Advent time: what time is this?

This is the second Sunday of the four week version of the Christian season of Advent, the season of waiting in joyful hope for more light and for Light Incarnate. 

As always, I wonder how this feels if one lives in the southern hemisphere; when we worked in South Africa, our friends described this as a time to go the beach ...

For this day, in the North American bit of the world, I'll share this musing from historian, Jemar Tisby, who cannot resist preaching alongside teaching the story of this country.

How Can We Talk of Hope?

In the context of the news going from bad to worse, speaking of hope seems foolish.

Hope has become another 4-letter word—something forbidden and distasteful.

Hope seems out of style, hokey, detached from reality, blindly optimistic, historically uninformed, naive. 

But what if we have misunderstood hope? 

Hope is not a feeling. 

Hope is action. 

Hope is a choice. 

Hope is a conviction. 

As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said,

“So I don’t think it requires you to feel that you’ll eventually lose. On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this steadfastness to keep going.” 

Hope is the steadfastness to keep going. 

We don't know what is around the corner; the future has not happened yet. 

Something is coming. But what? Might our actions or inactions effect what is to come? We can't know. Hope is the steadfastness to keep going. 

No easy fix for democracy

Maybe the US Constitution once worked for democracy at least for many, but it sure doesn't today as an autocratic chief executive, cowardly pols, and corrupt judges are now demonstrating. There are many examples of our founding document's failure; this post takes up one of the worst. "Broken Constitution" will be an ongoing series here; the potential posts are legion but we have to think about this stuff if we are ever to move in a better direction.

• • • 

It would be the course of least resistance for a political statistics expert to turn his data into a platform to promote his own political hobby horses. In fact that's what most do. Some sell their insights (if any) as consultants to politicians' campaigns; that can be honest work though the associated temptations and incentives to be something less than truthful are pretty overwhelming. Others feed our apparently insatiable political media, always looking for an angle. Some, mostly academics unnoticed by the general public, publish data-based studies after campaigns are concluded.

G. Elliot Morris, writing at Strength in Numbers, tries to do a lot of these things (except perhaps the political consulting) with apparent integrity. He seems unusually and insightfully concerned to figure out what the structural implications for democracy might be, based on his numbers. This causes him to look deeply into the dysfunction of our political system.

According to Morris, the constitutional system as we know it is full of distortions. Left and right, we all feel this; Morris describes one source of our unhappiness:

... An urban party in a system with geography-based representation is disadvantaged by a national brand, whether that brand is left- or right-leaning, because its voters are split across electoral boundaries. That’s it.

Republicans won in 2024 nationally carrying just the lightly populated (red) spaces (49.8 to 48.3)

This was not a problem for Democrats 60 years ago. Previously in American politics, there was much more geographic variation in what the parties meant to voters. Being a “Democrat” from Montana could mean something different from being a Democrat from New York City. This allowed candidates to distance themselves from the national party brand and from the perceived cultural sins of candidates in faraway places that shared the same party label. As regional variation in party labels has fallen, this has seriously disadvantaged the party associated with urban voters.

Call it whatever you want — polarization, nationalization, “Balkanization,” factionalism, etc. It is simply true empirically that individuals moderating their issue positions, but sticking within the same party label, is not a solution to that problem. ...this solution is analogous to putting a band-aid over a bullet hole. The root of the problem is not issue positions; it’s something much bigger.

To be clear, this isn’t just a problem for the Democrats — it’s a problem for democracy. As nationalization has decreased split-ticket voting, it has increased the number of safe seats in both the House and Senate. This decline in competition is bad for a lot of reasons: it limits accountability for poor performance of the government, leads to the entrenchment of members who are otherwise out of touch, and reduces incentives for parties to appeal to a broader range of voters. When politicians feel secure in safe seats, they have little reason to iterate upon their positions, listen to dissenting voices, or invest in genuine engagement with their constituents. 

Over time, this can deepen polarization, weaken democratic responsiveness, and erode public trust in the political system itself. ...

This dysfunction is only one of many anti-democratic consequences of our broken Constitution. Morris is only the latest to point out the obvious, but he updates the observation. Trump actually did win a popular margin from all those red places, but the President's assertion this was some kind of landslide is just another lie, enabled by a bad system. 

We need to figure out, collectively, how to overcome and restructure a broken Constitution -- just as our ancestors have done repeatedly.

An unexpectedly articulate Christian politician

Every once in a while a politician says something so intriguing that I perk up and take notice. (Yes, the contrary is also true: most of them, most of the time, are just boring.)

 

James Talarico is a young Texas Democratic state legislator who aspires to overcome better known pols and challenge the sitting Republican Senator, John Cornyn, who is up for a fifth re-election next fall. Cornyn is endangered in his own primary by the corrupt far right Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton. The last Dem nominee for Senate from Texas, Colin Allred, would be expected to clear a large field to take on either of these Republicans. 

But along comes the young guy. Texas Dems will have to decide who suits them. But I find this seminarian turned politican genuinely interesting. He has thoughtful ideas, ideas seldom expressed candidly in politics. 

