Traveling blog break

I don't think I can yet blame this on Donald Trump's meddling with the weather service (NOAA) or the FAA (air traffic control and airports). But nonetheless yesterday was such a miserable travel day from Martha's Vineyard to San Francisco that I need to take the weekend off from posting here.

Proud history here. Click to read.

It's easy to think of the Vineyard as a kind of precious retreat from American reality -- until reminded by experience that it is also a somewhat remote rock on the edge the Atlantic. And in the offseason, which is when we visit, the island is populated by incredibly tough, hard working folks who have to live off the short summer tourist season.

Our flight off island to Logan airport in Boston on a tiny regional airline, Cape Air, was cancelled at the last minute on Saturday; something about a torn up runway at the hub. So getting off the island suddenly turned into a marathon.

There was no way to catch our long flight home out of Boston. A lot of airline wrangling by Erudite Partner finally got us a different night reservation from Boston -- which would only work out if we could rush to a mid-afternoon ferry to Woods Hole, followed by an hour and a half bus trip. 

We managed all that and got seated around 9:30 EDT on a Jetblue cross country plane, only to sit for an hour and half on the runway, waiting for a bank of thunder storms somewhere on the route to clear. Finally got home at 2:30 PDT, grateful for pick up by insomniac house partner.

Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?

Reporting in the U.S. on the Afrikaner "refugees" -- some nearly 60 white people -- that Donald Trump has imported to this country is driving me nuts. Even media nearly as unsympathetic to this human migration stunt as I am seem to me to fail to convey the many complexities of South Africa. I'm not claiming to know all the ins and outs of South Africa as it exists today, but I did live there briefly in 1990 working on an independent anti-apartheid newspaper and came away with some basics that are missing from many accounts.

Some of my observations:

• The local Black-led independence party that led the struggle against white rule, the African National Congress (ANC), has won majorities ever since the first free election in 1994. But it's majorities have declined over time and today it governs in coalition with the Democracy Alliance which has a history as white-oriented party.

• Despite its many faults, including corruption, the ANC has continued to stand proudly for the self-expression of peoples enduring European rule, including the people of Palestine/Israel. We can suspect that the racial views of Afrikaners are akin to white Mississippi in 1963. Most Black South Africans, knowing racism, assume Palestinians have lived under something like the apartheid regime. When the issue is the oppression and genocide of a people, nuance gets lost. (Properly on this in my view, but that's another topic.)

• Rather importantly, given where Donald Trump probably gets his "information," Elon Musk is NOT an Afrikaner. He's from the wealthy English-speaking former ruling imperial class of the country, a man unreformed after the fall of white rule apparently. 

The BBC has published a very helpful explainer that rings true: 

South African History Online sums up Afrikaner identity by pointing out that "the modern Afrikaner is descended mainly from Western Europeans who settled on the southern tip of Africa during the middle of the 17th Century".

A mixture of Dutch (34.8%), German (33.7%) and French (13.2%) settlers, they formed a "unique cultural group" which identified itself "completely with African soil", South African History Online noted.

Their language, Afrikaans, is quite similar to Dutch.

But as they planted their roots in Africa, Afrikaners, as well as other white communities, forced black people to leave their land.

As was true in the United States, this small colonizing minority population could only rule by repressing the vast majority population, indigenous Black and later "coloured" people of Asian and mixed race backgrounds. Unlike in the U.S., neither Afrikaners nor later British imperialists succeeded in killing off the "others," remaining a well-off, empowered minority. They therefore put the others to work on farms and in mines.

In 1948, South Africa's Afrikaner-led government introduced apartheid, or apartness, taking racial segregation to a more extreme level.

This included laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.

They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that "blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water".

Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power.

Afrikaners currently number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million ...

... South Africa's most recent census, done in 2022, shows that Coloureds, (an officially used term meaning people of mixed racial origin) are the largest minority, making up 8% of the population. They are followed by white people, including Afrikaners, at 7%, and Asians at 3%.

The ANC has stood for what South Africans call "non-racial" government. There's plenty of grievance and prejudice, but by and large Afrikaners can have a chance in the country, certainly better chances than the Black African majority.

Even though white-minority rule ended in 1994, its effects are still being felt.

Average living standards are far higher for the white community than black people.

White people occupy 62.1% of top management posts, despite only accounting for 7.7% of the country's economically active population, according to a recent report by South Africa's Commission for Employment Equity.

The government has enacted a number of laws to try and redressing the balance, such as the Broad-Based Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity Acts. An amended version of the second act imposes strict hiring targets for non-white employees.

As in the U.S., this official affirmative action policy is not popular with white people who previously didn't have to compete so hard. The ANC's coalition partner, the Democracy Alliance, is challenging the acts in court.

Elon is telling Trump lies about his interactions with South Africa, according to its government:

... Trump's close adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has referred to the country's "racist ownership laws", alleging that his satellite internet service provider Starlink was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".

