- Is America being sabotaged from within?
- Robert Reich asks his readers what gives them hope, with four options;
- Headlines about Haitians, Satan, a terror attack, the end of free meals for children, hiding statistics, how conservatives are realizing Dolly Parton wasn’t on their side, erasing history, and shutting down forest research;
- And some inchoate thoughts, after the floods in Nepal, about the meaning of life.
It’s not getting any better.
LA Times, Jon Duffy, 31 Aug 2026: Trump is spending billions to reverse American progress
Key points handily summarized at the top:
• President Trump has ordered the Navy to strip advanced electromagnetic launch systems from future Ford-class carriers and revert to steam catapults, discarding decades of investment and adding new costs and delays.
• The administration is also paying energy companies nearly $4 billion to surrender offshore wind leases, using taxpayer dollars to erase future clean power instead of expanding proven renewable projects.
• Paying to dismantle successful technologies, including carrier launch systems to offshore wind, risks squandering hard-won progress and weakening America’s energy security, military readiness and long-term technological edge.
Concluding,
The United States needs more energy, a more capable military, modern infrastructure and the ability to compete technologically for decades to come. We have already paid billions to move forward. We should be investing in that progress, not buying our way back to where we started.
How can this not be seen as sabotage? If not by a foreign power, then by…?
\\\
Robert Reich, yesterday: Office Hours: What gives you hope?, subtitled “If anything”
He asks the question of his readers, with four options. I’ll expand his definitions of two of them.
- Frankly, I’ve lost hope.
I wish I didn’t have to admit this, but I’ve come to the conclusion that our democracy is doomed. A majority of the American public is too stupid to hold on to it. Trump has done so much damage that we can’t recover from this. We no longer understand our nation’s ideals. We’ve lost our moral compass.
- Democrats will take over the House and possibly the Senate in January.
- Trump won’t make it through the rest of his term.
- America is turning to progressivism.
Call me a cockeyed optimist if you wish, but I see a huge progressive wave coming soon — not just politically but also socially and economically. Americans are waking up to the predations of the billionaires and tech bros. Just as we had a progressive era after the first Gilded Age, another progressive era is on its way.
I have sympathy for the first option, since it really does seem that a large portion of the population is too stupid to understand democracy or why it should prevail over their personal religious priorities. But in reading beyond current events, and having some historical perspective, I see both the swing back and forth between progress and regress, and how our current state of politics, no matter how bad it might seem, is still better than the social assumptions of a century ago (never mind a millennium ago!); that is, we’ve progressed, and will continue to. I voted for option 4, which has 31% of the vote, while option 2 currently has 46% of the vote.
\\\
Headlines.
- Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today: Trump’s cruelest act yet: Haitians are being deported into total chaos, subtitled “First they were accused of eating cats. Now Haitian immigrants must face violence back home”
- “The cruelty is the point,” as Adam Serwer wrote years ago.
- The Daily Beast, yesterday: MAGA Gov Candidate Claims He Met Satan in Real Life
- No he didn’t. He’s addled.
- JMG, today: Eric Trump’s MAGA Prophetess: God Told Me That Mamdani Will “Oversee” Terror Attack On NYC
- Won’t happen.
- JMG, from NPR, today: Dozens Of School Districts Have Ended Free Meals
- See how happy they are.
- Reuters, today: Kennedy asked to remove Pennsylvania measles death from CDC tally, sources say
- Hide or don’t collect the data and you can pretend nothing is happening.
- Some conservatives are realizing that Dolly Parton wasn’t on their side.
- LA Times, yesterday: Dolly Parton’s Walk of Fame star scratched up days after her death: ‘Doesn’t make any sense’
- JMG, 1 Sep 2026: Texas Hate Pastor Re-Raises US Flag At Local Post Office Because It’s “Repulsive” To Lower Flags For Dolly Parton
- Conservatives trying to erase history they don’t like.
- LGBTQNation, today: Right-wing forces tried to stop these archivists from preserving LGBTQ+ history. They failed.
- Subtitled: “History is such a threat to this very alt-right conservative movement… because it happened, and it is a weapon to show people how you can fight back.”
- More destruction.
- AP, today: US Forest Service closing 23 research facilities as part of reorganization under Trump
\\
Latest inchoate thought about the meaning of life. In reflection of those who died, abruptly, in the floods in Nepal.
The creepy thing is that so many people, especially those who die in floods like this, but also in auto accidents and plane crashes, have no opportunity to ‘finish’ their lives, to draw their lives to some kind of conclusion. People with illnesses who die in a hospital bed do have that opportunity, perhaps. But either way, does it matter? How many people matter to very many other people? Here is the idea of the meaning of life, or ‘mattering.’ My take is that there is no greater existence in which each of us matters is some cosmic sense. (Unless you take a cosmic, species-wide perspective, about the fight against entropy, as some writers have suggested.) We only matter to the people who matter to us.