From an interview Talarico did with The Bulwark's Lauren Egan:  

EGAN: I want to talk about the attack ad from Terry Virts, the former astronaut also running in the Democratic primary, criticizing you for comments made in 2021 against GOP-backed legislation on transgender issues. You talked then about how “God is nonbinary” and that there are “many more than two biological sexes.” I understand that there’s more context to the points you were trying to make. 

But do you regret those comments? Is it something you would say today?

TALARICO: I don’t regret that comment. I realize that I was being deliberately provocative, which sometimes I do, especially when I want to grab people’s attention and communicate something important. 

I understand why those comments raised eyebrows, but theologically speaking, I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. I think most of my fellow Christians would acknowledge that God is beyond gender. In fact, the Apostle Paul says in Galatians that in Christ, there is neither male nor female. So if people have a problem with that sentiment, they should take it up with the Apostle Paul, not me.

... I think in a lot of ways my party is scarred from the last election and scared of its own shadow. We’re all freaking out about what the Republicans are going to say about any given thing. My experience in politics is if you’re genuine, if you’re telling the truth, if you’re connecting with people, that’s what will matter. Don’t worry about what the other side’s gonna throw at you.

... people are starting to get wise about this strategy of people like Ken Paxton and John Cornyn—they run for office riling people up about people’s private parts, about these culture-war issues. And when they get into office, they’re cutting taxes for rich people and raising health care premiums for everybody else.

EGAN: Right. But they got into office in part because they were able to effectively rile people up about these issues. So how do you neutralize that

TALARICO: I think it’s playing into their game and we’re not going to win at that game. We have to change the game. The first words out of my mouth in this campaign and in my launch video were that “politics is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.” So it’s completely changing how we understand and how we view politics.

... I started running for this national seat and I went to a bunch of national reporters and every single one of them asked me about trans athletes. Literally none of them asked me about childcare, none of them asked me about health care, education.

Trans athletes are a legit issue, and I’m completely willing to talk about it. But for that to be the only policy topic that any national reporters are asking about—what does that mean? Unfortunately, a lot of our media requires clicks and that is a perverse incentive, because it means the most red-meat, divisive, culture-war stuff is going to get that attention. 

But I think people are ready for someone who’s going to call that broken system out and maybe articulate another path forward of what a different politics could look like, one that’s not built on division.

EGAN: What would you say is the Bible verse that informs your politics the most?

TALARICO: One of my favorite verses [is] Matthew 5:5, which is “the meek will inherit the earth.” I talked earlier about politics being top versus bottom, and our campaign is really not coming at you from the left or from the right. It’s coming at you from the bottom. It is trying to bring working people together across all these divisions—including party, race, gender, and religion—to try to take power back.

If we bet on each other, if we love our neighbors as ourselves, ultimately people without any power can succeed. That’s a promise that’s built on faith, not necessarily on evidence. Because you look around and you’re just like ‘there’s no way you can take on these billionaire, megadonors who own all the media outlets.’ But there’s a promise there, a seed that’s planted in my tradition of betting on the underdog.

Is this a winning message in the Texas that exists in the year 2026? Who knows? I don't believe in commenting much on primaries in states where I am not a resident; local concerns are local concerns and should predominate in a healthy democracy. Maybe Talarico can strike a chord. I certainly like him in this interview, but we'll see how it goes. He seems brave, articulate and thoughtful -- not the norm in a politician. 

Criminality and luck

The Atlantic's Adam Server dissects the President's vile racism currently directed against Somali citizens of Minnesota and so many others after the DC shooting of two National Guard members.

I appreciate being absolved by Serwer of the crimes of so many individual members of my people.  

... white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.

...  The logic of [Trump's] racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. 

Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all “Third World” immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller’s narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be. 

Whatever individualism used to mean to American conservatives, their movement is now led by adherents of the most foul collectivism humanity has ever known.

He goes on the remind us all that white Europe never sent its "best people" to America.

Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller’s own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.

Most Americans of European descent are the children of such “broken” societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.

There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. 

Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.

My own ancestors were a mix of pesky religious fanatics that the Britain of their day was glad to send away and later adventurers of unknown probity. They did more than just okay at the expense of the native population and their less fortunate fellow immigrants. So it goes.

Trump and his nativist bigots can't face the truth; their momentary preeminence is a nasty accident of criminality and history. In the New World, it was ever thus.

Who are these Somalis?

That vile old racist who is polluting the Presidency let his freak flag fly in a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday:

via Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

My friend Shelley Sherman posted this heartfelt riposte to Donald Trump's vilification of the Somali community in Minnesota on Facebook. Somalis are not faceless to her and they certainly are not "garbage."

I am angered and appalled at the remarks by the President with the backing of his administration, insulting Somalis in general and Rep Ilhan Omar in particular. 

I had the privilege of working with Ilhan Omar before she was elected to public office, at the University of Minnesota Extension. I know her history and her character. She is an amazing person, intelligent, brave, thoughtful and funny, someone who came to the US as a child and knows how to build bridges between cultures. 

