Today’s Doom Watch

Posted on Sunday 23 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

A beautiful weekend here in the Bay Area.

We’re witnessing the downfall of the United States as an idealistic nation that for many decades has led the world on enlightenment principles and scientific achievements. At the same time, most people won’t notice this downfall. And it’s happened before.

  • Why doesn’t MAGA care that Musk donated hundreds of millions and is getting government contracts worth billions?
  • Another explanation of why conservatives do not prevail in academia;
  • Why not pray to God for everything? (Because prayer doesn’t work, and God is an illusion);
  • And how a dual state is arising in the US, as it did in Nazi Germany.
– – –

NY Times, Eric Lipton, 23 Mar 2025: Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts

Subtitled: “The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology.”

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Tribalistic Politics

Posted on Saturday 22 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Frank Bruni on why Trump keeps attacking Biden;
  • Paul Krugman, via Adam Tooze, on how Trump has prejudices rather than ideas;
  • Heather Cox Richardson recalls how Republicans have tried to create their own reality;
  • Why MAGA voters want their opponents to suffer, and why Trump voters love him despite everything.
– – –

It’s not enough for Trump to win; his enemies must be excoriated as well. The attitudes of a zero-sum tribalist.

NY Times, Frank Bruni, 20 Mar 2025: Why Trump Can’t Quit Biden [gift link]

For President Trump and many of his closest aides and allies, every day is a great day to beat up on Joe Biden. They treat bashing the previous occupant of the White House as proper political hygiene, best repeated and ritualized, the autocrat’s equivalent of flossing your teeth.

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“The Wholesale Destruction of the United States Government”

Posted on Friday 21 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the dismantling of the US government, on libraries and museums, and on the rule of law;
  • WaPo’s Dana Milbank on Musk’s ignorance of the government he’s dismembering, on what judges do, and on the administration’s bows to white nationalism;
  • Robert Reich on the attacks on education, and on the American mind;
  • Headlines about DEI and white supremacy, the cruelty of closing a library to Canadians, how Trump voters don’t regret that he’s ruining their lives, and burying the names of non-whites at Arlington.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson, 21 Mar 2025: March 20, 2025

It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.

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The Devolution of the United States

Posted on Thursday 20 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • America is 24th in a ranking of the happiest countries in the world. Don’t Americans wonder why so many other countries are happier? I suspect they do not. [Update: this is a fairly superficial measure. Even so.]
  • Trump and his administration take tactics to cripple the left, without actually debating issues;
  • Elon Musk, even as he wants to expand the human population, disdains retirees;
  • Short items reflecting the tribal mindset: demons, straws, measles, autism, will of God, the Holocaust, anti-White bias, Hitler-curious, appetite for revenge, fighting free speech, long-term thinking, anti-constitutional thinking.

Admittedly, many Americans, especially the MAGA crowd, don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the world. But don’t any of them wonder *why* people in so many other countries are happier than Americans?

AP News, 20 Mar 2025: Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world. The US falls to its lowest-ever position

I’ll acknowledge that a primary reason might be that these Nordic nations are monocultural, unlike the US. (But many African nations are monocultural, and they’re unhappy, mainly because they’re poor.)
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Is Science Partisan? How Could It Not Be?

Posted on Wednesday 19 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The astronauts have returned, and Trump and Musk lie about what actually happened;
  • The idea of blaming Mexico for the overdose epidemic is wrong, and will not work;
  • Short items about eating less, globalism, cutting aid to the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich;
  • White supremacy: Jackie Robinson, a repeal on rules prohibiting segregation, and dismissing human rights;
  • RFK Jr spews childish libertarian nonsense;
  • And Trump’s war on education, to fuel autocratic populism.
– – –

Well, when one side consistently, repeatedly distorts and denies facts, then how can it, as we already know, be on the side of science, which is about identification of truth and reality?

Ars Technica, Eric Berger, 18 Mar 2025: Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded?, subtitled “Let’s bring them home NOW, Sir!”

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How MAGA folks don’t actually believe in traditional American values

Posted on Tuesday 18 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Rather, they embody the essence of primitive tribalism.

  • A Ben Shapiro host renounces the Statue of Liberty and its “stupid” poem;
  • The disappearance of Navajo Code Talkers on government websites suggests again that MAGA is a white supremacy movement;
  • Shameless lies about Canada and fentanyl;
  • DOGE cancels weather tracking, the EPA’s scientific research arm, and positions at NASA — all about short-term thinking, with recollections about conservative resistance to the space program in the 1960s;
  • The reality of how Trump’s plans are sinking the global economy, and the fantasy by his supporters who think that the bad is actually good.
  • And another example of how conservatives try to deny reality by passing bill, in this case about trans people.
– – –

Anecdotal, but significant. In case it hasn’t become obvious, MAGA, or at least a portion of it, has never accepted the ideals of the nation they supposedly revere.

