The World Marches On, “With or Without the US”

Brief items today, catching up.

• • • Washington Post, 14 May 2026: Don’t react to car accidents. Predict them instead., subtitled “A new incentive strategy could save thousands of lives.”
    • It’s worked for flying. Why not rigorously investigate causes and identify avoidance strategies. We’re measuring the wrong things, and the targets aren’t incentives for avoidance. In other words, apply science!

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• • • OnlySky, Adam Lee, 14 May 2026: Petrostates fade, electrostates rise, subtitled “The world is planning how to phase out fossil fuels, with or without the U.S.”
    • The US, under Trump and MAGA, is going precisely backward toward any long-term strategy to avoid climate catastrophe, and long-term human survival. As if deliberately so.

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• • • Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 14 May 2026: Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery, subtitled “A rival Advanced Placement curriculum is offering a dangerous view of the Constitution and America’s founders”
    • Of course they are. This is what conservatives do. It’s dishonesty, in favor of tribal solidarity.

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• • • The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, 14 May 2026: The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet, subtitled “A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right.”
    • Tribal/caveman human nature has never gone away, it’s just that as cosmopolitan society has grown, it’s been less and less polite to say things like this. Now in MAGA American, they’re coming out.
    • “Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, ‘we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,’ he told me recently. ‘And that is, we vote by household.'”
    • He’s an evangelical Christian of course. The statement begs the question: improve American for whom? Troglodytes like him?

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• • • Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 13 May 2026: Assassination conspiracy theories? Blame Trump, subtitled “False flag stories reveal a deeper truth about Trump’s failing presidency”
    • He spreads them, because he knows his base eats them up.

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• • • JMG, from Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2026: WSJ Exposes Aide Behind Trump’s Batshit Lying Posts
    • Obviously Trump himself doesn’t write all those posts on Truth Social. What doesn’t astonish me anymore is that Trump, this women, and all Trump’s MAGA followers don’t care that all these stories are made up lies. They have no moral standing.

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• • • Washington Post, yesterday: The UFO files reveal a hidden truth about a growing religion, subtitled “Belief in alien life is on the rise — fueled by declining trust in institutions.”
    • It’s never about evidence. One’s understanding of the world is always about whom to trust. Because most people don’t think.

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• • • AlterNet, Nick Hilden, yesterday: Tennessee schools bans Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘Roots’
    • The book is banned from school libraries in Knox County, centered on the city of Knoxville. The county is apparently a hotbed of book banning: “the title is one of 11 that have been added to the country’s list of now-124 banned books over the past year.”
    • Never mind the Pulitzer Prize; the book was basis for the hugely popular and influential 1977 TV series Roots, a sea change in American understanding of racial relations, as I recall, having seen it at the time.
    • But this is what certain Tennessee parents and school officials do not want their children to know about.

• • • Right Wing Watch, yesterday: Mike Johnson Says ‘Rededicate 250’ Event ‘Transcends Politics’; So Why Are All the Speakers MAGA Christians?
    • I’ll leave it at that; it speaks for itself.

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• • Slate, Jim Newell, today: Trump’s New Grift Is His Most Brazen … Ever?, subtitled “The administration is mulling a plan for a massive taxpayer-funded slush fund for Trump’s closest allies.”
  • These kinds of things happen every week. His fans don’t care. This is the essence of tribalism: whatever their side does, it’s fine. If Biden had done it, they would raise the roof. No principles need apply.