We're going to be living with this question as long as we live

I hate the fashion online that substitutes video clips for text. For a person accustomed to learn by reading, video is slower, less precise, and less memorable than text. But, alas, perhaps we are becoming a post-literate world.

 

In any case, instead of writing frequently, Substacker Peter Beinart offers short videos at The Beinart Notebook. 

 

His most recent post is longer than the clips I usually share here. But if you've got 10 minutes, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The anguish in the original needs to be experienced.

An abbreviated transcript:

More deaths than Kishinev, Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday. Every Day. The astonishing scale of the killing in Gaza

So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more. And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that. 

And obviously the people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves, journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. ... But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve become compared to other moments and places in history

... there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate count of the death toll. ...

... obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000, which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a roughly similar number.

... So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7^th. More than 150 per day.

... But 150 people killed per day over 650 days is really just an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized. ... Even if we think about the horrors, the horrors, the war crimes committed on October 7th, where roughly 1,200 Israelis, mostly Israeli Jews, were killed, right? If you just think in terms of the numbers, there is basically a close to an October 7th in Gaza, in terms of the number of people killed, every week, right? Every week for now 21 months. And the band just kind of plays on, right?

... you can have 150 people killed per day, you know, over 650 days, and yet, you know, much of the world reacts with a shrug, and the world continues to give Israel the military and diplomatic support to make it possible. 

... I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be struggling to face and deal with, and contemplate, and understand about those of us who are alive in this moment. How—when there were other moments in history where far fewer people died, and it sparked the conscience of the world, and led to fundamental political change—how can it be that in this case that this can just be tolerated? I think all of us are going to be living with that question for a very, very long time. 

On MMMWA: Making the Male Military White Again for dear leader

 

A few years ago, this was a US Army recruiting poster. While I'm not much of a fan of armies, I kind of liked it when I passed it on the street.

 

Fintan O'Toole, an Irish journalist writing in the New York Review of Books, offers some insights into the role of the military cosplay and reality in the Trump regime. 

... For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend. 

 

[The TV-jabberer who Trump installed as Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. 

Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” ...

Strange posturing from a guy who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon to prep for his TV appearances, but there we are.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” ...

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. ... Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

O'Toole sees Trump as a would-be dictator trapped in a contradiction. 

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. 

Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. 

The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America. 

Let's try to get rid of our tinpot Mussolini before he blows all of us up. His Iranian adventure was bad enough. We face a test.

He speaks for himself ... did he have a premonition?

By way of the journalists of ProPublica:

José Manuel Ramos Bastidas entered the U.S. with an appointment with border officials made via the CBP One app, which the Biden administration used to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country, but he was immediately detained. An immigration officer and a judge determined he did not qualify for protection in the country. 

For almost a year, he waited in detention to be sent back home to Venezuela. In February 2025, when the Trump administration began a mass deportation campaign and news of the first immigrants being sent to a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, started trickling in to detention centers, Ramos panicked and asked his wife, Roynerliz Rodríguez, to record a message, “Just in case something happens to me,” he said. 

A month later, he called again. More upbeat, he said U.S. authorities told him he would be sent back to Venezuela. His family planned to bake him a cake and cook his favorite meal. 

But Ramos never arrived. Instead, he ended up being one of the more than 230 Venezuelans sent to the notorious prison in El Salvador known as CECOT on March 15. ...

Journalists are working to figure out who these men are. More here. 

Good Trouble Oakland

 

Folks in northern California aren't submitting to the Trump regime quietly.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson shares the philosophy which animated the deceased civil rights leader, Representative John Lewis of Georgia. 

Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

The Congressman has plenty of local disciples.

Some with some artistic talent.

 

Many offer good words.

 

Some chat with acquaintances.

 

We are not going easily.

Who's that masked man? Frightened bullies fear shaming

With apologies to the Lone Ranger; yes, Donald and his ghoul Miller are inflicting the country with a made-for-TV movie of their violent fantasies. 

At the CalMatters news site, Michael Lozano has provided a useable guide to which agencies some of these masked thugs snatching up random brown people from the streets come from. This is what we are supposed to get used to.

 

 

Criminal justice journalist Radley Balko calls foul on the masking fetish.

The administration says the masks are to prevent “doxing,” and has cited a “700 percent” increase in assaults on ICE agents.

Both the defense and the statistic are nonsense.

First, unless they’re operating undercover, it is not illegal to publish or publicize the names of federal agents — nor should it be. They are state employees who have the power to arrest, detain, and kill. Of course their names and identities ought to be public information. Of course the people they stop, detain, arrest, or abuse should have names and badges to seek redress in court.

Second, the 700 percent figure is absurd. ... Don’t forget that the administration claimed that New York City comptroller Brad had Lander “assaulted” agents when video showed nothing of the kind. So there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical ...

I will not be surprised if, when ICE hires on its new army of thugs made possible by Trump's Big Ugly Bill, they don't even bother with this much identification. 

These big bullies should be ashamed of themselves. They hide their faces because whatever shred of decency they have left within them shames them as they carry out vicious, marginally legal orders.

