Reality bites

What I appreciate about Paul Krugman is that the Nobel Prize winner in economics is willing to go out ahead of the consensus of the wise and important. Today's contribution is a humdinger:

Reality is a Communist Plot: Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election. ...

Such is the wisdom of Trump, MAGA, and dimwits like Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. If you want to control people, keep 'em stupid and uninformed as all good authoritarians have attempted to do.

... What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

... I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

... Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.  ... If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

... [Republican pols] behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. ...

Read it all.  

What I would add that Krugman does not: he instinctively believes that knowing the truth of difficult things -- like why masses of New Yorkers were dying of an unknown illness in spring of 2020 -- requires intellectual work. He also believes that there are people who are equipped by training to figure mysteries out. And that those people work for all of us.

MAGA is for people who want or maybe need answers for life's mysteries without work. For many, perhaps there is no space in their lives for the intellectual work of discerning what's true. But for some, there's a comfortable indolence which outsources judgment to glitzy influencers and charlatans like the Orange Toddler.

By the way, this isn't about educational attainment. Lots of people without fancy degrees can see what is in front of their faces. They looked at things.

Historically, the mass cure for this debilitated condition occurs when unanticipated realities intrude on daily life -- kind of like when you bark your shins on a low end table you didn't notice. Oops, there's a hazard. Maybe I ought to move it out of here? Maybe I should figure out why ICE wants to kidnap my nanny? Maybe bombing Iran without a plan might lead to more war?

If representative democracy withstands the Trump onslaught, maybe we can bring some of these willing know-nothings back to consensus reality. On to November ...

Tylenol is made from crude oil!

Now that Donald Trump has got the USofA into a fossil fuel war. I figured I ought to know more about oil in our lives. Obviously, the big issue is petroleum in several forms -- gas and diesel fuel for cars and trucks. And also in some areas for heating. But it turns out there is so much more that we do with oil, including with the ubiquitous petroleum-based scourge of modern life: plastics. 

The video here explains how Tylenol is made from a component of crude oil with a lot of help from appropriate bacteria-eating plastic. Really. This is a clear explanation and mind bending fun. Even the fund pitch in the middle is smart and bearable. Enjoy.

There are a huge lot of everyday items that use oil in some way. If the current disruption of the global oil economy goes on, the Donald will have succeeded in screwing up everyone's lives. Seems in character.

Click to enlarge.

The economist Paul Krugman observes our moment:

... now we have the worst of both worlds. The world is now highly dependent upon a complex global supply chain and the erstwhile leader of the free world is erratic. Does anyone know what our Iran policy will be a week from now, or even tomorrow? Moreover, the Iran debacle has revealed us to be far weaker than most people realized – so weak that we are afraid to stop Iran from exporting oil even as we threaten to destroy its civilian infrastructure. The truth is, even our allies no longer trust or respect us.

So what we are facing now isn’t simply a matter of consumers losing the ability to purchase imports. Instead we are facing a scenario in which producers lose access to crucial inputs they need to keep producing. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is raising prices at the pump, which is bad. But it is also threatening to deprive American farmers of fertilizer during planting season, to cut off essential helium supplies to semiconductor producers in Asia, to deprive pharmaceutical producers of crucial materials, and more.

In short, terrifying as the Hormuz crisis is, I worry that it may be only the beginning. For a world economy that is riddled with multiple potential choke points can no longer rely on a strong, reliable and trustworthy America to act as a guarantor of the system. While things are bad now, they may very well get a lot worse.

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 ...”

MAGA's nihilism of grievance has been defeated before

It's almost a throwaway line in a post by European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, a post mostly calling out the failings of the New York Times. But I think it's critically important for understanding much of the behavior of much of MAGA:

Key to understanding [Office of Budget and Management director Russell] Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more.

Vought is correct, to a substantial extent. Twentieth century America undermined, eroded, and finally largely tore down the unchallenged power of white supremacy and patriarchy (of which homophobia and gender absolutism are features.) Much of MAGA hates the America the majority of us have made. So they call us "the Left." Some of us may identify with some "Left"; but most of us are just ordinary Americans who have moved on from habitual white supremacy and woman hatred. The country is not perfected, but it has moved on from MAGA's cultural grievances. 

And Trumpism is wildly unpopular and getting more so with every price increase and raid on Black and brown neighbors.

