DEI and NASA

Posted on Friday 7 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Wallace-Wells on the sabotage of the American government;
  • Paul Krugman on “autogolpe” and the Musk/Trump chaos;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Republicans have, ever since Reagan, convinced voters that there’s an enemy “deep state” out to destroy their country;
  • Nicholas Kristoff on his experience with USAID and how now “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children”;
  • Brief items about MAGA’s Politico scandal, and supposed “anti-Christian bias”;
  • And a NASA reporter reflects on DEI and how inclusion is the point of the work NASA does.

Breaking News: Trump Takes Over Kennedy Center. Presumably he’ll tell them to play only pretty music. By white men.

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This piece is by the author of a book about the consequences of climate change, which I reviewed here, whose first sentence was “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 5 Feb 2025 (in today’s print paper): This Isn’t Reform. It’s Sabotage. [gift link]

It is, so far, worse than I feared.

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A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Posted on Thursday 6 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them.

  • How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business;
  • How Trump creates problems he then claims to fix;
  • How the assault on DEI is about resegregation;
  • How California farmers, who supported Trump, don’t want to talk about what he did to their water;
  • Timothy Snyder about what makes a country, and what we can do now to fight back against tyranny.

Slate, Derek W. Black, 6 Feb 2025: “Back to the States”, subtitled “Trump’s Department of Education plans go against our country’s long history of federal support for schools”
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Shades of Morality

Posted on Wednesday 5 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s crazy Gaza redevelopment plan;
  • How conservatives use “corruption” (without evidence) as an excuse to undermine institutions they don’t like;
  • And they would go after Wikipedia, if they could;
  • Then a long sequence about JD Vance on Christian love, various responses, and my take;
  • With a relevant quote by Bertrand Russell.

First, items about the Current Craziness.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Feb 2025: This Trump Plan for Gaza Is One of the Craziest Things I’ve Ever Heard

He proposed not only that the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza leave their homeland—because, he said, it’s “a hellhole” and always will be—but that the United States take it over, “own it” (he dropped that phrase a few times), and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Yes, he really said that.

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Living in History

Posted on Tuesday 4 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with.

  • Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an un-elected billionaire run the government;
  • Why Trump is shutting down USAID;
  • And withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council;
  • And wants to “clean out” Gaza;
  • How the coup is deleting data it doesn’t like;
  • And how if what’s happening here happened in any other country, we’d be calling it a coup.

Here’s what I think is a key point. There are always people like Trump, in every society, and their followers. They are driven by base human nature tribal values. Disregard for anyone outside their tribe, in this case white men, who say out loud that people of other races, and women, cannot be trusted. The question now is whether our American society, built on Constitutional principles designed to overcome those prejudices and claim equality, can survive someone like Trump. And it seems increasingly uncertain that that can happen.

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Let’s start with a summary from Heather for today.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: February 3, 2025

I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.

But they are not doing that.

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Easier to Destroy than to Build

Posted on Monday 3 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Or: The Anti-America Americans.

Latest about the coup:

  • Today Trump has suspended the tariffs he’d said would go into effect *today* on Mexico and Canada. Familiar pattern? He’s flailing.
  • Musk and his gang of college kids have compromised the financial records of everyone in America, as Musk is unilaterally deciding which government programs no longer need funding.
  • And probably something else I missed.

Today’s items.

  • Some of them say it out loud: white men should be in charge;
  • Conservative Wall Street Journal calls the tariffs (now postponed!) “the dumbest trade war in history”;
  • How Trump and his current acolytes only learn how things work by breaking them; aligned with Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending;
  • How Trump’s Gitmo detention center would be bigger than history’s worst concentration camps;
  • And Franklin Foer on how Trump is enacting the long-standing conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.

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They really say it out loud. (Realize that Boing Boing can be a bit sarcastic.)

Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 3 Feb 2025: New pick for high-level State Department job: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
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People Are Saying… It’s a Coup

Posted on Sunday 2 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Another sleepy day with a cold, and it’s gloomy and drizzly outside today too.

  • The latest on what’s going on, via Connie Willis and Heather Cox Richardson;
  • LA Times on Trump’s idiotic order to empty two California reservoirs;
  • An example of how the media would cover current US events if they were happening in another country: “Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices”

Let me summarize the latest outrages via columnists I follow.

