Cultural decadence, feminism, and ladies with too many cats

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard for its legal obligations. “The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” he wrote. Cooper also concluded that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by unilaterally adding Trump’s name to the center. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, he said.

The board will appeal. They also said the Center really does need renovations (though I’m sure the place probably doesn’t need to close for two years to do them and doesn’t need to expose the building’s steel skeleton in the process). In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Lauren Gepford wrote in her own Substack about the Democratic Party:

We keep treating every election loss like a communications failure or a leadership failure when the deeper reality is that the Democratic Party apparatus itself no longer functions coherently enough to sustain a strong national brand. The “party brand” problem still deserves the #1 spot it held a decade ago. But branding isn’t just slogans and ads. A political brand is the external expression of an institution’s internal reality. And right now, the internal reality of the Democratic Party is fragmentation, bureaucracy, process obsession, and organizational incoherence. I spent 16 years in Democratic politics, from volunteering for Obama in 2008 to serving as a state party executive director and later executive director of a national party-aligned organization that coordinated with 40+ state parties and 500+ local parties in 2024. Somewhere along that journey, I lost about 90% of my clarity around what the Democratic Party actually is, what it means, and what its purpose is supposed to be — and that’s a problem.

The Bulwark has an article about Ken Paxton winning big in the Texas primary for the US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges. You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John.

Dana Dubois of Blue Amp discussing the nasty guy’s administration calling on women to have more babies. Yes, the birth rate is way down and the nation has an interest to maintain a healthy birth rate.

And yet, here we are. Teen pregnancy rates are down, and Republicans think it’s a bad thing. Young adults are delaying marriage and parenthood. And rather than asking why Americans might feel hesitant about bringing children into this particular moment in history, the pronatalist MAGA right has decided the problem is cultural decadence, feminism, career women, and ladies with too many cats. Women need to log off Slack, put on prairie dresses, go full tradwife and start making babies again, I guess. Except many young Americans are having the exact opposite reaction. And can you blame them? If you wanted to design a society specifically engineered to make people feel terrified of parenthood, you would probably build something pretty close to modern America.

Kos of Kos discussed how weak the nasty guy is, including politically. Kos then highlighted stories from the week that show how deep that weakness is. He concludes:

Trump doesn’t care about Americans’ financial struggles. He doesn’t care about his party’s political future. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned with governing. He cares only about grifting and building monuments to himself. Republicans are trapped following a weak, feeble, self-absorbed man who mistakes loyalty for leadership and ego for strength. They can’t possibly suffer enough because of it.

In an article that’s been hiding in my browser tabs since last September Alex Samuels of Kos discussed why so many Republican voters think the nasty guy is more liberal than he is. Samuels establishes how not liberal he is. This blog has been doing the same for years and hundreds of posts.

And yet, a sizable share of Republicans still see Trump very differently. A late August YouGov poll shows just how off the mark GOP voters are about his record. According to the survey, 35% of Republicans think Trump supports raising the minimum wage, 45% believe he backs stronger worker protections, 26% say he favors higher corporate taxes, and just 29% think he’d raise taxes on the wealthy.

I wonder how much those numbers have changed in the last nine months. In contrast, Democrats and independents have a much more accurate view of the nasty guy. Samuels quoted polls that support that. Whether or not they agree with a position a Democratic politician takes they tend to know what that position is.

So why the misperception? Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, said it comes down to polarization and “expressive bias.” “I imagine what’s happening among many Republicans is that they start with the notion that they are supporters of Trump,” Reeher told Daily Kos. “Then, when they are asked what he wants to do in those specific policy areas, they choose what they would like to see happen, and assume that’s also what Trump wants to do, because they support Trump.” That’s the polarization effect at work. Expressive bias takes it further. Popular policies—like raising the minimum wage or taxing corporations—are often attributed to Trump by Republicans who want to reinforce their support.

Rheeler also said some supporters may make a connection that doesn’t exist, such assuming if the nasty guy supports this thing he also supports that. And that whole bit about the 2020 election being stolen wasn’t about belief in fraud but about signaling allegiance.

That’s what makes Republicans’ perception of Trump so revealing. If GOP voters truly believe he’s more liberal than he is, it suggests two things: Either Republicans want policies like higher wages and stronger worker protections but don’t realize Trump opposes them, or they don’t know enough about his record to notice the gap between rhetoric and reality.

So perhaps Republicans should be for higher wages and stronger worker protections too? Most voters don’t understand the details of issues and don’t know how the policies of the two major parties differ. That means there is room for misperceptions and loyalty. Also from last September Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Jeff Selingo. He’s been reporting on college admissions and compiled it into the book Dream School: Finding The College That's Right For You. Martin said she had applied to four schools. Selingo said he had done the same. So why are people now applying to 30 schools? Selingo said:

Well, I've worked in and around higher ed for nearly 30 years, and I could say this with certainty that we kind of lost our way. We don't think about purpose anymore in higher ed. We think about prestige. And so what's happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of applications filed to the most selective colleges and universities have gone from about 600,000 applications to nearly 2 million applications.

This is even though the size of the freshman class has stayed the same. Selingo’s point then is to say the most prestigious college may not be the best for a particular student. They may enjoy, learn more, and be supported more at a less selective college. What caught my attention in the discussion is students and parents are looking at the college or university in terms of prestige, in how it improves their place in the social hierarchy, instead of for the education.

