- Will begin posting more about science fiction; see previous post;
- That Qatari plane is a white elephant they’ve been trying to dump for years;
- A piece by the novelist George Saunders about the firing of the head of the Library of Congress;
- Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch about how Christian Nationalists lie;
- How the Trump administration is canceling grants to study misinformation;
- And a note about how some of the spam comments I get to this blog are obviously written by AI.
I need to get back to posting reports of the science fiction I’ve been reading, not just reports of nonfiction. (I don’t call these posts “reviews”.) I read four sf novels in April, and seven back in October; I just posted about one, and I’ll write the rest up here soon.
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So it seems that Qatari 747 they want to gift Trump (when did ‘gift’ become a verb?) is something of a white elephant that they haven’t been able to get rid of. So why not let Trump pay the maintenance costs?
Newsweek, 15 May 2025: Qatar’s Gift to Trump Is Unsold Plane It’s Been Trying to Dump for Years
Meanwhile, US security analysts are forecasting that it will take $1 billion to take the plane apart and put it back together to meet security standards. And will take years. But such a win! Right MAGA fans?
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The most striking piece today. By the author of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO.
NY Times, guest essay by George Saunders, 13 May 2025: George Saunders: Shame on the White House
If the White House wants to fire the librarian of Congress, it can. But it was interesting to have recently had the experience of meeting this dynamic, dedicated person, Carla Hayden, and feeling so proud that she was our librarian of Congress, then reading the White House’s sloppy, juvenile rationale for her dismissal; it gave me a visceral feeling for just how diseased this administration really is.
I was the recipient of the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction in 2023. Dr. Hayden struck me then as energetic, engaged and utterly dedicated to the work of the library. One of the things Dr. Hayden and I bonded over was the idea that knowledge is power, that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are.
The White House, tossing out nonsense from its meager box of repetitive right-wing auto-defenses, claimed on Friday that Dr. Hayden had, “in the pursuit of D.E.I.,” done “quite concerning things.” Did it name those things? It did not. It couldn’t have. Putting aside the basic idiocy of being against that position (“What, you value diversity? You think things should be equitable? And that all should be included?”), members of the administration now use “D.E.I.” as a sort of omni-pejorative, deliberately (strategically) leaving its exact meaning vague.
Fact-checking, and as I’ve noted before:
The White House also stated, with an inaccuracy that would be comic if it weren’t so sickening, that Dr. Hayden put “inappropriate books in the library for children.” The librarian of Congress doesn’t put books into the library. And presumably, the American people benefit from having access to the widest possible collection of books. Even those American people who are children, who, after all, have parents to decide what is inappropriate.
And then the point about reality, and honest engagement with truth, which seems to be beyond the comprehension of MAGA and the current administration.
In the real world, the world of cause and effect, when we tear down the best among us and provide bogus reasons for why we did it, reality will eventually come for us. To behave honorably requires that we be in contact with the truth, to be able to supply honest answers to simple questions. If the White House wanted to part ways with Dr. Hayden, why couldn’t it, without insulting her groundlessly, do so, and then (truthfully) say why? One wonders.
The firing of Dr. Hayden and the inane dissembling that followed represent a kind of diabolical Opposite Day phenomenon: An exceptional person is stupidly tossed aside, and to come up with an explanation, the administration turns to its patented Random False Rationale Generator.
Who again are the people who support this administration?
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This is analogous. Why do they constantly lie? I think I know why.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 14 May 2025: Rob McCoy Spreads False Christian Nationalist History
Kyle seems to be the go-to person for stories like this, on the RWW site.
As Right Wing Watch has noted in the past, one of the defining characteristics of Christian nationalist activists is a willingnessto misrepresent history, astimeafter timetheyspreadblatantfalsehoodsin defenseof their right-wing ideology
One of the most egregious offenders is Christian nationalist and Trump cultist pastorRob McCoy, who has a historyof making demonstrably false statements about the Founding era, as he did during a recent episodeof his “Faith Forward” podcast.
McCoy—who has long urged conservative Christians to get more involved in politics and himself served on the city council in Thousand Oak, California, for several years only to resign in oppositionto the state’s COVID-19 restrictions—has deep ties to Christian nationalist activists Dan Wilks, David Lane, who attends McCoy’s church, and Charlie Kirk, whom McCoy was instrumentalin transforming into a full-blownChristian nationalist.
During his recent podcast, McCoy and his co-hosts were discussing effortsto post copies of the Ten Commandments in public schools across the country. McCoy insisted that such efforts were perfectly constitutional because, he said, “in the Northwest Ordinance, you couldn’t become a state in the union unless you taught the Bible in schools.”
The Northwest Ordinance required nothing of the sort.
Why do they lie? Because they’re about maintaining a consistent story about their tribe, their culture, in its opposition to the threatening, dangerous outer world. The idea of a cultural story or history that is consistent with objective reality is a irrelevant to them.
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Again, analogously. Misinformation is irrelevant and dangerous to one’s cultural stories, including the modern ones. Make fake news great again.
NY Times, Steven Lee Myers, 15 May 2025: Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation, subtitled “Federal agencies say that by axing the funding they are protecting the First Amendment. Critics see it as stifling scientific inquiry into sources of harmful online content.”
he Trump administration has sharply expanded its campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online, abruptly canceling scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country.
The grants funded research into topics like ways to evade censors in China. One grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence. Another, at Kent State University in Ohio, studied how malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media.
Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that.
Well, maybe that’s because conservatives are the ones spreading the misinformation, which seems obvious to so many of us.
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I get lots of spam to this blog, much of it in Cyrillic text, and almost never any legitimate comments. Among the spam comments are a few that are obviously AI generated. Here’s an example of a comment two days ago, after I posted about the Tim Urban book WHAT’S OUR PROBLEM?, that I’d mentioned once before in December.
It’s interesting that you came back to the book months after first mentioning it—there’s something about Urban’s work that tends to linger like that. Looking forward to reading your deeper take, especially on how the book balances depth with accessibility.
And the sender is someone with API in their name; obviously I won’t reproduced it. Notice how the message says something that seems to relate to my post, without really saying anything.
If you are a real person, check out my blog and post a comment.
