Once again -- to remain human means to say NO!

Once upon a time -- when the New York Times revealed America's Vietnamese "allies" were torturing their enemies in "tiger cages," when photos revealed what US soldiers in Iraq were doing to prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- Erudite Partner and I would mutter to each other, when are they going to bring it home?

Yes, we knew that torture was all too prevalent in US prisons and jails, for example by Chicago police in this century. 

But local police malpractice and terror seemed a different thing than torture practiced on people who had been declared "the other" by the powers that be. 

But now we have that. 

My Erudite Partner Rebecca Gordon returns to the topic of her academic research in a current article for TomDispatch.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture 

... in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). 

Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.

But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”

 

We face a test. How do we choose to respond to the barbarism of our authorities rooted in the fears of our neighbor citizens? We are not helpless.

... Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity.  

I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections — that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters – is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come. 

Go read it all. 

Now what? After the spring rallies ...

After serving as an MC at Baltimore's version of 2025 spring resistance rallies, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Lester Spence has tried to figure out: where do we go from here?  His edited reflections seem important to share.

Folks used the rallies to lash local efforts to national ones and to provide proof-of-concept and to present political opportunities for people who weren’t connected on the other.  ... If the May Day rally represented coalition proof-of-concept, No Kings represented proof that there were thousands of people looking to join something bigger than themselves.     

... However, both skewed older and white. ...

Baltimore has been and remains segregated, even though it is increasingly multi-cultural and multi-racial.  ... There aren’t that many of us connected to both worlds. Which makes political organizing between them difficult.    

Alongside local segregation there’s the political dynamic generated by the Trump administration. Its secret police attacks on Latinx populations ... have politically and socially demobilized them to the point where many find it difficult to conduct normal day-to-day activity much less engage in political activism. The level of courage required for Latinx public participation cannot be overstated. Nor can the viciousness of state attacks against them.  And then [there's the] “let’s sit this one out” rhetoric unique to black Baltimore communities ...

... I’d suggest that for the average No King’s Day attendee in particular, what they’re experiencing now—with cuts to USAID and other federal government bodies—may be the first time they’ve experienced the underside of the American state. ... This isn’t quite the case for Latinx populations although perhaps it hasn’t been as vicious as this. And this isn’t quite the case for black populations in Baltimore, particularly working class ones. ...

Neither rallies really spoke to this as effectively as they could have (and as I was one of the MCs, I bear responsibility). Going forward we have to bring together three populations—the white populations bearing government cuts (but not experiencing police violence), the black populations (experiencing local police violence), and the Latino populations (experiencing national police violence). At the very least that means showing up for rallies. 

But it also means generating popular education programs that can generate understanding about the shared (yet unique) nature of these struggles. And then lashing them up to political projects that combine electoral strategies—putting people in office at the local, state, and national level—with referenda strategies.  

What those of us connected to the efforts that skew white and old have to do is work within those spaces to get people within them to commit to broader action. That broader action has to first involve getting people within these groups to see that the fascist turn didn’t start with Trump and didn’t move from Germany to here.

In developing this new understanding people have to get that these dynamics affect all of us, no matter where we are. The ally point of view would have us believe that there are certain populations who are affected and certain populations who aren’t. The role of the ally is to recognize how certain populations are affected and then aid them in their struggles.

This is wrong. It quite simply isn’t the case that there are people who aren’t affected and people who are. It is true that there are populations who are the victims of discriminate indiscriminate police violence and populations who don’t tend to be. ... [but] everyone loses materially and psychically.

This dynamic has to then translate into action. And working on the idea that it’s just a bit at a time, it isn’t about generating the equivalent of a May Day march among people who haven’t ever marched. It is, though, about getting people to commit to actions designed to change local conditions. Knowing that changing those local conditions end up building the community we need to change national conditions.    

That last point is important. We need local actions. Some of this from Spence seems peculiarly Baltimore-oriented. Baltimore is not California. In California, Latinos and various Asian-origin groups and individuals are more easily central to the resistance mix and can lead the way. 

