We saw the final episode of this new version of Little House on the Prairie last night. The first season arc ends with the Ingalls being driven out of their initial house by a prairie fire. Meanwhile their town has dealt with a government contract to take over the land once owned by the Osage Nation.
As I’ve said, I never saw the original Michael Landon series. But I’m sure this new series is more respectful to the native Americans who lived where these European immigrants chose to settle down. Manifest Destiny. Still, it’s a difficult tightrope to walk, making this series in 2026: make the settlers too sympathetic to the natives, and it could verge on the unrealistic (and the “woke”); depict the settlers as certain that the natives were savages, and you loose all audience sympathy. Just as with The Odyssey, stories change as times and sympathies change.
But I always think about the big picture history, and have noticed what other commentators have not: Humanity, over 10 or 12 thousand years, spread across the globe and killed off all the large mammal species. The mammoths, and so on. Most recently in Australia. So… in North America, where those mammoths and other species were killed to extinction, wasn’t that done by… what we know call the native Americans? This isn’t to blame any particular portion of the human race. Given the chance, all groups of our species have done that.
But this struck me as I was watching the show last night. The Osage are sore at being displaced, and native American tribes are moribund to this day, because, they’ve been deprived of their history of hunting (and killing off those big animals) and being forced to live on reservations, where they will have to take up farming. This us a latter-day agricultural revolution, but one enforced, rather than chosen.
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Otherwise just kibble today. I have some longer pieces to discuss, but they’re *long*.
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- Salon, Jason Kyle Howard, today: Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan causes a GOP meltdown
- Subtitled “Republican efforts to turn the Democratic Senate nominee into a boogeyman betray their fear”
- And he has a funny name!
- Many similar pieces like this today.
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- The Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire, yesterday: The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed
- Subtitled “As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames.”
- Let’s quote some of this, for Trump fans who dismiss or forget all of this:
One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.
But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.
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- Media Matters, Evlondo Cooper, 6 Aug 2026: ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change
- Subtitled: “In coverage from June 29 to July 26, national broadcast networks failed to link multiple successive heat waves to global warming”
- My take: they know they would lose viewers, those who don’t “believe” in climate change, if they mentioned it. This is the dynamic behind the softening or falsification of American history, as is going on in the current administration with the Smithsonian Institution.
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- JMG, today: Heritage: Fauci Proves We Should Ignore “Experts”
- Because he knows better, right? (They don’t understand that circumstances change and scientists change their advice as they do.)
- I wonder what this guy will do when he has a serious medical condition? Consult Google? Or resort to a medical expert?
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- JMG, today: Senate Bill Would Strip LGBTQ Student Protections
- Promoted by a senator from Alabama. Because Republicans *want* to discriminate. They *know* that some people are lesser than others, than themselves.
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- Trump is long gone; this is just another example.
- JMG, today: Trump Claims Drivers Of Electric Cars “Have A Disease”
- This is why humanity is likely doomed.
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- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Eric Metaxas Fails Spectacularly In Making The Christian Case For Supporting Trump
- (Here is Douthat, a reliably conservative opinion columnist for NYT who just got a gig at 60 Minutes, cast as a skeptic.)
- I won’t try to summarize the arguments on either side; I’ll just quote this:
Over and over again, when pressed to explain why he and other evangelical Christians continue to overwhelmingly support Trump despite his myriad personal and political failings and overtly unchristian behavior, all Metaxas could do was retreat to the argument that Trump is the only thing standing in the way of the “Satanic wickedness of the Democrats.”
- “Satanic wickedness”? He is demon-haunted, religiously-addled. There are no genuine arguments here. Don’t count of the religious to think rationally.