Just about perfect, as conspiracy theories go

Just before my trip I finished the book Southernmost by Silas House. It opens with the Cumberland River flooding and (of course) I thought a lot about the recent flooding in central Texas. I had thought the Cumberland River would be near the Cumberland Gap in western Maryland, but it actually flows through Nashville and much of the length of Tennessee. The main character is Asher, pastor at a rural church a ways downriver of Nashville. He and wife Lydia have a son Justin, nine years old. In the flood Asher and Justin rescue a gay couple, Jimmy and Stephen. Lydia won’t let them stay at the house where Justin can watch them. Justin is described as sensitive, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Lydia wants to toughen him up and Asher sees no need to do that. Asher is also thinking about his brother Luke, who is gay and was run off by their parents. As a critical moment Asher turned his back on his brother. Jimmy and Stephen try out Asher’s church but the congregation condemns them. Asher realizes he has been preaching judgment when he should be preaching love and acceptance. But the congregation understands God through judgment and refuses Asher’s change in direction. Even Lydia rejects the change; her upbringing is too strong. Asher sees he is losing everything but does not want to lose Justin. He also doesn’t want Justin to learn the judgmental attitudes of his mother. He ends up doing something rash and stupid. The rest of the novel is about how that plays out. While a gay couple is a catalyst to the story, they make only a few brief appearances. Luke appears and only briefly mentions his lover. So this isn’t a story about gay people. It is about straight people coming to terms with how gay people are treated. And about coming to terms with the nature of God and with making a mistake. I enjoyed this book. Asher genuinely cares for Justin. My Sunday movie was Maestra. I had heard of this movie a year ago and only recently found it on Netflix. The name is too similar to more popular shows for good internet searching. The competition La Maestra was established to promote female orchestral conductors. The first one was in Paris in March 2022. This is a documentary about five of the women contestants – Mélisse, originally from Paris, but currently with a conducting job in Iowa City. Tamara from America. Anna from Krakow, Poland and the daughter of a conductor. Zoe from Athens. We get to know the lives of these women in their home countries. We don’t meet the fifth one, Ustina from Ukraine, until just before the competition begins. That’s understandable because the competition was one month after Russia’s invasion. The only one of the judges I recognize is Marin Alsop, a female conductor what had made a big name for herself in Baltimore and does a lot of mentoring of female conductors. In documentaries like this I wonder how they select which contestants to feature. Do they pick a few and hope they win? Do they pick the ones that agree to have cameras in their faces? Do they follow several more contestants than appear in the film and then include the ones that do well? The women talk about issues that face female conductors. The first is the reason why the contest was created – 97% of conductors are men. They wonder whether pregnancy will put a career on hold for a few years and would they be able to take a gig wile breastfeeding. They are told their gestures are too big or that they should smile more and they wonder whether a male conductor would be told the same thing. At the end we are told the contest allowed this woman to be offered this opportunity and that woman was able to take that job, a step up from what they did before. They also said the contest created a community of fellow conductors, less interested in competing and more interested in collaborating. In last Thursday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic discussing the MAGA revolt over the refusal to release the Epstein files.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga is just about perfect, as conspiracy theories go. At its core, it’s about a cabal of corrupt billionaires, politicians, and celebrities exploiting children on a distant island—catnip for online influencers and QAnon types who have bought into any number of outlandish stories. Yet for such a dark conspiracy theory, there’s a great deal we know about Epstein’s life and crimes. There are unsealed court transcripts, flight records, victim statements. His black book has been reported on, giving the public access to names of people Epstein is thought to have associated with (though some have said they don’t know why he had their information). There’s real investigative reporting, much of it from the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, who spoke with detectives and victims and provided a fuller account of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and the attempts to downplay his crimes. Brown also credits the police officers who continued to press on their own investigation as federal officials seemed to wave it away. The case is real and horrifying, which gives life to all the wild speculation: If this is true, why not that? ... Whatever happens next will be a defining moment for Trump. However strange it seems to measure the Epstein conspiracy theory against, say, the president’s approach to tariffs or his bombing of Iran, this is the stuff Trump’s mythology is based on. Trump has positioned himself as an outsider who shares enemies with his base—namely, elites. It hasn’t mattered to his supporters that Trump is an elite himself; the appeal, and the narrative, is that Trump wants to punish the same people his supporters loathe. In appearing to bury the Epstein list—which, again, may or may not exist—by calling it a “hoax” and pinning it to his “PAST supporters,” Trump is pushing up against the limits of this narrative—as well as his ability to command attention and use it to bend the world to his whims. If Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem can successfully spin the Epstein debacle into a conspiracy theory that helps them, or if they can make the story stop, it would suggest once again that his grip on the party and its base is total: an impenetrable force field no bit of reality can puncture.

And if they can’t successfully spin it? David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times discussed what is known about the Epstein mess, which is quite a bit. Then:

Almost none of this information has satisfied those seeking it, or those seeking still more. And really, how could it? As with so many contemporary conspiracies, the known picture is expansive and uncomfortable enough, with abundant detail arrayed like so much proverbial red yarn. But the logic of paranoid thinking demands ever more cycles of disclosure and running epicycles of analysis. (This is among the many ways it is an extremely good match for the age of social media.) And what is missing in the Epstein story isn’t exactly more information — it’s more meaning. Is there more to see here, beyond the striking fact of a suspiciously wealthy and curiously well-connected sex offender? Or perhaps less, with Epstein turning out to have been more a shady influence hustler and savvy estate planner than some world-historical man of mystery? We get a classic conspiracy theory, we’re often told, when disempowered people try to make sense of a disordered world, seizing on a story that gives them a comforting sense of control, at least as analysts of an otherwise overwhelming system producing improbable or inscrutable outcomes.

In the comments of Sunday’s pundit roundup are a good cartoon and meme about the Epstein mess. The cartoon was from Marc Murphy. It is titled “The Real Epstein List” and shows a dozen female faces with black bars across the eyes to prevent identification with their names and ages, which range from 14-16. Murphy added:

This is the list. I hate that it falls to me to make this as clear as I can. Every sex act with these children was rape. Rape. It’s a moral and leadership and political problem, yes. But before all of these, it was a rape.

Murphy said it because, alas, the media sources I’m exposed to (and I can’t imagine any other source doing any better) ignore the underage girls that are why this is a scandal. A meme posted by exlrrp shows the nasty guy and Epstein, each with an arm around the waist of a woman. The text says, “Wow I can’t believe Epstein killed himself before realizing it was all a hoax.” That sentence is attributed to Elon Musk. In today’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Dan Pfeiffer of Message Box discussing why he changed his opinion on the nasty guy’s involvement in the Epstein case. The full article explains his reasoning.

Trump’s behavior is so bizarre, so unhinged, and so counter to his short-term interests that the most likely explanation for his actions is that Trump either believes or knows that he is mentioned in the Epstein files in ways that are even more damaging than the blowback he is getting for not releasing the files. This is, of course, speculation. There is no evidence that Trump was an Epstein “client.”

