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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Science | Comments Off on Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE

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.

\\\

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Cosmology, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on DEI and NASA

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”
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on A Nation vs. a Collection of States

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Morality, Philosophy, Religion | Comments Off on Shades of Morality

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.

\\\

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Living in History

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.

\\

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.”
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Comments Off on Easier to Destroy than to Build

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
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, History, Politics | Comments Off on People Are Saying… It’s a Coup

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

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on What They’re Trying to Wipe Out

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 →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The Corrosion of America