Today’s Political Readings from Facebook and Substack

Musk’s boys don’t know Cobol; Robert Reich accuses MSM of being wishy-washy about the coup; Paul Krugman on the Trump administration suppressing health information; Connie Willis on Trump’s “massacre” of attorneys who resigned rather than drop charges against Eric Adams.

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First, a possible explanation for that bizarre claim by Musk that he’d found 150-year-old Social Security recipients.

Facebook post by Christopher Rowe, 14 Feb 2025:

Most of Musk’s stuff is done out of simple hatred and naked ambition, but one shouldn’t overlook the great percentage that comes from simple incompetence. (This isn’t even to get started on his hypocrisy, such as implementing drug testing on federal employees who’ve never had them imposed under any administration–the guy has bragged about doing hallucinogens and smoked pot during an interview). These people have done more to spit on the US in six weeks than Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson did in eight years.

Well… this is plausible, about Musk’s kids, despite being computer programmers, being uninformed about older computer languages. They’re young. Anything to substantiate this? Let’s Google. OK, here’s this.

Daily Kos, 14 Feb 2025: Nope. There are no 150-year-olds on Social Security. It’s COBOL!

Reports say that his group at DOGE is made up of fairly young people.  What those kids don’t realize is that Social Security uses VERY OLD computers.  They’re programmed with an old version of the programming language COBOL.

A bit of history.  On May 20, 1875 a bunch of countries got together to create the International Bureau of Weight and Measures which established uniform standards of mass and length.  Later on, the Bureau established rules for dates as well.  The dates standard used a starting date of May 20 1875 to honor the creation of the Bureau.

Old versions of COBOL use that date as a baseline.  Social Security’s computers use that old version. Dates are stored as the number of days AFTER May 20 1875.

So what happens if Social Security doesn’t know a birthdate?  That field is empty in its records.  Thus that person appears to have a birthday of May 20 1875—about 150 years ago.

That’s why the crack team of youngsters Musk uses found 150-year-old people in Social Security getting benefits.  It’s all really as simple—and as stupid—as that.

You’d think that those bright MAGAheads would notice that ALL those 150 year olds have THE SAME BIRTHDAY:  May 20, 1875.

But they didn’t.  Genius Elon Musk didn’t.  And, of course, STABLE GENIUS Donald Trump didn’t either.

Sigh.

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As I’ve noted, for all that conservatives rail against main-stream-media, leftists (which these days means realists), as often accuse msm of being too wishy-washy and falsely ‘balanced.’

Robert Reich, 14 Feb 2025: Say what this is: a coup.

I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup.

I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators.

I’m referring to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The Guardian.

By not calling it a coup, the mainstream media is failing to communicate the gravity of what is occurring.

Yesterday’s opinion by The New York Times’ editorial board offers a pathetic example. It concedes that Trump and his top associates “are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War” but then asks: “Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?” and answers that what Trump is doing “should be taken as a flashing warning sign.”

Warning sign?

Elon Musk’s meddling into the machinery of government is a part of the coup. Musk and his muskrats have no legal right to break into the federal payments system or any of the other sensitive data systems they’re invading, for which they continue to gather computer code.

It goes on.

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The Trump administration is suppressing information.

Paul Krugman, 14 Feb 2025: Lies, Damned Lies and Trumpflation, subtitled “Big worries — and some investment advice”

We currently have a major outbreak of bird flu, with serious concerns that it may already have spread to humans. Normally we’d be learning about the evolving risks from the CDC’s flagship research publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But Donald Trump’s appointees have politicized the historically independent report, telling it what and what not to cover. And the agency is already suppressing reports on bird flu.

Much more, of course.

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Connie Willis, 15 Feb 2025: Trump Outdoes Nixon at Saturday Night Massacring

This is about all those attorneys resigning rather than dropping charges against Eric Adams.

–The story so far: Asst. AG Emil Bove demanded that NY federal attorneys drop all charges against Mayor Eric Adams, Danielle Sassoon refused and resigned after writing a scathing resignation letter, then the next in command, Scotten, did, too, followed by five other attorneys. Bove then put all the attorneys in a room and said if they didn’t do it within an hour, they were all fired. According to reports, he lectured the public integrity lawyers about leadership and loyalty and was combative and condescending.
–The collective hostage taking worked, and Ed Sullian and Antoinette Bacon ended up signing the order. (Remember those names–they’re now going to be famous, just like Robert Bork was when he did Nixon’s bidding in the first Saturday Night Massacre.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Leave a comment

What They Mean By Traditional

Family arriving today for the weekend, so just a few quick items for now.

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Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilly, 14 Feb 2025: What the DOGE Takeover Really Means, subtitled “In the dark corners of social media where Elon Musk and the people who aspire to work for him live, it’s clear: This is about putting ‘traditional’ Americans back in charge.”

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Their bigotry is in plain view. Only straight white men who are Christian are allowed recognition by the federal government.

LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 14 Feb 2025: GOP advances bill that would allow Nazi flags while banning Pride flags, subtitled “The GOP lawmaker behind the bill said that the Nazi flag can serve ‘educational purposes’ but the rainbow flag can’t.”

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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Feb 2025: “What the Lord established”: Elon Musk is camouflaging a Christian nationalist takeover, subtitled “Project 2025 was clear: First, purge federal workers. Then replace them with theocrats and fanatics”

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A reaction to the confirmation of RFK Jr. Conservatives are like terrorists in this way.

CFI, The Morning Heresy, Jeff Dellinger, 14 Feb 2025: “My Colleagues Should Know Better” – RFK Jr. Confirmed, Scopes Centennial, and the Ten Commandments

Quoting CFI President and CEO Robyn Blumner:

“It has been said that it takes an engineer to build a bridge but any a-hole can blow it up…The same is true for public health. Expertise and painstaking, methodical medical science results in effective treatments and good public health, whereas purveyors of quack medicine and anti-vaccine conspiracies, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can undo it all in the blink of an eye.”

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Conservatives were outraged over Obama’s executive orders, not so much about Trump’s.

Media Matters, 14 Feb 2025: Laura Ingraham sounded the alarm about the need for Congress to assert its authority against a “tyrant” “would-be dictator” in the White House — in 2014, subtitled “Shockingly, Laura Ingraham and her Fox News colleagues’ concerns about executive orders may vary depending on which party holds the White House”

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In their burn-it-all-down zeal, the Trumpists ‘accidentally’ fired people who oversee our nuclear weapons security. And now are scrambling to get them back.

CNN, 14 Feb 2025: Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile, sources say

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NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 14 Feb 2025: Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

They’re so afraid of being “brain-washed” by education and reality; but they’re fine brainwashing others with their faux-Christianity and white supremacy.

There’s a solid core of Americans who understand reality, and will endure, even if Trump/Musk cuts off their funding.

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The subtitle answers the title’s question.