Congressman Brendan F Boyle, writing in The Bulwark:

The question that will soon be before my party is: Should we provide our votes to fund the government—and they need our votes—knowing that Republicans may very well undo, on a strictly partisan basis, any deal we’ve made with them? I certainly don’t speak for every Democrat, but I believe we must be prepared not to do so. No one wants a shutdown, but agreeing to a deal that can be revoked whenever Trump demands it isn’t responsible. It only teaches the other side that they can do it again and again. Guided by Russell Vought, Donald Trump has set out to seize complete control over federal spending. Meanwhile, the administration is already impounding—that is, illegally withholding—billions in congressionally approved funds for public services and infrastructure across the country. We’re already in a slow-motion government shutdown. We cannot allow this blatant power grab to continue. We need to ask ourselves: Is Congress going to defend its responsibility to set and safeguard federal spending? Or are we just going to roll over?

I think this is an issue because a budget vote can be filibustered and a rescission vote to cancel previously approved spending can’t be. If I have that right then my earlier writing of a couple months ago about the death of the filibuster was not accurate. Reporting during the passage of the Big Brutal Bill also implied the filibuster is still alive. In last Friday’s Cheers and Jeers column for Kos Bill in Portland, Maine quoted late night commentary. Here’s one:

"This really highlights Trump’s dilemma. He’s desperate to tamp down the drama, but his entire career has only taught him how to heighten the drama. You can’t spend your whole life as the messy b*tch from a reality show and then suddenly say, ‘Can we have some decorum here, please?’ ” —The Daily Show's Jordan Klepper

Brian Mann of NPR went to Santiago, Chile to explore the country’s low birth rate, much lower than in the US, though the US rate is dropping and many of the reasons are the same. The birth rate in Chile is 1.6, well below the 2.1 rate of a stable population. Many social systems – the economy, labor market, and pensions – are based on a new generation big enough to replace the older ones. These systems will have problems if the new generation is notably smaller. Some of the reasons for the low birth rate: Younger women want fewer kids or don’t want kids at all, seeing them as a burden and great expense. Or they are delaying having kids until later in life after they are well established in their careers. To them being a mother means a loss of freedom and a loss of body autonomy. The number of women earning college degrees and entering the workforce is rising. They are rejecting the idea that the purpose of a woman is to give birth to and take care of children. They have almost erased teen pregnancy in the last 20 years. Immigration could relieve some of the problems of a low birth rate. But Chile is following the US opinion that immigration, even from elsewhere in South America, is seen as an invasion. They fear what makes the Chilean national character will be extinguished. Of course, conservative political leaders decry the loss of the mother-child bond. They propose policies to encourage women to have more children. The influential Catholic Church also preaches motherhood. Women respond by saying the government and the Church will not change their decision.

Big lies move like viruses in the culture

Kos of Daily Kos discussed why the nasty guy, the vice nasty, Musk, and many of their associates are calling for white women to produce more babies. Musk is even using the term “population collapse.” To keep the population steady, the fertility rate needs to be about 2.1 children per woman. But the fertility rate for every ethnic group in America except Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (2.24) ranges from 1.97 for Hispanic to white at 1.57 to Asian at 1.35. There are reasons why a declining population is a problem: A shrinking workforce leads to economic stagnation and a smaller tax base cuts into the needs of an aging population such as Social Security and Medicare. Innovation is done mainly by the young before they get stuck in “It’s always been done this way.” Smaller population lowers rural property values now and will soon affect cities. The population decline could be fixed by immigration – the solution that conservatives hate the most because most immigrants aren’t white. Immigration is also best for the world population that is way too high. Fertility rates are low because of Republican policies that care about babies only before they are born. The policies they oppose include: Day care support. Health care support, including Medicaid. Abortion care. Paid maternity leave. Promoting vaccines. School lunches. Help to pay for college. Livable wages. Kos says liberals oppose a piece too, that being affordable housing, to which liberals say Not In My Back Yard. All of those are reasons why fertile adults choose to have one or no children. Instead of addressing those issues the nasty guy and friends are proposing: Scholarship support for the parents. $5,000 cash “baby bonus” paid to mothers after delivery. Programs to teach women the best time to conceive. A “National Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children. They’re not serious about addressing the problem. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans love torture. Yes, Willis establishes the premise. Two planeloads of deportees, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, were sent to the CECOT prison in El Salvador known for its violence. And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went there in late March to be photographed in front of prisoners to show what a badass she pretends to be. In 2017 the nasty guy joked to police officers in New York they should abuse people they arrest. Bush II is known for the “enhanced interrogation” in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Willis asks, if torture has been proven to be ineffective in fighting crime and terrorism, why do conservatives still embrace the barbaric techniques? Willis answers:

Conservatism is weak. Problems like immigration, terrorism, and crime are complex. There is no magical button to make the fallout from these issues disappear. These are systemic issues that have to be addressed from multiple angles, which sometimes involves diplomacy, science, study, and reason. Conservatism would rather tell the public that the bad people will go away as long as they act “tough” instead of addressing root causes, which sometimes can indicate that the United States’ actions created the problem or made the problem worse. The right would rather just back torture and abuse—particularly if the subjects in question have brown skin.

Conservatives love to use strong solutions to show liberal weakness, even though the liberal approach has made progress on many big issues

It’s weak to resort to abuse and torture and posing in front of incarcerated people to get clout with the in-crowd. What is stronger is standing up against abuse and championing human rights.

I feel Willis doesn’t get to the real issue. Republicans claim a higher level in the social hierarchy. People who are obsessed with their position in the hierarchy oppress the levels below them. And torture is very useful in that. Getting to a browser tab that’s been there a while. In a pundit roundup for Kos posted on April 1, Chitown Kev quoted Ian Bogost of The Atlantic discussing the ways the nasty guy has cut billions in federal grants to universities. That has prompted universities to cut staff or freeze hiring and cut back on graduate admissions. Deportations have made international students and faculty scared, lowering foreign admissions which tend to pay full price.

Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination. Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.

Historian David Blight wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the executive order demanding the Smithsonian Institution make some changes. I heard about these demands when they were issued and mentioned them in passing. Now I have a way to share a bit more.

