Views from Crestmont Drive

• How my posts about current politics, including Trump and Musk, are about illustrating fundamental principles;
• Trump simply doesn’t understand trade;
• David Brooks on how conservatives have changed;
• A Christian law-maker who thinks “critical thinking” includes teaching about God;
• Short items about cherry-picking the Bible to justify tariffs; how an expert on tariffs claims Trump got his research all wrong; how DOGE has defunded a program to boost American manufacturing; how Trump channels Lee Iacocca; and how a MAGA prophetess claims everything bad is because of Satan.
• Music: Sibelius #1

Virtually all of the items I post here are meant to illustrate some of the fundamental principles, or provisional conclusions, that I’ve developed over the past decade. And one of the most fundamental is this idea of a range of human perception and understanding: that some people simply aren’t very bright and/or cling to a tribal mindset, while other people can take long-term consequences into account, and appreciate a broader cosmopolitan or species perspective, and/or are smart enough to perceive the world in other than the black and white terms and/or short-term thinking. And how this has consequences as explored in science fiction, because short-term, tribal, dim-witted thinking will doom the species, as problems like climate change occur that cannot be solved without global cooperation. The oligarchs will milk the system, denying or ignoring long-term consequences, as long as they think they can get away with it until the world burns (after they die), perhaps literally. Their followers will repeat their religious reassurances back and forth amongst themselves, because that’s what their ancestors have always done, and they survived! Humans are not good at understanding change, or perceiving long-term consequences.

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