The Atlantic, Russell Berman, 14 Feb 2025: Why Isn’t Congress Doing Anything?, subtitled “Republicans are just fine with Elon Musk gutting the government”

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New Republic, Michael Tomasky, 14 Feb 2025: Trump’s A.G. Just Did Something So Corrupt She Should Be Fired Already, subtitled “Note to right-wing ‘media’ and all you fantasists who believe them: This is what judicial sleaze actually looks like.”

This is about dismissing charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, which several attorneys now have resigned rather than do.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

Richard Dawkins: THE MAGIC OF REALITY

Subtitled: How We Know What’s Really True
Illustrated by Dave McKean
(Free Press, Oct. 2011, 271pp, including 6p of index and acknowledgements)

When I was organizing my nonfiction books notes and posts last December, I was surprised that I had nothing on this book, though I was sure I read it. My records show I read it shortly after publication, in 2011. I suppose the reason I didn’t write up any notes is that it’s Dawkins-lite, somewhat like FLIGHTS OF FANCY (review here), heavily illustrated and aimed at, perhaps, young adult readers. The themes are pretty basic. Still, those themes are fundamental and worth capturing. So I reread the book last month, to capture the book’s ideas here.

The first essential idea is in the subtitle. The book is a tour of a several basic scientific topics, not just to provide the current state of knowledge on those topics, but to explain *how* people reached these conclusions. You don’t get that in intro science courses in high school or even college, unless you specifically take history of science courses. (At least, in my experience.) Thus some people are put off by what they see as the impudence or even arrogance of scientists dictating what’s true and what’s not — especially when what they claim to be true conflicts with religious myths.

The second essential idea is that there have always been myths about what people have imagined to be true. Almost every chapter begins with examples of myths from various cultures, about each topic: what the sun is; who the first person was; what a rainbow is; and so on. This is what struck me when I first read the book, especially how Dawkins casually mixes the very popular myths (those of “the Hebrew tribes of the Middle East [with their] single god, whom they regarded as superior to the gods of rival tribes” for example) alongside mostly forgotten myths from other cultures (in this case, myths from the Tasmanian aborigines, and from the Norse people of Viking seafarers). There’s some speculation as to why those cultures might have imagined their particular myths, though in most cases nothing is obvious; and Dawkins pauses to wonder to what degree those myths contain any truth at all, by modern standards. (Answer: not much.)

The third, most essential idea is that reality is much more interesting, and more magical in a poetic sense, than all those myths.

The book is replete with illustrations, of both the myths and of the historic scientific developments, all by Dave McKean, who is famous among other things as a science fiction artist, having done cover for many SF books. (Here’s a bibliography.)

1, The first chapter spells out what reality is, and what magic is. Reality is everything that exists, including things we don’t perceive directly but can deduce exist or must have existed. We use ‘models’ [theories] to figure out what might exist; then we go looking for evidence. Science is about explanation; its enemy is the supernatural, which explains nothing. There are three kinds of magic: supernatural, stage, and poetic. The first is found in myths and stories; the second consists of tricks done on a stage, either honestly (e.g. Penn and Teller) or by charlatans claiming psychic powers; and the third is the feeling that comes from beautiful music or a sky full of stars, things moving or exhilarating. The facts of the world are magical in that sense.

A key principle throughout is the slow magic of evolution, which we didn’t understand until the 19th century. How things change gradually, a bit at a time, over generations.

The next nine chapters address individual topics. I’ll briefly summarize each one.

2, Who Was the First Person? This is where Dawkins reviews the myths of the Tasmanians, the Hebrews, and the Norse. The reality is: There wasn’t one. Every person had two parents, and they were people too. But not forever. Dawkins imagines a stack of photographs of all your grandfathers, where some 50,000 generations back they would be Homo erectus. But there’s never any pair anywhere in the stack that marks the shift from erectus to sapiens. That’s the tapestry of life.

3, Why are there so many different kinds of animals?. Evolution. Populations of animals shift over time (especially when separated by topographical features), just as languages do; when people can no longer understand one another, we call their languages separate. Same for species and when separate groups of a species become disinclined to mate.

4, What are things made of? From the four elements of the ancients — air, water, fire, and earth — to the idea and discovery of atoms, the states of matter, how each element has a different number of protons.

5, Why do we have night and day, winter and summer? History is replete with myths about these. Reality involves the discovery that the Earth rotates, giving only the illusion that the sun goes around it; that the Earth revolves around the sun at an angle from the axis on which the Earth rotates; how summer and winter are reversed in the northern and southern hemispheres. [[ This, I would guess, is something most modern people still do not understand. ]]

6, What is the sun? Lots of myths here too. Sun and moon, man and woman, or brother and sister; a chariot driven across the sky. Actually, the sun is a star. Dawkins provides the usual distance comparisons, and examples of how some other stars are much, much larger than our own, or smaller. The sun’s energy drives life on Earth.

7, What is a rainbow? More myths, more than one connecting a rainbow to a big flood. But of course the rainbow is an effect of sunlight through water droplets; you can never stand at the end; and the sun actually includes many ‘colors’ or wavelengths of light that our eyes cannot see. Humans see only a tiny band in the middle of a huge spectrum. [[ And it’s not a coincidence that we see the brightest bands in that spectrum… it’s adaption. ]]

8, When and how did everything begin? All myths assume the existence of some kind of living creature before the universe itself came into being; oddly, none explain where that creator came from. In reality, there were two leading ‘models’ of the universe until the mid-20th century, when evidence came down on the side of the ‘big bang’ model (as opposed to the ‘steady-state’ model). That came through a chain of deductions: the distance to nearby stars by parallax, to farther stars by ‘standard candles’, how prisms and spectroscopes revealed black lines in spectra which in turn revealed the elements in those stars, how Doppler shifts in those lines revealed that all the galaxies are moving away from one another. Extrapolate back into time: the big bang.

9, Are we alone? Myths about life elsewhere in the universe are all modern: alien abductions and so on. Answer: we don’t yet know, but probably yes. We can make informed guesses, from the number of stars, the number of planets, the likelihood any given planet can support life, and so on.

10, What is an earthquake? Many myths about those. The reality is that there are tectonic plates, and the shapes of the continents have changed over 100 million years. And when the edges of those plates slip against each other, that’s an earthquake. The original idea was ridiculed, being so counter-intuitive (that huge land masses moved), but the evidence eventually won out.

The last two chapters aren’t about particular scientific knowledge, but are a primer about critical thinking, chance and probability, and human nature.

11, Why do bad things happen? In fiction, and myths, there is a kind of natural justice, that doesn’t exist in reality. Quakes and diseases aren’t caused by sin, or evil gods. Instead we should wonder: why does *anything* happen? Bad things need explaining only if they’re more common than they ‘should’ be. We often think they do — e.g. Murphy’s Law — but this is due to a bias of human nature: we’re more sensitive to potential threats than other events. All things happen because of luck, chance, and cause. When people say ‘everything happens for a reason’ they usually imply a reason like sin. But this is leftover from childhood notions of things happening for some reason. Similarly ideas of good and bad luck arise from a misunderstanding of the law of averages.