The order’s repeated invocation of the Smithsonian Institution echoes now-familiar right-wing goals outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere: ending the alleged “woke” agendas on race and gender, creating “parents’ rights” and school choices and promoting history aligned with founders’ “values.” According to the president, “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then comes that penetrating epithet, the order’s organizing logic: the desire to end the “revisionist movement” carried out by unnamed historians. [...] The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites. [...] Big lies move like viruses in the culture, and though we do have evidence, facts and ethics on our side, there are no vaccines. The crude intent of this order is to further break institutions and to silence historians.

That paragraph about “objective facts” being replaced by “distorted narrative driven by ideology” sounds very much like projection – accusing opponents of doing what they are doing. This is a day for pundit roundups. This second one is from last Saturday and is by Greg Dworkin. He quoted EJ Dionne of The New Republic:

The most conspicuous moment of truth has been for Trump’s supporters in big business and other advocates of a loosely regulated free market. They thought they could get what they wanted out of Trump, mainly lower taxes and less regulation, without having to worry about his very explicit campaign promises to impose tariffs, let alone to do so in a madcap way that now threatens their own wealth. They couldn’t imagine that Trump would happily wreak such havoc in the national and global economies or demolish the entire post–World War II economic system. Why did they miss this? The fact that Trump lies regularly and has few fixed principles has, perversely perhaps, been a source of his political strength. Those who rally to him fool themselves into thinking they can have Trump à la carte. They assume he really means his pledges to policies they like and that he’s lying to the masses when he promises policies they don’t like. All the old nonsense about taking Trump “seriously but not literally” was a way for his apologists to assume he couldn’t really mean the more outlandish things he said. His supporters in business and among the wealthy like to view themselves as gimlet-eyed realists, so the ease with which they were bamboozled is quite remarkable—and is easily measured.

A Ukraine peace deal, though stalled, is still in the news. So this tweet by Ruth Deyermond from last Friday is still appropriate:

Trump admin threats to abandon "peace deal" negotiations would be more worrying if they'd ever shown the slightest interest in actually helping to achieve peace in Ukraine, instead of trying to compel a ceasefire on Russia's terms while grabbing Ukrainian assets.

Paul Offit of Beyond the Noise:

RFK Jr. believes many weird things about the causes, treatment, and prevention of infectious diseases. These false beliefs might seem disparate and unrelated, but they’re not. They’re all rooted in a single belief described on pages 285-288 of his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. In short, RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in the germ theory. He believes in something called the miasma theory. The miasma theory is a long-abandoned medical theory that holds that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors (i.e., miasmata) that are generated by rotting organic matter, such as trash sitting out on the street. According to the miasmists, diseases aren’t passed from one person to another; rather, they are the product of poor hygiene and sanitation.

I first heard about the miasma theory way back in November of 2009 when I read and discussed the book The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. It is about how physician John Snow and cleric Henry Whitehead figured out the cause of the 1854 London cholera outbreak. At the time the miasma theory was used to explain disease outbreak. The sleuthing of Snow and Whitehead to trace the source of the outbreak to a water pump contaminated by bacteria was quite remarkable for the day. That prompted London to create an adequate sewer system, though that took about a decade. Dworkin also quoted a tweet by Craig Fuller:

Many truckers I've spoken with don't realize how quickly container volumes have collapsed. Starting in May, port freight out of California will be almost eliminated. Its going to be a bloodbath in dray, followed by intermodal, and then a collapse in I-20 & I-40 trucking.

The pundit roundup for Sunday was assembled by Kev, who quoted Rosemary (Marah) Al-Kire, Clara L. Wilkins, and Michael Pasek writing for The Conversation.

Our 2024 research, as well as other scholars’ work, suggests that people’s beliefs about anti-Christian discrimination are tied with their attitudes about race. These studies suggest that when politicians talk about anti-Christian bias, it does more than signal a concern and commitment to Christians – it can also serve as a signal of white solidarity. Even though they remain the largest religious and racial groups, white Americans and Christian Americans have both declined as a proportion of the U.S. population. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Christian Americans has decreased from 78% to 63%, and the percentage of white Americans has decreased from 69% to 60%. White Christians now account for less than 50% of the country. Many scholars have argued that, at the root, some white and Christian Americans feel threatened by these demographic shifts. Increasing secularization and other cultural changes have added to some white Christians’ sense that their identity is under attack. According to FBI data, however, only 3% of hate crimes over the past five years targeted Christians. In comparison, 14% targeted Jews, Muslims or Sikhs – groups that make up just 3% of the population. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 55% of white Americans believe discrimination against white people is as much of a problem as discrimination against minority groups. Meanwhile, 60% of white evangelicals say that Christians in the U.S. face discrimination.

Timothy Snyder writing for his “Thinking About...” Substack on the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In just three months, the Trump people have made the unthinkable much more likely. They have created the conditions for terrorism, and thus for terror management. This is true at several levels. Most obviously, they have debilitated the services that detect terrorist threats and prevent attacks: [the CIA, FBI, DHS, and NSA]. The Musk-Trump people run national security, intelligence, and law enforcement like a television show. The entire operation of forcible rendition of migrants to a Salvadoran concentration camp was based upon lies. It is not just that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly apprehended. The entire thing was made for television. Its point was the creation of the fascist videos. But this is a media strategy, meant to frighten Americans. And a media strategy does not stop actual terrorists. It summons them. Terrorism is a real risk in the real world. The constant use of the word to denote unreal threats creates unreality. And unreality inside ket (sic) institutions degrades capability. Security agencies that have been trained to follow political instructions about imaginary threats do not investigate actual threats. Fiction is dangerous. Treating the administration’s abduction of a legal permanent resident as a heroic defense against terror is not only mendacious and unconstitutional but also dangerous.