JMG, 18 Mar 2025: Shapiro Host: I Don’t Love The “Pagan, Liberal” Statue Of Liberty, Remove That “Stupid Poem Off The Bottom”

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More Ticks Off the Dictator Playbook List

Posted on Monday 17 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

There will be no calm still point.

  • Trump defying the Court; a Constitutional crisis, perhaps;
  • The next phase of Trump’s dictatorship era;
  • Following the dictator playbook;
  • Concern about discrimination against whites, and how MAGA is about white supremacy;
  • How narratives win over data and facts, and how Democrats should tell stories;
  • The mythos on the right and the logos on the left;
  • Musk’s idea of “freedom cities”.

\\\

Back to current news. What’ the latest?

Trump seems to be defying judicial orders. The next step in a constitutional crisis.

NY Times, 17 Mar 2025: A Court Showdown on Deportations

A federal judge in Washington pressed the Trump administration at a hearing this afternoon to explain why the U.S. deported to El Salvador more than 200 migrants with little or no due process.

Over the weekend, the same judge had issued an order barring the expulsions, but the Trump administration went through with them anyway. At today’s hearing, the judge said he was trying to establish whether the government had defied his order. He made no ruling, but he told the Trump administration to return to his court on Friday to argue over the merits.

And:

NY Times, 16 Mar 2025: White House Denies Violating Judge’s Order in Deporting Venezuelans, subtitled “Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also asserted that the federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over President Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.”

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Son of Dispatches from Reality

Posted on Sunday 16 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How morality changes and can be used to build a better world, with tips about improving your moral technology;
  • How choices and options may or may not have made us free;
  • Music: Now on to Shostakovich; here’s Symphony #10.
– – –

One of yesterday’s items included an older link that I collected last October but never used. Let’s look at it now.

Again, a working premise here is that the human nature and morality of our ancestors, what can be called the tribal mentality, became optimized over hundreds of thousands of years for life on a Savannah in small groups, extended families or tribes of a few hundred. Loyalty was paramount, then authority and a hierarchy of obedience. As humanity filled up the planet and all these tribes merged and interacted, new ways of living *had* to be discovered, in order to avoid endless tribal wars. (Like the ones in the Bible, I’m tempted to say, written by the tribe that survived.) Those new ways involved principles developed during the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions — rules about equality and rule of law, rules placing empiricism above received wisdom, and so on, all meant to subvert or avoid those tribal instincts. They’ve worked for a while, but the instincts are inherent in many people, as we are seeing with the current MAGA folks and their authoritarian leaders, who delight in flouting law and ignoring objective facts about reality.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 30 Oct 2024: Morality is a technology to build a better world, subtitled “It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies.”

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Dispatches from Reality

Posted on Saturday 15 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Taking a day off from political posts, for posts about reality. Or at least, the exploration of reality.

  • Mathematicians solve a 125-year-old problem, perhaps;
  • OnlySky’s Dale McGowan about the evolutionary mismatch between the world we evolved in, and the modern world (a key theme of this blog);
  • Dalton Conley on a new scientific field that he claims resolved the nature vs nurture divide;
  • How movies depict looking through binoculars;
  • Dale McGowan again about how there are never normal times;
  • Long interview with Ed Yong;
  • Musical coda: Pettersson’s 9th.

To begin, I spent over an hour this morning installing “more” tags on my posts since early February, so that a viewer of this site would see only previews of each post, and not the entire posts. Making it much easier to browse through the site and see the subjects of each post. My plan is to do that every day for *yesterday’s* post, and leave the current one fully visible. Let’s see if I can keep up.

– – –

Via Facebook.

New Scientist, 14 Mar 2025: Mathematicians solve 125-year-old problem to unite key laws of physics

Subtitled: “Can one single mathematical framework describe the motion of a fluid and the individual particles within it? This question, first asked in 1900, now has a solution that could help us understand the complex behaviour of the atmosphere and oceans.”

I don’t have a New Scientist subscription, so I can’t read the full article. Interesting if true; if true, I’ll hear about it elsewhere.

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Pi Day Rationalizations

Posted on Friday 14 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How MAGA rationalizes downturns in the economy;
  • How scam artists prey on gullible old religious people;
  • How the Family Research Council is anxious to replace education with religious indoctrination;
  • How repeating a lie (“tariffs are tax cuts!”) often enough will make some people believe it;
  • How Trump and Musk are would-be dictators, with two examples.
– – –

You can understand why, like Trump himself, MAGAites are reluctant to admit they might have made a mistake, and will furiously rationalize whatever happens to the economy, no matter how bad. (Not unlike how the religious rationalize tragedies…”God works in mysterious ways” and so on.)

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Mar 2025: “You must sacrifice”: MAGA excuses for Trump’s trade war echo “prosperity” preachers, subtitled “Trump’s closest faith ‘advisor’ teaches that if you give her money, God will reward you with riches”

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