Connie Willis on Facebook, 2 Feb 2025: IT’S A COUP–Trump Moves to Completely Take Over Government
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What They’re Trying to Wipe Out

Posted on Saturday 1 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Under the weather the past few days, with an ordinary cold, mostly a scratchy-throat driven cough. Today: light reading, and naps.

  • At an FBI facility, someone is literally painting over a wall of value words, like “fairness,” “diversity,” “leadership,” and “Constitution”;
  • The Pentagon is ‘rotating’ out, via some newly-invented policy, press offices to NBC, NPR, and NYT to make room for right-wing venues;
  • Jonathan Chait hits the nail on the head: “The president is promising a return to meritocracy — while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”
  • And a sample of comments about the ongoing coup from my Facebook friends.

The Daily Beast, 1 Feb 2025: Trump Admin Paints Over FBI’s DEI Values in Viral Photo

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The Corrosion of America

Posted on Friday 31 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump 2.0 so far;
  • Comments from Willis, Richardson, and Reich;
  • Krugman on tariffs;
  • Trump’s mediocre cabinet appointments;
  • Lydia Polgreen on our age of mass migration, how countries like the US actually need immigrants, and how opponents of migration can only retreat to belief in a mythic past.
    – – –

    So let’s see if I’m caught up. Trump has invited virtually everyone in the Federal government (including air traffic controllers) to resign, in a kind of buyout, or risk being fired if they don’t agree to Trump’s New Order. The FAA head already resigned on January 20th at the behest of Musk, who resented safety standards being applied to his rocket company. This week a passenger plane and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington DC and Trump, along with his toadies, blamed Democrats and DEI, not so subtly implying that only straight white men are competent. After releasing all the January 6th rioters from prison, now Trump is firing the investigators who got them put away. The criminals and incompetents whom Trump nominated for cabinet positions are getting confirmed, one by one; Republicans have no low too low, apparently. What else? Let me check. Trump is moving forward with his tariffs, and threatening more, no matter how often real economists point out they will raise prices that ordinary Americans pay. He tried to freeze government spending on Monday, then reversed the decision on Wednesday, a sure sign he doesn’t understand the consequences of what he’s doing, or is simply flailing.

    What will be left when all this is done? Anything?

    Continue reading →

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The Usual Villains

Posted on Thursday 30 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A passenger plane and a military helicopter collide over the Potomac, killing 67, and who does Trump blame?
  • Trump’s vile plane crash press conference;
  • David A. Graham on how Trump is just watching, not taking charge;
  • Allan Pettersson’s Symphony #8.
– – –

Last night an American Airlines jet with 64 people aboard, including a number of ice skaters and their coaches, collided with a US Army helicopter (with a crew of 3) over the Potomac River in Washington D.C., moments before the plane was due to land at the Reagan National Airport just south of Washington D.C. Late last night and this morning TV watchers saw a video clip from someone who’d captured the collision. The plane on a glide path from the right, as this map shows; the military helicopter flying in from the left, and an explosion. Both aircraft landed in the river, the plane broken into pieces and the helicopter upside-down. It was quickly established that there were no survivors. When I saw the updates this morning, I predicted that Trump would blame Biden. I was right, but not completely right.

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The latest despicable display by the new administration is how, yet again, Trump and his minions blame everything bad that happens in the world the same set of people and ideas they don’t like. Without evidence of course. Textbook definition of prejudice. Pre-judgments regardless of facts. For everything that happens, like the plane crash last night in Washington DC, all they know is to invoke the usual suspects, the usual villains.

NY Times, 30 Jan 2025: How the Plane and Helicopter Collided in Washington: Maps and Graphics
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The Latest Chaos

Posted on Wednesday 29 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Let’s see if I can keep up. Today the Trump administration reversed the directive from two days ago to freeze federal grants until they could be scrubbed of improper thoughts. RFK Jr testified. And Trump announced he’ll build a detention center at Guantanamo for all the nasty immigrants he wants to rid the country of. At least he’s not calling it a concentration camp. Oh, and an internal memo directs defense agencies to ignore certain holidays that do not honor white men. (MLK Day, Black History, Pride, etc.) Only white men matter.

Here’s an item about that last one.

Raw Story via NewsBreak, 29 Jan 2025: Defense agency takes aim at MLK Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day in leaked memo

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Let’s look at takes from the commentariat.

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