Rubber-Stamps, Clones, Conformity, and Fate

Posted on Sunday 1 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Republicans loyal to Trump want Congress to rubber-stamp his every proposal, never mind America’s system of government;
  • Trump thinks Biden was executed in 2020 and was replaced by a robotic clone;
  • Trump has great ambitions to carve up the world, but he’s too dumb (why don’t his fans realize this?);
  • Republicans would ban student clubs, to enforce conformity to the tribe;
  • More about Joni Ernst and “we all are going to die”.
– – –

Following up on yesterday’s item by Peter Wehner about how Republicans no longer believe in the rule of law. (These examples come along every day. This one, though posted a couple days ago, is on the front page of today’s paper.)

NY Times, Anne Karni, 29 May 2025: For These Trump Voters, a Rubber-Stamp Congress Is a Key Demand, subtitled “In a recent pair of focus groups, voters loyal to President Trump judged members of Congress almost entirely according to whether they backed him — and rejected lawmakers who dared to dissent.”

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Fareed Zakaria, Peter Wehner, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Anton Bruckner

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Fareed Zakaria on Trump vs. Harvard;
  • Peter Wehner on how Republican principles gave way to Trump;
  • And so now there is justice for Trump supporters, and justice for others;
  • “Happy Memorial Day”
  • Brian Tyler Cohen about Trump’s confusion about “asylum”;
  • And an anecdote about the MAGA thought process;
  • And Bruckner 4, movement 2. The slow movements are the best.
– – –

Fareed Zakaria (whose book I admired here) on the Trump/Harvard situation.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 30 May 2025: Trump’s war on Harvard is bizarre — and incredibly damaging, subtitled “He is wrecking American competitiveness.”

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MAGA and human nature; How Trump thinks everything is about loyalty to him

Posted on Friday 30 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reconsidering the definition of MAGA, and how it relates to base human nature;
  • Recalling the David Brooks essay from yesterday;
  • Trump thinks an honest economic forecast is “unpatriotic”;
  • A Christian boy band preaches to public school students, and denies it;
  • How RFK Jr.’s battle against autism reveals simple-minded thinking;
  • We’re all going to die anyway, says a Republican defending Medicaid cuts;
  • How Trump makes the immigrant crisis worse by simply redefining legal immigrants into illegal ones;
  • And about that Facebook guy Justin, who asks basic questions of people on the street who cannot answer.
– – –

So perhaps we can refine the working definition of MAGA. It’s coming clearer into focus, though it should have been obvious all along.

What MAGA folks are yearning for is a return to small town life where everyone is like they are, the same race, more or less the same religion. Continue reading →

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Four Years; and Primitive, Atavistic Tendencies

Posted on Thursday 29 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Four years since my heart transplant;
  • David Brooks on loyalty to home vs loyalty to abstractions; human nature; and how Trumpism is an attempt “to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”;
  • Thus: Trump fired the historians whose job was to oversee an unbiased account of US foreign policy;
  • RFK Jr defends his report via fabricated studies;
  • And how even some Trump supporters are realizing that Trump is losing it (and Elon seeing his DOGE efforts undercut by the massive new GOP budget);
– – –

Four years since heart and kidney transplants, so another round of annual tests this week, including blood draws. Everything’s fine. The cardiologist says, he loves seeing us guys (my partner Y always goes with me), because you have so few problems! We sit in the office and chat about where the kids are going or have gone to college… This time’s most alarming incident: I got a bruise on my left arm a few weeks ago. They did a scan. It’s fine.

\\\

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Self-destruction, Mafia Politics, TACO, What Aligns the Right, Bread and Circuses

Posted on Wednesday 28 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on the economic damage of America’s withdrawal from the world;
  • You can get away with anything if you donate enough to Trump;
  • TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out;
  • Zack Beauchamp on how the right isn’t driven by materialism, but by their culture;
  • And how billion-dollar Sports Stadiums seem to be the best American can do.
– – –

Another round.

