What Is America Thinking?

Posted on Monday 7 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Will scientific advances by the US continue? Do most Americans care?
  • My take on the big picture of the cultural change in the US, and other societies;
  • Heather Cox Richardson, and Nitish Pahwa at Slate, summarize what’s to blame for the Texas floods: the denial of climate change, and the appeal of absurd conspiracy theories;
  • The problem of original intent, as demonstrated by that law school paper about white supremacy that won an award.
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Washington Post, Bruce Partridge, 6 Jul 2025: These scientific advances were ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Will they continue?, subtitled “America has long led in research. Budget cuts could jeopardize that dominance.”

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How Doing Your Own Research Actually Works, and the Texas Floods

Posted on Sunday 6 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Adam-Troy Castro on people who “do their own research”;
  • And how RFK Jr. is ignoring decades of research into autism that have already answered his questions;
  • Debates about whether Trump/MAGA’s cuts to weather agencies had a role to play in the Texas floods;
  • And standard Republican reactions: “All we know how to do is pray”; This isn’t the time to talk about weather agencies; and somehow or another, the Democrats must be to blame.
  • Yes, MAGA is reveling in the abuse of migrants;
  • And a history of US immigration, on CBS Sunday Morning today.
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Just sayin’.

An insight from Adam-Troy Castro, on Facebook, about people who “do their own research”: Sunday, July 6, 2025 at 8:58
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True Colors

Posted on Saturday 5 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • More conservative racism: Everyone is *not* welcome; Laura Loomer would boycott brands that don’t use white actors in their TV commercials;
  • MTG thinks evildoers are using weather control to create the deadly floods in Texas;
  • Meanwhile, people who know real things have been warning about the effects of climate change for decades — of course;
  • Yet another Republican (the “Jesus. Guns. Babies.” lady) thinks the Texas floods have been faked;
  • And Timothy Snyder on concentration camps and the potential in the Constitution’s 13th Amendment to allow slavery for punishments of crimes.
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From my favorite aggregate site. More evidence of conservative racism. And the idiocy of the extremes.

JMG, 5 Jul 2025: Idaho AG Bans “Everyone Is Welcome” Signs In Schools

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So Many People to Hate!

Posted on Friday 4 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • ICE now has a budget bigger than all but 15 countries’ military budgets;
  • Why has funding for ICE has ballooned, compared to previous presidents?;
  • Trump says he wants to deport bad people born in the US, too;
  • Trump wants to host a UFC Fight on White House grounds;
  • Robert Charles Wilson on the current times, and how science fiction might respond to them; how “change is inevitable” and how decency is more likely to build a sustainable human civilization.
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Conservatives in America.

The New Republic, 3 Jul 2025: Congress Gives ICE More Money Than It Could Have Ever Imagined, subtitled “It’s impossible to overstate how much power ICE just got from Trump’s budget.”

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How It Works. How They Work.

Posted on Thursday 3 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How it works: Republican megadonors get megacontracts to run ICE concentration camps;
  • How they work:
    • Republicans are even less pluralistic than they’ve ever been;
    • Robert Reich on the familiar reasons authoritarians suppress education, and what “conservative ideas” might possibly be;
    • Short items about prison costs, Christians who want to execute gays, and the White House invoking Satan.
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See how this works? (As usual, follow the money.)

JMG, 3 Jul 2025: Republican Megadonors To Get Tens Of Millions In Federal Contracts To Run Florida’s Concentration Camp

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Now It’s Concentration Camps

Posted on Wednesday 2 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Concentration Camps, and Republican salivation to send 65 million immigrants to the alligators;
  • Trump thinks brain scans measure IQ;
  • American science’s brain drain;
  • How societies maintain national myths to survive.
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What’s next? Dungeons and shackles? Do Trump voters know what they’ve done? Are they really fine with this? I fear that some of them are.

The New Republic, Melissa Gira Gant, 2 Jul 2025: The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp, subtitled “The Republicans are proudly calling it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Let’s call it what it is.”

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Implications

Posted on Tuesday 1 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Do justices not foresee consequences?
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the big beautiful bill;
  • How JD Vance reveals the administration’s true motivations; cruelty is the thing;
  • Jonathan Chait on Republicans’ “incomprehensibly reckless plan”;
  • Robert Reich on conservatives’ animosity to empathy (never mind Jesus Christ);
  • Initial thoughts about Springsteen’s “Western Stars”.
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Sometimes you wonder if lawyers, judges, and justices are so focused on the validity of a particular law that they don’t consider the implications of their ruling. Obsessed with the technical details and missing the big picture.

Slate, Heidi Feldman, 30 Jun 2025: Supreme Court Rules Some Americans Have a Constitutional Right to Insist on Theocracy

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Octavia E. Butler, PARABLE OF THE SOWER

Posted on Tuesday 1 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Four Walls Eight Windows, October 1993, 299pp)

In June I focused on reading classic science fiction novels, partly to see how many I could get through in one month, considering other obligations (answer: 6 and a bit), and partly to revisit two novels that have, in the past couple three years, become semi-permanent residents on extended bestseller lists, just as Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHT-FOUR and Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 have been for decades.

The first of these is Octavia Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, from 1993. I read it shortly after it came out (that’s the first edition shown above), and thought it a perfectly decent novel, if not especially outstanding. There have been plenty of other near-future novels about the collapse of society, the survivors having to fend off criminals and live off the land. What made it distinctive, perhaps, is that it was apparently set in Altadena CA, where the author lived at the time, and involved a female black main character. (And that the author was a female black author.)

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Stories, Archetypes, Morality

Posted on Monday 30 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Does anyone take Jung or Freud seriously any more?
  • OnlySky’s Bruce Ledewitz on the contemporary idea of “evil”;
  • Robert Reich on “the worst bill in history” and fact-checking claims about tax cuts;
  • How local communities fight back against ICE;
  • Republicans about cuts to services: “They’ll get over it”;
  • Paul Krugman on Republicans’ racist claims about Zohran Mamdani;
  • Springsteen’s “Down in the Hole”.
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I saw a Fb post a day or two ago — here it is, but it’s not public — that began:

My sister, who has a somewhat sentimental attachment to Jung, sent me a youtube video of a Jungian therapist explaining the rise of MAGA as a collective embrace of the American Shadow and trump as an expression of the archetype of The Fool. It makes sense, but I don’t consider it particularly useful. …

Setting aside the Trump angle, my thought was, Jung? Does anyone take his archetypes any more seriously than they do Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (id, ego, superego)? I took a psych course at UCLA and these things were discussed, but that was 50 years ago.

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Can You Hear Me?

Posted on Sunday 29 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich reminds us of the three branches of American government, and how, in plain site, Trump is attacking two of them;
  • How Donald Trump doesn’t align with William McKinley so much as William Jennings Bryan.
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete”.
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Robert Reich puts the latest Supreme Court decision into perspective. There used to be a “civics” class in 6th grade, or junior high school, and I gather there isn’t any more.

Robert Reich, 29 Jun 2025: Sunday Thought: The One Branch of Government that Trump Wants to Keep Alive, subtitled “While eviscerating the two others”

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