To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

This mainly refers to South Africa's majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) - a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors - told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence....

Only a small minority of Afrikaners are thrilled with Trump's offer of refugee status: 

After Trump's offer, Afrikaner lobby group Solidarity posted an article on its website headlined: "Ten historical reasons to stay in South Africa".

In parliament last week, the leader of the right-wing Freedom Front Plus party said they were committed to South Africa.

"We are bound to Africa and will build a future for ourselves and our children here," Corné Mulder said.

Let's give the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the last word here:

[He] has said it was "completely false" to claim that "people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution".

Referring to the first group who have moved to the U.S., he said: "They are leaving because they don't want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country and our constitution."

South Africa is one of the most violent and complicated places I have ever spent time. As is usual with Trump and MAGA, they are not doing justice to the intricacy of the nation. Complexity is hard.

Friday cat blogging

Sadly, these are the only cats I've encountered lately. Soon I'll be back to the usual felines; missing Mio and Janeway!

A rapid response to emulate

Democrats won another election in a somewhat unlikely (or at least divided) place on Tuesday. A Democrat evicted a longtime sitting GOP mayor in Omaha on Tuesday.

John Ewing Jr. was elected Omaha’s first Black mayor on Tuesday, defeating the city’s three-term Republican mayor, Jean Stothert, in a race where Democrats sought to tie her to President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda — another warning sign for Republicans in a critical battleground area.

Omaha and its suburbs have played a unique role in national politics, as the “blue dot” in a conservative state that wields an unusual amount of power in presidential contests. Though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the city limits of Omaha, Stothert kept her seat over three terms by building a broad-based coalition that included the city’s many independent voters. But Ewing’s campaign and Democrats sought to tie her to economic uncertainty and anger about Trump, whom she backed in 2024.

Ewing said Tuesday night that his victory belonged to “every resident of the city of Omaha” and that his campaign had demonstrated that when voters unite around shared values “we can achieve remarkable things.” Washington Post.

Congratulations to Mayor Ewing!

Delving a little further into the Omaha election, there seems to have been more going on here than bounce-back, anti-Trump energy among frequent Democratic voters. We saw that in 2017 and we're seeing it again this year. When DJT is not on the ballot, he's poison for Republican candidates.

Stothert was a seasoned mayor; she'd been through past campaigns and she and her people thought they could appeal to an issue that divides Democrats: 

 As she campaigned for a fourth term, Ms. Stothert, who is the first woman to lead Omaha, emphasized her record on development and public safety. But she also waded into cultural issues by trying to make bathroom use and sports participation by transgender people a campaign issue. New York Times.

Mr. Ewing didn't want to engage, but the Nebraska Democratic Party came in with a counter attack:

Not  bad -- reveal voters obsessed with trans folk in bathrooms as the slightly prurient scolds they are. Apparently citizens of Omaha didn't want to go there.

This might not work everywhere, but it is better than Democrats running and hiding at the first mention of their transgender constituents.

Trump encourages us all to release our inner crook

What Trump's exuberant corruption seeks to make us: a nation of envious cheats who yearn to emulate his delight in breaking the common good for personal gain. He's a pathetic specimen of a human; we sometimes do better.

This is a test. Paul Waldman laments: 

[The] norm of honesty is what Trump attacks so directly. Just as he encourages his followers to be sexist and cruel, he encourages everyone to grab what they can, laws and rules and basic ethical standards be damned. The president really is a role model, and unlike just about every corrupt official our country has ever produced, he isn’t even trying to hide how corrupt he is. It’s right out in the open for all to see. His message isn’t that he’s clean, it’s that everyone is dirty, so grab what you can.

That’s what makes it so dangerous. By the time these four years are over, domestic and foreign interests who want some policy favor — a tariff waiver, a change in regulation, an arms sale — will probably have deposited billions of dollars directly into Trump’s pockets. “I could be a stupid person and say, ‘Oh no, we don’t want a free plane,’” he said by way of explaining why he’ll take the Qatari jet. As far as he’s concerned, if you don’t cash in on public office, you’re just a sucker. After two terms of graft, to too many people it will just seem like common sense.

G. Elliot Morris is insightful about why the mainstream media is so inept and inadequate when it comes to calling out Trump's criminality. He introduces an English word coinage (highlighted below) which I think may come in handy in our current circumstances.

... today, when one is factual about Trump, one comes off as a partisan. In his second term, the president is breaking so many laws and political norms that when you cover them each on their own, you come off as an anti-Trump Democratic pundit with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” ...

This is all just a series of business decisions for most media institutions. Thirty years ago, I imagine network news would have done a whole show about how our politics was being corrupted by foreign influence, or some such. But given that factfulness has been polarized, we live in a media environment where news companies have business incentives to “moderate” their language on norm violations — else they risk alienating half of the country. With declining media ad rates, it becomes matter of paying the bills whether pissing off viewers is worth telling the story (or, in this case, “being ‘factful.’”)

