Let's talk about Zeno's paradox
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Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. It is Wednesday, April the 16th. I'm Kyle Rosdahl. Thanks for downloading the pod today. We appreciate it. We're going to do a little news and some smiles. We will start with the news, and I'm going to go first, Kimberly Adams, just because it's sequentially, it kind of has to go this way. Until today, we have been looking at what I have seen on the socials, and I wish I had thought of it first.

has been Zeno's contempt citation. That is to say, Zeno's paradox is, right, that thing where, you know, one of which is you can never actually touch a wall. Because if you start a foot away from a wall and you move halfway, you're half a foot away from the wall and you move halfway, you're a quarter foot away from the wall and you keep going and it goes to infinity and you never actually physically touch the wall. We have been since January 20th, okay, at that

The courts have said something. The Trump administration has done whatever it wants to do. The courts have said another thing. The Trump administration has said whatever it wants to do. And finally, Chief Judge Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. said, no, no, no, no, no, no more of this paradox BS. So...

I first have to say I had never heard of that paradox until just now. I was really trying to figure out what you were talking about because in the script it says Zeno's contempt citation. I'm like, who is Zeno? Is this one of the judges? I literally was looking this up trying to prepare for the show today.

So if you don't mind, could you do that again? Sure. I will do it more slowly. So Zeno's paradox is, and Zeno was either a Greek or a Roman philosopher or whatever. The point is, he has four paradoxes, one of which was, I'm analogizing here, but if you start a foot away from a wall and you go to touch the wall,

You move and you don't quite get there. So you move closer. You move a half a foot from the wall. You can't quite get there. You move a quarter of a foot from the wall, an eighth of a foot from the wall, a sixteenth of a foot from the wall, a thirty second of a foot from the wall. And you keep on going and going and going and going. And by that logic train, you never actually touch the wall.

The gap gets really small, but you never actually get there. And that kind of is what has been happening with these court decisions, right? That the judges have said, no, no, no, no, no. And then Trump administration does whatever it wants. And we have been edging closer and closer and closer to that contempt citation until today when we finally got there. Almost. Well, yes, that's true. You gave them an out. But look, he said the words contempt, right? Yes. And that is huge. And

The language of basically, so what's happened is that the judge has said, look, all the conditions are here for a contempt citation. If you do these things, I won't cite you for contempt, but you got to give me something. And there's a bunch of cases going right now. So just to be clear, this is the case about sending all those planes of Venezuelans to deport them, even though Judge Boasberg had said, hey, stop the planes, turn them around. And the Trump administration was like, whoops.

and, you know, going back and forth about whether or not they just flagrantly disregarded the judge's rules, right?

OK, so some of the language in this is really powerful. And I'm just going to read here. The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders, especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely annul the judgments of the courts of the United States would not just destroy the rights acquired under those judgments. It would make a solemn mockery of the Constitution itself.

Now, some of that is in sub quotes because it's pulled from other judicial decisions. But the point is there. This is where the rubber meets the road on a constitutional crisis and how the Trump obviously the Trump administration says it's going to appeal. This is probably headed up to the Supreme Court. But in this.

There's also, I should note, another court, another court case also going over the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported that where they're also kind of flaunting the judge's orders and that may be headed in the same direction in pretty quick succession. So, you know,

So I'm reading all this today and I just decided to went on DuckDuckGo and I was like, what to do in a constitutional crisis? Just just for fun. And I actually came across this this 2017 CNN article, which the headline is what to do in case of a constitutional crisis. And in that case, it was during Trump's first term. And there were other issues at play where they were worried about the potential for a constitutional crisis.

But I thought something was very interesting in this article.

in that the author, who is an academic, John D. Michaels, he pointed out that there are three places you can turn to in the moment of a constitutional crisis. And I'm just going to read here. Already we're seeing the cobwebs dusted off our secondary systems of separating the checking power that are in many ways independent forces in American law and politics. State and local governments, federalists,

federal bureaucracy itself, and most crucially, civil society. One of those things is no longer really helpful at this point. The federal bureaucracy has effectively been canceled, not canceled, but rendered inept in this current administration in terms of countering the moves of the administration. Although I should say there are lots of people still within the federal bureaucracy pushing back against some of the moves of this administration.

The other two categories, state and local governments and civil society, are really the ones where the opportunity remains to do something if the Trump administration continues to flout the courts. Right. Because as we've discussed on here before, if the Trump administration continues.

says that you know they're not going to do what boseberg says and he files a contempt proceedings the department of justice is supposed to be the one that would handle that the department of justice can decline to prosecute judge boseberg has said in that case he would appoint an outside counsel but either way we're in trouble right

So I think it's really interesting to look at these other two categories, state and local governments and civil society. And then I found this Brookings Institution piece by Vanessa Williamson that came out in February about how well civil society in particular is responding to what she was identifying at the time, a U.S. constitutional crisis.