• • •

Where government overreaches, not surprisingly Americans fight back. Hence the ICEBlock app which enables citizen sharing of ICE movements. Shades of the opening skirmishes of the historic national colonial revolt: "The British are coming..."

At the Intercept, Natasha Leonard explains: 

ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump’s supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.

The agency’s response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. ...

• • •

And now even ICE lawyers are refusing to admit their names in open court. Again from the Intercept: 

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers. 

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. ... It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names...

For shame!

Recurrent panics fuel mobs. Everything old is new again...

Watching MAGA panic about the existence of trans and gender variant youth and by extension their elders, I realized I'd seen something very like this before. This is a country all too easily led into periodic hysteria about sex and gender, especially when it comes to actual children. Trump and the Republican Party are fanning the flames of fear for political gain.

Does this seem familiar? It certainly could. I remember when our culture in the 1980s was obsessed with the McMartin Preschool abuse trial. Something terrible must have happened ... or not. From a New York Times retrospective [gift] by Clyde Haberman: 

... Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end ... lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. 

Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. ...

... Inevitably, perhaps, the mass frenzy over supposed Satanism and sexual predation invited comparisons to the Salem witch trials and to McCarthy-era excesses. Americans do seem prone episodically to this kind of fever. ...

Witness the widespread panic a few decades ago when people around the country convinced themselves that evil neighbors were handing children poisoned Halloween candy and apples embedded with razor blades. Arthur Miller highlighted this phenomenon in his 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which invoked the Salem trials to comment on a contemporary abuse, the scattershot McCarthy hunt for Communists ...

It seems to me obvious that Trump and MAGA are playing a very tired, very American, tune ...

So what's the other political party doing in response to MAGA's fantasies and bigotry? Far too often, cowering in closets. Most Democratic politicians are too timid to take on the assault on emerging medical science and anthropological understanding that the experience of many contemporary Americans is forcing into the light.

Parker Molloy, a Chicago media journalist, has some advice for timid Democrats:

There's a glaring omission in all the Democratic hand-wringing about trans issues: actual trans people. ... 

The disability rights movement has a motto: "Nothing about us without us." It's a simple principle that Democrats have completely abandoned when it comes to trans issues. Instead of talking to us about our lives and needs, Democratic strategists talk about us as an abstract political problem to be solved. ...

If Democrats actually bothered to have these conversations, they'd discover something ... we're not asking for much. We're not demanding special privileges or radical restructuring of society. We mostly just want to exist in public without harassment and access the same healthcare everyone else takes for granted. 

By and large, trans people are not demanding (who even asked for this?) that people announce their own pronouns or whatever corporate/HR nonsense Democratic politicians think trans people want...

Talk to trans kids and their parents, and you'll hear the same themes repeatedly: They want to use the bathroom in peace. They want to play sports with their friends. They want their teachers to use their names. They want to go to school without being bullied. They want to see a doctor when they need to. 

These aren't radical demands. They're the baseline expectations of any child in America.

Talk to trans adults like me, and the asks are similarly modest: Keep our jobs without discrimination. Update our driver's licenses to match our appearance. Access medical care our doctors recommend. Walk down the street without fear. Again, these aren't special rights. They're basic dignity.

But Democrats can't make these arguments because they don't know our stories. They've treated us as a constituency to be managed rather than human beings to be heard. They've let Republicans define who we are and what we want because they've never bothered to ask us ourselves.

This is more than just morally wrong; it's politically stupid. When you don't know the people you're supposedly defending, you can't defend them effectively. When you treat someone's existence as a political liability rather than a human reality, you've already lost the argument.

... they need to reframe the debate. Republicans aren't protecting children; they're weaponizing government to bully kids. They're the ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people's bodies. Democrats should make them own that weirdness. ...

Democrats need to connect trans rights to broader freedoms. This isn't about special privileges or ideology. It's about the government staying out of personal medical decisions. It's about families, not politicians, making choices about their children's health. It's about the freedom to live your life without constant government surveillance of your gender.

These are winning arguments if Democrats would bother to make them.

... they need to tell human stories. Trans people aren't abstractions or political footballs. They're people's children, siblings, friends, and neighbors. When Republicans attack trans people, they're attacking real families in every community. Democrats need to make that real for voters.

.. Democrats need to show some backbone. Voters respect politicians who stand for something, even if they disagree. What they don't respect is cowardice. Running away from every fight Republicans pick doesn't make Democrats look reasonable. It makes them look weak.

Democrats have been down this road before. It leads nowhere good. You can't build a political coalition by constantly throwing people out of it. You can't inspire voters by standing for nothing. You can't protect some children by agreeing that others are disposable. ...

Get over yourselves, Dem politicians. If you can learn just enough to be real, people will respect you. Most of us aren't on the side of witch burners, soiling our pants and fleeing phantom dangers. You won't win the QAnons, but there are plenty of other people who might be willing to stop panicking, if you modeled some guts. 

Would you want Donald Trump deciding what your doctor can do for you?

 

Young trans and non-binary folk and their friends rallied yesterday outside Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto where institutional cowardice is retreating when faced with the Trump administration's bigotry. 