... when you say the president shouldn’t accept a $400 million plane because the Emoluments Clause exists, and this seems kinda nasty and not something elected leaders should be doing, you are coded as pro-Democrat/center left/whatever.

I guess that perception is just the price one pays for covering the world as it is. I am happy to be writing for an audience that values the facts above everything else.

Morris, having been let go by ABC News, has launched his own polling interpretation site, Strength in Numbers.

Jumping jacks can't replace incompetence

One wonders how members of the US military react to the bellicose, largely incompetent Trump regime. A friend who is in the National Guard reports that not much has changed during their stints of service, but that co-workers feel hopeful that at least their immediate leadership won't be doing anything illegal or immoral.

However reporting suggests there is lots of evidence that the TV-lightweight Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is not inspiring confidence in the ranks. They weren't looking for a poseur, an actor playing at being a tough guy. 

Military.com covers the armed forces with journalistic integrity. It reports that Hegseth is no inspiraton: 

Instead of the standard suit and tie, he regularly appears in khaki hiking pants, rolled-up sleeves that reveal tattooed forearms and occasionally a trucker hat emblazoned with an American flag. He often posts videos and photos of himself working out with troops.

But that carefully curated image -- so different from past defense secretaries -- may not be totally landing with the rank and file. Interviews with service members and a review of hundreds of social media posts on message boards suggest the image the Pentagon chief is trying to project is seen by some as overly manufactured and desperate for affirmation.

"He seems too preoccupied with his personal brand," one Army captain told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. "This is the 'vet bro' Pentagon."

Across military Reddit forums and enlisted meme pages, Hegseth has become a regular target of satire, often referred to with nicknames such as "DUI Hire," "Whiskey Leaks" and "Kegseth." The references allude to past controversies, including alleged alcohol abuse and an incident in which he shared sensitive Yemen attack plan details in an unsecured Signal group chat that included a journalist.

After the shit shows that were the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, the military has struggled to professionalize and diversify its personnel. The Trump boys want to go back to the good old days of Abu Ghraib and no constraints from the laws of war. And Hegseth seems to yearn for a military mostly of white men that does not exist. In 2019, 17.5 percent of enlisted personnel were women; a little over 30 percent were non-white. (Some overlap there, obviously.) And he's kicking out perhaps some 15,000 successfully serving trans folk.

Hegseth is not in tune with the force he is supposed to lead:

Many who spoke with Military.com remarked that the military, especially the rank and file, don't have time to be focused on the kind of policy moves that Hegseth is making. They are more concerned with their day-to-day lives in the military -- an area that Hegseth and his team have largely been silent on in their view.

"It's a lot of 'look at me' stuff. He has said nothing about quality of life," Rob Evans, an Army veteran whose Yelp-style app Hots & Cots collects reviews of housing and dining facilities on military bases. "If he's for the troops, why has he not touched on quality-of-life challenges, whether that's food or housing?"

... Ultimately, several service members told Military.com they feel Hegseth's idea of what a defense secretary is expected to do doesn't line up with what the job actually requires of him.

"He'd make a great company commander," one officer said. "But that's not the job he's in right now."

Meanwhile, online, one Reddit member who is widely known on the Navy’s forum as a recently retired Navy captain, recently wrote that Hegseth and others in the Trump administration “are not the leaders we need or deserve.”

“If you are left leaning, Hegseth only serves to poke at and antagonize you. If you are right leaning, he only serves to embarrass and demoralize you with his incompetence,” they added.

Hegseth's antics are not a hit with people who take their missions seriously.

Donald's new toy

The gold toilet man is a happy fellow today. Let's do our bit to sour the grin on the crook.

Motherhood in Kyiv in war time

Ukrainian journalist Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova is choosing to have a child now, in the midst of war and air raids.

Why I’m giving birth in a warzone:

... Andrii, my husband, and I had talked about having a child for a long time. But no one prepares you for what it's like to wait for new life while others are dying every day.

At first, I was silent, even to him. It seemed better to keep it to myself – a secret, small light in the great darkness. But I knew I couldn't stay silent for long. This news, so big and so fragile, was about to break.

That evening, I prepared dinner — something tasty and homemade: potatoes baked in clay pots with meat and sour cream (I would say it's a traditional Ukrainian dish). ...

That evening, there was silence in the candlelit apartment, with no sirens – a miracle in itself. I handed him the box, holding my breath as if I were about to jump into an abyss. He opened it... and remained silent.

The silence seemed to last forever. Then he looked up: "Is it true?"

No, I'm f**king kidding, I thought, but instead I nodded in the affirmative.

