Today’s Political Readings from Facebook and Substack

Posted on Saturday 15 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Musk’s boys don’t know Cobol; Robert Reich accuses MSM of being wishy-washy about the coup; Paul Krugman on the Trump administration suppressing health information; Connie Willis on Trump’s “massacre” of attorneys who resigned rather than drop charges against Eric Adams.

– – –

First, a possible explanation for that bizarre claim by Musk that he’d found 150-year-old Social Security recipients.

Facebook post by Christopher Rowe, 14 Feb 2025:

Most of Musk’s stuff is done out of simple hatred and naked ambition, but one shouldn’t overlook the great percentage that comes from simple incompetence. (This isn’t even to get started on his hypocrisy, such as implementing drug testing on federal employees who’ve never had them imposed under any administration–the guy has bragged about doing hallucinogens and smoked pot during an interview). These people have done more to spit on the US in six weeks than Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson did in eight years.

Well… this is plausible, about Musk’s kids, despite being computer programmers, are likely uninformed about older computer languages. They’re young. Anything to substantiate this? Let’s Google. OK, here’s this.

Daily Kos, 14 Feb 2025: Nope. There are no 150-year-olds on Social Security. It’s COBOL!

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What They Mean By Traditional

Posted on Saturday 15 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Family arriving today for the weekend, so just a few quick items for now.

  • DOGE is about putting “traditional” Americans back in charge;
  • Where Nazi flags are fine, and Pride flags are banned;
  • Musk is about purging federal workers to replace them with theocrats and fanatics;
  • RFK Jr.: it takes an engineer to build a bridge but any a-hole can blow it up;
  • Conservatives were outraged over Obama’s executive orders, not so much about Trump’s;
  • Trump officials “accidentally” fired people in charge of US nuclear weapon security;
  • Trump wants to destroy all academia, not just the woke parts;
  • Republicans are just fine with letting Musk gut the government;
  • Actual judicial sleaze is Trump’s A.G. trying to get those charges against Eric Adams dismissed.

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Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilly, 14 Feb 2025: What the DOGE Takeover Really Means, subtitled “In the dark corners of social media where Elon Musk and the people who aspire to work for him live, it’s clear: This is about putting ‘traditional’ Americans back in charge.”

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Richard Dawkins: THE MAGIC OF REALITY

Posted on Friday 14 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: How We Know What’s Really True
Illustrated by Dave McKean
(Free Press, Oct. 2011, 271pp, including 6p of index and acknowledgements)

When I was organizing my nonfiction books notes and posts last December, I was surprised that I had nothing on this book, though I was sure I read it. My records show I read it shortly after publication, in 2011. I suppose the reason I didn’t write up any notes is that it’s Dawkins-lite, somewhat like FLIGHTS OF FANCY (review here), heavily illustrated and aimed at, perhaps, younger readers. The themes are pretty basic. Still, those themes are also fundamental. So I reread the book last month, to capture the book’s ideas here. There are three essential ideas.

The first essential idea is in the subtitle. The book is a tour of a several basic scientific topics, not just to provide the current state of knowledge on those topics, but to explain *how* people reached these conclusions. You don’t get that in intro science courses in high school or even college, unless you specifically take history of science courses. (At least, in my experience.) Thus some people are put off by what they see as the impudence or even arrogance of scientists dictating what’s true and what’s not — especially when what they claim to be true conflicts with religious myths.

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And They’re Doing It All In Plain Sight

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman about Elon Musk, fraudster;
  • Brian Tyler Cohen on how Musk’s search for fraud is only to advance his personal interests;
  • How if Musk were trying to find fraudulent spending, he would have gone in with accountants, not computer programmers, with a link to USASpending.gov;
  • Connie Willis summarizes the press conference with Elon Musk, and Trump in the background;
  • Short items: about 218 GOP representatives who have no purpose but to make up hysterical lies; RFK Jr. confirmed, why not a flat earther to head NASA?; How Ted Cruz thinks studying solar eclipses is “woke”; how Europe no longer relies on the US as a reliable ally; how Trump is pondering the birthright citizenship of Native Americans; how DEI is the new N-word; and how the removal of the T from LGBTQ is an Orwellian rewriting of history.

Paul Krugman, 13 Feb 2025: Elon Musk Is Faking It, subtitled “The fraudster who cried ‘fraud'”

Krugman starts with that howler about how USAID supposedly spent $50 million on condoms to Hamas. There was no evidence. Continue reading →

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Diversity is Out, Racism is In

Posted on Wednesday 12 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Military veterans say the trans ban is logistical nonsense;
  • How Musk and Vance stood up for a self-avowed racist;
  • How Trump and his administration are intentionally on the wrong side of history, favoring “competent white men”;
  • How philosopher Richard Rorty anticipated a renewed era of public cruelty;
  • How Republicans love spending cuts, just not in their own states;
  • Another view from Canada: “It’s been nice knowing you.”
– – –

Slate, Timothy Soseki Kudo, Lindsey Melki, and Kenneth Zavada, 12 Feb 2025: We Served in the Military. Trump Has No Idea How Much Damage He’s Just Done to It., subtitled “The trans ban isn’t just immoral. It’s logistical nonsense.”