So the universe doesn’t care what we want. Things just happen. Still, if you’re alive, there may be many things out to get you. Animals, or viruses. Natural selection requires it. Both sides work to survive. And so it pays for wild animals to be paranoid, e.g. that a rustle in the grass might be a predator. This attitude explains many human superstitions. When it goes too far, we say they are paranoid.

Dawkins wonders if illness and evolution are part of a work in progress. And ponders parasites, the immune system, vaccines, how an overactive immune system can lead to allergies and auto-immune diseases. Which perhaps are byproducts of an evolutionary war against cancer.

12, What is a miracle? Nowadays nobody believes in fairy-tale magic, and we understand that stage magic is trickery. But some people do believe in supernatural events that they call ‘miracles.’ Someone you dreamed about dies the next morning. Jesus turning water into wine. Mohamed flying to heaven on a winged horse.

These are due to rumor, coincidence, and snow-balling stories. We usually hear such stories after being passed from person to person. Humans are pre-programmed to see faces of other humans, and this errs in seeing faces everywhere. [[ In clouds, in tortillas. ]] We like creepy stories and don’t bother with evidence. Miracle stories get written down and become hard to challenge, especially in books that are old. They become tradition. Stories like those dreams are simply coincidences. We only tell such stories when they happen, not all the times the person you dreamt about *didn’t* die the next morning. And stories grow in the telling.

A good way to think about miracles comes from David Hume, who said that miracles would be transgressions of the laws of nature. He said, you shouldn’t believe a miracle unless its falsehood would be even more miraculous. An example of a claimed miracle was about two English cousins who took photos of ‘fairies’ in their garden. [[ Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes author, fell for them. ]] Some incidents can harm people, e.g. the panic about witches in Salem, driven by girls making up stories. A famous one was in 1917 at Fatima in Portugal, when two girls claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, later drawing huge crowds, and a ‘miracle’ involving the sun falling from the sky, supposedly seen by 70,000 people. Consider three options, p257: the sun really did move; nothing moved and the 70,00 experienced an hallucination; or or nothing happened at all, and whole incident was misreported, exaggerated, or simply made up. If the sun had really moved, millions of people over the hemisphere would have seen it. Not to mention destroying the earth. And the crowd had been told to stare at the sun.

People invent stories all the time. And we know that lots of fiction has been made up about this Jesus. Such as the Cherry Tree Carol. [[ I had never heard of this one; an English ballad is based on it. ]] Everyone agrees it’s fiction. It was made up only 500 years ago. We can conclude similarly about all so-called miracles.

Finally. There remain many things scientists cannot explain. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t, eventually. Technology from one generation would have seemed like magic a generation before — Clarke’s third law. Something seemingly supernatural only means we need to improve our science, not give up and call it a miracle.

Truth has a magic of its own. The magic of reality.

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To summarize: This is a basic sort of book, not one you’ll necessarily learn something from, if you’ve read other books, and gone to college. But it’s an excellent summary of how we know things that we know, and how ideas of the supernatural can be dismissed. This is a book I would give to a smart 15-year-old.

Posted in Book Notes, reality, Religion, Science | Leave a comment

And They’re Doing It All In Plain Sight

  • Paul Krugman about Elon Musk, fraudster;
  • Brian Tyler Cohen on how Musk’s search for fraud is only to advance his personal interests;
  • How if Musk were trying to find fraudulent spending, he would have gone in with accountants, not computer programmers, with a link to USASpending.gov;
  • Connie Willis summarizes the press conference with Elon Musk, and Trump in the background;
  • Short items: about 218 GOP representatives who have no purpose but to make up hysterical lies; RFK Jr. confirmed, why not a flat earther to head NASA?; How Ted Cruz thinks studying solar eclipses is “woke”; how Europe no longer relies on the US as a reliable ally; how Trump is pondering the birthright citizenship of Native Americans; how DEI is the new N-word; and how the removal of the T from LGBTQ is an Orwellian rewriting of history.

Paul Krugman, 13 Feb 2025: Elon Musk Is Faking It, subtitled “The fraudster who cried ‘fraud'”

Krugman starts with that howler about how USAID supposedly spent $50 million on condoms to Hamas. There was no evidence. (Turns out it wasn’t $50 million and it was to a province in Mozambique, not the area in the Middle East.)

Anyway, the incident demonstrated the level of care and understanding that DOGE is bringing to its alleged mission of identifying waste, fraud and abuse.

But both Trump and Musk insisted that DOGE has already found billions, maybe tens of billions, of waste and fraud. Here’s a complete list of the specific examples Musk gave during the press conference:

[ THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ]

That’s right: Musk has yet to offer any specific examples of government waste. The closest Musk came to specifics was his assertion that DOGE had done…

Just an unlikely assertion, no names, that people 150 years old are getting Social Security.

But back to that Oval Office scene. Musk also asserted that

there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is what happened at USAID

Is this true? What are these peoples’ stories, if they exist? Sorry, Elon, but why should we believe you when the obvious explanation is that you are taking us for fools?

Just as Reagan did decades ago, complaining about welfare queens driving Cadillacs. Anyway, Krugman shows how the Federal workforce has actually *declined* relative to the size of the population, ever since about 1968.

So why is Musk obsessed with reducing the federal headcount? Is he just ignorant of the basic facts? Or is all the talk about efficiency cover for a purge intended to replace professional civil servants with political loyalists? Both, if you ask me.

In particular, he’s purging inspectors and employees of government organizes who were inspecting his own organizations…

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Along the same lines, there was a story this morning about the US government agreeing to buy $400 million in armored Teslas. But the deal was retracted after the news got out. You see what he’s up to.

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Here’s a new guy I’ve seen on Facebook recently. Wikipedia: Brian Tyler Cohen. I checked out his Substack.

Brian Tyler Cohen, 11 Feb 2025: Elon’s fraud search exposed as a fraud, subtitled “DOGE is supposed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse– but thus far, it’s only served Elon Musk’s personal interests.”

The talking point being trotted out by the right is actually quite clever: Elon is rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, and if you don’t blindly support him, then you must be in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse. Let me just say, first and foremost, that I agree with his stated mission. But Elon is undermining that mission every step of the way.

Consider his intervention with USAID. First off, so as not to bury the lede: The USAID inspector general was investigating Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals, which were purchased with agency funds. In other words, one of Elon’s first targets just so happened to be an agency that was threatening his own business interests. Not a great start.

But let’s dig a little deeper.

About how USAID was “a tool for soft power” whose services will likely be filled by… China, its Belt & Road Initiative.

Does that seem like it’s in our national interest? No. But it sure is in favor of one particular person’s interest: a billionaire who has invested a lot of time building up his portfolio in China. Tesla’s Shanghai plant is the company’s largest factory, accounting for half of Tesla’s global car production. In other words, while dismantling USAID hurts American interests abroad and hurts those who rely on America for help, it’s a gift to the one country that Elon stands to benefit from helping… while also ending an investigation into his own possible corruption. Lose-lose for America, win-win for Elon.