His face conveyed it all – joy, shock, but mostly fear. Not just of becoming a father, but of raising a child in a war-torn country.

This wasn’t just two lines on a pregnancy test; it’s a vow – to protect our child, and to endure. And that vow feels even heavier than the emergency suitcase we usually grab during an air raid. ...

Read it all here.  

Smoke rises in the sky over Kyiv after a Russian missile strike on Sunday morning. Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

I now have only two months left before I give birth... I just hope everything works out — that I make it to the hospital, that Andrii is there, and that there are no Russian attacks that day.

But despite everything, I believe that everything will be alright, and I will give birth in Kyiv.

... Being pregnant during the war presents another challenge. Have you ever been in a bomb shelter? If you haven't, I hope you never have to. The closest bomb shelter to my house is the subway. If you have ever been in the subway, you know that it is very cold, especially in winter. Additionally, there is limited seating space, making it challenging for pregnant women to stand.

Usually, my husband handles it — he wakes me when explosions shake our apartment in the night, checks how serious the attack is, and decides whether we need to rush to the subway. Last time, we drove because I was already walking slowly.

Carrying two cats, a blanket for warmth, and a chair to sit on makes getting to the shelter a struggle. I can’t imagine doing it all with a stroller.

... Having a child during a war isn’t just about fear and uncertainty; it’s about endless love. It’s the realization that, even though we are afraid, we are also ready to protect a whole new world from all the bad things out there. ...

Brave woman; brave nation.

Mother's Day 2025 rogue's gallery

Here's my mother, Martha Sidway Adams, posing with her offspring (me). This is probably about 1950. I suspect we had come from church. She looks happy and proud. I look rather miserable in those clothes, not surprisingly.

Here's my grandmother, Amelia Roberts Sidway, formally posed with her offspring in 1910. This photographer knew how to frame a shot. The standing child, my aunt Margaret, likes the pose, while my two year old mother looks a little discomfited. As was common at the time, my grandmother had already lost two children to childhood illnesses. She had reason to be happy and grateful for these healthy specimens.

Standing up for law and the Constitution against two-bit fascists

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, reamed Donald Trump's preening cabinet secretary Kristi Neom in a budget hearing last week. Apparently there is no part of her job she's actually doing -- except play acting tough girl for the cameras and Donald.

Murphy is unremarkable to look at, but he's prepared and knows his stuff. This is longer than clips I usually post, but absolutely worth watching as a lesson in how government is supposed to work. 

Not only that, Murphy is morally outraged by Noem's complicity in the Trump regime's disappearing unlucky migrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to foreign torture prisons. Worth your time!

The crypto scam: still nothing but a con for crooks

Mission District, SF

According to NBC News:

Today a growing number of people in the United States have crypto kiosks at their local grocery stores or gas stations. There are roughly 30,000 bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) in the United States, according to Coin ATM Radar, a website that tracks them. The Coinstar machine where they haul in loose change for cash might now also sell bitcoin. Bitcoin Depot, North America’s largest BTM operator, has kiosks in 48 states and is still expanding. The operators can charge users hefty transaction fees, and the stores often receive payment for hosting the BTMs.

These machines (and other brands) are in every corner store in my home neighborhood which is full of poor workers and immigrants. Can't blame the folks who take a flyer on this thing; I've even seen charities boasting they'll take contributions in crypto. It must be real, right?

Nope, it's not. Here's economist Paul Krugman with the true story: 

Crypto Is Still for Criming

... the entire crypto enterprise is corrupt. Money-laundering and scams that exploit naïve investors aren’t unfortunate behavior that taints a potentially useful enterprise. For crypto, they are the whole game, more or less the only reason cryptocurrencies exist.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but you should bear in mind that Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was created in 2008. That makes cryptocurrency ancient by tech standards — not much younger than the iPhone, much older than Apple Pay. Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will find widespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now. But it keeps not happening.

At this point, 17 years after crypto arrived on the scene, there are still no — I repeat, no — significant legal use cases. This is despite many efforts to make crypto a real medium of exchange. ...

But if crypto has no legitimate uses, why are crypto assets worth more than $3 trillion? Well, the marketing of crypto has been brilliant, with many small investors in particular still being sucked in by the combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. Promotion of crypto by legitimate enterprises, which profit from crypto sales, has been relentless. Venmo is a digital payment system that actually works and is in widespread use — even the fruit and vegetable stand around the corner from me takes it. But every time I use Venmo it tries to sell me crypto:

And while crypto has failed to find legitimate uses, it has flourished as a vehicle for illegitimate uses: extortion, money-laundering and, as we’ve seen, bribes to politicians....

Ah, now we know why Donald Trump and his merry band of crooks have become crypto evangelists. Just another way to rob the American people ...