I don't know whether I agree with his implication that the time for big marches is past. There are plenty of people who still need to experience the high that goes with seeing our numbers. And our numbers are increasing according to all public polling. People don't like the incompetence and cruelty on display in the Trump regime. So long as we are able to come together at scale, it's good that we should.

When people ask what they can do to fight the BUMP,  the Big Ugly MAGA Power, my first answer these days is to talk with and bring in more of your neighbors. We need to grow. That increases the value of the little local actions blossoming everywhere. One such outpouring, the TeslaTakedown, went national and helped crash Trump's brother-in-destruction. 

Support all the little campaigns cropping up, as you are able. Support immigrants, individually and collectively. Support trans people, on whom the assault is life-threatening. Support teachers. Support union workers. Get the communities you belong to engaged. This is a time for creativity and boldness. The Trump project is vicious, but it is also phony, a house of cards. Let's blow their house down with our numbers. 

Questions for us all

Why do I read Matt Yglesias? He's routinely something of a know-it-all twit. But skimming through his broad range of topics does broaden my own thinking -- so yes, I do read him.

Today he answered an interesting reader question:

Vasav Swaminathan: In honor of the fourth of July, what was America's greatest moment? Of all time? Of your lifetime? Of the last decade?

Of all time, I would say World War II and the Marshall Plan. Of my lifetime, probably PEPFAR. And of the last decade, either the rapid development of Covid vaccines or the rapid deployment of emergency military aid to Ukraine. 

I can take a swing at that question. It's interesting.

Click to enlarge.

America's greatest moment of all time? Unequivocally, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. By the middle of the 1860s, the Union army had obliterated the Confederate rebellion in a bloody war which ended slavery. At the conclusion of that war, the President -- Abraham Lincoln -- who had cautiously and bravely led the North through that terrible trial of the nation's values, was assassinated by a sympathizer of the losing South. His Vice-President, the south-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, was quite prepared make peace with the defeated states on terms that allowed continuation of white oligarchic rule over the freed slaves. 

Republican majorities in Congress (the GOP was a different animal then!) stumbled their way through complicated legislative maneuvers, including a failed impeachment of Johnson, to enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution which were meant to ensure we'd be a democratically organized country observing citizens' rights. No more chattel slavery, the rule of law must be recognized by the various states, and no denial of the right to vote on the basis of race -- roughly speaking. 

Yes -- the current Supreme Court is trying to gut these accomplishments. But those 19th century Americans were right to enact their "rebirth of freedom" then and we are right now, to hell with John Roberts and his posse of black-robed crooks.

Of my lifetime? That's easy. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s which forced the reaffirmation and re-invigoration of Reconstruction amendment principles, including forcing one-person, one-vote districts, integration of public schools and public facilities, and, by extension, full citizenship for women and LGBT people.

The current MAGA party doesn't recognize any of that either. We're being subjected to the ascendancy of aggrieved ignorant white men. I guess we have to rise up against cruelty and bigotry again ...

Of the last decade?  On this I find myself agreeing with Yglesias: the development and deployment of the COVID vaccine pointed the way to species-survival in the world humans have made. We can make a livable world if we can overcome the fraction of us who are too dumb or too self-centered to understand the project.

Thanks Matt! How would you answer those questions?

Friday cat blogging

 

Who's that cat in the window? Janeway doesn't care. She has caught the evening sunbeam and stretches happily.

 

Here's the view from outside, Janeway looking far more alert.

A righteous rant ...

I reproduce here a righteous rant from Simon Rosenberg. His Hopium Chronicles project may be a little too Democratic Party-oriented for the taste of most of my friends. But you got to love that he activates people, in the style of, and in homage to, FDR and Harry Truman.

I've made this a little easier to read:

In these first six terrible months of Trump they have told us who they are and what they want - they want our country to be poorer, weaker, less safe, less healthy and less free. 

The agenda is clear. There is no American greatness or a better tomorrow. Their way is a diminished country, with fewer opportunities for our people, an end to our democracy, and a nation less able to chart our course in a competitive world. They want for more them and less for all of us. They cannot run away from who they are and what they are doing. There isn’t any way to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. 