So, because MAGA lost the culture, its supporters lost hope for the future. To replace an imperfect democracy, they think they've found their king. MAGA attracts losers, whose only unifying idea is to tear it all down. 

Paul Krugman catches this reality when he digs into the material and consequential stupidity of MAGA's war on science:

... Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want. ... A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. ... 

... Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over.

Historian of fascism John Ganz calls out MAGA as embodying the nationalism of losers. 

... MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts.  

Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. ... 

This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics ...

Dorothy Thompson recognized these second-raters in her classic 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? 

For that matter, so did my mother, who, though a Republican housewife, recognized and participated in warning against European fascism during its rise in the mid-1930s.

This country has always attracted the world's desperate who hoped to become winners. Are we going to let the MAGA losers kill off that hope? NO KINGS! 

Some of our tech billionaires have lost it

 

A rowdy little demonstration greeted the tech-bro billionaire's appearance at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this evening. His lecture series is on the topic of the Anti Christ. ... he suggests (seriously!) that activist Greta Thunberg might actually be the anti-christ we should fear. 

Being rich is no guarantee against stupid. Dude seems to think he's hooked into demonic forces. Perhaps he is a demon? This sort of fantasy doesn't usually end well.

Meanwhile, he doesn't care who he hurts. PLTR is the stock symbol for his corporation Palantir which is providing the data for mass public surveillance of our communities, the violent lCE kidnapping of immigrants, the genocide in Gaza, union-busting efforts and more.  

Thiel has stated his opposition to democracy, he actively supports defunding universities and public education, and aligns with Christian Nationalist movements that support white supremacy and the subjugation of women. He might wear a suit-and-tie and use his immense wealth for influence - but he dreams of a techno-feudalist society.

Some folks have other ideas.

From the dangerous front lines of public health

Last Friday, a man shot up the Centers for Disease Control buildings [gift] near Atlanta. The shooter is dead and so is a policeman who apparently got in his way. Investigators have not yet reported what they think went down. According to the shooter's family, he was suicidal and fixated on vaccines. Law enforcement officers found several long guns near his body. 

This violent attack was neither random -- nor, fortunately, effectually targeted. 

The attack also raised understandable questions about Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, the COVID vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr. Mr Kennedy said appropriate words about the shooting at one of the institutions he "leads," but who can believe him? 

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, writes the substack Your Local Epidemiologist sharing information and reflections on the state of the practice of public health. She explains from the perspective of the workers:

The hardest-hit area was the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) and the Immunization Safety Office (ISO). These are people who have carried a lot of the weight of the pandemic, endured relentless hostility, and have faced six months of attacks on vaccine policy. Many have almost no reserves left. And now, on top of everything, they were literally under fire.

Those bullet holes are a haunting, terrible metaphor for what public health has endured over the past six months—and the past six years.

We’ve endured doxxing, hacking, strangers at our homes, death threats in our inboxes, croissants thrown at us in coffee shops. Installing a new security system just because we volunteer for something or show up on TV. Wearing heart monitors because our cortisol levels have started impacting our organs. Deciding not to put our kids in daycare at the CDC campus because it may be targeted. Then firings. Defunding. Politically charged and targeted rhetoric.

And now a shooting happened. It could have been much worse if it weren’t for a police officer—who left behind three kids of his own—making the ultimate sacrifice. This doesn’t make it any less scary.

 Jetelina continues, trying to make sense of the atrocious and inexplicable.

One question keeps coming up from colleagues in my text messages: Why do we keep doing this [keep working in public health]?

I know why. Because people in public health care too much about our country to stop. Because we care about our kids’ futures. Because we believe in a better life. Better community. Better health. We will serve our neighbors even if they don’t understand what we’re doing or why it matters. It’s in the blood of public health workers, woven into every late night, every hard decision, every moment we choose service over family or safety, whether it’s running into an Ebola outbreak or writing a policy brief.

In the next week, the glass will be patched, the windows replaced, the bullets swept from the floor. And this story (which has barely made the news) will vanish. But the trauma, the fear, the exhaustion will remain.

We’ll go back to our desks, our meetings, our spreadsheets. We’ll keep working to stop the spread of disease. We’ll keep working to prevent the next shooting. We’ll keep working for communities that may never know our names.

And we’ll do it knowing we were targeted simply for doing our jobs, jobs that protect even the people who hate us.