Paul Krugman, 28 My 2025: America Turns Its Back on the World subtitled “Blocking foreign students is an act of self-destruction — and self-betrayal”

Beginning with an anecdote:

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America, increasingly anti-science and anti-intellectual, was founded by religious fanatics, as perhaps most Americans do not realize

Posted on Tuesday 27 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How America is becoming anti-science and anti-intellectual, with a comment by David Brin;
  • Adam Serwer on Trump’s attack on knowledge itself, with my comments about how most people won’t notice, but the world and history will;
  • How Americans venerate ancestors who were, in fact, religious fanatics, with seven Puritan credos that reflect base human nature;
  • And ideas for a secular story of existence, which, I suspect is probably not possible.
– – –

NY Times, TheUpshot, 22 May 2025: Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades [gift link]

The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the fundamental scientific research at American universities, is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at least 35 years.

The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.

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Education, Religion, Policies that Don’t Work, the Revolt Against Expertise

Posted on Sunday 25 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richard on the history of government suppression of education, especially as inspired by religion;
  • The GOP keeps promoting policies that history has shown don’t work;
  • The revolt against expertise, yet again.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson reviews the history of government suppression of education.

Letters from an American: May 24, 2025

Beginning with the Trump administration telling Harvard this past week that it can no longer enroll foreign students, which are about a quarter of the student body there. (Why does the government think it can tell a private university what it can and cannot do?)

While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.

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Nicholas Humphrey, LEAPS OF FAITH

Posted on Saturday 24 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: “Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation”

(Basic Books, Jan. 1996, 244pp, including 20pp notes and index)
(Chatto & Windus, 1995, as Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief)

Here’s a book I read when it came out, back in 1996 — I think I was intrigued by the “search for supernatural consolation” part, which appealed to my impression that religion is more about psychological need that consideration of what is actually true — and picked up again last week to reconsider in light my current ideas of how basic human nature is reacting to the modern world, an environment so different from the one our minds evolved in.

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Crime, Hypocrisy, Fraud & Abuse, Doing Your Own Research, Cafeteria Religion, and Christian Presumption

Posted on Saturday 24 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Crime rates are falling; crime is not a national emergency; Why do people think otherwise?
  • Republicans criticize Democrats for what they are doing now;
  • Why do Republicans think there is so much fraud and abuse everywhere?
  • Why “doing your own research” is not plausible;
  • JD Vance and cafeteria religion;
  • Why do Christians presume they have the advantage in the Supreme Court?
– – –

Once again people, crime rates are *falling*. They’ve been falling since the 1990s, except for a blip aligned with the pandemic. There is no emergency in the way conservatives insist.

Vox, Bryan Walsh 24 May 2025: Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US, subtitled “Americans remained scared of violent crime. The numbers tell a different story.”

The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most underappreciated — good news stories of recent memory. That made its reversal during the pandemic so worrying.

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How to Fix the Budget; MAGA; Steven Pinker

Posted on Friday 23 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman’s constructive suggestions for fixing the budget;
  • While Trump’s allegiances lie with lower taxes for the rich and cuts to the social safety net for the poor;
  • How MAGA is about bimbos, like Kristi Noem and Sarah Palin, who play dumb;
  • Steven Pinker, in a long essay, defends Harvard against “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” how some ideas are true that are nevertheless politically incorrect, how federal grants work, and how Harvard and other universities have made the world a better place.
– – –

Let’s start with something positive and productive. Instead of talking about Republicans.

Paul Krugman,23 May 2025: What a Decent Budget Would Look Like, subtitled “Imagining a Congress that was neither cruel nor irresponsible”

OK, I was wrong. I thought House Republicans would pass their surpassingly cruel, utterly irresponsible budget in the dead of night, hoping nobody would notice. And they tried! Debate began at 1 A.M., and if you think that bizarre timing reflected real urgency, I have some $Melania coins you might want to buy.

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