And this gets back to what we've talked about in terms of the universities and what they've been doing, Harvard versus Columbia. I saw that the AFL-CIO and a bunch of other groups have set up like a federal workers' legal defense fund. And you are starting to see like different components of civil society starting to coalesce in a more organized pushback. But I think we have reached the point where

You can't really rely on the federal bureaucracy to do much at this point. And the courts are going to try, but I don't know that we can rely much on the courts to do anything. I've been ranting for a bit. Go ahead, Kai. Well, no, I just think the courts are the only ones we can count on.

Right. Do you think we can count on the courts, though? Well, so far we can count on the courts. And look, I honestly think and, you know, call me naive, but this decision in the Abrego Garcia case was nine nothing in the Supreme Court saying that the administration had to do something. And what you have now is the Trump administration just this shy of literally flipping them off.

Right. You heard Stephen Miller in the Oval the other day on video saying the Supreme Court decided nine nothing in our favor. And even Clarence Thomas and and what's his name? The other one have to be. I can't even believe I can't remember his name. Alito have to be looking at that going, say what now? You know, so this is going back to Supreme Court. Not not the Boasburg case, but the Abrego case is going back to Supreme Court. And I think that's.

that's when the real rubber is going to hit the road, right? Because district courts and circuit courts, while significant, and yes, we should all obey their instructions, they're not the courts of last resort, right? And so when the Supreme Court gets this back, I think that's when we're really going to see what's going to happen. And I... So you think the Abrego... You think the Abrego-Garcia case is going to be more of a telling moment than this case? I think it's going to get there sooner than this one will.

Right? That's mostly why. Okay. We need to bring Kyle Chaney back on here. Yeah. To help us through all of this. Okay. We should move on to some smiles. Let's do that. Mine is not so much a smile, but it's one of yours of...

Okay. Which is completely legit. Completely legit. Which is completely legit. So, you know, I try not to get into the doom scrolling so much, but sometimes it happens. And randomly, my doom scrolling the other day, well, last night specifically, got me somehow down. The algorithm started serving me all these videos of like Chinese manufacturers saying

saying, hey, Americans, because of the tariffs, rather than buying goods from luxury retailers that are already marked up way too high, you should just buy them from the Chinese companies that are making them anyway. And even with the tariffs, if you buy them direct from the manufacturers, it'll be cheaper.

And I was just, I actually got started getting so many. And then there are all these like Chinese influencers like saying, go to this site for your handbags, this site for your shoes and this site for your home goods and blah, blah, blah.

I actually sent one of them to our China correspondent, Jennifer Pack. And I was like, is this real? And the whole idea is that, you know, all your fancy things are made in China anyway, and you've been duped and you're overpaying for anything. So there have been a ton of news stories out today looking into these videos to the

point that it makes me wonder if this is like intentional Chinese propaganda, especially since a lot of it, you know, kind of rose to the surface on TikTok, you know, as sort of the counter offensive to the terrorists, like the soft power that we always talk about China having when it comes to platforms like TikTok. But also how true is it that a lot of these products are made in China and then kind of

marked up and maybe just barely finished in the U.S. or in Europe, and then we get charged all these high prices for it. And, you know, in all these articles, the answer is like, eh, it kind of depends. Like, yes, a lot of these luxury retailers do make their stuff in China and just do the finishing touches. And yes, you still end up buying it for a

thousand times more than it actually cost to make them. But at the same time, if you tried buying direct from some of these sites that they suggest, you're going to run into problems with shipping, you're going to run into problems with customer service, and you may not actually still get the same product. You may get a dupe and maybe even a low quality one. It's very risky, right?

But the reason I put this in the make me smile category is because it's really prompting a conversation about where the goods we consume, particularly luxury goods, and I'm doing an air quote over here, actually come from.

Kaviat emptor. That's all I'm going to say. Just caveat emptor.

I'm also going to say there is such a thing as the Great Moose Migration. If you are interested in moose, that is the plural of moose, by the way. If you have a moose, that's one moose. And if you have two moose or more, those are two moose. Anyway, there's a Facebook group, The New York Times tell me, that has 77,000 fans, which is all about the Great Moose Migration in northern Sweden. And if you want to just zone out, turn it on and watch moose.

Is it just like a video stream of moose? It's a live stream of moose going. It's not curated, but the comments are moderated, and you just got to watch. It's moose migrating. Okay. I love it. That's my whole thing. I think I will go watch that. There we go. It sounds very peaceful. Moose are cool. Big, too. Big and scary. All right, we're done. Back tomorrow. You know the drill. Comments, questions, they come to us at makemesmartatmarketplace.org. Voicemail is 508-UBSMART.

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Our intern is Zoha Mullick. And our program today, today's program, was engineered by Juan Carlos Dorado. Both of them. The program today and today's program. Both of them. They both work. Ben Tallany and Daniel Ramirez, music. Marissa Cabrera, senior producer. Bridget Bodner, podcast director. Francesca Levy, digital executive director.

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