However, as military veterans, we know that this [Trump’s] order will accomplish exactly the opposite. When it’s 5 degrees out and expected to drop, and it’s you and your battle buddy’s turn on night watch to share a sleeping bag in the snow-covered mudhole the two of you have spent the past 12 hours digging, the last thing on anyone’s mind is gender or sex. In those moments, all that matters is a person’s character and the mutual trust that comes from living and training together until you’re certain you have each other’s back.

Trump, recall, had bone splints.
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Not-a-Surprises

Posted on Tuesday 11 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

I see TV commercials about health insurance that complain about “bills” and “not-a-bills”. I get plenty of both too.

  • Not-a-surprise: Trump and Musk are really after tax cuts for the wealthy.
  • Trump doesn’t grasp the point of foreign aid;
  • Conservatives upset by the Super Bowl half-time show are apparently for diversity after all;
  • How the Trump administration thinks America is full of the wrong kind of people;
  • A Thomas B. Edsall round-up on this attack against modern American liberalism;
  • Links about Musk and taxpayer-funded research, how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán, and how maybe Trump’s zone-flooding can’t go on forever;
  • Not-a-surprise: A Trump admin puts election security staffers, whose job is to ensure the security of US elections, on leave.
– – –

This is the least surprising thing yet.

Slate, Alexander Sammon, 1 Feb 2025: This Is Not About Cost Cutting, subtitled “What Trump and Musk really want out of their government rampage is hiding in plain sight.”
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The Roots of All This is an Unchanging Human Nature in a Changing World

Posted on Monday 10 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights;
  • Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end;
  • Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana;
  • Connie Willis on the best cartoon of the day, and the funniest thing of the day (from the Borowitz Report);
  • Short items;
  • Katherine Stewart at NYT asks, Now Will You Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
  • MSN’s Lindsay Beyerstein explores delusion as the key mental state of Trump’s supporters;
  • And my thoughts about how all of this is about human nature, in the ancient world and in the modern world.

What are the pundits saying?

Heather Cox Richardson, February 9, 2025

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The claim in the executive order implies that it is only at gunpoint that any other rights are maintained. A very primitive, frontier-justice notion; a concern for force, not principle. Heather counters at length.

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Nothing mattered, in the end

Posted on Sunday 9 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • NY Times’ timeline of Trump 2.0;
  • NRA graphic from Facebook;
  • A Canadian perspective on Trump;
  • DEI graphic from Facebook;
  • How Trump (and Musk) target agencies investigating *them*;
  • The cost of scrapping the social cost of carbon;
  • David French on the populist cure, how Steve Bannon doesn’t think populists are understood, and how populism is rooted in grievance and expressed in simplistic terms of good and evil.

First of all for today, this handy timeline.

NY Times, updated 9 Feb 2025: All of the Trump Administration’s Major Moves in the First 20 Days

I assume this will continue to be updated daily. The top of the page has buttons to filter by category, and by type of action or announcement.

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Here’s a fun imagine floating around on Facebook.

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Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature;
  • Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag;
  • Plastic straws, racist speech, inmates in charge of the asylum;
  • WaPo shows you some government webpages deleted by the Trump administration;
  • Perhaps Musk’s motivation for attacking USAID;
  • NY Times Editorial Board: Now is not the time to tune out.

A couple phrases have been deployed to describe Trump’s deliberate (or not) strategy upon taking office of moving quickly with lots of executive orders. One is “shock and awe” after Bush’s strategy for invading Iraq; another is Steven Bannon’s “flooding the zone with sh*t” by which he meant spewing so much garbage so quickly that no one could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Another strategy that I saw today on Facebook (I didn’t capture a link) was that Trump treats each day like a media contest. He gets up in the morning and thinks of something outrageous to say on Truth Social, then depends on the news media (who Bannon and his acolytes think can only focus on one topic at a time) to be distracted by that while Trump goes about his real work relatively unnoticed; yet his goal is to ‘win’ the news cycle each day.

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Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Climate Change from A to Z”
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook
(Ten Speed Press, 159pp, c2023, published March 2024) <Amazon>

This is a book I bought on the basis of the author’s name (I quite admired her book of a decade ago, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, reviewed here) without quite realizing that it isn’t a book of essays so much as a book of illustrations with short essay accompaniments; a book for casual readers, or perhaps for young adults. As the subtitle says, the book outlines issues concerning climate change in 26 topics, from A to Z.

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