Followed by the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which conservatives hate because they dislike being regulated, especially when they’re trying to take advantage of people, as has been happening with all those predatory loans students have been saddled with for decades).

To be clear, the CFPB literally only exists to protect consumers from predatory banks and financial institutions. Its budget is about $800 million… but it’s returned over $21 billion to 205 million consumers.


Frankly, if he was serious about his mission of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, he would start with the agency that serves as a poster child for financial mismanagement. The Pentagon has failed seven – SEVEN – audits in a row. And yet he starts with the CFP, the one agency tasked with helping consumers from predatory banks? With USAID, which offers medical care and clean water to Third World nations? That is why Elon’s commission looks, sounds, and smells like a sham. Because thus far, the biggest beneficiaries aren’t working class Americans, but rather Elon Musk himself.

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And via folks on Facebook…

Sarah Pinsker on Facebook (friends’ only post):

If they were investigating spending, they would have gone in with accountants. [Rather than computer programmers.] If they had a problem with what they found, the lawful way of dealing with it would have been through legislation and reallocation through Congress. A President has the right to present a budget reflecting their priorities, but not to arbitrarily cut spending allocated by Congress.

Here’s the link: USASpending.gov.

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Connie Willis, 12 Feb 2025: Today is Lincoln’s Birthday–and Tulsi Gabbard Just Got Confirmed

Mostly about the press conference by Elon Musk in the Oval Office with Trump just sitting there at his desk. Quite a long post; just a bit:

Yesterday Trump and Musk (or Musk, with Trump there) held a press conference in the Oval Office that was like nothing ever seen before:

–Trump sat slumped at the Resolute Desk, glaring, sullen, and often with his eyes closed, while Musk stood beside him, fielding nearly ALL the questions from the reporters. As Bill Palmer reported, “He just sat there, looking confused, like he didn’t know or care what was going on.”


–Musk stammered and spoke incoherently about what he was trying to do. He made wild accusations of kickbacks, waste, and fraud, but presented no evidence and no specifics. (A number of people online concluded he was drugged.)

–Musk claimed, “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” and then said as proof, “We post our actions to X and the DOGE website.” (Neither of which are public.)


–Musk called the agencies he was gutting “the unelected fourth branch of government.” (They are in fact part of the Executive Branch and completely official.)

–Musk also said, “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” and I immediately thought of H.L. Mencken’s saying, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

–Trump looked drugged, too, and barely aware of what was happening. At one point he said he totally trusted Musk and at another roused himself to attack the judges who have ruled against him and Musk in court, saying, “So maybe we have to look at the judges because I think it’s a very serious violation,” and then sank back into himself.

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Just some headlines.

For the subtitle:

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 13 Feb 2025: Musk took all their power, so Republicans remake Congress into a ministry of disinformation, subtitled “Do taxpayers need to pay 218 full-time GOP representatives whose only job is making up hysterical lies?”

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Nothing means anything to these people. Why not hire a flat earther to run NASA?

NY Times, 13 Feb 2025: Senate Confirms Kennedy, a Prominent Vaccine Skeptic, as Health Secretary, subtitled “The vote capped a remarkable rise for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed by a Republican Senate in a chamber where his father and uncles once served as Democrats.”

(You see the NYT style of trying to take a wide, historical, ‘fair’, perspective.)

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I completely understand how people like Cruz think science is “woke.” Because it’s real, and isn’t about prioritizing white Christian men.

NPR, 13 Feb 2025: Sen. Ted Cruz’s list of ‘woke’ science includes self-driving cars and solar eclipses

Among 3,400 NSF grants Cruz labeled “woke DEI” and advancing “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”

Characterized here as “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has labeled a solar eclipse research initiative for kids as part of the ‘radical left’s woke nonsense.'” Or is he trolling us? How could his accusations possibly make any kind of sense?

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Politico, 13 Feb 2025: Europe braces for a future without the US as a reliable ally

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Where would he send them? (America is only for white men!)

Salon, Russell Payne, 23 Jan 2025: “Excluding Indians”: Trump admin questions Native Americans’ birthright citizenship in court, subtitled “The Trump admin is leaning on a pre-14th Amendment law in its fight to redefine birthright citizenship”

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It’s the new N-word.

The Guardian, Mehdi Hasan, 11 Feb 2025: What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’

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People who read books understand this immediately, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

NY Times, 13 Feb 2025: U.S. Park Service Strikes Transgender References From Stonewall Website, subtitled: “The ‘T’ was removed in references to L.G.B.T.Q.+ on the official site for the Greenwich Village monument, which marks a milestone in the fight for gay rights. Later, the Q+ also disappeared.”

Soon they will insist that there are no transsexuals, that there never were any transsexuals.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Leave a comment

Diversity is Out, Racism is In

  • Military veterans say the trans ban is logistical nonsense;
  • How Musk and Vance stood up for a self-avowed racist;
  • How Trump and his administration is intentionally on the wrong side of history, favoring “competent white men”;
  • How philosopher Richard Rorty anticipated a renewed era of public cruelty;
  • How Republicans love spending cuts, just not in their own states;
  • Another view from Canada: “It’s been nice knowing you.”
– – –

Slate, Timothy Soseki Kudo, Lindsey Melki, and Kenneth Zavada, 12 Feb 2025: We Served in the Military. Trump Has No Idea How Much Damage He’s Just Done to It., subtitled “The trans ban isn’t just immoral. It’s logistical nonsense.”

However, as military veterans, we know that this [Trump’s] order will accomplish exactly the opposite. When it’s 5 degrees out and expected to drop, and it’s you and your battle buddy’s turn on night watch to share a sleeping bag in the snow-covered mudhole the two of you have spent the past 12 hours digging, the last thing on anyone’s mind is gender or sex. In those moments, all that matters is a person’s character and the mutual trust that comes from living and training together until you’re certain you have each other’s back.

Trump, recall, had bone splints.

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“Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not.”

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 10 Feb 2025 (but in today’s print paper): Why Musk and Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist

If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs. One is a West Point graduate, an Army veteran and a former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee. The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist. You can probably guess which of them Vice President JD Vance intervened to help out.

And

It is clearly absurd for Vance to insist that Elez is at once a “kid” who should be forgiven for things he wrote last year and a man who deserves a major role restructuring the federal government. But his argument isn’t supposed to make sense; Vance is asserting his freedom from the need to justify the administration’s actions according to pre-existing standards. Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not. This stark reversal of values is a signature of the Trump restoration.

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DEI means many things to many people.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 12 Feb 2025: Trump Is on the Wrong Side of History by Design

A good summary of many actions over the past three weeks.