And unlike 2024 we cannot shirk from our responsibility to tell this part of the story. 

For the first step in defeating Trumpism is to make sure every voter available to us understands exactly who they are and what they mean for our nation’s future. 

The passage of the Big Ugly [Budget Bill] gives us an opportunity to go tell this bigger story about this rancid agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal. We are no longer limited in our comms and story telling to the elements of the big ugly. We must now in fact integrate the elements of the big ugly into their broader agenda and attack it on all fronts. They have betrayed us and we can and must find a better way, together. 

• The tragedy in Texas has started a national debate about their “more for me, less for all of you” agenda. 

• The return of measles has given us an opportunity to talk about their assault on our health care. 

•Trump’s ongoing tariff fiasco allows us to talk about his core betrayal of working people by raising prices not lowering them. 

• His attempt to create a secret police gives us an opportunity to talk about his authoritarian fantasies and abandonment of the Constitutional order here in American. 

The upcoming debate over Congress’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget gives us an extended opportunity to explain the harms of their agenda to the American people. 

Democrats in state and localities across the country can start to immediately organize town halls, hearings and other community conversations to talk to their constituents about what the Big Ugly and the broader GOP agenda means for them (and we need to help them do this). 

For it is no longer notional or a promise. It is here. 

And people are dying. The economy is slowing. Prices are rising. Our debt is exploding. 

Masked men are disappearing people into foreign and domestic gulags. Measles has returned. 

The world is laughing at us. 

They’ve given themselves huge tax cuts while levying one of the largest tax increases in history on working people. 

Our leader is a fucking painted clown, a joke, an impulsive and out of control fool, being enabled by unprecedented cowardice in what was once the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. ...

What else, Simon? Unfortunately, there's always more when a conman is dependent on hyping up a base of the vengeful and deluded.

The blame game attracts, but can wait

Not long after I heard about the Texas floods, social media was buzzing. A friend from the Austin area posted a devastating video which helped convey the force of the waters. 

And then, some commenters started suggesting that the Trump regime had fired the requisite storm modelers and weather forecasters in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) and therefore should be blamed for the loss of life.

And that rang true, because we know Trump hates NOAA for contradicting him. In 2018, he falsely redrew a hurricane's path with a sharpie to include Alabama -- even though the official map didn't show that trajectory.

Trump has had trouble with the weather scientists. And pretty much all scientists.

But the haste to blame someone for the awful loss of life, including all those girl campers, felt suspect to me from the get-go. I can wait for whatever investigators discover about forecasts and warnings -- and also about likely buck passing and grift in the disaster recovery process. 

Stephanie Bai in The Atlantic also urged caution:

It didn’t take long for the finger-pointing to begin. While search-and-rescue operations were getting under way (at least 161 people remain missing in Kerr County alone), false claims circulated on social media that Texans received no warnings about the impending flash flood. 

Some state officials suggested that the National Weather Service—a federal agency responsible for issuing weather-related warnings—hadn’t accurately forecast the severity of the rain. Experts questioned whether the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had affected emergency response. The speculation prompted the weather service to release a timeline of their flood alerts. 

Congressional Democrats are demanding an inquiry into whether NWS staffing shortages have affected the death toll, and President Donald Trump took a swipe at Joe Biden for setting up “that water situation,” before conceding that he couldn’t blame Biden, either: “This is a hundred-year catastrophe.”

Those of us who are Trump critics should be cautious about assigning blame to the MAGA governments (Texas too) without evidence. That's what they do: make stuff up about their opponents. We are daily drowning in their convenient lies and conspiracy theories. If we all start choosing our own facts, we lose touch with realities we need to know and understand.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit calls out our temptation to add to a cacophony of tendentious misinformation. 

The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. 

But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. 

We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

Over one hundred people have been confirmed dead in the floods. Some diligent journalist will write a more considered version of their deaths, of the floods, and of state and federal systems which might have protected some of them. While taking in the horror, we can wait for that story. We need to practice practicing information discernment. The times demand this.

