The Cowboy Myth, Presidential Corruption, and Disingenuous Cuts to Science Research

Posted on Friday 25 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richard on the “cowboy myth” that informs the Trump presidency;
  • How Trump et al are giving billionaires a bad name;
  • How Trump has done the most corrupt thing any president has ever done — getting rich from anonymous investors — and how barely anyone cares;
  • How the administration’s cuts to science research echo the disingenuous schemes of the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel companies.
– – –

 

Heather Cox Richardson: April 24, 2025

She writes about Trump and his scandalous administration, beginning with his “Vladimir, STOP!” entreaty on social media yesterday morning. But I’m noting this for her summary of the “cowboy myth” that still permeates some sectors of American political and cultural thought. I noted this in my summary of her book (beginning here).

Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.

Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

Part of the MAGA myth of a past golden age (which never actually existed). How this has played out:

Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.

They “knew that the world has never worked this way.” Especially not in a society that necessarily requires much global interaction. You can’t shut out the outside world.

As the middle class hollowed out, Republicans hammered on the idea that government action was socialism and the government was a swamp of waste and corruption. Donald Trump rode that rhetoric to the White House in 2016 but was still restrained by establishment Republicans who understood that the modern state underpinned America’s strength. President Joe Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ economic vision and reorientation of the economy around ordinary Americans made Republicans rally against another Democratic president. They turned back to Trump, backed as he was by the MAGA base marinated in the rhetoric that government is bad, even though their counties are more dependent than Democratic counties on government aid.

Now the dog has caught the car.

And here we are. Who is benefiting?

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Related items:

The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence, 25 Apr 2025: Trump and His Billionaires Are Giving the Rich a Bad Name, subtitled “So much corruption. So much greed. So much chintzy gold in the Oval Office.”

and

The New Republic, Michael Tomasky, 25 Apr 2025: Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done, subtitled “He’s using the White House to get rich from anonymous investors—and it’s hardly even a news story.”

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Remember the outrage over Hillary’s e-mails? That pales in comparison to this. And yet Trump’s fans don’t care. Here again is the break between America’s national ideals, and the base hero-worship of cultish tribalists.

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More about conservatives vs. reality.

NY Times, Alan Burdick, 25 Apr 2025: Trump vs. Science, subtitled “We explain the administration’s cuts to research.”

Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.

The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.

The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.

How science is an investment in the future; how American scientists are being alienated and moving to other countries. And then this: redefining science.

These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.

One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.

And how calls for “further research” are disingenuous: “It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.” As we’ve read about in a couple books lately. (Newitz, O’Connor and Weatherall)

Posted in Culture, Lunacy, Politics, Science | Leave a comment

Conservative Intellectuals, and the Wrong Way to Do Science

Posted on Thursday 24 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich collects comments from conservative intellectuals about the Trump administration;
  • Reich summarizes ten points that demonstrates Trump’s ineptitude and incompetence;
  • Similarly, Salon’s Brian Karem on how Trump has turned the White House into a joke;
  • How RFK Jr.’s approach is the opposite of how actual science works;
– – –

So of course there are *some* conservative intellectuals. Even if they’re to the ‘left’ of the MAGA base, if only because they think things through (rather than react simplistically) and they’re not driven by raw tribal hatred of The Other.

Robert Reich, 22 Apr 2025: The view from the right, subtitled “Conservative condemnation of the Trump regime is almost as vehement as is progressive condemnation. Will they give cover to business leaders who have so far remained silent?”

There is an unfortunate tendency for those of us on the so-called “left” to assume that thinkers and pundits on the “right” disagree with us about Trump.

But what is occurring these days transcends left or right. It is now a matter of democracy or tyranny. More and more of those on the so-called “right” are condemning the Trump regime with almost as much vehemence as you and I condemn it.

Will this give cover to business leaders who have so far remained silent?

A recent sample of condemnation of Trump from the “right.”

Reich then quotes a bunch of them. More important than what they say, in the context of this blog, is who they are. I’ll list them with links to the articles Reich is quoting. I’m cleaning up some of the link redirects and including the titles of their articles.

Reich concludes:

I continue to disagree with much of what these people say and write and I suspect you do as well. But I also continue to be surprised by how much our views are converging when it comes to the Trump regime’s dangerous drive toward dictatorship.

We’re on the cusp of a national wave of outrage that transcends the old political labels. This hardly means that died-in-the-wool Trumpers will change their minds. But it does give America’s business leaders who have so far remained silent or even supported Trump — the CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, the captains of our largest financial institutions, the heads of media empires — enough cover to come out against this dangerous and despicable regime. Will they?

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Today Reich has this:

Robert Reich, 24 Apr 2025: Ineptitude, incompetence, stupidity, and chaos, subtitled “Trump is fundamentally incapable of governing. That’s the theme that unites everything.”

I’ll summarize his ten points: The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disaster; The Harvard debacle; The tariff travesty; The attack on the Fed chair fiasco; The Kilmar Abrego Garcia calamity; ICE’s blunderbuss; Musk’s DOGE disaster; Measles mayhem; Student debt snafu; and Who’s in charge?

I can’t help but wonder if people who get their News from Fox have even heard of most of these stories.

Reich concludes:

All this ineptitude in just the last few weeks reveals that the Trump regime is coming apart. Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.

While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

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Along the same lines.

Salon, Brian Karem, 24 Apr 2025: “Two beautiful poles”: President Trump turns the White House into a joke, subtitled “If you can’t use a hook to yank the bad comic off the stage, then there is only one way left to end the show”

At first I thought it was satire.