At the National Security Agency, it has meant an effort to purge all N.S.A. websites and internal networks of banned words such as diversity, diverse, inclusive, racism and racial identity. Over at the Department of Defense, led by Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, it has meant the end of official recognition of Black History Month, the disbanding of affinity groups at service academies and a move to curb military outreach to Black professionals in engineering and the sciences. Diversity, Hegseth says, is “not our strength.” At the National Institutes of Health, displays honoring women and scientists of color have been removed, and at the National Science Foundation, program officers have reportedly been directed to reject grant applications that mention anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility.

There’s more. In addition to purging the Department of Justice of anything that smacks of D.E.I., Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the agency to target private-sector diversity programs for potential “criminal investigation.” A company that wants to increase its proportion of female employees or place more Black Americans in corporate leadership may find itself in the cross hairs of the federal government.

For a long time, civil rights rules *banned* certain kinds of (what might be called negative, or exclusive) discrimination. Now, Bondi wants to ban, even in private industry, any kind of (positive, inclusive) discrimination. She cites that Darren Beattie guy.

“Competent white men must be in charge” is as close to a rallying cry as I can imagine for the Trump administration, although, of course, it strains credulity to say that either Trump or his subordinates count as competent.

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More about that self-described racist, Elez, one of Elon’s boys.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 12 Feb 2025: An eerie prophecy of Trump’s second term — from 1998, subtitled “Philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that someone like Trump might bring back public cruelty.”

Yet forgiveness requires contrition, and there’s no evidence Elez has any. He has not publicly apologized or even repudiated his ugly comments. In Trump’s America, you can engage in this kind of publicly performed cruelty without any real consequence.

This, for some, is actually the point of voting for Trump. New York’s Brock Colyar attended a swanky Trump party where one attendee said he voted for Trump because, in Colyar’s paraphrase, “he wanted the freedom to say ‘f**got’ and ‘r****ded.’” An anonymous “top banker” recently told the Financial Times that they felt “liberated” after Trump’s win because “we can say ‘r***rd’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting canceled.”

The new ethos of cruelty reminded me of a passage in the philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Warning of the rise of a right-wing American strongman in the not-too-distant future, Rorty predicted that such a political shift would also herald an alarming new cultural era:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘n****r’ and ‘k*ke’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

And here we are.

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We could have predicted this.

NY Times, 12 Feb 2025: Republicans Love Trump’s Spending Cuts. Just Not in Their States., subtitled “Even as they praise the president’s unilateral actions to slash federal spending, G.O.P. lawmakers have quietly moved to seek carve outs or exemptions for their own constituents.”

Spending cuts for thee, not for me.

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Another view from Canada.

Vancouver Sun, Pete McMartin, 3 Feb 2025, via Chris McKitterick on Facebook: Pete McMartin, Opinion: “Farewell to my American friends. It’s over”

Goodbye, America.

It’s been nice knowing you.

Goodbye New York, and your Jewish delicatessens with corned beef sandwiches stacked as high as your skyline.

Goodbye Detroit, my boyhood neighbour, and so long to Tiger Stadium, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Motown.

Goodbye Bellingham, Seattle and Portland — how I’ll miss my Cascadian cousins with our shared Pacific sensibilities. And while I’m at it, goodbye to the cheap gas and shoreline cottages of Point Roberts, America’s appendix dangling just below the border not a mile from me.
What was once so close has never been so far.

Goodbye Stag Leap’s Pinot Noir, Maker’s Mark bourbon, and Hebrew National hotdogs. My tastebuds mourn.

Goodbye to the cowards on both sides of the border who have demonstrated that whatever fidelity to democratic ideals they profess to have extends only so far as their self-interest. They should get a real job, say, in a chain gang.

Goodbye to anyone, again on both sides of the border, who bends the knee to Trump, rather than standing up to him, as any self-respecting person would and should, and telling him to piss off.

Goodbye to a culture that demands we bend the knee.

Most painful of all, goodbye to my American friends, some of whom I have known all my life, and some of whom I’ve collected along the way. I can cross your border but no longer wish to: Your Narcissist-in-Chief has decreed that my countrymen and I have the choice of becoming destitute, vassals or enemies. I’m choosing the latter

Meanwhile, your silence and the silence of all Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you.

Goodbye to what I envied as the country that prided itself on encouraging unparalleled innovation in science, art and business. Any good that remains of it has been overshadowed by rapacity, cheap commercialism and egotism.

Goodbye to that ever-present sense of inferiority I once had when considering the relationship between Canada and America. What doubt I had of our own greatness is gone, and in its place is a certitude that Canada is superior to the U.S. in all the ways that matter. I look across the border now and see a violent, burgeoning autocracy now ever on the edge of civil war, and a population that is either cheering on this new brutalism or quaking in fear from it.

So, goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore. I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.

MAGA Americans won’t care.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Decline, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

Not a Surprises

I see TV commercials about health insurance that complain about “bills” and “not-a-bills”. I get plenty of both too.

  • Not a surprise: Trump and Musk are really after tax cuts for the wealthy.
  • Trump doesn’t grasp the point of foreign aid;
  • Conservatives upset by the Super Bowl half-time show are apparently for diversity after all;
  • How the Trump administration thinks America is full of the wrong kind of people;
  • A Thomas B. Edsall round-up on this attack against modern American liberalism;
  • Links about Musk and taxpayer-funded research, how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán, and how maybe Trump’s zone-flooding can’t go on forever;
  • Not a surprise: A Trump admin puts election security staffers, whose job is to ensure the security of US elections, on leave.
– – –

This is the least surprising thing yet.

Slate, Alexander Sammon, 1 Feb 2025: This Is Not About Cost Cutting, subtitled “What Trump and Musk really want out of their government rampage is hiding in plain sight.”

As terrifying and probably illegal as Elon Musk’s tech-bro holy war against the federal government has been, it’s only Phase 1. Really, the spectacle of the past few weeks sets Donald Trump and Musk up for what they almost certainly want much more: massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

This subtext has been made very clear.


[U]ltimately, all this “budget cutting” is theater, albeit highly destructive theater, that sets the stage for the real, looming fight: extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Passed during his first term, these tax cuts were a multitrillion-dollar giveaway to the billionaire class and large corporations. They are set to expire this year. And Trump and the rest of the Republican Party want to keep those tax cuts, at minimum.

It was passage of the initial Trump tax cuts that created a tax environment where America’s billionaire class—its 400 richest people—now have a lower effective tax rate than the bottom 50 percent of American income earners. The year that bill passed, Musk was worth around $15 billion; now he’s worth $415 billion.

… When the Congressional Budget Office invariably scores the new Trump tax plan as massively expansionary of the deficit, just as it was in 2017, Trump, Musk, and the rest of the billionaire crew will point to the unorthodox “offsets” they’ve already secured via DOGE cuts, along with other cuts to the social safety net they have in store. It’s a cover story for deficit hawks and fiscal conservatives—even if it is fantasy.

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Because Trump only understands money.

AlterNet, Michael Signorile, 11 Feb 2025: Opinion | Trumper can’t quite grasp how the US gives foreign aid to keep the world safe

Sometimes it’s like banging your head against a wall. David in Pittsburgh called my SiriusXM program last week to defend Donald Trump gutting the United States Agency for International Development.