For the papal election

Not sure where I grabbed this, but it seems appropriate for the moment. For good or ill, the institution of the Roman Catholic Church will do what it does. The message of Jesus will be made more widely accessible in consequence. Or not. That does not depend on the Church as institution. Dorothy would hate my saying that. But she knew it. God and humanity are complicated and messy.

UPDATE: Well, who'd have thought it! Time will tell.

Genders diverge

In the contemporary USofA, girls and boys take different paths. The following visuals document the different life choices and life trajectories of the two genders.

Only in Vermont are boys keeping up with girls in high school completion. The South is notably weak in getting boys through high school.

It probably should not come as a surprise: Black and Hispanic boys lag behind all others in high school completions, while White boys only graduate at a slightly higher rate than Black girls. Everyone else is way ahead.

When it it comes to college degrees, the gap widens. Since 1980, women students have been increasing their share of BAs and MAs -- can dominance in PhDs and professional degrees be far behind?

The increasing dominance of women in the high school teaching profession may have something to do with whether boys believe completing education is important. Or it may not? But if we're not willing to pay teachers, a picture like this is not surprising. Teaching is hard; we don't pay for it. And you can still get women workers for less ...

I'm all for women getting ahead, but the divergence has to exacerbate the tensions which give us the Know-Nothing MAGA moment.

We need boundaries and a new aspirational consensus

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to assume that most Americans had, if not a considerd opinion, still an instinctive revulsion against Nazis. Those were the bad guys ...

No more. Elon, his incel acolytes, and his fanbase get their jollies from playing at fascism. One has to assume that many of these guys (yes, they are mostly guys) know little of what they are aping, because there's no evidence they know much about anything. Elon may be a deeper case; the South African class and milieu from which he emerged was often authentically fascist as they struggled to hang on to their white European privileges over the nation's Black majority.

Thomas Zimmer is a German, a professor of contemporary history at Georgetown University. He knows a thing or two about fascism. He reports that many in German society are trying to hold the line against resurgent neo-Nazis:

News broke Friday morning that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now officially classifying the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group. The decision came after three years of investigating the party and was presented in a 1,100-page report. ...

Zimmer explains carefully that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) can be accurately called "neo-Nazi" by US readers. All the other German political parties, much as they oppose each other, agree not to work with the neo-Nazis which made electing a coalition Chancellor, the Conservative Friedrich Merz, a messy process. But German civil society got it done; for the time being, their neo-Nazis are excluded from power despite winning 20 percent of the vote in the last election.

No surprise -- JD Vance and the MAGAts love them some AfD and disdain Merz.

Zimmer then looks at what the rise of German neo-Nazis might imply about parallel developments in US politics: 

This is a remarkable moment in U.S. history. The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus. 

The term is imperfect and perhaps even problematic. There was certainly never a universally shared consensus in America that the key elements of Nazi politics and ideology were bad. But there was nevertheless some agreement across the mainstream political spectrum that America had fought a righteous and noble war against Hitler. American society celebrated and revered its “Greatest Generation” and the soldiers who defeated the Nazis; American popular culture used the Nazis as a representation of ultimate evil. Anyone openly siding against this agreement would have had to expect to pay a price – politically, socially, and culturally. 

In post-1945 America, this was obviously never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics and “respectable” society.

That is evidently no longer the case. MAGA is now in power. This breakdown of boundaries did not happen overnight. It took decades for the most extreme factions to pull the entire “conservative” coalition further and further to the Right – and for the more moderate people, all those who might have objected to the idea of supporting German Neo-Nazis, to be ostracized. 

It will likely take decades to get the country out of this mess, which requires not just political change, but a fundamental reform of political and social culture. If a stable democracy that deserves the name is ever to emerge from this, America will have to restore some boundaries. We need to reimagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward. 

You are siding with the German Neo-Nazis? That makes you the bad guys. In a society that cannot hold even that basic line, democracy stands little chance.

I'm up for giving democracy a chance. No more MAGAts and Nazis!

No comment

Nothing more to say. Are you happier now?

When some evangelizing seems a right move

Fred Clark writes The Slackivist where he urges seekers and other ex-evangelicals to  "Test everything; hold fast to what is good." He is as horrified as so many of us are by the dragnet Donald Trump and this ghoulish assistant Stephen Miller are letting loose against migrants.

He recounts the story of the Oklahoma woman and her kids put out half naked in the rain while unidentified agents who trashed their house and stole their money -- all only to realize that the person the agents sought had moved on. (Homeland Security is now claiming lamely there had been human traffickers at the address previously.)

Clark has a suggestion, only a little tongue in cheek, for resistance to this kind of thing:

Doxxing the Secret Police to call them to repentance

The secret police of ICE know they’re the Bad Guys. That’s why they wear masks and don’t carry badges and refuse to give their names.

And so ... it is necessary for us — and for them — to unmask them, to use their names, and to identify them publicly. To make them famous. This is needed to save our freedom and to save their souls.

