- David Brin on the red state/blue state divide;
- The authors of a report about the 2016 election set the record straight, to correct Tulsi Gabbard, and all the Fox News coverage of her;
- Tom Nichols on the latest Trump distraction — the nuclear sabre;
- More about the administration’s forbidden words;
- How other nations who have suppressed real economic data have worked out;
- And my comments from Facebook on Saturday about the new Hofstadter book.
Let’s lead with another comment by David Brin on Facebook, saying something he’s said before, many times, on his blog. He’s commenting about another post with this graphic from Emelie Rose Barg.
David Brin on Facebook 3 Aug 2025
His comment:
If we set aside Utah and Illinois as outliers (or even if we don’t) average rates of almost every turpitude are far higher across Red-run states than Blue-led ones: from gambling, addiction, STDs, domestic violence and murder to teen sex, divorce and net tax parasitism on the rest of the nation. That is a huge, undeniable fact! It should discredit all ‘conservative’ claims of good governance, especially when you add in the fact that national Republican administrations are always spendthrift wastrels, sending deficits skyrocketing, while Democratic ones are always fiscally responsible. Always. And I welcome $$$ wagers on any of that.
Throw in the failure of a single Rightist “supply side economics’ prediction ever, ever to come true,with the sole outcome of rocketing wealth disparities, along with the deliberate war on science and the planet, and the stench gets overwhelming, even before we go on to all the lies and treason and an ongoing list of other insanities, a mile high.
Why don’t people point these things out and comment about them? Apparently it’s considered slightly rude. Like discussing religion or politics at a family reunion, or at work. (Which is the problem with that recent order encouraging “religion expression” in the workplace.) People don’t discuss religion or politics in such situations, because no one argues from any rational grounds.
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Meanwhile, no doubt as a diversion from all the other things going on in this administration, Trump’s acolytes have rediscovered, after all these years, the supposed conspiracy by Hillary Clinton to help the Russians rig the 2016 election. (In fact, there was no conspiracy, but there’s plenty of evidence that the Russians did try, because they favored Trump.) Here’s a piece by the authors of the findings at the time, who say that Tulsi Gabbard has twisted their conclusions.
NY Times, guest essay by John O. Brennan and James Clapper, 30 Jul 2025: Brennan and Clapper: Let’s Set the Record Straight on Russia and 2016
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals and engaged in a broad “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. That is patently false. In making those allegations, they seek to rewrite history. We want to set the record straight and, in doing so, sound a warning.
Many details. Concluding:
The real politicization is the calculated distortion of intelligence by administration officials, notably Mr. Trump’s directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., positions that should be apolitical. We find it deeply regrettable that the administration continues to perpetuate the fictitious narrative that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. It should instead acknowledge that a foreign nation-state — a mortal enemy of the United States — routinely meddles in our national elections and will continue to do so unless we take appropriate bipartisan action to stop it.
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Fox News doesn’t care about such clarifications or corrections. They have a story to tell, and their stories are always in support of the Trump administration, and the MAGA crowd.
Media Matters, Rob Savillo, 30 Jul 2025: Fox News has aired 168 segments about Tulsi Gabbard’s revisionist claims regarding Russia, Obama, and the 2016 election
(Yes there are people from liberal/realist sites who monitor Fox News 24/7 just to see how they treat certain stories.)
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The latest distraction from all the other things.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 1 Aug 2025: Not With a Bang, but With a Truth Social Post, subtitled “The president is rattling a nuclear saber as a distraction.” [gift link]
Donald Trump, beset by a week of bad news, has decided to rattle the most dangerous saber of all. In a post today on his Truth Social site, the president claimed that in response to recent remarks by former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he has “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.” (All American submarines are nuclear-powered; Trump may mean submarines armed with ballistic nuclear weapons.) “Words are very important,” Trump added, “and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”
And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
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More about those forbidden words. See? Another issue that raised eyebrows for two or three days and then was overtaken by later events.
LGBTQNation, commentary by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 3 Aug 2025: America is controlled by a party of mad hatters. We can’t let their nonsense warp reality., subtitled “Trump and the MAGA sphere have co-opted and transformed reality into a dystopian novel where down is up and up is left.”
“If I had a world of my own,” says Alice’s friend, the Mad Hatter, “everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Here in Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical upside-down world of Wonderland, right is wrong and good is bad, characters shrink, grow, and disappear quicker than a wink of an eye, the Mad Hatter sings “a happy unbirthday to you,” and the Cheshire Cat correctly reminds us that “We’re all mad here.”
This strange world resounds in the political discourse of the entire Trumpian era as the administration and the Republican Party gaslights its followers into believing its so-called “populist” agenda. We are the mad ones, they would have us believe, if we do not want to live in their upside-down world.
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Conservatives have metamorphosed concepts of justice and equity into toxic and violent epithets in their patriarchal heteronormative Christian white supremacist project in which they have positioned rich white hetero-cisgender men as the victims of a plot by left-wing socialists to turn the United States into a “nanny state” of feminine men and losers.
Trump and his MAGA sycophants are saturating the airwaves with lies that human-caused climate change is a hoax; that windmills are ugly, cause cancer, and take the lives of millions of birds; and that vaccines weaken the human immune system.
That there are only two genders and transwomen are nothing more than men in skirts; that immigrants are criminals and psychopaths who eat cats and dogs.
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Americans are so insular, and arrogant, that it never occurs to them to wonder how other countries have worked out trying similar ideas.
NY Times, Ben Casselman, 3 Aug 2025: Trump Fired America’s Economic Data Collector. History Shows the Perils., subtitled “Economists say unbiased data is essential for policymaking, and for democracy.”
I’ll quote the examples.
There is the case of Greece, where the government faked deficit numbers for years, contributing to a debilitating debt crisis that required multiple rounds of bailouts. The country then criminally prosecuted the head of the statistical agency when he insisted on reporting the true figures, further eroding the country’s international standing.
There is the case of China, where earlier this century the local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country’s economy.
Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government’s data. That loss of faith drove up the country’s borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations.
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Posted on Facebook Saturday.
There’s a new Douglas Hofstadter book out this past week, called AMBIGRAMMIA, with the subtitle “Between Creation & Discovery”, with the lead letters of the title and subtitled words spelling ABCD. Hofstadter has always been obsessed about patterns ever since GODEL ESCHER BACH (which I read, long ago.) This book is about calligraphy and graphics, and how words designed cleverly can be turned upside to read the same thing, or something complementary. Rather than order it from Amazon, I ordered it from Walden Pond Books a week ago, since we went to dinner at Sirene, right next door, And then yesterday, Friday the 1st, we deliberately dined at The Star, a pizza place across the street, so I could pick up the book from Walden Pond.
I’m curious about how libraries will deal with this book, given the issues identified by John Clute. Even if the British Library rips off and disposes of the cover, the cloth spine uses the same graphics to “spell” both the author and the book’s title.