MAGA morons and Fox fantasists have convinced themselves that there’s a massive amount of waste—using few dubious claims and some known outright lies—about agency that was less than 1% of the budget.


The facts are clear. The programs have done an enormous amount of humanitarian good. But the tiny investment for the U.S. also helps the keep governments stable, and stops them from collapsing and turning to our adversaries.

As I said to David, “if you want to be the big guy on the block,” you have to look out for your neighbors.

He couldn’t quite grasp how this worked, and said that there was waste—which, even if it is true, you could cut, without killing the entire agency.

Listen in to get a sense of how the MAGA mind works—or doesn’t. And let me know your thoughts!

With a video of a phone interview with “David”, apparently; I haven’t listened to it. (Where has Michaelangelo Signorile been all these years?)

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I saw, but did not capture links to, conservative outrage that there *were no white people* in the Super Bowl Half-time show. With snarky replies on Facebook. Oh, so you *are* for diversity? No, of course not; they think white people should be at the center of everything.

Thus:

NY Times, opinion by Carlos Lozada, 11 Feb 2025: Apparently, America Is Full of the Wrong Kind of People

In its early days, the second Trump administration is delivering a clear message: The United States is full of the wrong kind of people.

Federal civil servants, for example, have been deemed the wrong kind of people. Their political and ideological allegiances are questionable, their ideas destructive and their low-productivity jobs not worth their salaries. Too many are lawbreakers or just “evil.” Whether they toil at U.S.A.I.D. or the Treasury, the C.I.A. or the F.D.A., in Washington or throughout the country, they should look upon that fork in the road and opt to resign. In some cases, they should be purged.

And children born in the US to undocumented parents; and refugees and asylum seekers; and transgender people; and so on. Recalling Sarah Palin’s appeal to the “real America” of small towns (and not big cities).

If, according to the Trump administration, so many people in the United States are the wrong kind of people, who makes up the right kind? Who belongs here — in our military, our government, our territory?

The administration invokes meritocracy as one way to answer those questions.

Which, as many have noted, is laughable considering his cabinet appointments.

The answer is evident. Their merit is not found in professional experience or outstanding qualifications, but in their fealty to the president.

Lozada goes on but never calls out Trump and his fans for what they plainly are: racists, and white supremacists.

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This round-up of items by Thomas B. Edsall is similar: their target is anyone who is not white and Christian.

NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall, 11 Feb 2025: Their Target Is ‘the Very Core of Modern American Liberalism’

The enemy, in this paradigm, is Democrats, liberals and everyone left of center, expanding beyond ideology to encompass huge swaths of the federal government and of the immigrant population, legal and illegal.

This would be at least half the country.

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A few more links without comment.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 11 Feb 2025: Elon Musk built his wealth from taxpayer-funded research — now he’s trying to destroy future science, subtitled “The billionaire should be writing a thank you note to Al Gore, not wrecking burgeoning developments”

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The Guardian, David Smith, 7 Feb 2025: ‘In a real sense, US democracy has died’: how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán, subtitled “Trump has moved to gut the federal government, fire critics and reward allies – a path similar to ‘would-be dictators’ like Orbán, experts say”

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LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 11 Feb 2025: Column: Love it or hate it, Trump’s zone-flooding can’t go on forever

One can hope.

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JMG, 11 Feb 2025: Trump Admin Axes Election Cybersecurity Workers from ABC, 10 Feb 2025: US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave, subtitled “Staffers at the nation’s cybersecurity agency whose job is to ensure the security of U.S. elections have been placed on administrative leave, jeopardizing critical support provided to state and local election offices across the country”

Nor is this a surprise.

 

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Leave a comment

The Roots of All This is an Unchanging Human Nature in a Changing World

  • Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights;
  • Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end;
  • Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana;
  • Connie Willis on the best cartoon of the day, and the funniest thing of the day (from the Borowitz Report);
  • Short items;
  • Katherine Stewart at NYT asks, Now Will You Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
  • MSN’s Lindsay Beyerstein explores delusion as the key mental state of Trump’s supporters;
  • And my thoughts about how all of this is about human nature, in the ancient world and in the modern world.

What are the pundits saying?

Heather Cox Richardson, February 9, 2025

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The claim in the executive order implies that it is only at gunpoint that any other rights are maintained. A very primitive, frontier-justice notion; a concern for force, not principle. Heather counters at length.

Given the unilateral actions of Musk, apparently at Trump’s behest, she concludes they know they don’t have principles, or votes, on their side.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

///

Robert Reich, 10 Feb 2025: The end of law?, subtitled “The Trump regime is refusing to be bound by the federal courts. Where will this end?”

He is the most lawless president in American history.

He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed U.S. AID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, independent agencies, without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.

Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?

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Paul Krugman, 10 Feb 2025: Sabotaging the Pax Americana, subtitled “Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak”

Elon Musk — with Donald Trump’s acquiescence, but clearly Musk was calling the shots — has effectively destroyed USAID, the aid agency that was, aside from its humanitarian role, a major pillar of US foreign policy. This move was clearly illegal, and a court has already put a hold on some of Musk’s actions.

But it may already be too late. The destruction of USAID is a prime example of what Dan Drezner calls Humpty Dumpty foreign policy, as in, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. By furloughing the agency’s employees, ordering those working abroad to come home and canceling crucial programs and grants, the Musk/Trump administration undermined decades’ worth of relationship-building. Even if the courts eventually order everything the wreckers did reversed, it will be hard if not impossible to put the structure back together again.

USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago.

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Connie Willis, 9 Feb 2025: Everything Trump Touches Dies–Including the Super Bowl

She summarizes Trump’s visit to the Super Bowl (making it all about him), discusses the latest from Musk and his “kids,” and ends with two bits:

Best Cartoon of the Day: The GOP as football players in a huddle, saying “Here’s the play–we start offsides, pardon our own penalties, appoint our own refs, deport their linebackers, sack anyone who played for Biden, and claim we won the 2020 Super Bowl.”

Funniest thing of the day, from the Borowitz Report: “Donald J. Trump tightened his grip on the American arts scene on Monday by naming himself principal ballerina of the Kennedy Center Ballet…He said he was disgusted to discover that all of the company’s current ballerinas were women, a state of affairs he blamed on DEI. Trump’s takeover…has surprised millions of Americans, who previously thought that the worst thing that could happen to the Kennedy brand was JFK’s nephew strapping a dismembered whale’s head to his minivan.”

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How much more of this do we need? Hasn’t the point been made? Well no, you can’t look away, you can’t give up, or they will win.

Washington Post, opinion by Philip Bump, 10 Feb 2025: The right-wing bubble absorbs D.C., subtitled “During Trump’s first term, misinformation was not nearly as rampant as it is today.”

JMG, from Bloomberg News, 10 Feb 2025: How The End Of Banking Oversight Benefits Musk’s X

(Well of course it does; Musk especially is going after very specific targets.)