But make no mistake: this cannot be the cost of caring. We need more than patched glass. We need a country that values the people who protect it, recognizes the importance of words and their real-world consequences, and values community and neighbors, not just self. Now. Before the next shot is fired. 

• • •

The Atlanta CDC campus appears to be an expanse of fine modern glass and steel buildings, now complete with bullet holes. But somehow this story brought to mind this neighborhood vaccination station set up in the Bayview district of San Francisco in May 2021. A picture of Public Health, indeed!

There is no sane use for the Bomb

Today, August 6, 2025, is the 80th anniversary of the detonation of a United States nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Thousands of people died immediately from its blast. Arguments continue among military thinkers and historians about whether the 1945 atomic bombings were strategically and morally justified in order to end the war against Japan.

Many Japanese remember there is no future in a world where nuclear weapons proliferate.

Joe Cirincione seems to be the last of the United States' serious national security experts who is haunted by the reality that there is NO use of our current nuclear arsenal that leads anywhere good or perhaps even toward civilization and even human survival. There is no sane use of the Bomb.

In July at a talk at one of those strategic conferences that "experts" in destruction frequent, he took the opportunity to point out the fallacies in US nuclear thinking.

In order to solve the nuclear policy mystery, we need to consider what we don’t talk about.  Here are seven topics largely off limits, in rising order of importance:

Cost. Next fiscal year the U.S. government will spend $87 billion on nuclear weapons, up from $70 billion this year. The Congressional Budget Office predicts these numbers will skyrocket. We will spend almost one trillion dollars over the next ten years, averaging $95 billion per year. Add in $25 billion for the foolish “Golden Dome” and perhaps $20 billion for other “missile defense and defeat” programs and we will spend $130 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs next year. The costs will grow. Every one of the new nuclear systems is over-budget and behind schedule. ...

Targeting. What will we hit with all these weapons? The targets are kept secret, but why? We should want other nations to know what they risk if they attack the United States. ... Perhaps because the absurdity of targeting hundreds of military, economic and political sites with multiple warheads on multiple delivery systems would be exposed as absurd. In one example I was given at a briefing at the Strategic Air Command when I was on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee in the 1980’s, we would have hit Odessa in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) with 60 thermonuclear warheads. Obviously overkill. In the tortured logic of nuclear targeting, however, we were not targeting cities, merely the sites that happened to be located in cities.

Casualties. We gloss over the millions of innocent civilians that would be killed even by limited use of nuclear weapons. Most experts agree with the finding by the International Campaign against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) that “Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons.” ....

Consequences of Use. The immediate death toll would be just the beginning of the damage. With new climate tools we can predict that even a limited nuclear war in South Asia or the one-sided use of nuclear weapons where the attacked country did not respond could result in massive climate change. Scientists estimate that a war involving as few as one hundred weapons would pour enough particulates and soot into the stratosphere to surround the Earth in clouds, drop global temperatures and kill 40 percent of the world’s food crops. Billions would starve; human civilization would collapse. ...

Morality. Pope Francis repeatedly asserted during his papacy, “The use of nuclear weapons, as well as their mere possession, is immoral.” He is not alone. Most major religions denounce nuclear weapons as immoral, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Ayatollah of Iran to the Dalai Lama.... Despite the frequent invocation of religion in our national discourse, I cannot think of any recent conference where there has been a panel on the morality of our nuclear policy.

Politics. We cannot understand U.S. nuclear policy without factoring in the deep politics involved. This begins with the general antipathy of Democratic Party leaders towards fundamental change in national security policy. Afraid of looking weak, ever since Bill Clinton the party has largely sought to “triangulate” on national security, supporting massive spending and modest adjustments. ...  “People wonder why we don’t learn from failures like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The reason is simple: People who point out alternatives to current national security policies are systematically driven out of positions of authority,” Jeffrey Lewis told The Washington Post. ...

Corruption. We cannot evaluate nuclear strategy as if our decisions are made in careful deliberations among wise, mostly white, mostly men. Nuclear weapons are a big business. People get rich making nuclear weapons. ...

Cirincione concludes: "If this assessment sounds bleak it is because our strategic situation is bleak. Nuclear dangers are rising around the world." Read it all; it's fully accessible.

