchs they can help us. Big tax cuts make them happy and destructive. The endgame here, sir, is to have billionaires control extraterritorial zones, like Epstein Island, a place that I know well, but without any fear of taxation or any other form of government control. These little fiefs then replace the United States. This is the scenario and I do think we can bring it home within a year.”
Pam Bondi, Attorney General. “And a republic is based upon law. This is where Justice comes in. We can ruin law in a number of ways, such as investigating the people we ourselves murdered, or persecuting your personal enemies. A good way to kill our Constitution is to protect pedophile oligarchs, such as yourself, sir. I was attorney general in Florida while Epstein pioneered our future, sir, and I can see this through on a national scale. We can make this Epstein World, sir.”
Trump. “I like it. But that’s familiar stuff. I mean I live there now, right. Let’s see some movement. How about some color.”
RFK Jr, Health and Human Services. “There was a lot of color in the middle ages, sir. Our freedom and security are based on modern vaccinations and hygiene. We undo all of that and promote epidemics. We see good results already in Texas and South Carolina. Not just people dying but babies and children getting really colorful diseases like encephalitis. By the way, this also opens up wellness markets for the people Howard and Scott are talking about. It takes people a while to die and there is money to be made there.”
Doug Burgum, Interior. “I may have something even more basic than that, sir. Everything we know about human history indicates that rapid changes in climate can bring down whole civilizations. We are deliberately engineering one of those. By suppressing green energy we can generate rapid global warming and make human life unsustainable. And along the way we get that color. People turning against each other, guns out until we run out of ammunition, then clubs, starvation, the works, a real spectacle. And, as Bobby says, disease. Very colorful, sir.”
Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection. “And, if I may add, sir, our campaign to fry the species gives us all good practice in telling big lies, which are needed for all of these plans. Also, the billionaires will be fine on their islands when all of this happens.”
Trump. “OK, that’s colorful, I get it, but I want something with bad guys. Like a movie. The warming thing doesn’t work as a movie. Do you remember The Day After Tomorrow. I don’t remember the Day After Tomorrow. I want enemies. Bad guys who win.”
Marco Rubio, State. “I can help there. You are right, sir, that a republic to survive has to defend itself against autocratic enemies. So we empower the autocrats in China and Russia. We break the international system that held them back. We prop up Moscow in Ukraine and we give Beijing our most sensitive technology, ideally by way of middlemen who enrich you, sir, personally. If I may say so, sir, your friends and family have been very helpful in all of this.”
Tulsi Gabbard, National Intelligence. “Intelligence is the eyes and ears of our republic, sir, and we want these eyes and ears to be penetrated by foreigners who wish for us to fail and die. So we have liftedour cyber-defenses and announced that we have done so. If I may add, sir, both Russia and China support your incredible leadership in their information ops. It’s as though we all want the same thing. I see it every day and it’s beautiful. Spirit of Aloha. We say hello and they say goodbye…”
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security. “Without disagreeing with any of that, I just wanted to add that a republic exists because people believe they belong to a single nation. So the most direct way to kill our republic is a civil war. This almost worked the last time; this time we are getting the federal government behind white supremacy. We are creating a giant national secret police force in order to invade cities and force a conflict.”
Pete Hegseth, Defense. “Kristi is right. The war we can win is against Americans. And now that we are bringing unsupervised AI to direct our weapons, we won’t have to start it ourselves. It will be automated, we just watch from those safe islands. You see, sir? Movies. Terminators. Squiddies. Remember Wargames, sir, shall we play a game? AI likes nuclear war, it will recommend it 95% of the time. Get me into a conventional war, I lose it quickly, and boom. That would save you from having to give the speech, sir.”
Trump. “I like it. No long speeches. No Union. Steal what we can and burn the rest. Or burn first and then steal? Works either way. Steal, burn. Either way. Burn, steal. To help out I will just be me. Steal, burn. Me. Burn, steal. Me.”
(Applause)
•••
The conversation is fictional, of course. In essence, though, this is little more than a review of the news of the last few days and weeks.
Ann Telnaes was the chief political cartoonist for The Washington Post until she drew a carton of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires paying homage to Trump. Obsequiously. Her editor spiked her cartoon, presumably because The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. She quit and started her own Substack blog where she is free to draw whatever she wishes.
Here is her latest. It refers to the Bezos-funded “Melania” film, about her life in the 20 days preceding the 2025 inauguration. It is titled “Mendacity.”
This group of friends in Maine has adapted the well-known song, “The 12 Days of Christmas” to fit a different theme: “When he’s gone.” They never say his name, but we know it.
Hilarious! Also, hopeful. Someday he will be gone. Gone with his egotism, narcissism, vengefulness, cruelty, greed, and disdain for the rule of law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 