Might the warming world be a boon to women?

That's probably overstating it, but apparently women need to be warmer than men to feel comfortable. 

According to the BBC,  there's a measurable reason why women tend to think air conditioning is set too high while men want the temperature lowered. Or so a new study suggests.

... women feel the cold more readily - one small sample test the researchers carried out suggests that women are comfortable at a temperature 2.5C warmer than men - between 24-25C.

According to Prof Paul Thornalley, of Warwick Medical School, variation in average metabolic rate and body heat production between men and women "may explain why there is a difference in environmental temperature required for comfort between males and females".

The body's metabolism is responsible for growth and the production of energy, including heat. Resting metabolic rate is the minimal rate of energy expenditure per unit of time while we are at rest, calculated through a standard set of equations. On average women have a lower metabolic rate than men.

"A great determinant of resting metabolic rates is the fat free body mass in people's bodies," says Thornalley - accounting for around 60% of the individual difference in men and women's resting metabolic rates. Because men have more fat free body mass - all the components of the body like skin, bones and muscle, but excluding fat - than women, they have a higher resting metabolic rate.

... This higher proportion of body mass which is able to produce heat involuntarily means that on average men don't feel the cold as easily as women - and, in sultry summer months, means they have a lower tolerance for hot weather because their bodies produce more heat at a resting metabolic rate, getting warmer quicker.

Well maybe. Obviously people are different; individuals of both sexes may experience temperatures quite differently. And, the BBC points out, convention dictates to some women that we wear less clothes ...

We keep on keeping on ...

How curious. I turned 78 yesterday, as one does if one is fortunate enough to keep going. I'm a little creaky, but still here and still going, if a bit more slowly. (And I was never speedy ...) 

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! You folks are great. 

Anyway, on a visit to a friend in Northern California's almost-countryside, she pointed me to this charming video I'll share here showing her local June NO KINGS march. 

As we've said about so many not-yet-popular truths over the years: we are everywhere. And don't doubt or forget it!

Making more losers, but we do not have to be suckers

Click to enlarge

Taking a day away from this blog after an intense 10 day stretch. Leaving this chart about the effects of MAGA's Big Ugly Bill for anyone interested to ponder. Yes, this is bad. And notice the headline The Financial Times put on the information. Not where I'd expect that reference.

And then there is the money for ICE. Phillip Bump of the Washington Post [gift article] describes cogently what Trump's Homeland Gestapo is doing already with its funding. 

Much to do if this country is to have a future. 

This Independence Day, It's on us. As it always has been

 

I'm more comfortable with this image after having spent quite a bit of time recently in New England. To many people of that part of this huge country, the image feels fitting. Elmer Davis was a radio journalist who served FDR's war against European fascism and Japanese imperialism in the role of Director of the Office of War Information.

 

How might similar sentiments be expressed these days in my home state of California? Perhaps like this:

Here on the Left Coast, we'll take a dose of snark with our defiance of unjust rulers. But that doesn't mean we are not a force to be reckoned with when aroused. And we're getting aroused.

• • • 

The USofA has had quite a good 249 year run. Not saying we've always (or even most often) been on the side of justice, against oppression, for full liberation of all. In fact, this enterprise has always been murderous to some. It's taken us all those years to more fully recognize some people are really people. But in our better seasons, African people imported as slaves, and foreign newcomers, and women, and LGBTQ+ people, and even the native people whose land the rest of us stole have been increasingly recognized as fully human by the polity we have made for ourselves. 

 

Our institutions are creaky and not currently serving our best aspirations. We need to remember that there's more in our Declaration of Independence beyond the bold assertion that "all men are created equal' and should be understood to have "inalienable rights." The declaration goes on to insist that this understanding of where and from whom government acquired legitimacy means we can have expectations: 

... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Current US institutions -- the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Constitution of 1789, the various states -- are proving no match for an oligarchic aspiring king whose executive power derives from the votes of 31 percent of the citizens. (Kamala got nearly another third and the rest stayed home.) 

Trump is governing by arrogating to himself powers our system never gave him nor meant any executive to have. And the system itself is proving incapable of stopping him.