In the comments of Wednesday’s roundup are several more cartoons commemorating the death of Pope Francis. One by Steve Greenberg and posted by paulpro shows a smiling Francis and the words, “Pope Francis was really a DEI hire. Devotion, Empathy, Inclusion.” Also posted by paulpro is a cartoon by Antonio Rodriguez Garcia showing Francis on his way to heaven. In one hand is a soccer ball and the other hand is pulling a carryon bag with the Palestinian and LGBTQ rainbow flags. Way down in the comments Sotto Voce posted a cartoon by B. Smaller that had been printed in the New Yorker. It shows a woman talking to a young man. “Just remember, Mr. Big Fancy Libertarian, no one is a self-made man to their mother.” I’ve been a fan of the amazing videos put out by the band OK GO, though I’m not much of a fan of their music. I discussed their videos five times between 2010 and 2016 (sorry, I didn’t spend time finding the links). Just recently I heard an interview of a new video. And I may have missed one or two in the meantime. The video “Love” has a lot of fun with mirrors, both with robots holding mirrors and bigger mirrors used as big kaleidoscopes. At the end the singer puts on a mirrored suit. As usual, the video is amazing. I watched the video about making the Love music video. They used robots because they wanted the mirrors to be moved and held in precise ways that a human wouldn’t be able to do. And each of those robots had to be precisely programmed. Then they had to fit it all together to shoot in one take, though they needed 39 tries. Tomorrow I’m off to a handbell event, returning home late Saturday. So with a movie on Sunday and bell stuff on Monday and Tuesday I probably won’t post again until Wednesday.

A philosophy that justifies being assholes

Hunter of Daily Kos takes apart a new trend (that has lots of features of old trends). He discussed an article in the British site The Telegraph about the “pronatalism” movement sweeping the wealthy tech bros of Silicon Valley. Here is my summary of the movement: Because these people equate their wealth with superiority they assume their genes must also be superior. Therefore they must produce more kids. This philosophy also says that the top problem in the world is not enough kids, without them the world is doomed. Having more kids is more important than climate change and a world so polluted it may soon have trouble sustaining life – problems made worse by too many people. It’s also more important than the proliferation of guns, economic inequality, and wars. Must be nice to have a philosophy that justifies being assholes. Yeah, that’s the summary. Alas, there are many philosophies and religions that justify being assholes. Hunter’s full rant is still a good read. He even notes that with a story this absurd with an internal logic this messy it is hard to tell if the Telegraph reporter is teasing us. BuzzFeed has announced they are shutting down their news department due to a lack of money. So what’s left? Fluff? Clickbait? Sarah Kendzior explains why this is bad news:

BuzzFeed News was one of few outlets to report in depth about transnational organized crime and its ties to government. The type of reporting they were doing a few years ago has essentially vanished, despite the topic's popularity. I wonder what will happen to their archives. Buzzfeed News was targeted by the Mueller probe because its reporters dared to dig deep into institutional corruption - long-term corruption that revealed how awful Mueller was in multiple jobs.

Clyde Haberman, former columnist for the New York Times, tweeted:

Years ago, a stranger came to my NY apartment building wanting to speak to me about a topic he hoped I'd write about. The befuddled doorman let him up. I was leery but I talked to the guy, then saw him to the door. The point is: I didn't shoot him. US gun madness has to stop.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer added:

Most people #onhere support journalism and say it's critical for saving democracy. Here's what no one talks about: Great journalism depends on talking to strangers. And it's becoming impossible to talk to strangers in America

A few days ago a 16 year old black boy name Ralph Yarl went to pick up his twin brothers and knocked on the wrong door. 84 year old Andrew Lester shot Yarl. Thankfully, the boy survived and appears to be healing well. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed that black boys and men appear to whites to be bigger, stronger, and more threatening than they actually are. Lester was sure Yarl was six foot tall, when he’s only 5-foot-8 and weighs only 140 pounds. Tamir Rice was described as a 12-year old in an adult body. Michael Brown was compared to Hulk Hogan. Several studies have shown this consistent bias. As for Lester, Dartagnan wrote:

The New York Times interviewed neighbors and relatives of Lester, who described him as “surly,” sometimes “aggressive, and spen[ding] considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume.” In other words, he seems to be just the type of person—with a hair-trigger temper, just waiting to feel threatened—who one might expect to react violently to the unexpected appearance of a young Black male.

I write a great deal about the social hierarchy, how people are so caught up in their position in the hierarchy they seem to spend all their time oppressing people they think should be lower than themselves. A major part of maintaining the hierarchy is convincing those in the lower levels that their place is how things are supposed to be, that being dumped on by the higher levels is natural. Here’s an attempt at that kind of justification. I’m quite interested in the rebuttals. Yann LeCun, professor at NYU and chief AI scientist at Meta, tweeted to justify that AI won’t dominate humans.

Humans are hardwired by evolution to be a social species with hierarchical structure. This includes hardwired drives for dominance or submission. AI assistants will simply have hardwired drives to submit and not dominate.

Leah McElrath replied:

1) Your assertions are not supported by science. 2) Humans aren’t computers. We are not “wired” but rather have neuroplasticity that enables our adaptation. 3) Cooperation contributed to the rise our species. Civilization dates back to the first healed human femur bone fossil.

Daniel Baryon also replied to LeCun:

This is false. In fact, we have very little in common with species that function on natural hierarchies. Very few mammals do. Our species achieved its success by cooperation and the extension of ethical principles to other members of the species, regardless of prestige.

Peter Gelderloos, who is fighting for a world of care, imagination, and mutual aid, also replied:

We should be immensely worried that the people with the most power to sculpt the social architecture of the next decades promote the same kinds of pseudo-science used to justify slavery and segregation.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, had a few interesting quotes. Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann of The Atlantic discussed Fox News lies and that the National Enquirer pushed false info while hiding true info in helping the nasty guy gain power. The quote ends with:

Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.

Dworkin quoted James Poniewozik of NYT, who discussed Fox News and Tucker Carlson, who said, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve — through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths — to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder. All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

After that quote Dworkin added (addressing my annoyance that Dominion didn’t force more accountability onto Fox News):

The other side of the coin is that Dominion, which settled their libel suit for $787.5 million, is also corporation. Corporations are not people, my friend. They are not activists, and their job is to make money, not stick it to Fox. That’s our job.

Dworkin finally quoted Oliver Willis on Substack who discussed the conservative believe that Gen Z is rejecting them because the “radical indoctrination” by the left.