I also worked with other Somalis, and heard their stories of having to leave their country due to war, about life in refugee camps, losing family, and finally being able to come to the US, and to Minnesota, which welcomed them.

The Somalis, like the Hmong from Laos, the Oromo, the Sudanese, the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, the Cambodians and Vietnamese, came to Minnesota as refugees and have built lives there, attended school, learned English, worked hard and have become an important part of the fabric of the state. 

We benefit from their presence. They are found in many different professions, in private and public spaces. The majority of them are US citizens, through naturalization or birthright, and the President’s racist attack on them is an outrage; as is his use of ICE to threaten and abuse people, largely based on the color of their skin.

All over the country, organized people are learning how to push back against abuse of our neighbors. That work has become a measure of good citizenship for us all.

Welcoming the season awaiting Jesus' birth in Massachusetts

 

If you see something, you know what to do.

 

According to local reporting:  

Dedham church sparks outrage over nativity scene with political message

 

... “We thought this was a good way to show the dynamic of what’s happening in the world today,” said [Father Stephen] Jasoma Monday. “This is a stance I’d hope all churches would take. We should be a welcoming community.” 

... Father Jasoma, in response to criticism he recieved, told Boston 25, “I’ve some push back from total strangers, was called a murderer yesterday... What we celebrate at Christmas is the peace Christ brought into the world. It’s right here, it’s right now. We are to embrace it.”

Boston 25 reached out to the Archdiocese of Boston and is still waiting for comment.

I suspect this trouble making priest and congregation might be on the same page with the new pope. 

Trumps goes bonkers; pundits insult Americans' common sense

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic points out the pathetic essence of media coverage of Donald Trump's current mad enthusiasms. Too many commentators assume Trump's outbursts are just fine by the foolish people of this country. Tomasky isn't buying it: 

... I think a lot of pundits, trying to imagine the thoughts and emotional responses of the “normal” Americans they may never have met, assume that people just reflexively fall for tough talk. That tough talk and common sense are the same thing. But they aren’t.

It’s important to understand this, especially this week, because Trump is apparently about to take this country down two very dark and, I suspect, deeply unpopular paths. The first is his thuggishly over-the-top response to the shootings of those two National Guard officers in Washington. The second is this regime-change war we’re evidently about to embark upon against Venezuela.

These are not bold moves that reflect sturdy middle-American common sense. They are desperate acts of a desperate and unpopular man who is surrounded, in his life and news-consumption habits, by a retinue of flunkies—many of them billionaires or Botox junkies or both—who wouldn’t know middle-American common sense if it smacked them in the face.

We know Pete Hegseth, Trump's cosplaying Secretary of Defense, is really just acting out "adolescent bloodlust," when he orders kill shots against some unknown guys in small boats in the Caribbean. And then tries to shove off responsibility onto a military officer.

Over seventy percent of us suspect that, however awful Venezuela's strong man may be, we have no proven cause for a war. Fifty-six percent don't think even making war on Venezuela would reduce the flow of drugs. (That seems wise, since Venezuela is not a major source of drugs to the US market.)

We know the crime of one murdering Afghan guy, exiled to this country because he worked with our military against the Taliban in his homeland, cannot be used to trigger massive exclusions of Black and brown migrants. 

The media owe it to its consumers and customers to tell the truth: Trump is flailing -- losing his marbles -- and trying to save himself by leading this nation to terrible places that suit his broken soul.

An advent of a "messy non-linear process"

When it comes to AI, I'm a Luddite, perfectly happy to use my own good brain to do my thinking. Take your fancy, energy-hogging chips and shove 'em, as far as I'm concerned.  I'm sure there are some useful applications for this human invention, but we haven't seen them yet. Instead we get slop, enhanced enshitification of the web world, and more garbage all around. (Though I have to admit my Erudite Partner thinks language translations via AI are pretty good.)

Less backward observers than I offer interesting thoughts. Here's David Rothkopf who is sure there is something there, though sometimes uncertain whether that is a good thing. On balance, he comes down for AI's positives. I appreciated his historical analogy and ruminations on likely effects. You can find David at his podcast: Siliconsciousness: AI Fears, Scapegoats, and Myths.

It took almost two hundred years for the industrial revolution to spread worldwide. It transformed life and society in massive, immeasurable ways. But, fortunately, the pace of change gave us time to consider the outcomes, their implications, what was desirable and what was not. 

This revolution will be just as sweeping but will come at us all much faster. While it would be much better for the world for us to have the benefit of more grounded, thoughtful philosophical discussions about what we want the changes to look like (and what we should avoid), I fear the pace of change will outstrip our ability to understand what is happening and to guide it. 

Indeed, while most people see the AI revolution as one impacting our ability to process massive amounts of data then act on our analyses, I see it as one that may most notably be different from past techquakes that have shaken the globe in terms of its implications for the speed of life, decision-making and wave upon wave of future changes.

That creates a responsibility for each of us, regardless of where we are in life, to educate ourselves—because the implications are not just for technology or technologists or markets or jobs but rather they touch virtually every aspect of every life and will to an increasing degree going forward.