Another Facebook quip

MAGA: Why do we need USAID? We should be helping people here in America.

Democrats: Okay, let’s help people here in America.

MAGA: No, that’s Socialism!

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NY Times, guest essay by Katherine Stewart, 7 Feb 2025: Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us? [gift link]

They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.

Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?

To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.

The last sentence is the key point.

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Because…?

MSN, opinion by Lindsay Beyerstein, 7 Feb 2025: Delusion: The mental state that drives Trump’s hardcore supporters with scary accuracy

Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

Good piece that summarizes many essential points. Note these:

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

So Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. The piece goes on to discuss the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism.

If everything you don’t like becomes evidence of your opponent’s plot to destroy you, you can’t discuss anything rationally.


When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

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I think the big picture entails something even pieces like this don’t explore. There’s no addressing the conspiracist mindset (except perhaps through education, which conservatives resist). It’s a fundamental aspect of human nature, but for a species to survive indefinitely in a global culture, it’s a flaw. It wasn’t a flaw as long as we lived in isolated tribes on the African Savannah, for hundreds of thousands of years, when understanding reality didn’t matter, as long as you survived; and the perception of conspiracy theories was sometimes right, and if they were wrong most of the time, it didn’t matter. Times have changed, and humans haven’t. And now it does matter.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Decline, Human Nature | Leave a comment

Nothing mattered, in the end

First of all for today, this handy timeline.

NY Times, updated 9 Feb 2025: All of the Trump Administration’s Major Moves in the First 20 Days

I assume this will continue to be updated daily. The top of the page has buttons to filter by category, and by type of action or announcement.

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Here’s a fun imagine floating around on Facebook.

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Here’s another item being passed around on Facebook. I’ll quote some, but here’s a link to the full piece.

Facebook, We the People Under Siege, 16 Jan 2025: Written by the highly respected Canadian journalist, Andrew Coyne

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rap.ist and serial sex.ual preda.tor, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Pvtin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trvmp and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

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And here’s another image from Facebook.

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Just as Trump fired Inspectors Generals who had investigated *him*, now he’s shutting down the agency fighting financial abuse. Do his fans not realize what’s going on?? How is this not obvious??

CNN, 9 Feb 2025: Consumer watchdog ordered to stop fighting financial abuse and to work from home as HQ temporarily shuts down

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The essence of conservative selfish, short-term, irresponsible thinking.

Washing Post, Cass R. Sunstein, 5 Feb 2025: The high price of scrapping the social cost of carbon, subtitled “On climate policy, the new administration is entitled to recalculate this metric — but it cannot act arbitrarily.”

(Sunstein is the author of numerous books, including Nudge with Richard H. Thaler.)

With the deluge of executive orders in the initial weeks of the second Trump administration, an important directive flew under the radar. It requires the federal government to consider abandoning “the social cost of carbon,” potentially undercutting all climate policymaking.

That is a technical way of signaling something simple and false: Climate change is not real. If the social cost of carbon is treated as zero, then greenhouse gas emissions inflict no damage. Regulations that reduce those emissions have no benefits, which suggests that those regulations should be eliminated.

The social cost of carbon has often been described as the most important number you’ve never heard of. The metric is meant to capture the harm caused by a ton of carbon emissions, making it a foundation of national climate change policy. A lower value would justify weaker regulations, while a higher one would warrant more aggressive policies.

This is one of those long-term costs that you’d think a government, especially if run like a business, would keep track of. Unless the government/business realizes it’s going to be around for only four years.

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Many of us understand ‘populism’ much better than populists understand anyone besides themselves.

NY Times, David French, 9 Feb 2025: The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.

I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”

I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.

If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the “man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.

Because the populists do not read books or watch documentaries or listen to podcasts. They listen to each other, in town halls, at bars, in churches.

And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.

So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.

And that’s exactly where we are today.

French goes about the rural South, Andrew Jackson, the Farmers’ Alliance, and so on. Long piece. A few more bits:

In fact, populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.


Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. Lots of people have lived rather messy lives, and they can see themselves in the politician who doesn’t hide his warts — and sometimes even in the politician who revels in his transgressions.

They’re seen as real, while even the most honest politician can seem fake for coming across as too polished.


If you watch populist media or listen to populist politicians, there is very little ambiguity or nuance. Stories are mapped out in terms of good versus evil (or friend versus enemy). “They” are always wrong. “They” are worse than wrong — “they” are callous, uncaring, even evil.

A well-informed population is less vulnerable to the demagogue. Even if informed voters are not political obsessives, they’re aware enough of the limits of the president’s power to know that he or she can’t truly fix anything alone. If they’re even somewhat aware of the complexity of the economy, or of health care, or of foreign policy, they know that the political savior narrative is suspect.

Posted in conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

  • How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature;
  • Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag;
  • Plastic straws, racist speech, inmates in charge of the asylum;
  • WaPo shows you some webpages deleted by the Trump administration;
  • Perhaps Musk’s motivation for attacking USAID;
  • NY Times Editorial Board: Now is not the time to tune out.

A couple phrases have been deployed to describe Trump’s deliberate (or not) strategy upon taking office of moving quickly with lots of executive orders. One is “shock and awe” after Bush’s strategy for invading Iraq; another is Steven Bannon’s “flooding the zone with sh*t” by which he meant spewing so much garbage so quickly that no one could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Another strategy that I saw today on Facebook (I didn’t capture a link) was that Trump treats each day like a media contest. He gets up in the morning and thinks of something outrageous to say on Truth Social, then depends on the news media (who Bannon and his acolytes think can only focus on one topic at a time) to be distracted by that while Trump goes about his real work relatively unnoticed; yet his goal is to ‘win’ the news cycle each day.

So what to do? Dismiss the outrageous things that will never happen, like making Canada a 51st state? Or bring up the casual cruelties? (Such as Trump firing a former Coast Guard leader — for DEI excuses but likely simply because she was a woman — thus giving her three hours to vacate her government-provided home. NBC.)

Or, as I try to do, look at the bigger picture. What does each action by Trump or Musk or his minions reveal about their motivations? About what they believe about the world? Taking an almost psychiatric, certainly psychological, approach. The answers are usually apparent, and they’re not kind. They’re evidence of a very basic, primitive, survivalist, mode of human nature.

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More about Trump taking over Kennedy Center.

Variety, Katcy Stephan, 7 Feb 2025: President Trump Says He Will Fire Kennedy Center Board Members and Name Himself Chairman

Turns out it’s because he objects to drag shows.

Trump went on to attack drag programming mounted at the performing arts center, adding, “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

Drag shows put on at the Kennedy Center in 2024 included “Broadway Drag Brunch” and “Dancing Queens Drag Brunch” on the venue’s Roof Terrace Restaurant, “A Drag Salute to Divas” on the South Millennium Stage, “Bertha: Grateful Drag” in the Terrace Theater and “Dixie’s Tupperware Party” in the Family Theater.