Facts can be terrible things, but they matter

Every few days, among my morass of emails, begging letters, and occasionally worthy newsletters, I get a little send-out called USAFacts. This email is a visual, simplified presentation of basic data about the economy and society, derived from US government sources. Sometimes it is interesting; often it's boring.

But not yesterday. Yesterday's email began with a careful social-scientific howl of horror in response to Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the crime of reporting true unemployment numbers. 

At USAFacts, we rely heavily on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to help Americans understand what’s happening in the economy. The BLS provides crucial metrics on how many people are employed, what they’re earning, and much more.   

President Trump ordered the firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday. This decision, which came after a lower-than-expected jobs report, has created fears of future politicization of one of the nation’s most critical economic data agencies. 

The United States is the global standard for economic data because of the independence granted to statistical agencies. Politicizing that process is a serious departure from that tradition. This administration — and every administration — should protect this independence.  

Data about jobs, prices, and wages belong to the American people. Your tax dollars fund this work. You deserve accurate, timely information that’s free from political interference. Undermining trust in official statistics threatens the integrity of the data that millions of everyday Americans depend on to understand our economy. ...

When this mild-mannered little non-profit denounces you, you've crossed a line.

"Facts deserve to be heard. Democracy is only successful when it is grounded in truth." says Steve Ballmer in this strange little video.

USAFacts is the project of one of our more benign domestic billionaires. Perhaps better than most, Steve Ballmer knows that facts matter. He made a little mistake, dismissing the Apple iPhone as an over priced gadget, that ended his tenure as Microsoft's chief executive. Though he is still believed to be the 8th richest man in the world. And though USAFacts may have a bit of a pro-business built-in bias, it's always intriguing.

Meanwhile Trump has gone full banana republic. He insists the truth is whatever he says it is and the Republican Party must repeat his claims. That is -- he's bonkers mad. And vicious. And dangerous. It's his world and we just live in it.  

This moment's hot data analyst, G. Elliott Morris -- the Strength in Numbers guy -- sums up the meaning of contemporary Trumpism for those who deal in facts:

... I predict we will see a rise in third-party data providers, and an adjustment among media economic reporters in how they talk about government statistics.

... The MAGA prioritization of blind loyalty to Trump is simply not compatible with republican democracy. So the two will not coexist for long. Democracies require acceptance of pluralism, compromise, and reality. Trumpism offers intolerance, absolutism, and factlessness. The two are on a collision course, and unless more people of conscience in the GOP and beyond pull the emergency brake, we may careen past a point of no return.

It’s imperative that defenders of democracy — in both parties — wake up to this reality and reassert that no one is above facts, and country should come before party. Otherwise, as history warns us, the slide toward authoritarianism will only accelerate.

Dark times indeed. 

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?

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.

On Donald's drive to destroy the production of knowledge

In a statement calling for the defunding of NPR and PBS, the White House complained about a story correctly describing banana slugs as hermaphrodites, describing it as 'woke propaganda.'

For normal Americans, among the minority paying attention, the impulse is repeatedly to ask WHY? Why do Donald Trump, his MAGAs, and his various enablers among Christian nationalists and techno-utopians, want to tear down contemporary American life and civilization? What do they want?

Assuredly there are many answers: racism, sexism, gender rigidity, greed, vengeance, bruised egos, injured ignorance -- all combined in a toxic stew. 

But a common element is a war against science, against knowledge, against the human quest to accumulate scraps of truth. Adam Server describes where the Magats are trying to take us under the title, The New Dark Age. There's wisdom here; a few highlights:

... destroying American universities will also limit the growth of a Democratic-trending constituency—fewer educated voters will translate to fewer Democrats in office. The tech barons supporting Trump have companies that rely on educated workers, but they want submissive toilers, not active citizens who might conceive of their interests as being different from those of their bosses.

A formal education does not immunize anyone against adopting false beliefs, but two things are true: Many of Trump’s supporters have come to see knowledge-producing institutions and the people who work for them as sources of liberal indoctrination that must be brought to heel or destroyed, and they do not want Americans trusting any sources of authority that are not Trump-aligned. ...

Possible sources of alternative information and different visions of possibility must be stamped out.

... Trump’s attack on knowledge will harm not just the so-called [liberal] elites he and his allies are punishing. The long-term price of solidifying their power in this way will be high—perhaps even higher than Trumpism’s wealthy benefactors expect. One obvious cost is the damage to technological, scientific, and social advancement. Another will be the impossibility of self-governance, because a public denied access to empirical reality cannot engage in self-determination as the Founders imagined.