Will we be able to stay ahead of it all? Make the right choices? Almost certainly not. Will we be able to increasingly better handle this technology if we make that our mission? Yes. And that should be our collective and individual goal.

I should add that having been involved in and around AI and related fields for a long time now and having the benefit of speaking to leading experts in the field from all disciplines and from across the political spectrum, I have emerged optimistic about AI and its potential for making our lives much better even as I have grown aware of areas of real concern (as noted above).

Why? As a rule I believe in progress even though I am acutely aware it is a messy, non-linear process. 

Charlie Warzel [gift] at The Atlantic (which discloses an AI partnership relationship) describes the technology in terms which seem appropriate to the Christian Advent season, both apocalyptic and eschatological. He's a journalist whose business is to follow the meanderings of the tech bros who have brought us to the AI era. Like most informed observers, he both marvels and feels some skepticism about the hype deluge. 

... If you believe that Silicon Valley’s elites have lost their minds, foisting a useful-but-not-magical technology on society, declaring that it’s building God, investing historic amounts of money in its development, and fusing the fate of its tools with the fate of the global economy, being furious makes sense.

... We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait. Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.

It doesn’t matter that the technology is already useful to many, that it can code and write marketing copy and complete basic research tasks. Because Silicon Valley is not selling useful; it’s selling transformation—with all the grand promises, return on investment, genuine risk, and collateral damage that entails. And even if you aren’t buying it, three years out, you’re definitely feeling it. 

I like a little observation Warzel include among his speculations about where all this leads:

... the pope has warned students, “AI cannot ever replace the unique gift that you are to the world ...”

The future of war -- no limits

No wonder Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a TV talk show bully, is threatening to attempt to punish the Congresscritters [gift] who have reminded our military that its members have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Hegseth is reported to have ordered Seal Team 6 to ensure that any survivors in his boat sinking binge in the Caribbean were assuredly dead [gift link]. He offers no proof that the US government had any intelligence which justified any strike at all, much less a killer hit to ensure no victims remained alive.  

The secession of the Trump regime and the United States generally from any attempt to uphold the idea that there are such things as "war crimes" marks a terrifying breach with the last 80 years of the development of the international law of armed conflict. We aren't recognizing any limits any longer. This way portends unimaginable carnage.

Phillips P. O'Brien, professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews University and an acute observer of the Russian war on Ukraine, saw this development coming. In the world being launched into being under the axis of Trump, Putin, and Xi, what had been defined as criminal acts are returning as the definition of a successful means of waging war.

... what we are seeing now around the globe is the disappearance of any restraint, what we might call the normalizing of war crimes. Yes, I know war crimes have always been committed. However it was notable that during the period of the International Rules Based Order (now arguably over) states at least wanted to act like they were not committing war crimes. Now that pretense is over—and that means that the reality will be worse. 

As ranged weapons become more numerous, accurate and effective, and as restraints on what can be attacked lessen or even disappear, this will mean the great incentive will be to try and achieve strategic effect through devastating attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

Fighting on the battlefield will be seen as a slow, bloody slog through death zones—while ranged war crimes will be seen as faster and more effective. So when we add up what we are seeing, its terrifying and ethically bankrupt, but also strategically rational. It may very well represent the future of war. 

Russia in Ukraine, with United States encouragement, is now executing a law-free pattern of unbounded murder. All to satisfy the greedy desires of fanciful oligarchs. 

O'Brien today still points out something we should remember. Faced with invasion and internal corruption, nonetheless...

... Ukrainian democracy has proven itself now to be more resilient than American democracy...

Commentary for a moment

 

So much for what we were taught in civics ... If we get through it, there will be more.

 

Posting continues sporadic over Thanksgiving weekend as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away. 

They hate women

No more spending money on professional training for women if the Trump administration gets its way. In particular, they apparently don't think they'll ever need nurses ...

A call for accountability from ICE and from ourselves

Martha's Vineyard island lies off the coast of Massachusetts. Reached only by ferry boat or small plane, it can seem a world apart from the agonies of the mainland. It is not. 

It has long been a landing spot for successive waves of migrants, hardy people willing to work. Early English settlers here pushed the native Wampanoags to the margins of the island, where they were often joined by previously enslaved people of African descent. Seamen and whalers from around the world came in the 18th and 19th century; the East Coast Black bourgeoisie populated the vacation town of Oak Bluffs. At present, about 20 percent of the year-round population are referred to by others as "the Brazilians" -- working class, relative newcomers from the Azores and continental Brazil itself whose industry keeps much of the life of the island going.

ICE sails away with some of its captives in a summer raid.

That mixed migrant population has put a target on the island for ICE under the Trump regime. 

When we are on Martha's Vineyard, we attend Grace Church (Episcopal) in the town of Vineyard Haven. The priest of this friendly parish shared a message this week in an island newspaper about the nightmare the Trump's anti-migrant crusade is inflicting on this place. 

