- JD Vance’s caveman rage against a lesbian stepmom;
- Heather Cox Richardson about Trump’s decline in mental acuity, and Sen. Mark Kelly on Pete Hegseth;
- Zack Beauchamp on how Trump is advancing the white nationalist worldview;
- Hegseth’s misunderstanding of the metaphor “fog of war”;
- Briefly noted items about hurricanes, affordability, unlawful orders, the Ten Commandments, and that “Bible Says So” essay in Oklahoma.
- Preisner: Red.
Given the weightiness of the discussions summarized in the Steven Pinker posts this week, I think it entirely justified to balance things out with the latest lunacies from the Trump administration for today’s regular post.
(Also, I’m again tweaking my format here for posted items, to see it if works.)
- LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 28 Aug 2024 (yes it’s from last year, but it popped up on the site’s homepage a few days ago): JD Vance rages at lesbian stepmom for being childless & “brainwashing” children, subtitled “Her not having biological children ‘really disorients me, and it really disturbed me,’ Vance said.”
- Disturbed? Disoriented? Because in cave man morality the only reason for the existence of a woman is to bear children?
- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: December 1, 2025. About Trump’s decline.
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President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity. A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.
- And Sen. Mark Kelly on Pete Hegseth.
“[H]e runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous, it is embarrassing, and I can’t imagine what our allies think of looking at that guy in this job, one of the most important jobs in our country…. He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons. And last night, he’s putting out on the internet turtles with rocket-propelled grenades…. This is the secretary of defense. This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate. And then every single day after that.”
- Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 3 Dec 2025: The dark reality behind Trump’s new anti-immigrant policies, subtitled “His administration is now openly advancing a worldview built by white nationalists in the 2010s.”
- Like the guy in 2016 who said “One fundamental policy we’re going to put forward is a break on all immigration, particularly non-European immigration, for a 50-year period.”
- Trump, in particular, considers Somali immigrants to be “garbage.”
- NY Times, 3 Dec 2025: Hegseth Invoked the ‘Fog of War’ in a Boat Strike. What Does That Mean?, subtitled “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the term, which alludes to uncertainty in battle, in reference to a deadly U.S. military attack in the Caribbean.”
- Hegseth thinks that a metaphor for uncertainty, an idea coined by Carl von Clausewitz, is literally about fog.
-
“I did not personally see survivors,” he said at a cabinet meeting in the White House, referring to people who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage between two U.S. strikes on Sept. 2. “The thing was on fire. It exploded, there’s fire, there’s smoke.”
“This is called the fog of war,” he added.
- JMG, 2 Dec 2025 (from People): Noem Thanks Trump For “Keeping Hurricanes Away”
- Noem speaks as if Trump literally influenced the weather. Imbecile? Or toady.
- JMG, 2 Dec 2025 (from USA Today): Trump: “The Word ‘Affordability’ Is A Democrat Scam”
- To Trump, everything that doesn’t align with his whims is a scam or a hoax or a fraud or fake news. What a chaotic, anarchic, exhausting world he lives in. Full of evil-doers and demons.
- Oh look, here’s what Pete Hegseth said about the military following unlawful orders back in 2016.
- JMG, 2 Dec 2025 (from CNN): 2016 Video Shows Hegseth Saying Troops Shouldn’t “Follow Unlawful Orders” From Then-President Obama
- But that was when he thought Obama was issuing unlawful orders. It’s completely different now.
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 3 Dec 2025: Texas families file class action lawsuit to halt Ten Commandments display in every school district, subtitled “As Attorney General Ken Paxton urges districts to disobey federal rulings, church/state watchdogs are pushing for a statewide injunction”
- Because school districts in Texas keep defying judicial orders against posting the Ten Commandments in public schools. They know better than the law; they have God on their side.
- JMG, 3 Dec 2025: Former Oklahoma Schools Chief: Fire Everybody Who Agreed With Flunking Student For “Bible Says So” Essay
- Once again, evidence for my provisional conclusion that religious inculcation (especially in childhood) undermines the ability to think rationally, to draw conclusions from object evidence and not from authority or holy books. Christians, some of them at least, seem genuinely not to understand this. Their old stories must be retained as their modern stories. Nothing learned since the Bible was written can revise their understanding of anything. To take exception is what they consider “persecution.”
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Still revisiting the couple dozen albums I have by Zbigniew Preisner, most of them film music. This is one of the best, despite my distaste for including songs on a soundtrack album. You can skip them. Or not.