By way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

The Trump administration has pushed to limit access to gender-affirming care for youths. In January, the president signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to prohibit hospitals and medical schools that receive some federal grants from providing gender-affirming care to children.

... Some Stanford patients received notifications this month that surgical procedures were being canceled, according to one parent of a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. ... The child had been receiving care at the clinic for more than a year, and the abrupt cancellation of the procedure is leaving the family scrambling to figure out how to get the care elsewhere. ...

... “The fear is we were totally blindsided by this and it has no legal basis, so I have no confidence or trust,” the parent said. “How do I know the other care will continue? That’s the biggest impact for us. The trust has been kind of taken away.” 

 

For all the fear in the moment, communities which have been rejected often remember they are FABULOUS!

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.

Denouncing the war on those who have served

 

Every Wednesday at noon, veterans and friends gather at the entrance to the San Francisco VA Medical Center to protest Trump administration cuts and privatization plans.

Protesters are a lively bunch, spreading out to all four corners of the vehicle entrance and chanting loudly.

 

A vet explains the protest to a Med Center visitor exiting the campus. This crew makes a point of talkng with their people.

 

Choosing to alienate veterans seems a foolish move by Trump and MAGA.

When freedom seemed possible ...

Does history really have "turning points? The more deeply one looks into it, the less apt that metaphor seems. Human history is a long flow of events, accidents, and choices that could lead in different directions, but which are never entirely dictated by what came before and are uncertain in what future they may portend. 

But, oh, are there moments when something epic seems to have come along!

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper, a senior Oxford historian revisits one such moment which, looking backward, we seem to periodically notice and then forget. In 1525, in the wake of Luther's destabilization of Western Christendom, in what is now modern Germany, peasants undertook to overturn feudal society and it looked for a moment as if their marching columns had succeeded. 

The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. ... Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellions would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months they won. Authority and rulership collapsed ... People even began to dream of a new order. 

But this moment didn't last. ... The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. ...

Insofar as the revolt can be said to have had an intellectual inspiration, Martin Luther's Freedom of a Christian published in 1520 served, despite Luther's quick repudiation of these ungoverned rebels. But the peasants, with input from other reforming clergy, created their own manifesto.

For them, freedom mean ending serfdom ... the peasants themselves ... formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels didn't know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of moveable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.

... The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naive, and contradictory. ... this was not a movement driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world. ...

The vision that drove them was about humans' relationship to creation. They were angry that lords claimed ownership of natural resources-- the water, the common land, the woods and forests -- when these were God's creation, given to all. They were enraged that the lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood,"thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free." They were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them ... They wanted men to live as brothers, in mutual obligation, not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal, nourished by bonding amongst the peasant fighters, though that doesn't mean that women didn't support it too. They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment that God had created. ...

... for most of the war, the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.

Roper's account of the peasants' brief but unprecedented revolt is detailed and granular. This is fascinating narrative history which for an American needs to be read alongside maps.

• • • 

The peasants' war is a huge historical event which 1) tends to be dropped from most accounts of early modern European history because its implications remain unclear, except that 2) Friedrich Engels brought a tendentious explanation of it to the fore in the context of articulating 19th century socialist thinking.

Roper's conclusion is her contribution to this historiography, to the academic theories and debates about what sort of frame in which to put the eruption. Here are some of those points, quotations from the book unless bracketed:

• ... [the peasants] were angry at how the lords treated them, but explaining the revolt in economic terms is not enough. Many richer peasants and even burghers joined the revolt ... if anything, conditions might have been improving as peasants engaged in markets and a long period of economic upswing continued after the Black Death. 

• ... the Reformation brought a religious transformation that did far more than legitimize or justify previous attacks on the abuses of feudalism; it brought a new vision of freedom, and of relations between human being as the environment. ... as some put it, all of us, rich and poor alike, are Christ's 'aigen,' his 'own', the same word as for serfs. 

• ... Marching together or taking over monasteries and convents allowed peasants to experience together a life of plenitude, where there was enough meat for all and more wine and beer than you could drink, a life of comradeship and brotherhood, not of dour monastic asceticism. These were ideals for which people were willing to fight. ... All could subscribe to the Twelve Articles, even those who did not know its specific contents. ... The rebels hatred of princes and 'top dogs' was now sealed in blood and gone was any reverence for rulers.

• ... the movement was held together by male bonding ... it is hard to know whether women would have felt included in their men's demands though the revolt could not have succeeded without women's support in running the farms and gardens their menfolk had left.

• ... the peasants' failure to bring the large towns in ... the cities were simply too populous, rich, powerful and well-armed to be seriously threatened by a peasant army.

• ... [yet] the peasants flattened the towers of lordship and wiped out the sacred geography of pilgrimage and monasticism. ... the war permanently undermined the power of the lesser nobility ...

• ... the ideas and dreams that had been formed in the war did not disappear but lived on in Anabaptism and in many varieties of radical thought. ... The war's legacy of blood desacralized lordship ... 

It's easy to think and feel that the present moment is another hinge point, a turning of some sort, what with climate change on top of the decay of Western capitalism and democracy. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But Roper's volume casts light on a time that felt and perhaps still appears to have been such a moment. I recommend it.