Time to hold ICE accountable for its actions 

by the Rev. Stephen Harding 

As a priest ordained in the Episcopal Church, I am bound by the vows I made at my diaconal and priestly ordinations and by our Baptismal Covenant. When I was sworn in as a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, I took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of New York, and the Charter of the City of New York. As a citizen of the United States, in addition to the rights provided by the Constitution, part of my obligation is to support and defend the Constitution.

When I served as director of pastoral care at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, my department and I were expected to comply with the medical center’s policies. We were directed and expected to report any unethical practice, or anything that might involve wrongdoing. The policy explicitly stated that if we saw something being done that was wrong and kept silent, our silence made us complicit in the wrong.

I believe that once Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States, and there has been time for reflection and the restoration of the rule of law, the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and their enablers will prove to be among the more shameful moments of our country’s history. ...

... ICE has made itself judge, jury, and enforcer, with no transparent oversight or accountability. By wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, and detaining individuals without charging them, ICE agents are indistinguishable from masked vigilantes, and jeopardize the safety of the public and themselves. 

... If the elected, appointed, and other government officials cannot keep their oath to protect, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States, then they, too, are acting dishonorably, and are complicit in ICE’s actions.

I remain convinced that the people of the U.S. are fundamentally decent, compassionate, and generous. The tactics, actions, and insolence of masked ICE agents demean themselves, disrespect our dignity as human beings, and diminish us as a nation. ...

If ICE and other Trump officials should be held accountable, the rest of us can't turn away from our own responsibilities in the times. What can we do to care for and protect strangers in our midst? What can we do to replace government leaders who are doing wrong?

One woman drops away: where's she off to?

Tressie McMillan Cottom's dissection of Marjorie Taylor Greene's split from the Orange Toddler and his MAGA fiefdom is delicious. Don't miss it. [gift article] 

[Explaining her resignation from Congress] ... she offered a mealy-mouthed apology for her role in our “toxic politics.” But on the whole she is, like many conservative women, a beneficiary of the very feminism that she reviles. She has long thought that being a tough girl rumbling alongside the boys will earn their loyalty, when all it ever does is earn women the right to throw themselves on the sword for men who never deserved their sacrifices.

To her credit, Greene is a survivor. She took a hard look at her political fortunes and appears to be betting on herself. As some reporting indicates others in the House are also looking to retire, she may end up being prescient. Or she may have mistimed the market on Trump’s political fortunes. Either way, she took the only choice she really had available to her.

There is not a real place for women in Trumpism, in MAGA or in the mainstream Republican Party, as long as they are one and the same. But Greene’s trajectory is a lesson fit for a fairy tale. If you want to control your own destiny, it’s better to be a wicked witch than a princess.

There's a way that MTG is sharper than some of her MAGA sisters. She has been even more of a true believer in the MAGA fantasy universe than many who just offered a self-interested imitation. (Think GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik for example.) She'll seek, or more likely invent, her own new authentically crazy persona. Who knows what Greene will adopt in order to chart a new course? What seems certain is that she won't just exit the stage quietly.

The people who count and those who don't

Here we are spending a season on Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts and the question inevitably arises as we see old friends: "how's Alan Dershowitz holding up?" This is a small place, especially in winter, and our decidedly not-oligarchic-class friends regularly encounter the famous TV-lawyer and defender of the likes of OJ Simpson and his more recent buddy, Jeffrey Epstein.

Dershowitz is infamous around here for being angry that his chummy attachments to such criminals make him an Undesirable himself. He rages at social exclusion. He's been known to get into a loud public beef at the summer farmer's market, for example. 

Anand Giridharadas' oped, How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails [gift link] seems to me both insightful and incisive about why elites and their hangers-on like Dershowitz feel injured when called to account. On this island, the rest of us get a close up glimpse on occasion, especially of the ones who are Democrats. A lot of people know what they are seeing; this place is full of smart New Englanders. (And yes, still feel they have to look to Democrats for something better.)

... People are right to sense that, as the [so far released Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped. 

... The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.

The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.

... If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen. ...

Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through J.F.K., L.H.R., N.R.T. and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. ...

Giridharadas is brutal, revealing the moral emptiness of the Epstein class. 

...the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins. ... These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again when they turn. ... 

Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.

American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.

This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us. ...

Jeffrey Epstein's immediate victims are not alone in being treated like disposable trash by this set. We all are.

Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away. 

Fraught times

This is not a good year for a Sunday celebrating "Christ the King." We are -- properly -- in a No Kings mode these days in the corner of the US populace I live in. 

The Christian liturgical observance is actually quite modern -- and came along in response to threats to human life and dignity in Europe only one century ago.

Originally, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast as a direct counter to the totalitarian claims of the modern state. The immediate threat in 1925 was, of course, communism on one hand, and the looming threat of fascism on the other. In more general terms, the annual celebration of this feast with its particular focus on the lordship as well as the universal and eternal scope of Christ’s reign was promulgated to stand as a witness over against any and all secularizing tendencies of the contemporary world.

... All worldly claims to ultimate loyalties are rendered relative. For Christians, reflecting on this is part and parcel of taking stock, both personally and as a community, at the inception of a new [liturgical] year. -- What Are We Waiting For?: Re-Imaging Advent for Time to Come by William H. Peterse

Okay -- American Christians and non-Christians alike are being reminded of the need to use the good brains we are born with to discern how to live, thrive, and resist under the rule of a monarchical pretender. 