On Earth Day, the Trump administration published a press release with the headline, “On Earth Day, we finally have a president who follows science.”

I stifled a laugh.

And so on, and so on.

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This the essence of conservative thinking, and why you can’t trust them when they claim to “follow science.” They already know what they want to conclude. That is not science; that’s ideology.

The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, 24 Apr 2025: ‘This Is Not How We Do Science, Ever’, subtitled “The Trump administration is manipulating government-sponsored research to get the answers it wants.”

One of the most notable things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency tasked with “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America”—is how confidently he distorts the basics of health, safety, and well-being.

In his short stint as health secretary, Kennedy has touted cod-liver oil as a valid measles treatment (it’s not), said that Americans are being “poisoned” by seed oils (they’re not), and claimed that “many” vaccines are not adequately safety-tested (they are). And he has readily cherry-picked and exaggerated findings to suit his own needs: “There’s a scientist at Harvard now who is curing schizophrenia with a carnivore diet,” he said at a press conference in March (it’s not a carnivore diet, and it’s not a cure).

The secretary also seems to think he knows what causes autism, a topic that scientists have been looking into for decades without producing a simple, clear-cut result, M. Daniele Fallin, a genetic epidemiologist at Emory University, told me. Kennedy, however, is adamant that a series of new investigations by his department will reveal at least “some of the answers” by September. “And we will be able to eliminate those exposures,” he said at a recent Cabinet meeting.

Once again, conservatives want clear, simple answers to everything, in a world that is apparently complex beyond their comprehension.

Among scientists who study and treat autism, the consensus has long been that “there is no ‘one cause’” of autism, Neelkamal Soares, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician in Michigan, told me. Genetics are likely to play a role; researchers have also explored the possible contributions of factors such as parental age; labor and delivery conditions; and exposures to certain chemicals, medications, or infections during pregnancy. Experts also generally agree that much of the growing prevalence of autism can be attributed to increased awareness and diagnosis—an explanation that the CDC, an agency Kennedy oversees, cited in its report.

And much more.

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Quickly noted.

The Guardian, Melody Schreiber, 24 Apr 2025: Autistic people and experts voice alarm at RFK’s ‘terrible’ approach to condition, subtitled “Health secretary is planning wide-ranging monitoring of autistic people’s health record and cuts to disability services”

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Science | Leave a comment

The Latest Cultural War Conservatives are Losing

Posted on Wednesday 23 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Conservatives keep badgering the law even as they lose the culture war;
  • Specifically, the Supreme Court case about banning books that Christians are uncomfortable with;
  • Related: HHS is proposing defunding the LGBTQ+ suicide hotline; and Sam Alito misreads a children’s book, exposing his animus toward gay marriage;
  • And noting how the White House bragging about following science means the opposite.
– – –

 

Last year I read and reviewed that book by Stephen Prothero called WHY LIBERALS WIN THE CULTURE WARS (EVEN WHEN THEY LOSE ELECTIONS), whose basic point was that as society changes (as it inevitably does) those uncomfortable with change, i.e. conservatives, complain only once such changes are well under way, by which time they’ve already lost the battle. (Save for once in a generation or two authoritarian crack-downs… which are part of this cycle too. And which most of us thought America was immune to.)

Here’s a perfect example from the Supreme Court this week.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Apr 2025: Too late to opt-out: Supreme Court ultimately can’t save the religious right’s futile book bans, subtitled “Even if SCOTUS allows LGBTQ books to get pushed out of classrooms, the right is still losing the larger culture war”

Marcotte begins by calling out the hypocrisy of Christian ideals.

Can you treat someone with “love, kindness, and respect” while simultaneously insisting their identity is so poisonous that it cannot be acknowledged?

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday for Mahmoud v. Taylor, which has become known as the “don’t say gay” case, because it’s over conservative objections to children’s books, taught in Maryland classrooms, that position queerness as a normal fact of life. The arguments involved a lot of legalese about “burden” versus “coercion,” or what constitutes a “sincerely held” religious belief. But at the heart of the battle was a more philosophical question, one with an answer that should be self-evident: Is it possible to “respect” someone while trying to erase their existence?

Naturally, the argument from relies on fatuous, long-discredited premises.

The right’s lawyer argued that censoring these books wasn’t about disrespecting queer people, but protecting “children’s innocence.” It’s a nonsense argument, however, as it assumes there’s a “respectful” way to erase people. But it was also quite silly, as if hiding these books would shield children from the knowledge that LGBTQ identities exist. (An unspoken corrollary is the false view they can prevent children from growing up queer.) The case illustrates the animating futility at the heart of the MAGA movement: they will never manifest their dream of a past “great” America, when “queer” wasn’t a thing. Such a period never existed, but especially not in an era when queer people are visible in pop culture, the internet, and the general community. The government can force teachers not to say “gay” in school, but kids are going to hear about it everywhere else.

Point: see Mark Lilla on the corrosive notion of childhood innocence. Point: see my point oft-repeated on this blog that animus toward gays is the existential worry by parents that if their kids are gay they will have no grandchildren (which, these days, is not necessarily true). Point: gay people have always existed, and there never was a “golden age” when they didn’t exist. (Most people just didn’t know about them, just as they didn’t know about autistic people.)

And point, extending the second one: this is all about tribal priorities to expand the tribe at all costs, from an age when infant mortality was high. This became part of base human nature; thus that existential dread. It’s never about individual choices or fulfillment. Times have changed but human nature hasn’t, and has come to conflict with the ideas to overcome the problematic aspects of human nature, as the Enlightenment thinkers, and the American founders who wrote the Constitution, sought to overcome.