They think that the Borg-like Boogeyman creature they caricature as “the left” has burrowed its way into young minds, via high school and college teachers and professors who are purportedly preaching Karl Marx like biblical heretics, pop culture icons like Cardi B who are imparting life lessons about wet genitals, and TikTok videos that are supposedly making everyday teens decide to become transgender. As always, the Left of the right’s fevered nightmares are impressive and terrifying. Of course, this is all nonsense. What is really happening in America is that young Americans are lashing out at the nightmares built by years of conservative policy and rhetoric, because those toxic ideas are making their lives worse.

We shouldn't call it a celebration

I spent the afternoon at the Detroit Institute of Arts and their current exhibit of Van Gogh in America. The artist, who died in 1890 at the way too soon age of 37, did not set foot in America. The framing story of the exhibit is this artwork first being scorned, then embraced by American art museums and American collectors. The timing of the exhibit is because now is 100 years since the DIA was the first American museum to buy a Van Gogh. The purchase was criticized because so few people could make sense of the artist and his art. He was just too modern. Van Gogh as modern seems strange – we’ve seen Picasso, and Pollock. But his work, and that of his contemporaries, no longer went for accuracy in reproducing a scene and that was revolutionary. A show in 1928 that included Van Gogh’s work and one in 1935 that was exclusively his work and that traveled the country turned public perception of the artist. The last room of the exhibit includes a video of scenes from the Vincente Minnelli film Lust for Life, a biopic of Van Gogh’s life. This video criticizes that movie for portraying it subject as a “tortured genius” – that his artwork was a result of his mental anguish. That is not correct. Yes, Van Gogh did spend time getting treatment for mental illness. But his letters to his brother Theo show his desire and ability to create art were done through careful and deliberate steps. Alas, the Minnelli film still colors our perceptions of Van Gogh. I finished the book Winter’s Orbit by new author Everina Maxwell. It is both a gay romance and science fiction – and I like both of those. Prince Kiem of Iskat is thought of as the most disappointing of his generation of forty cousins. He is called before his grandmother the Emperor and is told he’ll have to give up his playboy ways because tomorrow he must marry Count Jainan of Thea. Iskat and Thea and a few other planets are to sign a Resolution in one month. That Resolution requires a marriage between an Iskat prince and a Thean diplomat. The marriage is the next day because it is the day after the end of the one month of mourning of Taam, who was Jainan’s previous partner. The wedding is not much more than the two of them signing the marriage contract. That night is awkward because Kiem assumes his new partner is still mourning and Jainan assumes he’s being rejected for being unworthy. Yeah, these guys are bad at communicating. The Auditor in charge of assuring all aspects of the Resolution are proper is taking way too long to agree the marriage is proper. And the palace Internal Security has flagged Jainan. The whole thing smells of cover-up. Figuring out what is being covered up takes our lads that whole month. That does give them time to fall in love before those trying to do the cover-up put them in grave peril. How much the humans of Iskat and Thea differ from earth humans of today is not explained. Jainan and Kiem are given only sparse descriptions of height and skin color. So one wonders about orientation and gender identity. Kiem admits to bedding both men and women. Jainan keeps his mouth shut. We do get another glimpse because men wear some sort of amulet made of wood and women wear one made of flint. Nonbinary characters wear neither. Does that imply men and women have become hard to tell apart? Or is the convention a handy way to alert another person to preferred pronouns? Since Kiem’s bisexuality is not remarked on does it imply a large portion of the population is also bisexual? That aspect of the story isn’t explained, it just is. In the decades that I’ve been reading science fiction magazines at one point an editor explained that a good science fiction story includes some new feature of science that is critical to the story. He used the example of an old Western story given a new setting and replacing bullets with lasers. But the new story is essentially no different than the Western. I felt much of this book is the same. The fancy wristbands central to their work and communication aren’t all that different from a smartwatch. This federation of planets could just as easily be a federation of nations on one planet (I felt Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar series – and I’ve read and enjoyed them all – had the same issue). It isn’t until we’re 85% of the way through the story that we see a technology that is both something we don’t have now and critical to the story. Even with this quibble I enjoyed the story. While in a bookstore yesterday to buy the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine I saw a book with two young men on the cover. It is Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore. The description says it follows the outline of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original with the difference that both Nick and Jay Gatsby are transgender. The six online reviews declare it to be wonderful. But since I didn’t care much for the original (and avoided the DiCaprio movie) I won’t be buying this one. A little note on that page says this book is part of the Remixed Classics series. A search brought up: A Clash of Steel a remix of Treasure Island in which the lead pirates are a lesbian couple. Travelers Along the Way a remix of Robin Hood with a lesbian couple, though this is about the Crusades and not Nottingham Forest. And Teach the Torches to Burn a remix of Romeo and Juliet, in which the lovers are gay (won’t be released until next August) – the lovers of the original are already doomed because of the hatred of the two families so I’m not interested in a huge scoop of homophobia on top of it. I didn’t check out the details of the remixes of Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Jekyll & Hyde, Secret Garden, and Pride & Prejudice. I will agree it is important for us in the LGBTQ community to see ourselves in some of the literary classics. I suppose it is good business to supply such versions. Just don’t expect my dollar. Recently Niece declared that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is much more interesting than the original. I haven’t read it, nor have I read classics updated with vampires and werewolves. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated two days ago. I didn’t report on the numbers a week ago because election day delayed timely updating. As of two days ago the peaks in new cases per day for the last few weeks are 1910, 1503, 1551, and 1183. Yes, the data is going in a good direction. A predicted increase with new variants hasn’t yet hit Michigan. I’ve been hearing Michigan’s data is no longer capturing the whole picture. Those doing home tests aren’t reporting cases to the state. So I considered looking at other sources of data, such as sewage sampling. Michigan provides that data, but through maybe a hundred individual sampling locations and without any composite data. Alisa Chang of NPR spoke to Lauren Frayer stationed in Mumbai about the United Nations estimating the world now has 8 billion humans on it. While the population growth of China and India may be slowing, the growth in Africa is not. I’m puzzled and annoyed that the UN is calling this a celebration. I suppose, as Andrea Wojnar, the India representative for the UN Population fund, says, we should celebrate people living longer and that there is a decline in maternal and infant mortality. But the world can’t handle so many people. Some say it can, but climate change and a scarcity of water (implying a future scarcity of food) show our world can’t. And rapid population growth (did we add a billion people in just 15 years?) means there are too many women with a lack of education and a lack of family planning – generally unempowered. There is also the problem that the population growth is mostly in poorer countries while the countries with declining population have much higher rates of consumption and environmental damage. Today marks the 15th anniversary of when I started publishing this blog. This is post 4979. There have been almost 340,000 page views since the system has been keeping track starting in June 2010. By the time I started posting I had already spent three years writing up LGBTQ news alerts to send to family and friends. That was prompted by the first same-sex marriages in Massachusetts.

