What's wrong with this guy?

 

The Donald (or perhaps some adoring minion) has seen fit to stick his ugly mug on National Park passes. 

Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin comments: 

There is something truly pathetic about this man’s need to take every opportunity to place himself at the center of our lives. Chalk it up to a fascist mind, or just plain self-centeredness and narcissism. It’s an insecurity that anyone should be able to acknowledge is more at home in the mind of a five-year old than the most powerful man on the planet.

But this also tells us something about the people around him, who enable this behavior, in large part, for their own benefit. It’s a vicious cycle that all of us must somehow endure.

At this rate, President Trump will soon be awarding himself medals. Oh, wait ....

Perhaps because Levin teaches high school and undergrad history and an audience of Civil War amateur enthusiasts, he often seems to speak the obvious that needs to be said.

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 ...