As one liturgical cycle ends and another begins, let's keep up the good work of justice and compassion and remember that no false king can claim to determine for us how we ought to live.

I am thankful for our rising rage ...

As we come into the Thanksgiving season, I realize that I am heartened by growing rage against the offenses against our country by the Trump regime and oligarchy. These are too many to catalog. The list here is necessarily short and incomplete, but plenty infuriating.

• a deportation dragnet which empowers masked thugs to abduct harmless persons within our country for the crime of speaking another language or having brown skin;

• a plan to turn over our coastlines to oil drillers to pollute; 

• the attempted surrender of the sovereign state of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. (Europe might yet step up; Ukrainians have no choice but to resist. I remain convinced the proper historical analogy is the democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic to the fascists in the 1930; the resulting regime of terror lasted 50 years in unhappy Spain.)

• Trump's claim of treason against brave office holders who reminded our military they swear fealty to the Constitution, not Donald Trump;

• and then there are ongoing skirmishes over Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes. Beneath the noise, there's a smoldering blaze sustaining too many watching women, perhaps slow to ignite, but enduring and combustible.

Somewhat to my surprise, the New York Times has given space to a professor of literature and journalism at American University, Rachel Louise Snyder, [gift link] to lay out the case for legitimate fury among women.

... the emails are just a piece of the larger story: the lengths this country and the systems we’ve created — from the smallest jurisdiction to the national stage — will go to maintain the power of men at the expense of women’s bodies. 

... Mr. Trump is right. He has nothing to hide because he stands to lose nothing. Whatever exists in those files surely will not be enough to wrest him from his perch. At least not yet. ... [He] has overseen an era that might be unique in its willingness to sacrifice democratic institutions and American norms to control women.

As I write, there is a White House proposal that aims to lower the Office on Violence Against Women’s stature within the D.O.J. and cut its shoestring budget by nearly 30 percent. This would devastate shelters, advocacy programs and violence prevention measures, and escalate the danger for victims of intimate partner and familial violence in all corners of the country.

At the same time, a report on violent deaths of girls and women from 2014 to 2020 noted that laws constraining abortion providers were associated with a 3.4 percent rise in the rate of homicides related to intimate partner violence. We are being killed for our own lack of choice. An estimated one in 20 women in the United States gets pregnant from rape or sexual coercion, which equates to a whopping six million women with violence-initiated pregnancies. Six million. Two-thirds of the women who became pregnant from rape were injured during their assaults.

Are you as angry as I am yet? The misogyny that is such a casual part of Mr. Trump’s entire modus operandi gives license to systems that prioritize men’s freedoms over women’s lives. ...

We are entitled to demand more from our leaders, to demand an open investigation into the Epstein files, to demand accountability for the perpetrators regardless of political party or cultural cachet, to demand justice for the children and women trafficked by Mr. Epstein, and perhaps more than anything to demand actual real change in which a broken system is compelled to reinvention.

In the meantime, we are entitled to all of our rage, and men, frankly, we would welcome a moment of gratitude from you that we have not burned this whole damn human enterprise down just yet. ...

Stay mad. Rage is dangerous, but it can be righteous. Our lives depend on it.

Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away.

Friday deer blogging

 

This inquisitive youngster was attracted by seeds fallen from the bird feeders. The animal showed little distress that I was watching close by. That's too bad, since it's hunting season -- though this spot is too close to a house for hunting to be legal. Eventually what appeared to be the mother rounded up and led away her offspring.

All together now ...

On the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, the Human Rights Campaign writes:

The Human Rights Campaign is both saddened and infuriated by the deaths of at least thirty-two transgender and gender-expansive people whose lives were tragically and inhumanely taken through violent means, including gun and intimate partner violence, in 2024. 

... These victims, like all of us, were loving partners, parents, family members, friends and community members. They worked, went to school and attended houses of worship. They were real people who did not deserve to have their lives taken.

As we continue working toward justice and equality for trans and gender-expansive people, we celebrate the lives for those we have lost in 2024: 

The link takes you to pictures and short bios of the people killed last year. Explore it if you dare. 

As the Trump regime seeks to erase all gender-nonconforming people, it's up to those of us who can to stand alongside each other. The Trumpkins don't like any of us, but transfolk face violent erasure.

From the No Kings March, October 2025

Donald is sure taking a lot of hits

The pundit class consensus today seems to be that "the tide is turning" against the Donald. So opines JVL at the Bulwark and he's no cockeyed optimist. I'll be skeptical til I get around to assessing for myself what a determined observer can see. 

Meanwhile, here's JVL's list of why we just might save some broken version of American democracy. He enumerates a case that efforts to throw sand in the gears of a rising fascism might be having an impact.

• 7 million people came out to protest the regime.

• The administration’s shutdown of the government turned into a political liability for Trump.

• Trump demanded that Senate Republicans get rid of the filibuster; they refused.