Genes v. knowledge

At the recommendation of my friend and debate partner I read and have finished the book A Thousand Brains, a New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. After a short career in computers (remember the Palm device?) he turned to his first love of trying to understand how the human brain works. This book is written with the average person in mind. The author wrote in a style that is easy to understand. At the end he lists several papers for further reading, though warns papers about neuroscience can be difficult to read. The first section of the book delves into this new theory. Hawkins says the brain has two major parts, the old brain (I think that others have called the lizard brain) and the new brain. The old brain actually controls muscles and is where the basics of life (including sex drive) are carried out. The new brain, the neocortex, the wrinkly part we think of as the brain, is where intelligent thinking happens. If the neocortex was flattened out it would be the size of a napkin and not much thicker. It is made up of about 150,000 cortical columns about the size of a grain of rice. Each are essentially separate and nearly identical bits that do their own intelligence thing. Yeah, some are connected to the nerves from the eyes, others to nerves from the ears, from the skin to feel, from the nose and from the tongue (all routed through the old brain). So those columns do different kinds of intelligence things, but are still structured nearly the same. These columns do their thing through constantly predicting what will happen next, comparing that to what is actually perceived, and doing it all through reference frames. There is constant learning. Then the columns communicate their conclusions to other columns that put together an entire model of the world around us. For any more explanation than that please read the book. Hawkins does a good job of explaining this theory. The second part of the book is about machine intelligence. Hawkins says that’s not the same as AI or artificial intelligence as we understand it now. The current AI systems can learn how to do one thing and once they’ve learned that they can’t learn to do another thing. True machine intelligence means a machine can continuously learn to do an increasing number of things and then think about what it has learned, much like a human can. Hawkins then discusses why he believes machines, though they may become more intelligent than humans, cannot turn on us and enslave or kill us off. The third and last section of the book discusses the future of human intelligence and parts of this were the most interesting to me. The brain doesn’t actually see, hear, feel, taste, or smell. It receives signals from nerves. From those signals it constructs a model of the light that enters our eyes, the vibrations that hit our ears, and so forth. A big puzzle, even with this theory of the brain, is how do some nerve signals get interpreted as red, others as the rustle of leaves, as a smooth surface, as sweetness, as the fragrance of a rose, or as pain? They’re all nerve signals. What we experience is not the world, but our brain’s simulation of the world. And that means the simulation can be sometimes wrong. Since the brain is constantly learning – constantly comparing its model with input it receives – the simulation is usually corrected. And sometimes it isn’t. Hawkins explains how false beliefs persist. The earth as a flat surface was a useful model for a very long time in human history. There was little to contradict it. When there was something to contradict it most people didn’t experience it directly. We had to take someone else’s word for it. And some people refuse to do that. If they don’t experience it themselves they don’t believe it. I’ve shared a few social media memes, small pictures with catchy sayings that make a specific point. The original definition of a meme is similar to a gene, an idea that replicates through a population. Yeah, a social media meme is a subset of the original definition, an idea that replicates through the population through social media. An example of a meme is “all children should be educated.” Another meme, with a few parts, is “Everything in this book is true. Ignore evidence that contradicts it. Help others who believe this book is true. Banish or kill those who don’t believe.” This meme, with its extra sentences, has spread far. Now add a few more sentences. “Women should have as many children as possible. Don’t allow children to encounter contradictions to the book.” And the memes of the book spread as the genes of the people are spread. The way out of this situation, the way to correct our mental model is to seek out information that supports and information that contradicts our model. It is only through the contradictions that our mental model revised. Seeking to disprove our mental model is the scientific method. I add: One way to do that is to read books from a wide variety of types of authors. Another is to associate with a wide variety of types of people. Throughout time the old brain has one evolutionary goal, to pass on genes. And such behaviors as fighting over territory, dominating or eliminating mating rivals, and rape further that goal. Our new brain might find such things as abhorrent, but the intelligence in our new brain can be, and frequently is, overridden or used in service of the old brain. Until the last eighty years or so, when an old brain goes on a rampage a lot of people could be (and were) killed. See the world wars. But humanity lived on. In those last eighty years humanity has developed a couple ways that could make the whole species go extinct. These are nuclear war and climate change. Climate change would be less of a problem if the world population was smaller – fewer cars on the road, less pollution from farm animals, and less less rainforest burned for cropland. So why has the world population gone from three billion in 1960 to nearly eight billion today? Because the old brain is still in charge. Having as many children as possible increases the chance of some surviving to pass along the genes. The children may suffer (perhaps from starvation or viruses) and the parents grieve. But genes don’t care about that. There are ways for the new brain to take control of the old brain. In the case of overpopulation it means giving women control of their own fertility. The old brain can have as much sex as it wants while the new brain can prevent having children. Yeah, that is up against a lot of old brain thinking in a bunch of old men doing all they can to make sure women don’t have control of their fertility – and also preventing these women from getting sufficient pay and affordable child care. And preventing moving those old men out of positions of power. All that old brain thinking and all those false beliefs are a risk to humanity. Hawkins has a chapter on merging brains with computers. One idea is uploading a person, their memories and way of thinking, into a computer to provide infinite life. Another is to install directly into a brain connections to a computer for instant information access and presumably higher intelligence. I’ve read many science fiction stories about both ideas. Hawkins says both have advantages, but both are extremely difficult, both probably won’t produce the intended result, and neither helps with the major risks to humanity. I’ll let you read the details. Hawkins spends a chapter on a topic that has intrigued me. If humanity faces the possibility of extinction how do we preserve our vast knowledge? We’re a species that has learned the secrets from subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, and DNA to planets, solar systems, and galaxies, and everything in between. We want to at least be able to say we were here, we learned, we know. If humanity becomes extinct, a new intelligent species might arise in a few million years. How might we preserve our knowledge for them. How might we do that in a way that survives general erosion and plate tectonics? I don’t have an answer and wish it was considered by a scientist (who probably has) or a science fiction writer (who might tell me about it). Hawkins has a solution – put all the knowledge into a satellite that orbits the sun (see La Grange points). That doesn’t satisfy me because to get it the species would have to develop spaceflight – and one of the things we could share is how to do spaceflight. We would also want to share what causes war and why developing a fossil fuel industry is a bad idea, things likely to happen before the species gets to spaceflight. To prevent total extinction of humanity we could colonize other worlds. Mars is the logical next one. But what would happen (we have a pretty good idea what would happen) if, after a Mars colony is firmly established (and doing so is extremely difficult), the environment on earth becomes dramatically more hostile to life and billions of people want to go to Mars? It could be disastrous for the colony. That prompts Hawkins to propose we should use our ability to edit genes to make the old brain less in control and the new brain more in control so that the goal would be not about passing on genes but about preserving and passing on knowledge.