... By destroying knowledge, including the very scholarship that would study the effects of the administration’s policies on society, the Trump administration and its allies can ensure that their looting of the federal government and public goods can never be fully rectified or punished.

A Magat ascendancy threatens to engulf us in profitable hucksterism, the right spot for an RFK Jr.

For Trump and his allies, this large-scale destruction of the knowledge-production process could be quite lucrative in the short term. Some examples of this, such as Musk using his influence to secure himself federal contracts and the administration removing regulations on pollution on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry allies, are obvious. But fewer restraints on business means more corporations getting away with scamming and exploiting their customers, and more money for unscrupulous hucksters like those surrounding the president.

The disappearance of high-quality empirical evidence means not only fewer rebuttals of right-wing dogmas, but also a bigger market for wellness pseudoscience and other scams—such as Kennedy’s imbecilic suggestion to treat the growing measles outbreak in the Southwest with cod-liver oil. America under Trump is rejecting one of the most effective health-care infrastructures in human history and embracing woo-woo nonsense on par with medieval doctors measuring the four humors.

Server's conclusions are dire.

The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. 

The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” 

This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. 

Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

My summary cannot do this article justice. Read it all (gift).  

What's wrong with these people?

From where I abide, that's the chronic question I come to when I take in what MAGA Republicans seem to want. Their fury against my life and that of my friends and neighbors seems inexplicable. What matters to them?

Okay, I know some people react to human differences by wanting to erase the unfamiliar. Perhaps that was adaptive for small wandering bands of early humanoids -- though I doubt it. I bet the ones who learned new ways to get along with differences survived better.

But for MAGA, strange people who they experience as different from themselves are not all they want to erase. They also want to erase science, knowledge itself. Economist Paul Krugman attempts to explain this strange mania for destruction.

... why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

Again, this isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not about the long run. American science is being gutted as you read this

There's a human impulse to kill the thing you don't understand.  But that impulse has never contributed well to surviving and thriving.

It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

A miscellany of British museums

What did we do in England for the month of July? In addition to crewing on a narrowboat and hiking in the Lake Country, we visited museums. Here are a few of them:

The best, or at least most rewarding, first: the Imperial War Museum outside Manchester. I've wanted to visit one of the IWM's three locations for years. The visit was totally worth our time; we did it by tram from the boat. This charitable foundation shares not just stories of wartime heroism and sacrifices, of massive social upheavals, but also asks the questions and highlights the misgivings raised by Europe's spasms of 20th century barbarism. 

• • •

Also in Manchester, we visited the Science and Industry Museum which recounts, celebrates, and interrogates the history of the first modern industrial city. Erudite Partner was mainly excited by the historic cotton looms; she's a weaver. I was gripped by seeing this earl 20th century Linotype machine on display; in the early 1970s when I worked on the Catholic Worker newspaper, we went to press from a shop that used just such a set up; their real business was printing Variety, but they made room for us. Typesetting consisted of a skilled printing professional typing out lead lugs for each line of print from such a mechanism. The machines, arrayed in a long line, were deafening.

I sat in on a class which instructed 8 year olds about the industrial and scientific accomplishments of their city. They were enthusiastic.

• • •

 

On the  Liverpool docks, we visited the International Slavery Museum. I got the impression of a facility trying to find its footing. On the one hand, the museum makes very clear how the trade in human chattel formed the city, its economy, and its residents.

 

But the museum seems to be struggling to give voice to what enslavement meant in the lives of the enslaved people. A work in progress?

• • •

In Sheffield, we were impressed by the Kelham Island Museum which documents the industrial accomplishments of the city, particularly in steel fabrication. Among these, the prototype of the modern water closet.

Sheffield is a city whose prosperity is rooted in steel fabrication, so it is not surprising that its Anglican cathedral features this steel nativity scene by Brian Fell.

We had a great time, away from the local lunacy. There are few joys to equal learning about new places and people!

Humanity's terrible warning shot against itself

This weekend is the 77th anniversary of the U.S. dropping the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

We don't usually live in daily terror of The Bomb these days, though maybe we should.

We've been reminded this week that we (most immediately Ukrainians and other Europeans) live in danger of explosive nuclear discharge as Russia and Ukraine trade artillery blasts in the vicinity of Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. The plant has been occupied by invading Russians but is still run by its Ukrainian technicians. When it comes to blowing up a nuke plant, who is at fault is less important than just not taking the risk!