• The MAGA right split on the acceptability of Nick Fuentes and his groypers.

• Democrats won more electoral victories and by far larger margins than polling indicated they would.

• A series of Epstein documents suggested a much closer relationship between Trump and the pedophile than was previously assumed.2

• Four House Republicans defied direct pressure from Trump to a enact a discharge petition and override the speaker’s attempt to avoid an Epstein file vote.

• With the petition signed, enough Republicans were going to defect that Trump had to surrender and “authorize” them to vote for the release of the Epstein files.

• The DHS occupation of Chicago failed. The city did not bend to Trump’s will. The state prevented him from deploying an invading force of Texas National Guard troops.

• Indiana Republicans have resisted Trump’s desire for them to redraw their congressional districts.

• His net approval rating is -14.

Unfortunately, we'll have to see -- and must keep pushing to make it happen

Meanwhile, not considered in JVL's catalogue of Trumpian horrors, is a crypto collapse that takes down large parts of the US financial sector. Could happen. I put my money of Paul Krugman's assessment of crypto. 

 

If only this madness didn't also take down the rest of us. We're running a hella test of Adam Smith's proposition that "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation."

Up, up, and away ...

Six hours on JetBlue, not so bad. A bit of the cattle car sensation, but better than some other airlines. Wonder if that competes successfully?

Then the more interesting bit: a Cape Air night flight in an eight seater to Martha's Vineyard. It was cold and clear and I got to sit behind where the co.pilot would have been, but there wasn't one.

Almost pleasant travel ...

Comically overcomplicated healthcare -- that can also be cruel

A heck of a way to get to a napkin ...

I know I don't understand US healthcare policy. That's in part because I am personally fortunate enough to enjoy a reasonable facsimile of access to adequate medical care via Medicare and the Kaiser Permanente system. 

And it is also because the whole thing is a "Rube Goldburg machine," defined by Wikipedia as "a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way."

We can't seem to enact a better way, though I give Democrats credit for sporadically trying to get us there.

But I can refer here to Katelyn Jetelina and Hayden Rooke-Ley's totally lucid description of our mess at Your Local Epidemiologist, timed for the season when many of us have to make decisions about how we'll try to protect ourselves for another year.

5 ways our health care system has become utterly insane

1. Costs vs. wages: A 20-year disconnect. 

Over the past two decades, the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance—how the vast majority of privately insured Americans obtain their health care—has skyrocketed. Premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs have all soared—far faster than wages. ...

2. We pay the most and get the least.

The United States spends far more on health care than any other wealthy country yet achieves worse outcomes, less access, and a more demoralized workforce. ...

3. Americans don’t “overconsume” health care. Prices and private bloat drive costs.

There’s a common myth, especially amongst policymakers, that we spend too much on health care because we consume too much of it. A similar narrative has taken hold about doctors: because they get paid for each service, they provide too much care. Certainly, there is low-value care in the U.S. health care system. And as profit-seeking corporate actors own more and more of the system, they’re finding ways to bill for more—and more expensive—services.

But Americans don’t visit the doctor more, we don’t go to the hospital more, and we don’t stay in the hospital for longer. ...

4. Corporate and financial firms have taken over care. 

Perhaps the most underappreciated transformation of the past 40 years is the corporate consolidation and financialization of medicine. Care delivery—once local and community-based—is now dominated by corporations. ...

5. Existing approaches have failed—and the latest proposals are more of the same. 

None of this happened by coincidence. Our current governing approach began in the 1980s, when a bipartisan consensus emerged around how to address accelerating costs in the system. The idea was to embrace more free market principles in health care ...

If you want to take a stab at understanding why you hate your health insurance and sometimes even your medical providers, I can't recommend this article too highly. 

Preparations for a looming invasion

Indivisible Brooklyn volunteers with the Hands Off NYC campaign handing out materials to defend neighborhoods from ICE.

 

I love this photo. I haven't lived in New York for many years now, but I can still readily imagine this scene. New Yorkers are tough. They have to be. No wonder Donald hates them and the sentiment is reciprocated.

Boycott Starbucks!

When we lack direct political power -- that is, have enough elected officials who stand for what we might believe in -- it is normal to turn to consumer power to make our point. This is a good impulse. How could I say otherwise as a veteran worker on the great farm worker grape boycott, back in the day?

In this moment of relative powerlessness we are encouraged to participate in plenty of consumer boycotts of firms that one way or another support the Trump regime: Tesla (that's easy for most of us), T-mobile, Amazon, Target. 

But here's another call for a boycott of a more traditional sort: workers are trying to unionize and win contracts at one of the most widely distributed consumer outlets in the country.

With more than a thousand Starbucks baristas on strike across 40 cities and growing, the No Kings Alliance is announcing its support for striking baristas and calling on consumers to pledge not to shop at Starbucks while baristas are on strike. 

For the last four years, Starbucks baristas have powered a historic, inspiring union organizing campaign, taking on one of the most powerful corporations in the world. Yet, the coffee giant continues to fight workers at every turn, cozying up to the anti-union Trump administration and racking up more federal labor law violations than any other corporation in U.S. history. 