Looks like the future of the United States of America is up to the consent of the governed, once again. Are we going to let King Donald get away with his heist?

Listening to the next generation

The aftershocks of Zohran Mamdani's victory over the Democratic field in New York City's mayoral primary just keep on coming. I've read and listened to a slew of them in the last few days. For an election operative/election junkie like me it's all fascinating.

From my own idiosyncratic background in decades of trying to get ordinary citizens to turn out for good causes as well as striving to enlarge the electorate, what Mamdani did is astonishing. About 975,000 people voted according to the final ranked choice tallies: 545,000 for Mamdani; 428,500 for Andrew Cuomo.  Mamdani's campaign organized something over 50,000 campaign volunteers (most of whom we can assume were New York voters.) That is, nearly 10 percent of his voters volunteered in some way. And this number doesn't count whatever percentage of Mamdani's over 20,000 small donors gave money but didn't actively work in voter contact in the campaign.

Getting this high a percentage of an electorate activated is extremely rare. I'm not sure I've ever seen any thing close; perhaps for Obama in 2008, though I doubt it. Mamdani must have combined good fundamentals -- a deep appeal -- with extraordinary organization.

John Della Volpe has been polling director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics for over 20 years. He has a specialty, he explains: "I spend most of my time talking with, surveying, and thinking about young Americans." 

Young people campaigned for Mamdani and voted for Mamdani in very high numbers. Della Volpe describes what he thinks Mamdani evoked and what he has seen emerging for a long time: 

To Republicans, Mamdani represents everything they warn against: a socialist insurgent, a destabilizing force, a glimpse of where they fear the country is heading. Trump labeled him a “100% Communist Lunatic.” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis called him “very dangerous to the future of the city.” Charlie Kirk went even further, comparing Mamdani’s win to “9/11 2.0.”

But the louder panic came from inside his own party. Democratic leaders rushed to express concern — not just about his victory, but about what it might signal. ... What’s become clear is this: Mamdani didn’t just pull off a political upset. He revealed a deeper fracture — a generation of voters who feel unseen and unheard — and a political establishment that, instead of listening or re-engaging, is warning the rest of the country to look away. 

Della Volpe makes three observations about Mamdani's win. There were voters available to be persuaded.

#1: This Wasn’t About Labels. It Was About Lives.

Mamdani’s win wasn’t a fluke. It was the result of a campaign that grasped something most politicos and consultants still miss: in cities like New York, the real divide is no longer left versus center. It’s disconnection versus recognition. 

... Mamdani didn’t offer slogans. He listened. He took those stories seriously. Then he built a platform that sounded less like a press release and more like the people living it. ... And Mamdani didn’t manipulate it. He mirrored it — and then turned it into momentum.

Listening won Mamdani what money could not buy: 

#2: The Trust Recession

This election wasn’t just about housing or crime or affordability. It was about trust. And how little of it remains.

Sounds easy, but for a politician to choose to really listen and thereby win trust is a stretch for even willing politicians. Throwing oneself into the public arena is hard; you quickly learn there will be detractors, some of them unfair. Listening requires ego strength -- but also a strength that doesn't mask defensiveness. Mamdani seems to have such an equilibrium; this made for a perfect contrast to Cuomo's habitual arrogant bluster. 

#3: The Strategy Worked — But It Doesn’t Travel on Its Own

There’s already a rush to frame Mamdani’s win as a warning shot — or a roadmap — for Democrats nationally. But the truth is more grounded than that. What happened in Queens, Brooklyn, and across parts of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island wasn’t a template for the nation. It was a local reaction to a local crisis — a campaign rooted in New York’s specific pain points: housing, transit, affordability, and a growing sense that city government no longer works for regular people.

The lesson isn’t to copy Mamdani’s message. It’s to copy his method. ... In a post-election interview with Jen Psaki, Mamdani put it plainly: “We hoped to move our political instinct from lecturing to listening.

This New Yorker is going to have to be tough. Fortunately, he's suited for a tough city -- a city in Donald Trump's crosshairs.