Meanwhile in Japan, citizens observe the terrible anniversary. In the memory of ultimate terror, quiet and prayer seem what is left to humanity. 

Even after the war against fascism in Europe and the even more brutal race war in the Pacific, there were voices in the United States that cried out against the news of The Bomb. 

Here's what Dwight MacDonald wrote on August 9, 1945:

At 9.15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ex­ploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, The Bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning was given. This atrocious action places “ us” , the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with “them” , the beasts of Maidanek. And “we”, the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as “they", the German people.  

So much is obvious. But more must be said. For the “atomic” bomb renders anticlimactical even the ending of the greatest war in history.  

(1) The concepts, “war” and “progress”, are now obsolete. Both suggest human aspirations, emotions, aims, consciousness. “The greatest achievement of organized science in history,” said President Truman after the Hiroshima catastrophe—which it probably was, and so much the worse for organized science.  

(2) The futility of modern warfare should now be clear. Must we not now conclude, with Simone Weil, that the technical aspect of war today is the evil, regardless of political factors? Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used “in a good cause” ? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause?  

(3) The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American Way of Life as electric ice-boxes, banana splits, and hydromatic-drive automobiles. We do not dream of a world in which atomic fission will be “harnessed to constructive ends”. The new energy will be at the service of the rulers; it will change their strength but not their aims. The underlying populations should regard this new source of energy with lively interest— the interest of victims.  

(4) Those who wield such destructive power are outcasts from humanity. They may be gods, they may be brutes, but they are not men.  

(5) We must “get” the national State before it “gets” us. Every individual who wants to save his humanity— and indeed his skin— had better begin thinking “dangerous thoughts” about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men everywhere. The mental attitude known as “negativism” is a good start.

Some of this has not aged well. But most has. There are truths that war-ravaged people knew in 1945 that we may have forgotten.

The GOP is killing its own base among old people

This isn't about vaccine-rejection and anti-masking hysteria. This was pre-COVID:

In this national analysis [from the BMJ - a peer reviewed publication from the trade union of the British Medical Association], we found that Americans living in counties that voted Democratic during presidential elections from 2000 to 2016 experienced lower age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) than residents of counties that voted for a Republican candidate, and these patterns were consistent across subgroups (sex, race and ethnicity, urban-rural location). The gap in overall AAMR between Democratic and Republican counties increased more than sixfold from 2001 to 2019, driven primarily by changes in deaths due to heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory tract diseases, unintentional injuries, and suicide.

Click to enlarge

 "Unintentional injuries" is a euphemism for opioid deaths.

It's not so much that old Republicans were dying of different causes than old Democrats -- both were mostly afflicted by heart disease, cancer, and cardio-vascular ailments. But Democratic counties did a better job of reducing mortality among their old people, based on such factors as Medicaid expansion (access to health insurance coverage), stronger tobacco and gun control, and more generous social welfare systems in general.

It does seem counter-productive -- no, ghoulish -- for a political party to cooperate in killing off its supporters.

H/t commenters at Emptywheel.

What are the science nerds going to come up with next?

On the indispensable Popular Information substack, Judd Legum and friends report that an awful lot of corporate pledges to work toward "net zero" deserve Zero Credibility.

Corporations want the public to know that they take the climate crisis seriously. Most major corporations have taken a public "climate pledge," promising to reach "net zero" carbon emissions by a future date. ... As a concept, climate pledges are appealing. ... there is no "sustainable" rate of CO2 emissions. By pledging to reach "net zero" emissions by 2040 or earlier, corporations are aligning their companies with science. ...

The NewClimate Institute recently released a report that evaluates the climate pledges of 25 multinational corporations. The results are not encouraging. Specifically, while all 25 companies have pledged to reach "net zero," they've collectively made specific commitments to reduce just 20% of their current carbon footprint by 2040. 12 of the 25 companies have made no specific carbon emissions reductions whatsoever.

Maybe all this corporate feel-good posturing will do some good. In the struggle toward a sustainable climate, every little reduction in fossil fuel pollution helps -- a little. It's probable that these pledges can give climate hawks additional angles from which to goose the corporate behemoths to do better.

