- Trump pardons George Santos, of course;
- The “No Kings” rhetoric from the Republicans, and the results today;
- With some thoughts about conservative thinking;
- Jamelle Bouie;
- Lunatic: MTG still obsessed about weather control;
- Science: how humans perceive only a tiny bit of reality.
Today began thusly:
NY Times, 17 Oct updated 18 Oct 2025: Santos Is Released After Trump Commutes His Sentence, subtitled “George Santos’s lawyer said the disgraced former congressman was freed from a New Jersey prison around 10 p.m. on Friday. He served less than three months on his fraud conviction.”
And
NY Times, 18 Oct 2025: Santos’s Release Frustrates His Former Colleagues and Constituents, subtitled “George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, was freed from prison on Friday after President Trump commuted his sentence. On Long Island, in his former district, some people called the decision an outrage.”
In the hours after President Trump’s announcement that he had commuted the prison sentence of George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, New York politicians and some voters greeted the news with a mix of anger and frustration.
“George Santos is a convicted con artist,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, said in a statement on Saturday. “That will forever be his legacy, and I disagree with the commutation.”
Robert Zimmerman, a Democrat who lost to Mr. Santos in a 2022 congressional race, said in a post on social media that “this decision demonstrates the lawlessness of the Trump administration.”
“Donald Trump is trying to put his political enemies in jail while he frees George Santos for the unconscionable crimes he committed,” he added.
This again is pure tribal thinking: membership and loyalty trump principle. Rule of law is irrelevant.
In other words: Andy Borowitz, today on Facebook:
George Santos is a convicted liar and fraud, so Trump had to free him out of professional courtesy.
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Then there’s today’s “No Kings” demonstrations across the US. It’s always interesting to realize that the rest of the world is watching.
BBC, 18 Oct 2025: No Kings protests draw huge crowds as anti-Trump rallies sweep across US
Guardian, 18 Oct 2025: Republicans mostly silent as millions of Americans protest Trump on No Kings day
CNN, 18 Oct 2025: The GOP’s extraordinary rhetoric about the ‘No Kings’ rallies
President Donald Trump and his allies have spent weeks painstakingly trying to manufacture an image of an irredeemably violent American left.
This despite a series of rulings from judges, including several Republican-appointed ones, saying the image being painted is a mirage. And it’s despite hard data showing that, even as left-wing violence has increased this year, it still pales to decades of right-wing violence.
But ahead of the “No Kings” rallies across the country on Saturday, the GOP’s effort has taken a rather stunning turn.
The Trump team and its allies suggested that the rallies, which are likely to draw millions of people, will essentially be chock full of antifa, terrorist sympathizers and even terrorists themselves.
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How’d it turn out?
NPR, 18 Oct 2025: Photos: Scenes from the No Kings Protests
PoliticsNY, 18 Oct 2025: ‘No Kings’ march in NYC sees more than 100,000 marchers speak out against Trump, no arrests or disruptions
Similar stories on other sites.
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I’m beginning to think that Republicans/conservatives are truly dim-witted, delusional and paranoid. Again: this is not about defining Republicans exactly; it’s about identifying the reclusive strand of human nature that retain tribalistic thinking. They are wrong about everything. The protesters today don’t hate America — they hate Trump, and his minions. But the Republicans/conservatives simply cannot comprehend this, given their simplistic, tribal thinking. (If that’s not true? Then maybe they’re savvy political strategists who are playing to a base that they assume is dim-witted, delusional, and paranoid.)
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Thoughts.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 18 Oct 2025: Republicans Know How Vulnerable Trump Is. The Attacks on No Kings Prove It. [gift link]
Millions of Americans are gathering across the country on Saturday — including in Washington, D.C. — to protest the monarchical pretensions of the Trump administration.
In the four months since the last No Kings protests, President Trump has gone even further down the road of claiming plenary authority over the executive branch. He has continued to claim the right to fire anyone he pleases, to cancel or spend federal funds outside congressional appropriations and to launch lethal strikes against foreign civilians without explicit authorization from Congress or evidence of imminent threat to Americans.
The president has tried to leverage the power of the federal government against his political opponents and legal adversaries, sending the Justice Department after James Comey, a former director of the F.B.I.; Attorney General Letitia James of New York; and one of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton. Trump also wants to use the I.R.S. and other agencies to harass liberal donors and left-leaning foundations. He has even tried to revive lèse-majesté, threatening critics of his administration and its allies with legal and political sanctions. With Trump, it’s as if you crossed the bitter paranoia of Richard Nixon with the absolutist ideology of Charles I.
Today’s protesters, in other words, are standing for nothing less than the anti-royal and republican foundations of American democracy. For the leaders of the Republican Party, however, these aren’t citizens exercising their fundamental right to dissent but subversives out to undermine the fabric of the nation.
With the calumnies we’re heard before.
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Let’s finish today with one lunatic item, and one philosophical item.
Lunatic:
JMG, 18 Oct 2025: MTG Cheers Shutdown As Stopping Weather Control
Greene and her fellow QAnon nutbags have blamed sinister weather control devices for wildfires and floods in multiple states and for having deliberately “steered” hurricanes into red states.
This is what happens when you have no education about how the world actually, physically, works.
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Far beyond the left-right political/psychological divide among humans is the realization that all humans live within a bubble of perception and experience, which systematic investigation (science) has discovered in recent centuries is but only a tiny part of reality.
The Atlantic, Shan Wang, 18 Oct 2025: These Photographs Are Not What They Seem, subtitled “The naked eye is only one way of seeing the world.”
One of my favorite moments of elementary-school science class was “microscope day,” a version of show-and-tell where kids brought in everyday objects to marvel at under the lens. I raided my family’s kitchen—salts, sugars, spices, chilies, peppercorns—while many others cut off tufts of aggrieved siblings’ hair. Someone brought a wriggling worm. Someone else simply picked from his nose in front of the microscope when it was his turn (our teacher let this proceed). Absolutely nothing looked like what we expected. The naked eye, I first learned on those days, was only one way of seeing the world.
Followed by a series of photographs that the reader is invited to guess what is being depicted.
