Whatever They Can Get Away With

Posted on Friday 20 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Short items today

  • Trump’s move to demolish greenhouse gas standards is based on a (admittedly technical) lie;
  • America is experiencing a tourism slump (because… one guess);
  • About Trump’s “cartoonish” monuments to himself;
  • How Trump makes his own voters suffer;
  • How Democrats might take advantage of Trump’s claims he “fixed” the affordability crisis;
  • And more items about renaming the Palm Beach Intl Airport; Sean Feucht’s long hair; Trump telling soldiers to vote GOP; Trump officials want to rebuilt the WHO access that they cancelled for three times the cost; Statin hysteria; how trust in clergy hits a new low; Trump’s sons blame their own corruption on all of us (and our pesky laws); and Hegseth inviting a Christian Nationalist extremist to lead a Pentagon worship service.
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Today is the day the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Much consternation is about the land.

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A bunch of short items today, which I don’t need to quote from or comment about very much.

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Does Western Civilization Depend on Christian Monotheism?

Posted on Thursday 19 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Challenging David Brooks, the retiring NYT columnist, and his idea of building a humanist culture, from Bruce Ledewitz and Robert Reich;
  • Brooks’ problem, claims Ledewitz, is that Brooks can’t let go of religion; “the past collapsed for a reason”;
  • And Reich challenges him on issues of inequality.
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Not unrelated to yesterday’s items. Two writers respond to the retirement of David Brooks from the NYT by examining the worldview he espoused — another version of restoring Western Civilization — and its crucial flaw: his unwillingness to let go of the presumptions of monotheism and learn what science has discovered about the actual world.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 18 Feb 2026: David Brooks wants to rebuild a humanistic culture, subtitled “To rediscover our values, we first have to forge a new foundation for them.”

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Are There Superior Civilizations?

Posted on Wednesday 18 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reactions to a speech by Marco Rubio claiming the superiority of Western Civilization over all others, by Bret Stephens, Eliot A. Cohen, Jamelle Bouie;
  • Noting again Jared Diamond, who explained decades ago why the fact that the Enlightenment et al originated in Europe doesn’t mean white men are superior to all others;
  • And by the way Trump is building concentration camps.
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There are divergent takes on a speech given by Marco Rubio in Europe the other day.

NY Times, opinion by Bret Stephens, 17 Feb 2026: Western Civ Can Save Us — Again

But the title in print, in this morning’s paper, was “The Only Civilization Worth Defending.”

And I thought, seriously? Isn’t this a little like saying, the only religion that is true is mine — because it’s mine?

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Religious Motivations

Posted on Tuesday 17 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jerry Coyne challenges claims of a religious revival in America;
  • Review of a book called “Why I Am Not an Atheist” by Christopher Beha;
  • And a NYT essay by author Christopher Beha.
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A couple items about religion today.

Even the best of the media love to identify supposed “trends,” especially if they’re counter-intuitive. Thus there have been articles in newspapers and online about how the decline in religiosity in America is reversing. Wishful thinking, by some?

Jerry Coyne, 17 Feb 2026: There isn’t a revival of religion in America
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Visually Stunning

Posted on Monday 16 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • More about conservative comments about San Francisco;
  • Paul Krugman wonders why MAGA hates the planet;
  • How conservatives prioritize big families: quantity over quality;
  • Connecting dots between mentions of Tom Holland and his book DOMINION;
  • The MAGA attitude of contempt for others, as seen recently by Pam Bondi;
  • And some early Philip Glass: A Madrigal Opera.

Which locals come to take for granted, of course.

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Another item about conservative hatred of San Francisco.

Salon, Sophia Tesfaye, 10 Feb 2026: Super Bowl bursts popular right-wing media myth, subtitled “Conservative commentators and podcast bros backtrack on what they’ve said about San Francisco”

I always thought the idea of San Francisco as a dystopian nightmare was some kind of bit. An exaggeration made meme, something people said with a wink to signal their politics more than their understanding of reality. I didn’t realize just how many Americans actually believe it so deeply that they could travel across the country, step off a plane and walk through one of the most visually stunning cities on the continent — only to be shocked that they were lied to.