But it also seems possible that techno innovators are making strides which might change the sustainability arena. We've come to understand that to keep warming caused by CO2 under limits, we need to Electrify Everything. If we're to switch from coal and gas to renewable power from sun and wind, we need sustainable technology to electrify. We need new, bigger, and different batteries.

Here's a battery innovation story that's more than feel-good posturing.

 

No more mining rare earths in the Congo with slave labor for these guys. There's innovation here that just might work out.

There are more things on heaven and earth ...

... than we imagine or pause to notice.

Pyroaerobiology is being built by people following their curiosities.

These women wondered and found delight. Well worth a few minutes of your life.

Friday cat blogging

Portrait of Janeway at her most dignified.

Thanks to Christopher Ingraham who writes a delightful Substack called The Why Axis, I've learned that which animals we choose to live with carries political meaning -- maybe.

... while dogs are more popular overall, liberals are disproportionately likely to own cats, while conservatives tend to be dog people. There’s been some debate over what’s behind the split — urban/rural differences? Household income? Gender?

New peer-reviewed research points to another cause: conservatives hold strong anti-cat biases, likely stemming from cats’ disregard for social hierarchies, their general lack of loyalty, and their refusal to submit to authority. Those characteristics are at odds with certain principles conservatives tend to hold dear.

Apologies to the researchers who put out this stuff (the linked study seems to implicate UC Press) but I found it hard to tell whether I was reading satire. Somehow elaborate statistical data analysis seems overkill.

But what politics, if any, do cats prefer in their servants? Now there's a proper research question.

Why won't they get their shots?

Most of us know someone who insists they won't get the coronavirus vaccine. As the number of unvaccinated persons shrinks, thanks to persistent persuasion and broader mandates, the sort of refusers I least understand are the hippie health nuts. Why would these nice, inoffensive folks be joining hard core libertarians protesting mask mandates and free shots? Eva Wiseman found such a person to profile in The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies. The story is enlightening.

Melissa Rein Lively had always thought of herself as a spiritual person. Her interests were grounded in “wellness, natural health, organic food”, she lists for me today from her home in Arizona, “yoga, ayurvedic healing, meditation, etc.” When the pandemic hit she started spending more time online, on wellness sites that offered affirmations, recipes and, on health, the repeated message to “Do your research.” She’d click on a video of foods that boost immunity and she’d see a clip about the dangers of vaccines. ... 

“Much of what I read took a hard stance against the pharmaceutical industry and western medical philosophy, and was particularly critical of individuals like Bill Gates, who seemed to have an incredible amount of influence and involvement in public health policy,” continues Rein Lively. At first, she enjoyed what she was reading. She liked learning. She liked the community. She liked the idea that there were patriots in the government who were working quietly to help save the world. But as she clicked on and read about imminent genocide under the guise of a health crisis, she felt herself changing. ... 

She was becoming convinced that nothing was really what it seemed; that there was a carefully constructed narrative being told, which was designed to control society. “I was willing to expand my thinking and consider a completely alternative theory, especially during a time of unprecedented chaos. What if nothing was what it seemed?” It was shocking, she says, and horrifying, and also, “Oddly comforting. What I had felt I knew was true, and others knew the same thing. ..."

Ms. Lively eventually suffered a very public cognitive explosion in a Target store where she attacked an array of masks -- a performance which, because she possessed the cash to obtain real help, caused her to be hospitalized for a mental health intervention. This nudged her back into consensus reality. She's brave to tell her story.

Dr. Timothy Caulfield studies pseudoscience enthusiasms. He explains:

“There is a strong correlation between the embrace of ‘wellness woo’ and being susceptible to misinformation. And as conspiracy theories and misinformation become increasingly about ideology, it becomes easier to sell both wellness bunk and conspiracy theories as being ‘on brand.’ In other words, if you are part of our community, this is the cluster of beliefs you must embrace – Big Science is evil, supplements help, you can boost your immune system, vaccines don’t work…”

Selling pseudo-spirituality, pseudo-health products, and COVID misinformation in a New Age-ish package is good business for unscrupulous entrepreneurs. And for unscrupulous politicians.

• • •

Wiseman pointed me to a TikTok influencer, Abbie Richards, whose schematic presentation of a hierarchy of conspiracy theorizing is brilliant, funny, and scary all at once. I'm not a TikTok person, but here's Richards on YouTube. Enjoy.