The Enemies Within

Posted on Tuesday 28 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Are those who are actively seeking to dismantle the government and turn the US into a selfish, xenophobic, insular, backward nation. Trump and his minions. And their fans.

  • Trump thinks there’s a big water faucet in California that the military turned;
  • Trump halts funding to government grants to clear them of ideological thinking;
  • Trump, halting funding for anything to do with fighting climate change, will go down as one of the greatest villains of history;
  • Robert Reich’s comments about Trump’s actions;
  • Why Trump’s freeze on science funding will undermine American leadership in the world;
  • How Trump’s actions this past week have unleashed more crime.

This is hilarious.

JMG, 28 Jan 2025: Felon Lies That “Military Turned On The Water” In CA

Trump apparently thinks there’s some big faucet somewhere that someone can turn — he thinks the military actually did that! — to direct water from the northern part of the state to the southern part. This is nonsense in so many ways. Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on The Enemies Within

RIP Wordpad

Posted on Monday 27 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Windows has deprecated WordPad, which makes my life more difficult;
  • David French on a German thinker, Carl Schmitt, and the friend-enemy distinction, and how it informs current American politics;
  • Latest thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson, about the cancellation of foreign aid, and Connie Willis, about Trump and the California wildfires;
  • Music: Bob Dylan’s “Restless Farewell,” and Joan Baez’s sublime cover.

Microsoft Windows stopped me in my tracks a couple days ago to update itself, which took 10 minutes or so of downloading, then installing, the updates. And when I was able to use my computer again, I quickly discovered that they deprecated WordPad! WordPad is gone! This is extremely irritating. I Googled and found a statement from MS about how everything can be done with Word or Notepad. Well yes, but with more effort. Word wants to automatically instantiate http links; I write posts in text to copy into WordPress. NotePad is plain text, which entails hitting returns for every spacing between paragraphs, that WordPress will then require me to take out. Just now, I’ve compiled this post in NotePad, and will now copy here. Let’s see how this works. …Later: drafting posts in NotePad, and then copying into WordPress, seems to work. For now.

—

Another variation on the idea that human nature has split into two. Conservative/progressive, tribal/cosmopolitan, whatever. A running theme here.

NY Times, David French, 26 Jan 2025: How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality. (Gift link.) (In the print paper today, under the headline “Us and Them Is All the Rage”)

Continue reading →

Posted in Human Nature, Music, Politics | Comments Off on RIP Wordpad

Fury and Chaos

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • An off-hand summary of what Trump’s done in his first week, apparently working to install an authoritarian police state in America;
  • How those who think the president should solve egg prices don’t understand capitalism, and Vance admits grocery prices aren’t coming down soon;
  • How Trump’s definitions of male and female are nonsense, and useless;
  • How Trump’s war on the “deep state” means dismantling the government that has kept our society running, for a century;
  • A psychologically revealing comment by Mel Gibson about “Daddy” Trump.
– – –

Apparently Trump – or the Project 2025 architect – was smart enough to understand that by opening his presidency with a volley of executive orders, some substantial and some silly, no one would be able to keep up, and a lot of them would slip through without notice. Just for future reference, let me see if I can compile what has happened this past week, mostly off the top of my head, without links. Then some links.

  • Trump freed 1500 criminals, those convicted of various crimes during the insurrection against the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. Even those who assaulted police. Police groups have complained. Even some Republicans are horrified. The irony: Trump is always complaining that other countries are ‘sending’ us their criminals and refugees from mental asylums as immigrants, while in fact it’s now Trump who is loosening criminals, many quite violent, on the American population.

Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Fury and Chaos

Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 3

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Summary thoughts about this book.

(Earlier posts with review and comments: post 1; post 2.)

Richardson tells the story of the past century, of the previous four years (before the book was published in 2019), and of the nation’s first century, in a matter-of-fact style that expresses not so much any kind of partisan position as it does the the development of conflicts between the founders, and those who’ve always opposed them, from first principles, as she, being a historian, understands them. Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, conservatives, History, Human Nature, Psychology | Comments Off on Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 3

Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 2

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Continuing my fairly detailed summary notes of this book. The second part of this book is about the ascendance of Trump, finishing with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The third part of the looks back at the roots of America and wonders how we can now reclaim its ideals from the authoritarians and autocrats.

