Consider some good news — where progress is being made.
Click through to the site, where text boxes appear as you hover over each colored block, offering links to background information.
Information Is Beautiful: Most Beautiful News of the Year 2025.
Perhaps needless to say: these are all accomplishments of science, technology, and even politics.
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Meanwhile there are people like these loose in the world, accomplishing nothing, just being outraged.
Items from JMG:
- Megyn Kelly Doesn’t “Give A Damn” 40M Americans Speak Spanish, Football Belongs Only To White People (Is this racism? Bigotry? White supremacy? All of the above?)
- Watters: The Left Wants To Take Away Our Culture (Who is “our”? The white supremacists and racists and bigots?)
- Turning Point: “The Left Is Activating Their Terror Cells” (Are they going to use those Jewish space lasers?)
- GOP Rep Demands Federal Probe Into NFL And NBC Over “Explicit Gay Sexual Acts And Glorifying Sodomy” (What show was he watching? And why does he care so much? When conservatives are obsessed with gay sex it’s usually a tell.)
On this last item:
LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 10 Feb 2026: GOP lawmaker brutally mocked for calling the Super Bowl Halftime Show “gay pornography”, Subtitled: “Sir, I believe you are conflating a dream you had with the actual halftime show.”
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And when they’re not outraged, they’re tearing things down.
NY Times, 9 Feb, updated 10 Feb 2026: Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation, subtitled “A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.”
They’re happy to let the planet burn, in the long-term, as long as big business can make lots of money, in the short-term. History will cast them as villains.
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As a general aside, I think many MAGA folks underestimate the extent to which the rest of the world *does* pay attention to the US, even if MAGA folks don’t pay attention to the rest of the world.
NY Times, 9 Feb 2026: Trump Is a Global ‘Wrecking Ball,’ European Security Experts Say, subtitled “The organizers of the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s main defense-related forum, said in a report that President Trump is helping destroy the postwar international order.”
It’s not just American commentators saying this; the world is noticing. Worth quoting:
The security order that has bound together the West and much of the rest of the world since the end of World War II is under attack from President Trump and like-minded leaders, officials of the Munich Security Conference warned on Monday in remarkably blunt terms.
The world has entered an era of “wrecking ball politics,” a team of conference staff wrote on Monday, in their 2026 Munich Security Report. The conference is a highly watched annual gathering of security officials from Europe, the U.S. and beyond, and was roiled last year by a castigating speech from Vice President JD Vance, who called on European leaders to cooperate with parties they have deemed extreme.
…
“Ironically, the president of the United States — the country that did more than any other to shape the post-1945 international order — is now the most prominent of the demolition men,” the authors wrote. “As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the postwar international order is now under destruction.”
“Under Donald Trump,” they said, “the United States has largely abandoned the role of the ‘leader of the free world.’”
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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 9 Feb 2026: Pete Hegseth’s Attack on Harvard, subtitled “The anger at the Ivy League is about status envy, not war-fighting.” [gift link]
Harvard University has more than 100 students who are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. They will get their diploma and then put their life on the line for their country, serving under a secretary of defense, if he is still in his job by spring, who has nothing but contempt for their education and their alma mater.
In a statement issued on Friday, Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.” He declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs.
Hegseth’s characterization makes it sound like students are lolling under the trees in Harvard Yard while getting instruction in Marxist theory from the Chinese Red Guards. This is, of course, nonsense, but Hegseth wants to paint colleges in general, and especially elite schools of the type he attended, as enemy territory. (His undergraduate degree is from Princeton, and he has a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, though he symbolically returned his diploma in 2022.) This campaign against education is not about what’s actually being taught at Harvard; rather, Hegseth, among others, is using the school as a punching bag to express the generic social anxiety and status-based resentment that drives much of the MAGA movement.
MAGA and the administration are against education; they have no use for it. More specifically, the last sentence above: it’s about “the generic social anxiety and status-based resentment that drives much of the MAGA movement.”
Nichols ends by pointing out how Hegseth has things upside-down.
Hegseth’s announcement on Friday betrays this kind of neediness, a plea to be accepted by elite institutions: “For too long,” he said, “this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class.” But that’s not why the military sends people to universities. They do not go to Harvard or Johns Hopkins pleading to be understood; they go so that they will understand. They go so that they can comprehend the complexities of the world they live in, develop the intellectual skills to be agile and dispassionate thinkers throughout their career, and, most important, spend time among the civilians they will one day work with in creating strategy, procuring weapons, and planning the use of force. In America, civil-military relations are 99 percent civil and 1 percent military.
This reminds me of some comment I heard years ago, perhaps in the context of military folk bewailing the weakness of folks back home, or of the arts, or whatever is outside immediate military experience. All of those things are what military is fighting to preserve. It’s not about them.
Education is the foundation of a healthy democracy, especially one that relies on citizen-soldiers rather than a separate class of isolated Spartans. Hegseth yet again is showing that he is unfit for his post: He doesn’t seem to understand (or care) that when some of these young officers attain the ranks that Hegseth never reached and become senior leaders in the United States Armed Forces, what they learned at a top university or at a senior war college will be a lot more important than how many push-ups they did 20 years ago.
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Short items.
- JMG, from New Republic: DC Health Officials: Annual Anti-Abortion Rally On National Mall Was Also Measles Superspreader Event. (Somehow fitting.)
- Right Wing Watch: Mark Meckler Says It’s ‘Revolting’ For Zohran Mamdani To Discuss His Muslim Faith (I could say the same about him. He doesn’t realize how revolting some of us find Christians discussing their… faith.)
- John Pavlovitz: To White People Tired of Being Called Racist, From Another White Guy, beginning “Yesterday, a Trump supporter dropped a lengthy, rambling, profanity-laden diatribe into my comments section, lecturing me for implying that MAGA is inherently a white supremacist movement.” (I alluded to this yesterday.)
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More from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. One two three four…. onetwothreefour… wentithy…
And here’s another section, live, where it’s more wentithy.
