Back and Forth, On and Off

Posted on Thursday 6 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • CDC recalls fired workers;
  • Tariffs are delayed again;
  • Why would Trump want to destabilize the country?
  • Texas would make identifying as transgender a felon;
  • Trump blames the victims;
  • TN names July a month of “fasting and prayer”;
  • Miracles are happening every day because Trump is listening to the prophets.
– – –

Trump has no plan. He has bluster, and a magic toy he’s discovered that he thinks can solve everything: tariffs. But he can’t make up his mind. On again, off again. Even his supporters are becoming discontent.

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AP News, 5 Mar 2025: ‘Read this e-mail immediately’: CDC tells about 180 fired employees to come back to work

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Annalee Newitz, STORIES ARE WEAPONS

Posted on Thursday 6 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “Psychological Warfare and the American Mind”
(Norton, June 2024, xxv + 246pp, including 42pp of acknowledgements, notes, and notes.)

Here’s a book that offers a different spin on the ideas of misinformation, fake news, and narratives, than earlier books I’ve read on these subjects. The author is a journalist and science fiction novelist, with now three books each of nonfiction and fiction.

Broadly, as the subtitle says, this is about the idea of psychological warfare, of deliberately spinning the truth or telling alternative narratives for political purposes. Its techniques go way back before social media. From the perspective the modern ideas of fake news, psychological warfare isn’t about conspiracy theories; it’s about misinformation spread deliberately to sway people’s ideas and opinions. One surprising player in this history is one Paul Linebarger, who wrote science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith mostly in the 1950s and 60s. It’s long been known that Smith worked for the US government and spent his early life in China, but I’ve never seen the extent of his work in psychological warfare spelled out as Newitz does in this book.

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Many Lies, No Coherent Plan

Posted on Wednesday 5 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Commentaries and fact-checks about Trump’s speech to Congress last night.
  • Dana Milbank on how Trump has set the country back 100 years;
  • Fred Kaplan on Trump’s unhinged plans for the rest of the world;
  • And Heather Digby Parton and David Frum;
  • Trump still claims 150-year-old people are getting Social Security; and he doesn’t know “transgenic” from “transgender”;
  • Fox News pivots to blaming Biden;
  • Thomas L. Friedman on what an actual process for improving the government might be like.
– – –

I did not watch the speech last night (Trump to Congress, in the spot on the calendar where the State of the Union speech would usually be), nor have I even read the commentaries and fact-checks closely. But I will list some of the headlines, which are not surprising, and excerpt a quotation or two.

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Stepping Outward, from Tariffs to Globalization

Posted on Tuesday 4 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Rationales for tariffs against Canada and Mexico: perhaps Trump just hates Canadian decency, how his rationales keep changing, and in any case they’re foolish;
  • With my thoughts about two possible motivations;
  • How Trump is losing the 21st century: by alienating friends, destroying the business environment, and undermining science and research;
  • How Trump is undoing the revitalization of US society set by FDR;
  • About the backlash to globalization;
  • And brief items about white men, town halls, and education.
– – –

Trump doesn’t seem to have reasons for doing anything except for childish petulance.

Paul Krugman, 4 Mar 2025: Trump Hates Canada for its Decency, subtitled “The president lacks basic decency, and loathes people who do”

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Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION

Posted on Tuesday 4 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Why We Never Think Alone”
(Riverhead Books, March 2017, 296pp including 30pp acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

This is a book that I’ve thought of as a companion to the O’Connor/Weatherall book I just reviewed ever since they’ve been sitting together on my TBR shelves for the 6 or 7 years since they were published. Their themes seemed adjacent, their dustjackets are similar, and  each has two coauthors, none of whom I’d heard of before.

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Triage, and Kittens

Posted on Monday 3 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Busy weekend, so I’m behind and have three days of political links to catch up on. I’ll triage.

  • Reactions to the meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump/Vance/et al;
  • Conservatives react by projecting;
  • And links without comments about corruption, witchcraft, getting worse, contempt, taking credit, chaos, WSJ, and price of eggs.

Beginning with: The Trump/Vance/Zelensky meeting was a setup.

Slate, Jim Newell: Volodymyr Zelensky, subtitled “A setup.”

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Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, THE MISINFORMATION AGE

Posted on Sunday 2 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How False Beliefs Spread”(Yale University Press, 2019, 266pp, including 80pp of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index)

This is an interesting enough book that wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It seems right up my alley: why do so many people believe things that are not true? Sure social media is involved (with their conspiracy theorists and chaos agents), and we understand that most people know only what they hear from social media or glean from casually interacting with their friends and neighbors. Further, no matter how ambitious or well-intentioned one is, no one can acquire first-hand knowledge about everything, so to some extent we rely on experts, or at least on the conclusions of those who have studied matters more deeply than we are able to. Even further, as I’ve discussed, most people live their mundane lives without any great concern about whether what they believe about matters outside their immediate concern are true or not; they don’t care, and it doesn’t actually matter toward living a good life.

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Moving to the Dark Side

Posted on Friday 28 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The big news today was the contentious meeting at the White House between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky, which signals an abandonment of US foreign policy as a leader of the free world and a signal that Trump is aligning the US to the world’s dictators… moving to the dark side. Is that what Trump voters voted for?
  • Conservatives, apparently not understanding the concept of “an ounce of prevention…” are cutting the NOAA, funding to prevent diseases, and research in Antarctica;
  • And as in any good Orwellian authoritarian society, there’s a list of forbidden words that are not allowed in any government-funded research or on any government websites. I found a complete list. It’s quite a list.
– – –

How much worse can it get? It’s still getting worse. Today the president and vice-president bullied a former US ally, in the White House, in favor of siding with the Russian dictator Putin.

NY Times, 28 Feb 2025: Trump Administration Live Updates: Trump and Vance Berate Zelensky, Exposing Break Between Wartime Allies

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Conservatives Espouse Principles, But Behave Very Differently

Posted on Thursday 27 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • With an example of a Florida Attorney General suing Target for selling products the MAGA folks find objectionable; what happened to free enterprise? Let the market figure it out!
  • Our Orwellian fascist government wants to eliminate past social media posts about diversity;
  • While RFK Jr downplays the current measles outbreaks and cancels FDA plans for flu shots;
  • Despite conservative claims, the US government has, in fact, being doing audits of itself, but Trump just fired those “inspector generals”;
  • How Europe is appalled that Trump has become Putin’s poodle;
  • And on a more enlightening note, another piece about “the dress” ten years on; it’s all about the lighting, or the lighting people expect from their daily experience.
– – –

Some of these things I just can’t figure out. I guess it’s because I still think conservatives act according to some underlying principles — like free enterprise, perhaps? — rather than behaving like tribal bigots, or authoritarian dictators.

AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 26 Feb 2025: ‘Buffoonery’: Far-right Florida AG suing Target over LGBTQ Pride merchandise (From Miami New Times)

There’s some background about Republican AGs attacking Target in 2023.

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Two More Books of Futuristic Art

Posted on Thursday 27 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

FUTURE PERFECT: Vintage Futuristic Graphics, ed. Jim Heimann (Taschen, 2002, unpaginated)

DRIVING THROUGH FUTURES PAST: Mid-20th Century Automotive Design, by Hampton C. Wayt (Kythe Publishing, Feb. 206, 59pp)

Here are two more books that I read the same couple days I read the Asimov, posted about earlier.

The first one is a small though heavy-weight trade paperback book from a publisher famous for expensive coffee table books. Continue reading →

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