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The Clash Within

Posted on Sunday 15 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How there isn’t a clash of civilizations (e.g. Christian vs. Muslim) so much as a clash between modernity and those who resent it: WOKE vs MAGA;
  • Items about ensuring the “right” people will vote, the erosion of the separation of church and state, Trump’s relentless self-promotion, and how the destruction of the US vaccine market will hurt the entire world;
  • Philip Glass’s Glassworks.
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Another big picture piece today.

Thumbnail history. In the early 1990s Francis Fukuyama published a book called The End of History and the Last Man which argued, in part, that liberal democracy was winning the international war of governments. Samuel P. Huntington wrote a response called the Clash of Civilizations that objected to Fukuyama’s thesis. A few years later 9/11 happened, which seemed to discredit Fukuyama and confirm Huntington.

The present article, if I can guess before I read it, says the true clash isn’t between different cultures or religions, it’s internal — a clash between basic (even primitive) and advanced human nature. MAGA vs. WOKE. Continue reading →

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The Trump Administration Declines All Knowledge

Posted on Saturday 14 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Satire from The Atlantic based on the Trump administration’s renunciation of scientific conclusions about climate change;
  • Conflicted ideas about the state of the world;
  • How Gallup will stop tracking presidential approval rates;
  • Another movement from Akhnaten: Attack and Fall
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Suitable for this administration, and the MAGA crowd. (And the flat-earth crowd.)

The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri, 14 Feb 2026: Trump Administration Announces That We Don’t Know Where the Sun Goes at Night, subtitled “After deciding carbon dioxide does no harm, it was the logical next move.”

A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don’t know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.

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Regressing to Might Makes Right

Posted on Friday 13 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Trump is reviving pagan values in which might makes right, while historian Tom Holland gives Christianity all the credit for ideas of inherent morality (ideas the administration is ignoring), which I dispute;
  • Author Rod Dreher think the Enlightenment was a mistake, and would prefer the certitudes of Middle Age religion;
  • Germany understands that Trump has destroyed the world’s rules-based order;
  • Charts showing the increasing isolation of the US on the world stage;
  • Brief items on Trump’s racism, a white nationalist up for Senate confirmation, and how trust in American healt care has plummeted since RFK Jr. took over;
  • Philip Glass’s “Hymn to the Sun,” from Akhnaten.
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As I’ve been saying. They’re all hypocrites — they’re primitive, racist tribalists who openly flout the ideals they claim to venerate, the ideals that people better than them have established in recent centuries.

NY Times, guest essay by Leighton Woodhouse, 11 Feb 2026: Donald Trump, Pagan King [gift link]

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada recently described the world that President Trump is dragging us into with this aphorism: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

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Renouncing Reality, Yet Again, to Make Money

Posted on Thursday 12 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Trump administration denies climate change, in favor of big business;
  • Trump is best on cashing in;
  • Paul Krugman explains why deportation don’t create jobs and will lead to more deaths of native-born Americans;
  • Brief items about conservatives and small government; the end of CBS News; theocracy; how women need to be imprisoned; and how evangelicals need to outbreed the left;
  • An NFL writer finds San Francisco to be a delightful place; “they lied to you” about the city.
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The big story, once again:

NY Times, 12 Feb 2026: Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change, subtitled “The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.”
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How Crises Disappear

Posted on Wednesday 11 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Trump has quietly withdrawn National Guard troops from various cities;
  • Adam-Troy Castro predicts that the ballroom, the Kennedy Center overhaul, and the arch, will never happen;
  • John Pavlovitz on how Bad Bunny reminds MAGA that they’re losing;
  • Amanda Marcotte on why evangelicals will never dump Trump;
  • Paul Krugman on the banality of MAGA evil: Howard Lutnick.
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Let’s note this first.

Washington Post, today: National Guard troops were quietly withdrawn from some U.S. cities, subtitled “The deployments encountered repeated legal setbacks that stymied President Donald Trump’s desire for a show of force in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon.”
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