Refusal by such "agents of the law" to say who they are and who they work for seems to indicate fearfulness ...

... But what are the secret police afraid of? Who are they afraid of? Why are they hiding their faces and their names?

They are afraid of us — of the majority of normal, decent people. And they are hiding their faces and their names because they know that what they are doing is wrong and shameful and bad. They know that they are the Bad Guys in this story. That is as obvious to them as it is to you and so they cannot face you. They cannot do what they are doing and save face, so to do what they are doing they must hide their faces.

So let’s see their faces. And their names.

In asking to see those faces and names, some fear I’m also asking thereby to learn their addresses, which seems to imply a hint of violence or, at least, the threat of such. (“We know where you live” almost always seems to be an implicit threat of violence.) But violence is not at all what I’m suggesting and not at all what I have in mind

Clark has experience meeting people who didn't expect visitors at their houses ...

What I have in mind, rather, is Evangelism Explosion. What I have in mind is what I learned and practiced in youth group at my white fundamentalist Christian church growing up — the spiritual practice my white evangelical tradition shares with the Latter Day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m talking about door-to-door evangelism.

Most of you reading this have only experienced this from the other side of the door — as the knock-ee rather than as the knock-er. I’ve been on both sides. Neither one is pleasant.

The one positive thing from my experience conducting door-to-door “evangelism” was probably that it made door-to-door political canvassing so much easier for me. Sure, an undecided voter might not welcome a random knock at the door, and, yeah, they might not favor the candidate I’m campaigning for, but even the worst case scenario here isn’t as bad as the essential premise of the conversation you’re trying to have when doing door-to-door evangelism. 

That involves standing on the front porch of a stranger and saying, “Hi. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I know you’re a sinner who deserves to suffer for eternity in Hell.”

... you can kick the boy out of evangelicalism but you cannot completely kick the evangelicalism out of the boy. And so when I think about these secret police masking themselves in their shame — when I think about a group that already understands that they are sinners in desperate need of repentance and salvation — I can’t help but think it’s worth giving this a try.

...  the names and addresses of our secret police should also be treated just as all those Evangelism Explosion training sessions taught us to treat the names and addresses of our “unchurched” neighbors.

We should be knocking on their doors.

We should smile and tell them we’re there with the good news of salvation, because even though they are damnable sinners, repentance and redemption are still available. The repentance and redemption they need are still possible. The salvation they already know they need can still be theirs.

After all, they are already admitting to guilty consciences with the masks and gear ...

... The Bad Guys may choose to continue being the Bad Guys, but we cannot allow them to deceive themselves about the fact that that is what they are choosing.

Our “Evangelism Explosion” training taught us more tactful ways of saying that. But still, that’s what we were saying.

Caveat: The political canvassing training I've had nowadays is, perhaps, a little more sophisticated and a little less ham-handed. The model promoted by the union UniteHERE calls on canvassers at the doors to share, empathetically, what motivates them to do anything so odd as knock at the house of a stranger. "I'm here because I'm afraid a Trump administration might screw up my Social Security ..." for example.

But Fred is onto something. Reaching out directly, non-violently, to the consciences of the agents of a rogue state seems a right idea. Probably not simple or easy, but one right approach among many. Takes some courage, but so does everything these days.

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.

May Day in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

The crowd at Five Corners had a lot of issues with the present regime. Trump 2.0 offers a wide spectrum of harms to be called out.

This family came out to express historic May Day issues. May Day in the United States is descended from Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Market demonstration where cops violently broke up a protesting crowd and the emerging socialist/labor movement called for a general strike. Contemporary oligarchs may drive us there one day.

 

Generalized protest of the Trump regime's crimes was common.

What could be more straight forward?

So was the shout out to horrors past.

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Kamala Harris, once again finding her voice:

She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”

Vineyard folks have not forgotten.

Happy May Day!

Let's keep up the good work. Quite a slide there.

Via The Guardian: They’re the sort of damning reviews that would give any normal person pause for thought. But Trump is not a normal person and is not known for self-reflection. Instead, he ignored the scathing verdicts and immersed himself in the rightwing mirror world, spending most of Tuesday retweeting increasingly hyperbolic praise from Republicans.

“The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

See you at a May Day demonstration. We'll be at one near us. Will you?

We're an unruly and unruled people

After reading at least twenty 100 Days of Trump appraisals of the regime, I think I give my prize for doing the distasteful subject the most justice to historian and opinon writer Jamelle Bouie (gift article).

Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. 

You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.

If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure....  Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings. ..

... MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness. 

Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.

Bouie warns that Trumps' relative failures in his first 100 days are no reason for incautious confidence that we can hold off his attempt, abetted by tech bros, to end our democratic experiment.

Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.

But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.