Of course base, survivalist human nature priorities expansion of the tribe, and especially in the ancestral environment in which human nature evolved and infant mortality was high, discourages to the point of condemnation any behavior that does not lead to the production of more babies. Thus, drag shows might confuse young people about sexual roles. Thus, the sins of the Old Testament, from homosexuality to onanism. And in the modern age, condemnation of birth control and abortion.

Base human nature is no longer appropriate; in fact, it’s counter-productive. Human sexual urges may endure, but having more and more babies is a danger to the survival of the race given the limitations of the planet. To advocate this is irresponsible.

So then, what would Trump then do? Ban all those classic movies involving drag and cross-dressing, like Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Mrs. Doubtfire? I wouldn’t put it past him. He probably just hasn’t thought of it yet. The right already loves to ban books. Why not movies too? And wait, what about all those Shakespeare plays in which characters cross-dress? (Not to mention that his Shakespeare’s time men played all the roles. But Shakespeare wasn’t American!)

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Headlines:

Yahoo!news, 7 Feb 2025: Trump slams paper straws, vows ‘back to plastic’

He has no clue what the problem with plastic straws might be. Short-term convenience at the expense of long-term ecosystem damage.

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Vox, 8 Feb 2025: The real lesson of the DOGE racist tweets scandal, subtitled “Musk and Trump say they promote free speech. They seem to only defend racist speech.”

Having a history of racist tweets is just fine with the current administration. Because….

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Yet another example of putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

NY Times, 8 Feb 2025: Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters Now Runs Office That Investigated Them, subtitled “Ed Martin, a loyal Trump soldier, oversees the U.S. attorney’s office, which is likely to help turn the investigative powers of the government on several of the president’s perceived enemies.”

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Authoritarians always try to shape reality to their liking. So much for freedom of speech.

Washington Post, 7 Feb 2025: A sample of the government webpages Trump doesn’t want you to see, subtitled “When President Donald Trump took office, dozens of government webpages disappeared as part of his plan to reshape the U.S. government to his liking. Not even NASA was spared.”

Everything on the internet is archived, by someone, usually web.archive.org. There is no deleting the past, for better or for worse. The piece here shows current and archived pages from various organizations including DHS, EPA, FDA, USDA, Census, DOJ, NOAA, and many others. Why? Conservatism is always about reducing options. You should only know what your government wants you to know. You should behave in the way conservatives believe you should behave.

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Apparently USAID was instrumental in taking down the Apartheid regime in South Africa… where Musk is from. He’s now ornery that whites in South Africa are being discriminated against, and striking back. Which is to say, he’s not about government efficiency, he’s about seeking revenge against those who reduced his white privilege.

From Facebook: Horsey, The Seattle Times.

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Concluding with

NY Times, Editorial Board, 8 Feb 2025: Now Is Not the Time to Tune Out

Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people and the very concept of diversity itself; the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords; and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.

Places where Americans can’t afford to turn away:

  • Elon Musk’s Executive Takeover
  • The Administration vs. Public Officials (a.k.a. Trump’s Enemies)
  • The President’s Imperial Bluster and Attacks on Allies
  • Public Health Imperiled
  • The President’s Anti-Civil Rights Blitz

Do kids these days have any idea what’s going on?

America faces a new reality, and it demands wisdom, endurance and courage. The United States is now led by a president who appears willing to stampede over any person, law, congressional statute or country that stands in his way. He is driven by impulse and is disinterested in rules, history or reality.

How Americans and the world handle such a president will determine much about the next four years, and it will ask much from all of us. We must meet the moment. Mr. Trump won the election fair and square, but his position is that of president, not king or god-emperor. Every time Congress allows him to exceed his constitutional role, it encourages more anti-democratic behavior and weakens the legislature’s ability to check further erosion of the norms and values that have helped make this nation the freest, richest and strongest in the world.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE

Subtitled “Climate Change from A to Z”
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook
(Ten Speed Press, 159pp, c2023, published March 2024) <Amazon>

This is a book I bought on the basis of the author’s name (I quite admired her book of a decade ago, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, reviewed here) without quite realizing that it isn’t a book of essays so much as a book of illustrations with short essay accompaniments; a book for casual readers, or perhaps for young adults. As the subtitle says, the book outlines issues concerning climate change in 26 topics, from A to Z.

I sat down to read this looking for something light, as I was coming down with a cold, yet wondered about if given the kind of book it is, how much will I really learn that’s new? Yet curious to find out what her hope for optimism, if any?

Each essay is half a page, or a full page or two, or even three pages. With a couple full-page illustrations for each, and a 2-page break between each letter. That said, Kolbert rather cleverly manages to choose topics for each letter that make the book a kind of narrative.

So: A is for Arrhenius. A Swedish scientist who first constructed a climate change model, in 1895, predicting that the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise temperatures by three or four degrees C… over 3000 years.

B is for Blah Blah Blah, the way political leaders and Greta Thunberg keep talking, and sound optimistic, yet virtually nothing has gotten done. C is for Capitalism, essentially why nothing has gotten done. D is for Despair, which is unproductive, and a sin.

There are stories about some specific efforts to combat dependence on fossil fuels. F is for Flight, about an electric airplane called Alia. G is for Green Concrete, made without cement, which takes a lot of energy to make, usually from coal.

H is for Hope, as there are plenty of similar efforts. J is for the Jobs those efforts could create. Leapfrogging is how India, for example, might jump from having very few phones in 1989 to everyone having cellphones now, jumping over the phase of everyone having landlines, and how similar advances might occur.

And yet. O is for Objections, how the optimistic forecasts make unreliable assumptions, ignoring feasibility limits. R is for Republicans, implicated only by noting that virtually no Republican voters in a 2022 poll considered climate change an important problem facing the nation.

X is for Xenophobia, whereby the costs of climate change may be borne by those who have contributed least to the problem — e.g. tiny Pacific islands, and Bangladesh. And how people from such affected areas will try to migrate, and be despised wherever they go, vilified by right-wing politicians, creating a feedback loop of racism and xenophobia. Will the world come together, or will nationalism and fear intensify?

Z is for Zero. The author tours Hoover Dam, built with a promise of unlimited power. But the area has been in drought since 1998; the water level is low, and a bathtub ring is visible on the canyon walls. And tour guides don’t want to talk about it. And so (despite the title of the book) the author ends thus:

Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” thought these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.

The short ‘further reading’ pages include titles in my library (some of which I’ve read) by Smil, Bjornerud, McKibben, Gates, Oreskes & Conway, and Wallace-Wells. The book echoes the grim tone of Wallace-Wells: it won’t be getting better any time soon; we are living in a time of irreversible change.

So: worth reading? Sure, in part as a refresher on some of the basic parameters of the climate change problem, and in part as a reminder of the seriousness of a problem we too often push to the back of our attentions. (Of course, at the moment, Trump and his minions are making everything worse.)

Posted in Book Notes, Science | Comments Off on Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE