How will I know I’m special if I don’t have all this?

I had written about the meeting between the nasty guy and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The nasty guy kept pushing the racist lie of white genocide in South Africa and Ramaphosa tried to refute it. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos wrote that the video and paper images the nasty guy used as evidence were not at all what he claimed they were. A field of white crosses was a protest, not a burial ground. Another image was from Congo, not South Africa. And so forth. No, I’m not surprised. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote that U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy was getting mighty annoyed with Department of Justice lawyers. The reason was that the lawyers didn’t give deportees enough time to challenge their deportation. Then the lawyers refused to say which country the were sent to. South Sudan? Djibouti? Or maybe it was Narnia or Atlantis. Sending people to South Sudan is quite bad because the State Department says to avoid it because of armed conflict. DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin said the crimes of these deportees are so uniquely dangerous that no other country would accept them. To that Needham wrote:

Show your work, Tricia. If these are the worst criminals in the world, surely you can easily prove that.

Emily Singer of Kos discussed a new poll by Civiqs for Kos. It shows that 46% of voters say that “bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. is more important than keeping prices low.” But 66% don’t want to be those factory workers. Only 5% said they already work in a factory. That poll was done because Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been saying when manufacturing returns to the US workers would be glad to do the jobs. So what happens if manufacturing is brought onshore but nobody (or not enough people) want the jobs? Are Republicans trying to make life for the poor so difficult they’d be glad to take these jobs? Speaking of which, Singer reported that the One Big Beautiful Bill (I’ve replaced the third word with “ugly” and Singer used “cruel” though I think the best substitute is “brutal”) passed the House by one vote. It now goes to the Senate, where there is Republican opposition. But don’t be surprised if fealty to the nasty guy gets it passed anyway. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Michael Podhorzer of Weekend Reading:

The current backlash against Trump is exactly the outcome we’d expect to see if my long-standing argument is true: that America has an anti-MAGA majority, but not necessarily a pro-Democratic one. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the reality of American politics today is not a “realignment,” wherein the views and values of most ordinary Americans have become fundamentally more aligned with the views of MAGA Republicans. Rather it’s been a “dealignment” from both parties. Voters, increasingly distrustful of institutions and clamoring for substantial change that neither party is delivering, have punished incumbent parties in nine of the past ten elections—a D-R-D-R presidential alternation pattern unseen in over a century.

From Monica Hesse of the Washington Post discussing the nasty guy’s claim of white genocide in South Africa:

“Dead White farmers” was a bizarre fixation in what should have been a serious meeting. In three words, he invented a genocide. And then he spent the rest of the hour creating a different problem. Because every time he insisted that the mainstream media refused to cover the genocide of dead White farmers, he sowed more distrust in journalism. To the point that now, every time an article on the topic doesn’t appear, that in itself will become evidence for this genocide that is not actually happening. So if you came to this column because you Googled “dead White farmers,” here is your mainstream media coverage of the issue. I’m so sorry.

Harry Enten tweeted in response to Musk’s announcement that he will no longer donate to politics:

Why's Musk edging out of politics? Because he's political kryptonite. His net favorable plummeted: +24 pts to -19 pts. (It fell by 126 pts with Dems!) Musk crushed Tesla's popularity (-20 pt net favorable). Trump was done with him (100% drop in Truth Social posts about Musk).

I’m not sure how favorability can fall 126 points. I thought the scale maxed out at 100. In the comments is a cartoon by Dennis Goris. It shows the Capitol dome surrounded by the words:

We remember the poor and sick. As it is written. In the bill. Let us prey.

The caption: “From the book of big and beautiful” Nick Anderson posted a cartoon showing a pregnant woman with “Waste” on her forehead, a child with “Fraud” and an old woman with “Abuse.” The nasty guy, holding a sharpie, says “I told you we could make big spending cuts!” Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit started a discussion with a quote Neil deGrasse Tyson made this week.

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.

Almost two-thirds of Americans can’t afford life necessities. Income for the bottom 60% of Americans declined from 2001 to 2023. Before the pandemic a family earning $75,000 could afford half the homes on the market, now they can afford only 20% of homes. Hartmann talked about the Santa scam. Republicans claimed they were better than the Democratic social safety net by bestowing tax breaks. That was followed by declaring the national debt was a big problem, forcing Democrats to end social programs. The same scam is now being used to hollow out the American government. From the start of the nation until Reagan the federal government was consistent at paying off the national debt, which had only grown through war. The Revolutionary War was paid off in the 1830s. The Civil War was paid off by the end of the 19th century. Paying down WWI was interrupted by the Great Depression, but there was only $17 billion remaining. The debt from WWII was 106% of GDP, but was steadily paid down until Reagan took office. The national debt under Reagan rose by $2.4 trillion. That boosted the economy, masking Reagan’s faults and this plan’s faults. Hartmann said that Jude Wanniski came up with a “Two Santas” plan. As Hartmann described it, quoting Wanniski:

Force the Democrats to “shoot their Santa [of programs like Social Security and Medicaid] in the face.” Whenever a Republican is in the White House, Wanniski argued, Republicans should run up the debt as hard and fast as possible, so when a Democrat is in the White House they can squeal about “the debt our children will inherit! Oh, the humanity!”

Republicans have followed that plan for 44 years. Hartmann included a chart showing the national debt falling after WWII until 1981. It rose under Reagan/Bush I, fell a bit under Clinton, rose again under Bush II, then slowed under Obama, before rising quickly under the nasty guy. Biden’s efforts aren’t shown. By the chart, if Reagan hasn’t slashed taxes and balanced the budget we would have paid off WWII about year 2000. So the entire national debt since then is because of Reagan and Bush tax cuts (and now nasty guy cuts) and the illegal wars of Bush II. This tactic transferred about $50 trillion from the poor to the rich. In 1980 the middle class was about two-thirds of the population and did it on one paycheck. Now about 47% of Americans are middle class and require two paychecks to stay there. So that Big Brutal Bill is damaging education, changed the promotion of democracy to the embrace of dictators, and gutted the social safety net. I had written that the national debt is unsustainable. The reason is the national debt has passed the GDP, the total value of the American economy. I did an online search and found the GDP of America is just under $28 trillion and the national debt is above $36 trillion and the Brutal Bill could push it up to $40 trillion. Then Hartmann gets to his question. Why are Republicans doing this? Did Putin or Xi tell the nasty guy to do it? (Quite possibly.) Greed? Because democracy is outdated? And why is the media saying so little about this? I was a bit surprised that Hartmann keeps saying nobody knows. Commenters to the article give a good try at answering the question: Greed. Power. Commenter mozartsister explained what I had also developed on my own.

I’ve said this before, but my ultimate light bulb moment was when my rich friend took me to lunch in the mahogany-clad dining room at his country club, where the waitress greeting him by name. He said, sweeping his arm around the room, “How will I know I’m special if I don’t have all this?” It was power, it was stuff, but above all it was the deepest need imaginable to prove yourself superior to and more deserving than others. To me, those are the two fundamental belief systems: his, which I think of as authoritarianism, which categorizes people into groups, hierarchies, of more or less worth. And mine, which I think of as humanism, in which all people (and all living beings, actually) fundamentally have innate dignity and worth, i.e. all humans are equal on an existential level. Looking at things this way has been very useful for me in explaining a lot of what’s going on, from white supremacy to dismantling democracy to the Silicon Valley tech bros. Capitalism is based on the “deserving” worldview; democracy is based in the “equality” worldview. They could be more compatible than they are, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope lately.

This is, you know, textbook “Mein Kampf.”

Sunday evening I watched episodes 5 and 6 of Cosmos, the series originated by Carl Sagan in a recreation hosted by Niel deGrasse Tyson. Episode 5 explored the idea that because stars are so far away – sometimes millions of years – by the time the light gets to earth the star may be long dead. So the sky is full of ghosts. The animation of this episode was about William Herschel, a famous astronomer in England. He discovered a binary star and realized the gravity that affected life on earth also operated between all celestial bodies – and everything in the universe. The episode also discussed relativity – no matter the speed of the light source the speed of the light from that source, and every source, is always constant. Then there was a discussion of black holes – we know they’re there because of the gravitational effects on the bodies around it. The episode made an important point. Some branches of Christianity believe the earth was created only 6500 years ago. If that were true we could see nothing further away than 6500 light years away. Our sky would be quite empty. Where episode 5 went big episode 6 went small. It explored the world of the dewdrop. From there it discussed chlorophyll. It said that if we could harness what chlorophyll does we could power all human needs with the ultimate clean energy while sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Then the show went on to flowers and scents, then atoms and molecules. The idea of atoms was theorized 2500 years ago in what is now Turkey. Some of the thinkers of that age created theater and the idea of democracy. They also figured out that things like thunder are the results of natural processes and not punishment for humans. Atoms form molecules and the repertoire of configurations of almost all atoms and the molecules they form are quite small. Crystals make only so many patterns. The lone exception is carbon, where the kinds of molecules it can form are vast. The Supreme Court has adopted a code of ethics! Finally! NPR host A Martínez talked to Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Supreme Court ethics. The good bit is that public pressure had an effect. Frost said:

But I'm also concerned by the lack of an enforcement mechanism and by the suggestion in the opening statement to this code that it's all been a misunderstanding, and they've been following these rules all along, which just isn't true.

They talked about something better, such as legislation to impose oversight. And yes, Congress can impose some things on the Court – it already imposes a budget. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos also reviewed this code of ethics. She came to the same conclusion, though does so in a lot more detail. One example: The existing code for other federal judges says: “A judge shall disqualify himself or herself...” and the new Supreme Court code says, “A justice should disqualify himself or herself...” In both phraeses McCarter added the emphasis. Another section of the code uses phrases, such as a justice should not “knowingly” lend the prestige of the office to private interests. McCarter responds, “Because how often does a justice just stumble into an event not knowing that they’re going to be the star attraction?” Another big problem is a not-quite-explicit exception that says the justices can hang out with their Federalist Society buddies, no problem. The Federalist Society is the highly conservative group that worked to get five of them into their jobs. And hanging out with those pals is a big conflict of interest. On to the big story of the week. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed an article in the New York Times written by Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan. The article reported on one aspect of the nasty guy’s plan for when he is returns to the White House. He will be cracking down on immigration, including rounding up undocumented people, detain them sprawling camps, and deport them. They plan to round up so many they’ll need the help of state National Guard troops, local police, and maybe even the military. He will also restrict visa applications. They plan so many actions that are likely illegal that they would overwhelm the legal system, even though many courts now have many nasty guy loyalists. The effort will be led by white supremacist and former aide Stephen Miller. He’s dismissive of the economic disruption the loss of workers will have on the agriculture, hospitality, or construction industries. The nasty guy and his supporters clearly believe the public will support all this. These measures will feature prominently in his 2024 campaign. Mark Sumner of Kos reported on the nasty guy’s vile and alarming Veterans Day speech that mirrors Nazi propaganda. Sumner wrote:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said. He followed by saying that the threat from Russia, China, and North Korea was “less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”

Two important things to note. First, the word “vermin” was used by both Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize opponents, at the time mostly Jews. Second, the praise for dictators and the claim that the threat is from within. Sumner then contrasted the headlines of the NYT with that of the Washington Post. On NYT: “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.” On WaPo: “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing Hitler, Mussolini.” Walter Einenkel of Kos posted a video of a conversation between Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC and Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University and the author of “How Fascism Works.” They discussed that Veterans Day speech. The key phrase came from Stanley:

I mean, this is straight—it doesn't echo “Mein Kampf.” This is, you know, textbook “Mein Kampf.”

An Associated Pres article posted on Kos discussed the nasty guy’s plans for what he would do if he gets back into the White House. The article says the campaign and allied groups are “assembling policy books with detailed plans.” An overview of the plans: Dismantle the deep state – fire all federal employees felt insufficiently loyal to him, including firing officials that leak to reporters. There are laws to fire civil service employees for political reasons, but the first order would be to reclassify all employees as political appointees. Immigration, which is described above, though this adds ending birthright citizenship, which is part of the constitution. Trade – give himself authority to impose a tariff on any country that imposes one on us. Also, there is a plan to phase out China’s access to the US market. Foreign Policy – End the war in Ukraine, at least by cutting off US aid. Also, reevaluate NATO membership and stand with Israel. Transgender rights – ask Congress to pass a law specifying there are “only two genders,” creating bans on gender affirming care. Energy – “Drill, baby, Drill.” Education – both terminate the Department of Education and have influence over all schools and colleges. That includes abolish tenure, ban vaccine and mask mandates, promote prayer in schools, impose a “patriotic education” so kids don’t hate their country, promote the nuclear family with proper roles for men and women, and train teachers to carry weapons. Homelessness – there won’t be any, though little is said about where the currently unhoused will go. Public Safety – send the National Guard to cities “struggling with violence.” I’m sure that’s the Fox News depiction of the phrase. Also, shoplifters should expect to be shot. Hunter of Kos works from an article on Axios to add how much the Heritage Foundation has been a part of these plans. They’re the ones developing Project 2025, their name for the plans outlined above. Their policy book is already over 900 pages. One part of the plan not mentioned so far is a purge of the military of those who prioritize the Constitution over the nasty guy.

Strip out all of the people who objected, both in government and in the military itself, and a second coup becomes both plausible and winnable. This is not merely Trumpism. If it were Trumpism, then it would be Trump proposing the agenda and his underlings carrying it out. Trump himself, however, has been generally indifferent to policy except as means of riling his far-right base; it is the conservatives around him who have shaped that agenda and pressed for Trump to adopt it as his own. These four planks are the Heritage Foundation’s plan to unmake America, forming a one-party government that sees laws as unconstraining and fungible. Conservatism has fully collapsed into a fascist movement, and Trump is merely the tool. When he is gone, they will find another.

Einenkel reported that Joe Scarborough, host of “Morning Joe,” talked to Brian Klass, professor of global politics at the University College London. Here is part of what Klass said,

I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don't know how to say this more clearly. We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism, and people are not waking up to this. And the Constitution is not written with magical ink. It is protected by the people who make brave choices during moments of political peril and we are in one of those moments. So the question is, do voters wake up as well? Because our political class is not rising to the challenge. They're not distancing themselves and the Republican Party from this rhetoric. They're just sort of pretending like it doesn't exist.

About that political class not rising to the challenge. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about the Republican response to that speech. Some tried to compare it to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” though she used it as a call to vote, not a call to exterminate. Others refused to comment. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted a bit from the NYT mentioned above:

He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. ... Since Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re-elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.

Note the millions per year. Kev also quoted Philip Bump of WaPo reporting on PRRI’s annual American Values Survey.

Included among the questions was one that specifically addressed the question of authoritarianism: Did they think that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction? About 2 in 5 respondents said they did. That included nearly half of Republicans. ... Less than half of respondents objected to the idea that we need a strong leader, even if the leader bends existing rules. A plurality of conservatives endorsed that idea. Less than half of respondents similarly expressed concern that the government might want to muffle critical reporting with a plurality of conservatives again expressing a lack of concern about that possibility.

In another pundit roundup Kev quoted Jamelle Bouie of NYT:

Americans are obsessed with hidden meanings and secret revelations. This is why many of us are taken with the tell-all memoirs of political operatives or historical materials like the Nixon tapes. We often pay the most attention to those things that are hidden from view. But the mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.

I’ve heard more from that guy, what’s-his-name, who is trying to challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination. There are those upset with Biden’s support of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and vow never to vote for him. And there are all those mentions of Biden’s age. All this is implying, sometimes outright saying, that this time Biden can’t win against the nasty guy. But I don’t see any other Democrat of national stature, including what’s-his-name, who could accomplish what these people say Biden can’t do. And all of the above shows how critical it is the nasty guy loses again. So I will vote for the Democratic nominee, including if it is Biden. And we keep repeating that until the MAGA movement goes away (which will be a really long time). After all that gloom we need something lighter. On Sunday mornings I listen to the first hour of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. A feature of the hour is the puzzle. In a 6-7 minute segment host Ayesha Rascoe and NPR puzzle master Will Shortz will answer a challenge from last week, bring on a guest who correctly answered the challenge and ask them to play an on-air puzzle, then post a challenge for listeners to answer in the next week. Sometimes I can say the answers before the guest, sometimes not. This past week the segment with Shortz ran 15 minutes. Yeah, there was a puzzle. Then Rascoe and Shortz talked about his second passion of table tennis. And then they talked about Shortz’ love life. He’s gay. For a while he didn’t want to be gay. Then for a long time he was content to be single. Then at age 69 love found him. He’s now in his mid 70s and in a happy relationship.

Making territory uninhabitable

My Sunday night viewing was two episodes of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The set of 13 episodes on 4 DVDs was a Christmas gift, probably in 2014 (when the series was released). Kind of my speed to get around to actually watching it almost eight years later. This is an update of the series Carl Sagan produced for television in 1980. Since one of the fleeting credits of this series was for Sagan and Ann Druyan, both authors of the original series, I wonder how much of it is Tyson speaking Sagan’s lines with better visuals. There was a moment that was definitely not Sagan – Tyson, as a youth, visited Sagan, which inspired Tyson’s career in science and explaining science. Yes, the visuals are stunning. A great deal of effort – and a long list of companies – went into creating them. I did see at least part of the original series and, from what I remember, some of the visuals were primitive, such as Sagan pushing pieces of paper around a table. So the visuals are a big improvement. The one exception is the sequences showing animated people. They’re definitely not state of the art, even for 2014 – if they could create such stunning visuals on computers they could generate better animation. In the two episodes I’ve watched, each about 45 minutes, I did learn a few things, though a lot I already knew. There was a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian era (the first of five, but he didn’t get into three of them, the fifth was the meteor that ended the dinosaurs). He explained how humans guided the evolution of wolves into dogs. This is a case where adorableness was a factor in which dogs were allowed to breed. He also explained the evolution of the eye. Yeah, these two episodes were enjoyable. However, I’ve got another 7:45 in viewing to go. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos quoted the story of the battle between Abimelech and Shechem from Judges 9:42-45 in the bible as an example of war combatants going as far as making territory uninhabitable. This biblical passage is about 3000 years old. The story of Anitta doing something similar to Hattusa is from 3700 years ago. Yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time. The modern equivalent of that is mines, things that go boom when pressure is put on them, such as stepping on or driving a tank over. “There are an estimated 80 million landmines from past wars still buried in battlefields around the world.” And there are hundreds of thousands now on either side of the front lines. And since a lot of the battlefield was fields and soon will be again farmers will have to deal with mines.

Why are some areas along the front line so incredibly stable? Mines. Why are most advances by either Ukraine or Russia so slow even when it seems like they have an opportunity to break into the enemy backfield and run for the end zone? Mines. Why are some villages not just “in dispute” but essentially unoccupied after they were fought over for weeks? Mines. They don’t get much talked about. They’re not at all “sexy” when compared to tanks, or drones, or missiles, or long range artillery. But mines are doing a lot to shape the battlefield in Ukraine. Because they are almost always there, and anyone who forgets this for too long, will get a reminder. Russia is salting the earth in Ukraine, and getting that land back is one helluva a dangerous job.

Removing mines from areas no longer under immediate threat will be full time employment for a large number of Ukrainians. Kos of Kos started with the military definition of culmination, the point at which a military force is no longer able to perform its operations, the time an attacking force can no longer continue its advance. Kos suspects Russia has reach that point. For example, in Donbas there has been no Russian advance in weeks and two months since the last significant victory. Kos reviewed each area of the war Kharkiv, Izyum, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. In each one the story is Russia doing very little attacking and not advancing with Ukraine making gains in each region. This includes raising the Ukrainian flag over Visokopillya, which used to be a Russian stronghold and command center. Kos related the tale of Ozerne in the Luhansk region. Russia had spent a long time taking all the territory on one side of the Siversky Donetsk River. Ukraine sent a raiding party across the river and into Ozerne. They found the place empty. They visited the nearby villages of Brisivka and Yampil – also empty. The villages were unguarded. They took selfies and left. Kos cautions that we can’t quite call them liberated yet. If Ukraine can, they would have kept the incident quiet and launched a bigger operation. They still might. In the meantime this is a big propaganda win. David Neiwert of Kos discussed a report by Mackenzie Ryan of The Guardian. It says the Patriot Front, one of the far right gangs ready to do violence for their cause, is more like a pyramid scheme that is doing quite well at enriching its young leader at the expense of its recruits. Of course, its operations are quite authoritarian. Underlings must buy the propaganda literature, which has a premium price. Mid level leaders keep a lot of data on their underlings, such as eating habits and fitness. And – the scary part – they are required to participate in a certain number of “actions” – including public vandalism. But, hey, they get to own the libs. Aysha Qamar of Kos wrote about the flooding in Pakistan. It was a difficult article to write because she has Pakistani roots. Floods cover about a third of the country. The resulting lake is visible from space. In addition to the 1,100 dead (I’ve heard it is now over 1,300) and a half million in displacement camps, there are 4 million acres of destroyed crops, 800 thousand dead livestock, a million homes lost, and 2,200 miles of roads destroyed. Because of poor sanitation illness and malnutrition are rising. About 73,000 women will give birth in the next month and the women and their newborns are at risk. Damage is estimated to be $10 billion. It isn’t just the rain. Pakistan’s mountains have over 7,200 glaciers, more than any other country. This year the glacier melt season, stronger due to climate change, coincided with the early monsoons.

The most heartbreaking aspect of this situation is that while climate change impacts the entire world, Pakistan currently faces a crisis bigger than any other country despite having contributed very little to global carbon emissions.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Fair Vote discussing the recent election in Alaska, which Sarah Palin lost. A couple days ago I had written that since ranked choice voting was used in that election Republicans will try to say RCV was how the election was rigged, and voters consider it enough of a mystery that conspiracy theories can thrive. Fair Vote showed voters understand RCV just fine, they got ample instruction, they report it is simple, and nearly two thirds of them want to keep using it. Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post who discussed Biden’s speech last week in which he called MAGA Republicans wanting to tear down Democracy. Republicans said Biden was angry, divisive, political, hateful, and depicted the Republican party as the enemy. What they are not saying, and they should be asked about, is that Biden was wrong. Dworkin also included a tweet by Jennifer Rubin:

Alas, the mainstream media cannot seem to process the notion that defense of democracy is not “partisan.” By adopting that frame (and rending garments over Biden’s defense of democracy), they implicitly make Biden’s point.