About ten days ago, I began to sense that people and institutions were pulling themselves together to fight the MAGA authoritarian onslaught. Folks are taking on Tesla, immigration prisons, even the defense of ultra-rich Harvard. We going to be badly damaged in this fight; some people -- as usual those who were always in the most need of support from society -- will not make it to another side. But there is no reason to give up the fight now.

Victorious Canadian leader brings more than sticking it to Trump

I was so glad to pass along that Canada had repudiated Donald Trump in an election in which the American bully had made himself an issue, I didn't do much research on Mark Carney, the guy who led the Liberal Party victory. 

It turns out, according to US environmentalist champion Bill McKibben, Carney is not just some smart, central banker turned politician who grabbed a chance to save his party from electoral purgatory and stick a nationalist finger in Donald Trump's eye: 

... though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England.  (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs. 

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history. 

McKibben credits Carney with helping win the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, the high water mark of international recognition of the planet-wide emergency we are living. 

[Carney] now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years. ...

... I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.

• • •

Karen Kelly pointed me to this updated version of a Canadian nationalist statement even more appropriate to the moment. Enjoy.

Canada strikes back

The election up north demonstrated that our neighbors aren't having any of the Orange Bully. 

This is old, but I think captures the sentiment:

 

Doing democracy

I've never been very good at the necessary task of agitating my own Congresscritter for more action for better policies. I think I've been on two visits to Congressional offices in the last 35 years  -- of course for me the target has been Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi which gives me a sort of an excuse: for most that period her real constituents were not her local voters but more the recalcitrant members of her fractious Democratic caucus. As constituents, we felt a little beside the point and we were.

But I love reading accounts from people newly inspired to do this work of direct democracy. In the present moment, agitating slow poke Democrats and useless Republicans is part of the necessary struggle.

At my core I’m a storyteller. I love probing the past and the present to learn the “story of us” and how these true-to-life tales might inspire us to become better humans.

Dr. Jemar Tisby is an historian of religious faith focused on racial justice and a prolific writer and preacher. But he'd never done a Congressional visit before this past month: 

People Power

I'll be marinating on my time visiting offices of representatives and senators for a long time.

This was precisely what our government was set up to do--provide an avenue where constituents can let the elected officials who represent them know their concerns and have a reasonable expectation of being heard.

In its most basic sense, democracy means "people power."

That day I felt like a person who at least had the power to express my views to the people empowered to make policies.

The experience made the work of the federal government less opaque and intimidating.

At the end of the day, all the bills, all the laws, all the deliberations are done by people.

Regular human beings.

They are imperfect, they have fears, hopes, and worries.

They can also be influenced.

The most frequent refrain I heard throughout my day on Capitol Hill was, "Your voice matters." ...

... when we speak, we disrupt complacency. We remind officials and politicians that the people still have power.

As I looked back at the marble of the Capitol, I felt it again: this is our building, our Congress, our country. Our democracy. And we must never let them forget it.

If we can possibly stand it, more of us need to do it! Or at least call these reps up, frequently.

• • •

Tisby is author of several books. I've just finished reading one as an audio book and looking over the young adult version of the same material snagged from the wonderful Cape Cod library system.

Both tell stories of individuals central to the US Black experience -- central to "doing democracy" in the context of the long freedom struggle -- that may be unfamiliar to most white readers. Tisby is particularly attentive to the roles and accomplishments of women. Highly recommended.

When the people lead, our leaders will follow

It was great to see that House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Cory Booker held a "sit in" on the Capitol steps this Sunday morning to denounce the Trump regime's budget plans. 

“Republicans in Congress are proposing cuts that will take food from children, health care from the sick, and dignity from those already struggling," Booker said. "It's wrong. To stop it, we all must say so — clearly, courageously, and together. Speaking out and speaking up is how we will convince four Republicans in the House and Senate to do the right thing and vote no.” NorthJersey.com

Senator Chris Murphy reported one phase of Democratic Senators' push back.

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. ...

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice ....

Dems don't have the votes to completely stop Republican priorities, but they've gotten around to fighting. Angry constituents in town halls and all those phone calls are making a difference.

Senatorial signs of life follow Cory Booker's 25 hour filibuster at the beginning of the month and Senator Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to check on abducted Marylander Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Several Congressional reps followed after Van Hollen. 

It's notable that Trump doesn't even bother to try implement his wish list by passing laws, instead issuing a blizzard of executive orders. He can't rule with even the pretense of regular process. Republicans have tiny, fractious majorities and couldn't pass most of this stuff. And a multitude of people's lawyers are doing a lot to stymie the executive orders.

Meanwhile Representative Jaime Raskin and Senator Richard Blumenthal are demanding that the big law firms which have capitulated to Trump's threats to their business must reveal what they've promised to our law-breaking president. Legal ethics complaints in the states where they have business could seriously impact their standing; so could the refusal of law students to seek jobs with them. 