Many people have thought this through, but not MAGA conservatives. If they can’t legally define gays and trans people out of existence, then at least they can demonize them, which is what this Supreme Court case is about. Marcotte concludes:

One thing censorship of queer books does accomplish is signaling to LGBTQ kids that there’s something shameful about who they are. “LGBTQ+ youth who attend schools with an inclusive sex education curriculum report lower levels of depression and suicidality,” explained the American Psychological Association in their amicus brief in support of the school district. Listening to the mean-spirited arguments from the right before the Supreme Court today, it’s hard to shake the sense that this shame is the desired outcome. Kids are going to learn what “gay” is one way or another, and at very young ages — and many of them will be queer. The only question is whether the authorities in their life tell them they’re bad people for it. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the GOP’s goals with the case are crystal clear. They can’t win the culture war, but they’re going to use these lawsuits to spit in the face of all the queer people who offend them just by existing.

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Related: also in the news this week:

Axios, Avery Lotz, 23 Apr 2025: LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline among proposed HHS budget cuts

Let ’em kill themselves, seems to be HHS and RFK Jr.’s position.

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One more on this topic.

Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 23 Apr 2025: How Sam Alito Inadvertently Revealed His Own Homophobia From the Bench

The book shown is one of those in question. It’s a picture book about two men getting married, in which a little girl has reservations about it. Alito interpreted to mean she had moral objections to the marriage. He was wrong.

A few minutes later, Sotomayor made this point to Rassbach. “The character, the child character, wasn’t objecting to same-sex marriage,” the justice said. “She was objecting to the fact that marriage would take her uncle away from spending more time with her, correct?”

And how Alito couldn’t let this go.

“No one in the book has any problem with same-sex marriage,” the author said. “Everyone in the story supports Bobby and Jamie’s decision to marry, including Chloe. She’s thrilled about the wedding after she gets to know Jamie better” and is “completely supportive.” Brannen said she was “dismayed” by the way Alito characterized the book; she first wondered if Alito hadn’t bothered to read it…

So Alito was reading into the story what he wanted to see.

The broader story here: change in society happens, but at a pace where not everyone can keep up. We have to give allowance to Alito, and many other older people, who are uncomfortable with the changes in society younger folks take for granted. This is a truism in science too, which after all is done by humans. Sometimes, for the evidence to prevail, you have to wait for old guys, driven by convention, to die off.

This has always been true.

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Covered by many spots today. If they claim to be following science, you can be sure they are not. The Trump administration is an instantiation of Orwellian reality.

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Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Leave a comment

What Conservatives Mean by the Deep State

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Namely, anything that interferes with their agenda, in effect the entirety of Jonathan Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge,” since MAGA conservatives don’t truly believe in the Constitution or our system of government;
  • Robert Reich on the billionaire class, that doesn’t care about anyone else, and who are planning for an “event” to further isolate themselves from the real world;
  • Once again, Republican elites tolerate Trump because they want the tax cuts;
  • Checking in with Michael Hobbes, and his comments about how conservatives have turned against reality;
  • A new conspiracy theory: JD Vance killed the pope!; Numbers on autism, despite RFK Jr; and conservatives shielding their kids from the reality of the world through library boards.
– – –

To conservatives, anything that interferes with their agenda means they’re “being framed by the deep state.”

Or: what conservatives mean by the “deep state” is the entire set of government institutions that keep our society running — including the functions of law and order. (See Rauch.) They think it’s some kind of conspiracy, waiting to pounce when they try to take advantage of the system, or impose their worldview on others, since they don’t truly believe in the Constitution.

These thoughts triggered by this relatively incidental example in the news today:

JMG, 22 Apr 2025: Fired Hegseth Aide: I Was Framed By The Deep State

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More about the notion that wealthy conservatives are happy to cut government services, and then cut taxes, because they themselves don’t need those government services, and don’t care about the many people who do.

Robert Reich, 22 Apr 2025: The secession of the billionaire class

Billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the drop in the stock market is nothing to be concerned about because Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.

Billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says we shouldn’t be concerned that mass layoffs in the Social Security Administration have caused delays because his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check.

The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, whose minions are busily slashing the Social Security Administration, calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

Billionaire Trump says he “couldn’t care less” if automakers raise their prices because of his tariffs.

On what planet do these people live? Surely not this one.

This is what you get when oligarchs are in charge of the nation.

To be fabulously wealthy today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. It therefore means having not a clue about how average working people live or what they worry about it.

The billionaire class doesn’t care if producers raise their prices, because prices mean almost nothing to them. They aren’t concerned about retirement savings, because they don’t have to prepare for retirement.

If anything, Reich goes on, the billionaire class is preparing for an “event” —

the thing that will cause them to secede even further from the rest of the world into isolated, sanitized survival chambers. The “event” could be massive social unrest, an unstoppable virus, a malicious computer hack that takes everything down, or environmental collapse.

You wonder how much of this, like Musk’s obsession with colonizing Mars to ensure the survival of the human race, comes from alarmist science fiction. Reich quotes a Guardian article by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, then concludes:

[Trump] and his billionaire appointees feel no connection to the rest of America. They want only to dismantle government and insulate themselves from the ensuing chaos.

As Klein and Taylor say, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

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Once again.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 22 Apr 2025: The Force That Holds Trump’s Coalition Together, subtitled “Traditional Republican elites tolerate the authoritarianism because they want the tax cuts.”

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I pulled an extremely mean trick on my little brother. I told him that if he cleaned my room, I “might give him a dollar.” Once he had performed the chore, I told him I’d decided against paying him.

I thought of that shameful (and oddly Trumpian) moment a few weeks ago, when I began encountering news stories reporting that President Donald Trump was considering a plan to raise taxes on the rich. (Axios: “Scoop: Trump might let taxes rise for the rich to cover breaks on tips.” Semafor: “Trump told Republican senators he’s open to raising taxes on highest earners.”)

The gist here: Republicans have from time to time over the years floated the idea of raising taxes on the rich. But they never do.

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Via a post on Facebook, something by Michael Hobbes, a journalist and podcast host with considerable background, and 174K followers, whom I’ve not been previously aware of, and this post on BlueSky.

Michael Hobbes on BlueSky, 21 Apr 2025.

The conservative movement has turned against reality on every scientific issue of our time, from gun violence to climate change to epidemiology.

If campuses are ideologically homogeneous, it’s not because academia has ostracized conservatives. It’s because conservatives have ostracized academia.

Followed by comments, including numerous follow-up remarks from Hobbes:

The entire concept of “ideological conformity” applied to academia makes no sense. Is the belief that the Earth is round a type of conformity? On some level, yes: Everyone thinks the same thing.

But sometimes everything thinks the same thing because that thing is true! This is how science works.

—

I expect that the field of geology does not have a lot of Scientologists. Is this evidence that there’s a culture of “stifling conformity” among geologists? No! It’s evidence that humans didn’t emerge from fucking volcanos.

—

When Republicans take power do they expand “viewpoint diversity”? No. They purge scientists, delete data and promote their own mediocre minds. If you support Trump you are signaling membership in a movement that *hates* science, science is not obligated to pretend otherwise.

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Short items.

Boing Boing, Rob Beschizza, 22 Apr 2025: J.D. Vance killed the pope, at least according to memes

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Some numbers.

PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson, 21 Apr 2025: RFK Jr. exaggerates share of autistic population with severe limitations

The highest figure we found for people with autism severe enough to pose significant challenges to daily living was about one-quarter of the autistic population. More frequently, academic estimates for this group are in the range of 10% of people on the spectrum, or lower.

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Conservatives are obsessed with shielding their children from the reality of the world.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 17 Apr 2025: Arkansas Republicans just fired the state’s Library Board to please one Christian Nationalist

And

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 16 Apr 2025: Christian Nationalist Jason Rapert Topples The Arkansas State Library Board

Sigh.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

The War Against Intelligence

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s rage against smart people;
  • Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us;
  • Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age;
  • Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges books based on word searches; Hegseth, one of Trump’s “best people,” keeps blundering; and how a former beauty pageant contestant is in charge of removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian.
– – –

Trump’s war against war against intelligence and expertise isn’t strategic; it’s personal.

Paul Krugman, 21 Apr 2025: Trump’s Cultural Revolution, subtitled “The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry”

First he quotes Trump’s Easter Day outburst, which begins with his version of Christian charity… Well it’s shown here as an image, so I’ll just retype a bit, complete with gratuitous caps.

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.

When Trump goes on to say Biden was, quote,

…our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing

He is, of course, projecting. The description fits Trump, not Biden.

Krugman:

Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.

It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Thus the photo above. (Some of that was visualized in the opening minutes of the TV adaptation of Cixin Liu’s THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM.)

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

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This synchs with a big piece on The New Yorker’s website today. Again, most people don’t realize what benefits they’ve been getting in better health care over the decades. It came from investing in universities.

The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, 21 Apr 2025: The Cost of Defunding Harvard, subtitled “If you or someone you love has cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or diabetes, you have likely benefited from the university’s federally funded discoveries in care and treatment.”

(My grandmother died of Parkinson’s disease, in the early 1970s. And I have cardiovascular disease. Or had? I had a heart transplant.) Gawande is the author of Being Mortal, among other books.

With U.S.A.I.D., President Donald Trump proved willing to impose catastrophic consequences, including widespread death and financial waste. But that was for people and investments far away. His attacks on universities involve lives and investments here at home.

These attacks are part of a broader assault on America’s health-and-science infrastructure. More than ninety per cent of the nine billion federal dollars for Harvard that are now in danger supports life sciences, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. The university itself receives only a fraction of this funding. Three-quarters of it goes to five independent Boston hospitals affiliated with its medical school: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The threatened defunding, if implemented, would choke off science and research across all of them.

With examples of patients he’s treated. MAGA seems to think any part of government spending they don’t understand should be slashed, without realizing that that spending is supporting real people, who are working to improve the lives of real people — including themselves.

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Several people today on Fb are posting a piece by one Lauren Thompson, an historian specializing in US history from the late 19th to the early 20th century. (This era has recently been dramatized by the HBO series The Gilded Age.)

Here’s one example of a post about this: Nigel Sellars: One fool’s great era is another, better educated person’s horror

Here’s the relevant part of Lauren Thompson’s post.

Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money’s supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.

There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day.

Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women’s purity. Creating instability in the Philippines, the Caribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women’s suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.

Sound familiar?

Here’s an appropriate cue for the famous George Santayana quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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Short items.

As we’ve seen much evidence of, conservatives including Christians feel entitled to lie, despite one of those commandments, because they feel they have some higher cause.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Apr 2025: ‘They Do Not Deserve The Truth’: Andrew Isker Praises Trump/Vance For Lying About Their Position On Abortion

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They revise history by word search. Simpletons.

LA Times, Michael Eric Dyson, 21 Apr 2025: Hegseth purged two of my books on race. Did he actually read them?

Well *of course* he didn’t read them.

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After yet another blunder, by the former Fox News host, Pete Hegseth is apparently being shown the door. Because Trump hires only the best people!

NPR, 21 Apr 2025: Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

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Yet another example of only hiring the best people.

Washington Post, 21 Apr 2025: She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it., subtitled “Who is Lindsey Halligan, the attorney assigned to help remove “improper ideology” from a major cultural institution?” (via)

Answer: she’s a former beauty pageant contestant. Really. Seriously. And she’s going to stroll through the Smithsonian and override the decisions of professional historians, according to her provincial values. This is where we are.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Culture, Politics | Leave a comment

Civic Uprising?

Posted on Sunday 20 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative David Brooks calls for a civic uprising against the Trump administration;
  • How Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir reacts to this;
  • How psychopaths and financial services seem to go together;
  • The extent to which JD Vance lies;
  • Aid to foreign children has ended; many of them will die; the administration doesn’t care;
  • The office on foreign disinformation has been shuttered;
  • And the CDC will cease collecting consumer safety data;
  • There’s a pattern here, as identified in the Brooks piece.
– – –

I neglected to note this latest David Brooks piece that appeared in Friday’s New York Times, or Thursday when it appeared online. It’s getting attention.

NY Times, David Brooks, 17 Apr 2025 online: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.

In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.

But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.

This fits neatly with my discussions of the institutions of society, including government and science, that the current administration wants to dismantle. They claim they want a smaller government (why? to save money? then cut the bloated military), while their motives are obviously different.

Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

All their battles, against law firms, foreign aid, universities, global trade, are really just one thing.

These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.

I will note that the current threat is not an illustration of my admittedly simplistic binary of tribalistic vs cosmopolitan thinking. It’s about something in between: call it, perhaps, the enactment of the tribalistic alpha male aggressiveness to more and more *other* tribes, including in the past century, the entire world. Even Trump: he’s trying to impose his values on the entire world through tariffs, and via threats to cancel trade agreements with other countries (like England) if they don’t cancel *their* DEI policies.

The important part here is this:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

This is a conservative writer, conservative in the sense of his emphasis on shared cultural values and so on (one of the few “intellectual” conservatives still around), advocating resistance to the current administration.

One more bit, as he cites Jared Diamond:

In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.

This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

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Here’s one reaction, from the executive editor of Salon.

Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 20 Apr 2025: The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?, subtitled “Welcome to upside-down America: David Brooks calls for revolution while Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom grovel”

The question of who understands the nature of the moment, and who does not, has been thrown into dramatic relief over the course of the last week or so — and boy howdy, have there been some surprises. This is too much of a generalization, but it’s an irresistible one: We are seeing a truly extraordinary transformation, something like the awakening of the mainstream conservatives alongside the continuing surrender of the mainstream liberals.

Yeah, I’m talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the “Communist Manifesto,” pretty much non-ironically. I don’t think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I’m also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the “distraction of the day” compared to truly important things like whether Trump’s tariff policy is “accountable to the markets.”

And this pull-quote:

When we see Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the wrong moment, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality.

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Quickly noted links.

AlterNet, The Conservation, 19 Apr 2025: Why a psychopath wouldn’t hesitate to cause a global financial crisis — according to science

People in the financial industry are more likely to be psychopaths.

The theory won support because psychopaths are more commonly found in financial services than in other sectors. It has even been argued that up to 10% of employees in financial services could be psychopathic. That is to say they have no empathy, care for other people, conscience or regrets for any damage they do.

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NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 19 Apr 2025: This Is How Far Vance Will Go to Sell a Lie

A lie about how many immigrants Biden let into the country.

You can read the rest of Vance’s post if you’d like. It’s just more of the same: a set of distortions, falsehoods and bizarre suppositions that all depend on the lie that there has been some “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants.

(Why do they need to lie??)

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The Atlantic, Hana Kiros, 18 Apr 2025: ‘In Three Months, Half of Them Will Be Dead’, subtitled “Elon Musk promised to preserve lifesaving aid to foreign children. Then the Trump administration quietly canceled it.”

They’re foreigners, let them die, is how I suspect they think.

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Salon, Brian Karem, 27 Apr 2025: Trump’s open defiance of the law leaves no room for Republican redemption, subtitled “‘A monster’: A madman president sinks even lower, as the GOP remains silent”

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JMG, from NYT, 16 Apr 2025: Marco Rubio Shutters Office On Foreign Disinformation

Just think about this. Why would they do this? To let the disinformation flow.

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JMG, from Reuters, 17 Apr 2025: CDC To Cease Collecting Consumer Safety Data

The U.S. consumer product safety agency will stop collecting data on injuries from incidents like car accidents and adverse drug effects due to staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an agency email seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the situation.

If there’s no data about the damage big business does, then they can’t be held accountable. Right? And profits won’t be affected.

Posted in conservatives, History, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

The Most Sublime Moment in Classical Music

Posted on Saturday 19 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Asimov on Heinlein, about libertarianism;
  • More about “viewpoint diversity” in science, and how scientists react;
  • About another stupidly doctored photo by Trump, to prove something to his dimwitted followers;
  • How the history Trump wants to erase hold the answer to his future;
  • How elections seem to swing back and forth parties, and whether this will continue;
  • And Bruckner 8, movement 3, and the history of classical music.
– – –

Another item seen in passing on Facebook today, from more than one person. I’ll save the image rather than linking it.

This struck me because it reminded me of the comment someone made recently about the people who most love low taxes and a small government are the very wealth, because they benefit from the first and don’t need the second. Never mind the many more people who *do* depend on government services, even if they don’t realize it. We’re now seeing how that might work out.

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Here’s another take on the administration’s current bugaboo of insisting on “viewpoint diversity” in academia, and in particular in science. This echoes what Steven Pinker said as quoted in this post three days ago.

Boing Boing, Jennifer Sandlin, 19 Apr 2025: DOJ’s menacing letter to med journals “a chill down the spine of scientists”

The piece quotes a letter sent by the DOJ to various scientific journals, with questions like these:

*How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?

*Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?

It’s clear the DOJ is trying to ferret out DEI or ‘woke’ or whatever, without realizing who they’re speaking to. So:

Dr. Eric Reinhart provided a scathing critique of the letter, commenting, for instance, on the absurdity of the notion of “viewpoint diversity” in scientific research:

‘Viewpoint diversity’ – is sarcoidosis actually bad? Should trans people get treatment for chest infections? Is ivermectin the cure for lung cancer? Why shouldn’t Joe Rogan perform lung transplants? So glad RFK Jr is in charge to ensure these important views get airtime.

With further speculation about why his particular journal, CHEST, might have been targeted. (By people who know nothing, it might be said again.)

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Many stories today about the latest lunacy from the Trump administration.

Joe.My.God, 19 Apr 2025: Trump Posts Doctored Photo Of Kilmar Abrego Garcia

The administration insists the guy is a gang member, and so posted this *obviously* doctored photo, apparently to prove something to all his dimwitted followers. (Remember his altered weather forecast map? Apparently it’s called Sharpiegate, and as its own Wikipedia page.)

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The past seems to foretell the future. Because human nature being what it is.

Salon, Douglas H. White, 18 Apr 2025: History holds the answer to Trump’s future, subtitled “To fight Trump’s vision of the future, turn to the history he wants to erase”

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It’s long been noticed that US presidential elections swing back and forth between parties, very regularly. Is it because that sentiment changes about which way the country should go? I doubt that, because I don’t think that sentiment sways much. More, it’s about how Americans don’t understand our system of government, or the way politics works, and so blame each administration for whatever they perceive is not going right, despite the fact that the things not going right are not under the control of the president, or even his administration. (Though the current one is doing its best the control everything.)

OnlySky, Mary T Luthenauer, 18 Apr 2025: The pendulum always swings, until it doesn’t, subtitled “Have we finally reached a moment when American politics will not swing back?”

US politics and culture are cyclical, alternating between values. On the large scale, the shifting social psychology of the American electorate is as predictable as a Carter following a Nixon. When we’re in one of the swings of that pendulum, it feels like a permanent condition, and that is certainly the national feeling right now.

But if democracy continues to have any say in the matter — admittedly a big “if” at the moment — the status quo will grow tiresome to just enough voters in the middle to push the pendulum the other way for a while.

So many modifiers and conditionals in that sentence.

With background about the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and so on. The 1950s, and so on. Long piece. Concluding:

Pendulum swings are not guaranteed. In regimes where dissent is muted, institutions are hollowed out, and elections are performative, the natural oscillation between competing values stops. Instead of correction, societies become trapped in a single mode—and it’s rarely the compassionate one.

Unless democratic mechanisms are defended and restored, the US could find itself not in a phase awaiting reversal, but in a stalled system where the very structures that allow for political and cultural renewal have been dismantled. The pendulum doesn’t stop because people no longer want change—it stops because the machinery that turns it has been broken.

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The most sublime moment in all of classical music. The peak of the third movement of Bruckner’s 8th symphony. It’s about 21 minutes in.

More to the point, it takes listening to the entire 3rd movement to understand why this moment is sublime (twice, it tries reaching for the stars, the third time it succeeds); it takes listening to all of Bruckner’s symphonies, and the many times he tries similar patterns of the traditional symphonic structure, over and over, before he could achieve this sublime. And maybe it takes understanding the history of classical music, how the symphonic structure came to be in this form, and how the most powerful moments of symphonies from Beethoven to Mahler were often left to the slow movements. After the 8th, Bruckner tried one more time, in the 9th, left unfinished. Its 3rd movement was rather similar to the 8th’s, but abbreviated, and didn’t quite achieve the 8th’s power. More to the point: context is everything. You can take in a novel or a symphony at face value, but each means much more in the context of its artistic history.

This is why people are so often disappointed by this or that “classic” novel or movie. You have to have read many novels and seen many movies to understand why the “classic” ones stand out.

Posted in Lunacy, Music, Politics, Science | Leave a comment

Today’s Notes on the Destruction of America

Posted on Friday 18 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the quality of American life depends on the regulations that Trump and his vandals are discarding;
  • Paul Krugman on Trump’s trade war and how they don’t know what they’re doing;
  • Dana Milbank on how Trump’s first 100 days are an historic failure;
  • Slate’s Fred Kaplan on how “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”.
– – –

People who don’t understand what we have will miss it when it’s gone. Trump and DOGE are vandals that are ravishing the library and discarding any book that’s too heavy, or too ugly.

NY Times, Coral Davenport, 15 Apr 2025 (in the print paper 17 Apr 2025): Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations, subtitled “The White House will soon move to rapidly repeal or freeze rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation and more.”

Print title: “Behind the Rush to Discard Rules and Reshape Life”

Long piece with lots of details, best summarized by his pull-quote in the print paper:

“Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent and stable enforcement of regulations, and if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,” said Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation.

And continuing beyond the pull-quote:

“This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace.”

Bring back salmonella outbreaks!

The barbarian analogy isn’t perhaps entirely correct. I saw a better overview explanation today, somewhere I didn’t save the link to, perhaps a comment from a Facebook friend. I’ll paraphrase from memory: All the regulations the Trump administration want to repeal are things that make it more difficult for oligarchs to make more money. I could expand, but that’s the gist. Trump and his billionaire pals are only out for themselves. And the rest of us are letting them get away with it. So far.

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I alluded to this recently: China knows what it’s doing, while Trump does not.

Paul Krugman, 16 Apr 2025: Why Trump Will Lose His Trade War, subtitled “His people don’t know what they’re doing or what they want”

Scenes from the trade war:

  • In response to Donald Trump’s huge tariffs on Chinese exports, China’s government has suspended exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, both critical to many modern industries and the military
  • Trade talks between the United States and the European Union appear to have gone nowhere, with Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s top trade official, reportedly having “struggled to determine America’s aims.”

In other words, the Chinese, unlike the Trump administration, understand what trade and trade wars are about. And the Trumpers, in addition to not knowing what they’re doing, don’t even know what they want.

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And the people who don’t see this are delusional. Or selfish. Or dumb.

Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 18 Apr 2025: Trump is wrapping up 100 days of historic failure, subtitled “America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin.”

By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.

He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.

He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.

Milbank goes on with many other failures: foreign-policy, to friends, to foes, to the constitution, in public opinion.

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Similarly.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 16 Apr 2025: Nobody Quite Knows What’s Going On With U.S. Foreign Policy Right Now, subtitled “We’re all not quite sure how Trump (or any two or three of his top aides) would answer the question, ‘What are U.S. security interests?'”

Homepage headline: “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”

It’s a toss-up which is most remarkable: (a) how much of the federal government Donald Trump has altered, in some cases destroyed, a mere three months into his second presidency; (b) how he’s done so while knowing so little about the subjects at hand; or (c) how he still delusionally seems to think he knows quite a lot.

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No time to get to further items today. Perhaps I should abandon this.

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

The Future is Coal Mining? Really?

Posted on Thursday 17 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Thomas L. Friedman has never been more afraid for our country’s future;
  • How RFK Jr.’s claims about autism are nonsense;
  • And a deep piece at NYT about migration patterns around the world.
– – –

As with the manufacturing jobs item yesterday, Trump wants to bring back *coal mining*.

NY Times, Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, 15 Apr 2025: I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.

“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

The last comments are especially nonsensical; how does Trump know? Conservatives have an odd penchant for presuming to know what others think (and how they should behave).

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.

He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day — and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”

But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned. Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

Followed by details of how other nations will be treating America. And how China *does* have long-term strategies, unlike Trump.

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The latest nonsense from RFK Jr.

Washington Post, 17 Apr 2025: RFK Jr. said autistic people don’t work or play sports. They say he’s wrong., subtitled “The health and human services secretary on Wednesday suggested that autistic children would never play baseball or pay taxes, enraging those in the community.”

Autistic people and their loved ones have swiftly and publicly rejected statements by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, that people with autism will never play baseball, date, pay taxes or have a job.

They say the health and human services secretary’s comments Wednesday, during his first official news conference, misstate the capabilities of many people with autism — and they flooded social media with counterexamples.

ABC News, 17 Apr 2025: RFK Jr.’s comments on autism draw reactions from parents and experts

“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children,” he said at an HHS press conference in Washington, D.C.

Autism advocates were dismayed to hear Kennedy’s blanket characterization of children with autism: “They’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

This is *nonsense*; it applies to only to the extreme cases, and if recent statistics were filtered to divide those extreme cases from the many more cases that have been identified in recent decades under relaxed guidelines for identifying autism (it’s a spectrum, as they say), I would bet money that the number of such extreme cases has *not* increased. What’s increased is the number of cases of people (like me) who exhibit some elements of autism — in my case, a relative lack of sociability, and an extreme distaste for crowds and noisy environments, and I suppose my distaste for sports, which some people think is some kind of disorder. (As I alluded to in my discussion of that famous Mark Haddon novel, here.)

And it’s a peculiarly American arrogance that it occurs to no one to wonder, what about autism rates in other countries?

Scientific American, Stephanie Pappas, 17 Apr 2025: RFK, Jr. Is Wrong about Cause of Rising Autism Rates, Scientists Say, subtitled “Autism rates are rising, but RFK, Jr. is wrong about the reasons. Here’s what the science says”

But Kennedy’s greatest breach with the scientific consensus was likely his insistence that autism is an “epidemic” that must be caused by an environmental exposure that has been introduced within the past several decades. In fact, researchers say, autism is between 60 and 90 percent heritable. And in up to 40 percent of cases, doctors can find a specific set of genetic mutations to explain the condition. While there are environmental risk factors for autism, such as air pollution, rising rates are mostly attributable to broadened diagnostic categories and more comprehensive screening.

As has been noted again and again.

Another thing I’m going to say again. Autism is not a disease; it’s a point in the range in human psychology about perception and interaction with the world. The opposite of being autistic is being a con man, like Trump. Just as intelligence is a range between smart and dumb. One doesn’t “have” smartness, one is smart. One doesn’t “have” autism, one is autistic or not. And being smart, or dumb, or autistic, or not, is not a crippling or enabling factor in one’s life.

The real issue is: why is RFK Jr. so obsessed with autism being an environmental diseases, despite decades of research that indicates otherwise? Perhaps it is RFK Jr. who has some mental condition. About needing to simplify the world into clear causes?

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Here is a huge topic, which Americans interpret only through their narrow self-interests. (Though I suppose other nations do the same.) Foreigners bad. With some cool graphics.

NY Times, opinion by Kathleen Kingsbury, 17 Apr 2025: To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First, subtitled “New estimates based on location data from Meta reveal a picture of humanity in motion.

The human species is on the move. Last year there were more people living outside of their birth countries than at any other time in modern history, according to the United Nations. It’s a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations.

It’s no coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for incumbent political parties, as leader after leader was voted out of power in democracies at the center of the human storm.

This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn’t collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

A very long piece, mostly about trends, not causes. Though some of those causes are easily understood, albeit denied by conservatives.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy | Comments Off on The Future is Coal Mining? Really?

And Now We Have Linus

Posted on Wednesday 16 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why manufacturing jobs are never coming back to America;
  • Heather Cox Richardson records Steven Inskeep’s quip;
  • And How JD Vance is fine with abandoning due process;
  • About Linus, our fourth cat.
– – –

I keep thinking: we’re living in history, that is, we’re living in a period of rapid change that historians will record, yet that most people living right now are not noticing. (I think this is the way history has always happened.) Basic institutions are being undermined. The ideals of the American form of government are being undermined. This seems to be an era in which the ideals of American gave way to fascist or tribal thinking. Without most people noticing.

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This has been common knowledge for years, for decades. For many reasons. I’ll resist spelling out my own understanding of this, and let the article speak for itself.

Vox, Dylan Matthews, 16 Apr 2025: Manufacturing jobs are never coming back, subtitled “Putting Americans back to work in factories isn’t just hard. It’s impossible.”

This has long been the key argument behind protectionist policies like Trump’s: They will bring manufacturing jobs back to America. It’s a claim popular not just on the right, but with pro-tariff Democrats and labor unions, too. Chris Deluzio, a House Democrat from western Pennsylvania (a traditional hotbed of protectionism), has urged his party to “embrace tariffs as one component of a broader industrial strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and make whole communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad trade policy.”

Once again, conservatives what to retreat to a past that is gone. The world has become globalized…. and, but I refrain.

It’s a false promise. Tariffs cannot “make whole” any communities that have seen manufacturing jobs depart. That’s partly because tariffs are wildly ineffective at that purpose, as we saw in Trump’s first term, when his tariffs failed to lead to any increase in manufacturing employment, while costing jobs elsewhere.

But the bigger reason is that the fall of manufacturing employment in the US was not caused primarily by changes in policy, and changes in policy cannot reverse it. What’s happening is a transition from manufacturing to services that occurs in all countries as they get richer.

This transition happened in countries whose policies were strongly biased toward manufacturing, like Germany, just as it did in the US.

It’s because manufacturing more stuff is not how the world economy works anymore. Manufacturing stuff is more and more given over to robots. The world is moving to service-based economy. Trump dreams of rebuilding car factories.

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Choice bit from Heather Cox Richardson’s column yesterday. This is about that guy living in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was “accidentally” abducted and departed to El Salvador. Now the Trump administration is saying there’s no way to force El Salvador to return the man to he US. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, one of those strong-man dictator types that Trump so admires, was there.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, April 14, 2025

At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S.

Remember, Trump and Rubio and others keep insisting Abrego Garcia is member of a terrorist gang, without providing any evidence. But this is the choice bit:

As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

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Meanwhile, this administration demonstrates once again its indifference to law and order (including due process), never mind basic values of humanity and justice.

Salon, Charles R. David, 16 Apr 2025: Why not tyranny? JD Vance says he’s fine with the “inevitable errors” of abandoning due process, subtitled “The vice president argues it would too difficult to provide due process to those he wants to imprison or deport”

The opening summarizes the situation.

It can be hard, living in a free society. In places where the rule of law prevails, and where all people — citizens, criminals, immigrants — are believed to be endowed with certain inalienable rights, guilt or innocence is determined by an independent judiciary and a jury of one’s peers. Even when the facts of the matter are hardly contested, liberty and justice require that the accused be judged not by the mob, or any one person, but through an oft-lengthy process wherein they are entitled to challenge the evidence against them.

Have you ever been certain of something, only to be later proven wrong? That happens to governments, even when they are composed of people doing their best to ascertain the truth; due process serves to protect everyone from an earnest mistake, but it also has safeguards against the possibility that the state may one day be run by those who are not acting in good faith at all.

That process isn’t perfect, and actually existing criminal justice systems tend to fall short of the ideal: sometimes the guilty get off, and sometimes the innocent are condemned. But it beats the alternative: tyranny.

In a tyrannical system, the accused’s guilt is determined by their being accused in the first place. If the government says someone is a terrorist, then they are dealt with accordingly. There is no appeal and indeed there is no formal process at all beyond the pronouncement: terrorist; guilty.

That is the system that the Trump administration would like everyone in America to live under — one where the word of a 78-year-old man and his underlings is enough to justify sending anyone to a foreign prison for the rest of their life.

And are even most of Trump’s voters just fine with this? If so they haven’t thought this through. Or perhaps, much more likely, they simply don’t care.

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About Linus. Long story. Mother and kitten showed up on our back patio on Aug 25th. Mother was frail, the kitten so tiny he could barely climb into the kitty bed we put outside. We kept feeding them, mother got healthy and kitten got bigger. They stayed outside except when the weather was bad and we’d let them inside, despite hissing from a couple of our indoor cats. Months went by. The Montclair Village vet wanted $1500 to spay Mother. I put it off. Six weeks ago, Mother had four kittens. This past week, I contacted the East Bay SPCA, and took Mother and her four kittens to “surrender” them, to put them up for adoption. We still have Mother’s original kitten, all grown up now, whom we’ve named Linus. He’ll become part of our family, maybe as an indoor/outdoor cat. We’ll see how he settles in. He’ll be our fourth permanent cat.

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