What if the 25th Amendment came with a trophy… If that doesn’t work, maybe we should enact a similar amendment for citizens made crazy by the relentless craziness coming out of the Oval Office. I’d say it was ironic that a guy so vehemently against granting asylum has made the whole country feel like it’s one big one, but irony is long gone, having emigrated from America and cut off all internet access about two minutes into Kid Rock’s alternative halftime show. If I were on the Artemis II, which is scheduled to splash down on Friday, I think I’d suggest we do another loop. Why come back to this? In the course of about an hour on Thursday, we experienced the latest maniacal spinning about the Iran negotiations, a shock Epstein-related press conference from the First Lady, and a 482-word presidential postthat attacked former allies like Tucker Carlson and MTG (he gave more details about what is wrong with them than he did about why he went to war with Iran). Maybe this is all a secret plot to get us to look at our devices less often. Sorry, I’m out of the office messages have escalated to Sorry, I’m out of my mind. Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner explain how the craziness has spread, if not all the way to you and me, definitely throughout the administration. “What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how the president’s pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is because it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state. This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president himself. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, his impulsivity, inconsistency and his outright breaks with reality have become state policy.” NYT (Gift Article): The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State. (I’m pretty sure that headline applies to news curators as well.) 2The American Add VanceNegotiations over the next days and weeks will determine what we have or haven’t achieved through the Iran “excursion.” But some parts of the scoreboard are already coming into focus. Fareed Zakaria talked to Ezra Klein about what Iran has gained: “What it has gained is a far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons. It has realized — and shown the world — that it can destroy the global economy, that it can block the Strait of Hormuz — and that it would have a cataclysmic follow-on effect.” And what America has lost: “That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away. I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.” 3Modern Mythos“According to Anthropic, the bot has been able to find thousands of software bugs that had gone undetected, sometimes for decades, a sophistication and speed of attack previously thought by many to be impossible. The model has found a nearly 30-year-old vulnerability in one of the world’s most secure operating systems. The Anthropic researcher Sam Bowman posted on X that he was eating a sandwich in the park when he got an email from Mythos Preview: The bot had broken out of the company’s internal sandbox and gained access to the internet.” Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem. 4Weekend WhatsWhat to Doc: Chess Mates on Netflix tracks the biggest controversy in the chess world (and, as it turns out, in the anal bead world). You might not know who to believe and you don’t have to be into chess, or beads, to be into this documentary. 5Extra, ExtraPolitical Pawnshops: In large part due to the Iran war, Inflation is way up and consumer sentiment is way down. Don’t want to listen to the economists? Then listen the pawn shop owners. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Pawn Shop Loans Spike as High Gas Prices Weigh on Americans. 6Feel Good Friday“’It wasn’t real until we got here,’ said Steve Gildner, a friend in the insurance business. ‘When he was stretching this morning, he was between [Dustin Johnson] and Rory [McIlroy]. It’s crazy.” Meet the realtor who earned a tee time at Augusta National.
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Business Blog
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Hit the Psychotic Brake
Thursday
I’m out tonight, which means y’all get the night off. Also, you get chickens. It’s warming up here, and I’m hoping to get some spring coop cleaning, garden planting, and touch-up painting done in the next few weeks. The chickens follow my progress as I survey what needs doing, and Pickles seems acutely aware of when there’s a camera pointed at her. She is a stunner! Today is the start of the annual bamboo feast, where we cut down some of the tender young shoots and let the girls go to town. It’s high in protein and always seems to help the last feathers grow back in at the end of their molt. I’m ready for my fluffy girls again, after watching them try to grow out some very bedraggled-looking feathers these last few weeks. This sweet girl, the smallest of our chickens, ends up in over her head in the bamboo forest, but she really loves it. But I’m pretty sure she’s ready for her true favorites, basil and cucumbers, so I’m hoping my seedlings are ready to go outside this week. Enjoy your night off! We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Hit the Psychotic Brake
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