Meanwhile, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol was paid $96 million for just 120 days of work in 2024, paying himself 6,666 times what the average barista made — the worst CEO-to-worker pay inequity in the country. At the same time, Trump and his billionaire backers are doing their best to scare people out of speaking up for their rights on the job and in their communities. 

“We're sick of Starbucks executives seeking to lord over our workplaces, ignore our basic needs, and break labor law—all while the CEO makes millions. That's why we're on an unfair labor practice strike,” said Diego Franco, a Starbucks Workers United barista in Chicago. “Allies like the No Kings Alliance are helping power our movement forward, and we look forward to uniting together on the picket line.” 

Union baristas are demanding higher take-home pay, better hours to improve staffing in stores, and the resolution of hundreds of outstanding unfair labor practice charges for union busting.  

You can sign a boycott pledge here.

The barista role is too many peoples' entry level job these days. If that's to be the case, let's help these workers make it a good one! 

Roman Catholic bishops do right by immigrants

 

As pastors, we the bishops of the United States are bound to our people by ties of communion and compassion in Our Lord Jesus Christ. We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones. ...

... To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone!

We note with gratitude that so many of our clergy, consecrated religious, and lay faithful already accompany and assist immigrants in meeting their basic human needs. We urge all people of good will to continue and expand such efforts. 

We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials. In this dialogue, we will continue to advocate for meaningful immigration reform. 

The Roman Catholic hierarchy is not where I am accustomed to look first for affirmation of universal human dignity. 

But the MAGA agenda of deportation and cruelty offends them and most of us. 

Here they speak bravely and broadly for compassion and justice. 

The fury to come

 

Even the complicated, partial release of the Epstein files has revealed and confirmed enough to make decent women (and men) see red -- and should help push our mad king off his phony pedestal.

I don't know how this plays out in younger age groups, but casual sexual exploitation of very young women is all too recognizable to most women in my age group. These guys, these powerful men, just assumed that women's bodies existed for their pleasure. (In their eyes, we had no souls.) Least culpably, some merely leered without remorse at young women; many of the richest and most powerful felt entitled to molest.

Some women can only deal with our dehumanization by men by denying it happens. A small number aid the perpetrators. In my generation, a lot of us gave up on men, even those men who were not personally guilty, but who couldn't see the burden women carry under the male gaze. Most women just soldiered on, living on a hurtful battlefield that is barely recognized by their male peers, even the men they love. 

And, if the good women and men with any power have the strength to pursue the Epstein revelations and implications, the nation faces a protracted release of stifled fury and agonizing confusion, necessary but terribly painful. Thanks Donald.

Cartoon via The Guardian. 

Let those migrants go!

So many bits of good news for both small "d" democracy and also Democrats in the recent election! I want to highlight one that most of us in much of the country didn't know about.

Voters Ousted This Pennsylvania Sheriff After He Signed Up to Collaborate With ICE

A populous, swing Pennsylvania county replaced its GOP sheriff on Tuesday after months of controversy over his joining ICE’s 287(g) program. The Democratic winner promises he’ll end the contract. 

... Since Donald Trump’s return to office, local and state agencies across the country have rushed in huge numbers to aid his deportation campaign by joining 287(g), which authorizes local law enforcement officers to act as federal immigration agents. The agreement in Bucks County granted [Sheriff Fred] Harran’s deputies the power to question the immigration status of people they encounter and to serve and execute arrest warrants on ICE’s behalf.  ...

... [Harran's] Democratic challenger, Danny Ceisler, a 33-year-old attorney and Army veteran, spoke up against the ICE partnership, putting the issue at the center of his campaign.

Ceisler defeated Harran by 11 percentage points last week, a margin of roughly 25,000 votes. He confirmed to Bolts after his victory that he intends to terminate the 287(g) agreement once he enters office. 

• • •

County sheriffs are part of "law enforcement" but they usually not the cops on the streets. They mostly run the jails (an important job) and guard public buildings. 

That's the case in my home county of San Francisco. I figured I should find out what our elected sheriff, Paul Miyamoto, is doing in ersponse to over-reaching federal immigration invaders. After all, San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" for migrants; we sure don't want our sheriff working with them.

On the one hand, in July, Miyamoto insisted 

he will not act as an "arm of immigration enforcement," refusing to hand over inmate information. 

We certainly hope that is the case.

But also, Miyamoto seems attracted to strange political buddies for a San Francisco sheriff.  In July he endorsed a MAGA Trump supporter for governor.

His reasoning seems shallow.

“I support Sheriff Chad Bianco, alongside other sheriffs in California, as a peer leader in law enforcement and in the work we do to keep our communities safe,” Miyamoto wrote in a statement to Mission Local. “Law enforcement is not defined by political parties, but grounded in a commitment to public safety and the integrity of the profession.” 

Maybe we ought to pay attention when Miyamoto comes up for re-election. This choice of friends seems madness.

San Francisco has had some quite benign sheriffs in my time here, especially the excellent Mike Hennessey. The job is not a stepping stone to anything so candidates are few.