Part 2: The Authoritarian Experiment

Ch11, A Snapshot of America, p83

Trump announced his campaign for president on June 16, 2015. He came from reality TV, a show the producers thought was a joke, beginning in 2004. He was more image than substance. p84.7:
Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, conservatives, History, Human Nature | Comments Off on Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 2

Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 1

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Notes on the State of America”
(Viking, Sep 2023, xvii + 286pp, including 30p of notes and index)

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become well-known, in addition to several earlier books, for her newsletter called Letters from an American, now on Substack. I don’t recall how I first heard of her, probably on Facebook, her Wikipedia entry suggests. (That entry notes that her newsletter is the most successful on Substack, bringing in $1 million/year. She’s the most prominent in a trend of influential thinkers to abandoned traditional media for independent subscription-based platforms, even though most of their content is free. Paul Krugman being the latest.)

This book takes a century-long view of America, explaining how we got to the point where someone like Trump could be elected president. It was published in 2023, and of course she continues to narrate history as it unfolds in her daily posts. Her style is straightforward and equanimous, matter-of-fact in describing the situation without seeming overly partisan. I started this book when it came out in late 2023, put it aside for some reason, and finished reading it last August. And now am finally writing it up here.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, History, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 1

The Price of Eggs

Posted on Friday 24 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tech-bros don’t care about the price of eggs;
  • David Brooks on why Trump will fail;
  • Dan Milbank on his astounding ignorance;
  • Evangelicals have abandoned Jesus for Trump;
  • Get ‘em while they’re young, said Hitler, says the Church.
– – –

Well Mr. Trump? What about the price of those eggs? You were going to fix that, right?

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 24 Jan 2025: Trumponomics is back: Tech-bros are delighted, but the price of eggs is soaring, subtitled “Trump thinks he won by talking about the economy — and now he gets to wreck it and enrich his billionaire pals”
Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on The Price of Eggs

As Things Fall Apart

Posted on Thursday 23 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Trump’s war against DEI isn’t actually about merit;
  • How despite claims of merit, those executive orders were shoddily written;
  • How Trump prioritizes white Christian patriarchy;
  • Comments from Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich;
  • How conservative response to that Bishop reveals themselves to be Old Testament zealots;
  • Short takes;
  • Allan Pettersson’s Symphony #5

Evidence: his Cabinet picks.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Jan 2025: Donald Trump’s war on DEI is not about “merit”, subtitled “Executive orders attacking DEI are about promoting unqualified white men over diverse candidates”

Title and subtitle pretty much say all, but it’s worth quoting Marcotte:
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Music, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on As Things Fall Apart

What Our Time Will Be Remembered For

Posted on Wednesday 22 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Doing next to nothing, while the world burned.

  • Our time will be remembered for nothing else than our inaction on climate change;
  • David Wallace-Wells searches for a silver lining;
  • A book I’m reading recalls similar conservative resistance to action on the ozone layer and acid rain;
  • How humans are responsible for our future, and can’t keep blaming “acts of God”;
  • Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
——

OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 21 Jan 2025: The unforgiven generations, subtitled “We will be remembered for nothing else.”
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Music, Politics | Comments Off on What Our Time Will Be Remembered For

Party of Hypocrites

Posted on Tuesday 21 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s pardons of the January 6th rioters was an act of contempt, and a violation of the Constitutional standards he claims to uphold;
  • Trump and his minions show contempt for an Episcopal bishop at Washington’s National Cathedral who pled for mercy to gays and transgenders;
  • Connie Willis on Biden’s pardons and the rationales for them that Trump and his fans cannot comprehend.

Following directly from previous post. What Trump did do on his first day in office was pardon some 1500 rioters (he called them hostages!!) who attacked the Capital in 2021. So much for the party of law and order (thought it’s not the first time).

NY Times, Opinion by the Editorial Board, 20 Jan 2025: Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on Party of Hypocrites