Harvard University's vigorous pushback against the Trump regime's attempt to control institution has freed up nearly 500 colleges and universities to affirm their intent to maintain free speech and free inquiry under the First Amendment.

As Josh Marshall has reminded us: All political power is unitary. ... It’s all one thing. Everywhere that Trump/Musk/MAGA meets resistance helps every other form of resistance to tyranny. That's the other side of Republican's "flood the zone with shit" strategy; as the push back grows, they'll find a free people sniping from every side. 

We are doing this. Find a May Day rally near you.

The disappearance of Andry José Hernández Romero

One of the fascinating findings in the slew of polls surfacing reactions to Trump's 100 day bundle of blunders is that people now recognize the name Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The story has broken through of the Maryland sheetmetal worker deported illegally (and in error?) to a Salvadoran torture prison. Kudos to his wife and his lawyer for their continued legal agitation for his return. 

And kudos to Senator Chris Van Hollen who dared to travel to El Salvador to see a person taken from the state he represents. His mission alarmed me; I'm old enough to remember when Congressman Leo Ryan attempted such a mission to the Guyana jungle and was murdered for his pains. 

Following Van Hollen, several other members of Congress have made the trip. They have not been allowed to see the prisoners, but they can help make us all more aware of these kidnapped men.

On of those Congresspeople, Representative Robert Garcia, a gay Democrat from the Long Beach area, is trying particularly to bring light to bear on Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay, 31-year-old Venezuelan makeup. Hernández Romero was classified as a gang member because he has tattoos that say “mom” and “dad” with crowns....

no one ... heard from Hernández Romero, who has been documented to have no history of criminal activity, since March 14.

Jonathan Blitzer, a journalist at The New Yorker, found out a lot about tattoos and young Venezuelans. 

Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who’s reported extensively on criminal groups in Venezuela, published the definitive book on Tren de Aragua. “The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” she told me. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In Rísquez’s view, tattoos are a completely unreliable indicator of someone’s criminal proclivities; rather, they reflect contemporary fashions and socioeconomic class. “Most young people in Latin America these days have tattoos,” she said. ... Rísquez went on, “People get a tattoo because it means something particular to them.”

Andry’s tattoos have an immediate significance to the people in [the small Venezuelan town of] Capacho. For a hundred and eight years, the town has held a special festival for the celebration of Three Kings Day, replete with elaborate theatrical acts, sets, costumes, and casts of dozens. The holiday is observed widely across Venezuela (and indeed throughout much of the Christian world), but the production in Capacho is legendary in the country and has been awarded distinguished status as a national patrimonio, or heritage. “This work represents for the community of Capacho the greatest cultural expression of street theatre,” Jorge Cárdenas, a leader of the Foundation of Reyes Magos of Capacho, told me earlier this week. “To speak of Capacho is to speak of the Reyes Magos.”

Cárdenas has known Andry since he was a boy, when Andry participated in the festival’s program for children. When we spoke, Cárdenas described Andry’s contributions to local theatre, including all of his roles in the festival itself, before leaving me a series of messages brimming with literary and religious detail. Andry was one of the thirteen main actors in the show, a makeup stylist for the others, and the costume designer for nearly two dozen dancers. One of the principal symbols of Three Kings Day is a crown. “Andry is a great lover of the festival, and the two crowns on his wrists are a tribute to his passion for it,” Cárdenas said.

Nobody has been able to speak to Hernández Romero since ICE secretly flew him away.

Andry’s American lawyers are caught in something of a paradox. They’re vocal about sharing the details of his disappearance, because, if he fades from the news, his situation may grow even more dire. Yet Andry is also an asylum seeker. Disclosing the full identity of someone fleeing persecution is inherently risky. ...

[Lindsay] Toczylowski and her colleagues had debated whether disclosing that Andry was gay would make him a target inside the Salvadoran prison. They decided it was pointless to try to hide it, and that maybe it would make the public more sympathetic to his case. Ordinarily, this would be a conversation they could have had with Andry. Under the circumstances, all they could do was discuss it with his mother. She told them, “Do absolutely everything you can to get him out of there.”

Congressman Garcia, himself an immigrant who came to this country as a child from Peru, gets the level of danger to Hernández Romero. 

“He clearly was scared for his life because he was gay,” Garcia said. “And then we picked him up and sent him to this horrific prison. He hasn’t had any access to his family or legal counsel or really anyone.” ...

...  Garcia said the situation is growing more alarming by the day, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s continued use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove immigrants without hearings — even after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency order blocking further deportations under the statute.

“Right now, Trump is still defying the Supreme Court,” Garcia told The Advocate. “He’s doubling down on the idea that Andry is not coming back when the Supreme Court is saying that he should.”

... “We have to highlight his case and make sure people know.” 

The Trump regime would like nothing more than for its victims to simply disappear. We can't let them get away with this.