Actual cheating is not necessary

A.R. Moxon quoted Ari Berman, who linked to an article in the Washington Post discussing the bill in the Texas legislature to suppress voting:

This is insane: “In a last-minute addition, language was inserted in the bill making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race.”

Moxon added:

Republicans are openly planning to end democracy in our country, and they're acting quickly. Democrats are busy trying to make it clear that they're willing to work with Republicans. This is really alarming. The only remaining proofs that Republicans intend to install white supremacist authoritarian Christi-fascism are the sorts that you only get after it’s too late. Democrats were elected to oppose this. They must do it now. We don’t have next election.

Judd Legum tweeted a bit more:

Texas Republicans just released the text of its voter suppression bill, SB7 Votes will be held before midnight Sunday The bill includes a NEW PROVISION that allows judges to OVERTURN AN ELECTION "WITHOUT DETERMINING HOW INDIVIDUAL VOTERS VOTED" This section appears to validate Trump's claims that he won various states because a certain number of people voted "illegally" without any other details Now people like Guiliani can take these absurd allegations to court and, with a sympathetic judge, OVERTURN AN ELECTION. Texas is poised to adopt this unprecedented and radical legal provision without ANY DEBATE IN EITHER CHAMBER It was negotiated in a secret conference committee and released on a Saturday of a holiday weekend. And there is plenty of other bad stuff in this bill.

Legum then listed major corporate donors to the legislators who sponsored this voter suppression bill. David Roberts responded to Legum:

Republicans are engineering minority rule, right out in the open, in plain view. Red flags waving everywhere. When they steal the 2024 election, Rs will *say* that they are simply defending against D cheating. And they will convince themselves of it. And they will bully the media into covering the whole thing as partisan squabbling. It won't matter that there was no D cheating. Crucial to understand: the whole cycle, the whole dynamic, works *whether or not there's any actual D cheating*. Actual D cheating is not necessary for Rs to convince themselves there is, or for them to bully institutions into behaving as though there was.

That was last Saturday. With the legislature’s session ending at midnight on Sunday the Texas House went into a long session. The Democrats worked to run out the clock, then, as Julián Castro tweeted:

Texas House Democrats aren’t letting democracy die in the darkness. They have walked out of this sham session as Republicans try to jam through their voter suppression bill. This is the kind of fight we need from our legislators.

This worked because their absence meant there was no longer a quorum. The session ended without passing this voting bill. Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed he will call a special session of the legislature, so the danger of this bill isn’t over yet. The date for the special session hasn’t been set yet. Nor is the danger over in other states. Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections reported that committees in the Arizona House and Senate have passed a bill that would strip the ability to defend the state in election lawsuits from Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, and give it to Attorney General Mark Brnovich. This change lasts only until Hobbs’ term ends at the end of 2022. Since might run for governor the state GOP is hoping the next SoS will be one of their own. One line that gun lovers use is that we need a good guy with a gun to stop the bad guy with a gun. Doctor RJ of the Kos Community Contributors Team tackled that myth.

It’s a fantasy built upon long-held narratives of revenge that cast the average citizen as a lonely hero amid chaos, their gun simultaneously a symbol of freedom and savior from doom. This vision of American life accentuates a need for power that’s tied to a form of masculinity that ventures into the toxic. ... Instead of trying to deescalate violence, the philosophy plays into ego and displays of strength, pushing the option to “stand your ground” and legitimizing millions of scared people walking around with their weapons and their biases like tragedies waiting to happen. And to rationalize the cruelty, mistakes, discrimination, and loss of life that may flow from such a decision, the fantasy ultimately plays into the worst stereotypes, spreading a message that believes the worst about the people in one’s community for one irrelevant or bogus reason or another.

RJ listed related myths. Such as: We need a strong, silent hero with a gun. There have been lots of movies where the white guy resents the feeling of deprived status, that they were being displaced. The nasty guy cultivated that feeling. The resentment is eased by having a gun available. Another myth: Power comes through strength, force, and the will to act, not through law. There is a feeling – again backed up by cinema – that the good guys can be trusted, even when they have to use violence to get rid of the bad guys. These good guys are all that stand between civilization and chaos. See Captain America and the whole vast array of superheroes. That symbolism is transferred to real life police. The next myth: The world needs badasses to stop bad guys. This is an extension of the previous myth, saying that the good guy, because he’s a good guy, can (and is encouraged to) flagrantly abuse civil rights as long as the bad guys are vanquished. Even the late Justice Antonin Scalia used one of these fictional bad guys and fictional scenarios to justify a lawless act. It is these myths that are used to justify vigilante justice. And that leads to:

Civil rights are merely an impediment to justice. In the right-wing universe, anyone who questions the law must sympathize with criminals and hate America. In this viewpoint, the law is only there to protect white people and property … and perhaps to keep the wrong people from voting.

RJ discussed assumption under those myths and fantasies: Being black equates to being bad. Ending white supremacy equals the cataclysmic end to civilization. In real life a good guy with a gun really can stop a bad guy (it happens, but rarely). Commenter Ed Martin added:

The proposal that it takes a good guy with a gun to counteract a bad guy with a gun is based on the false premise that both should have a gun. The obvious solution is to remove having guns from the proposal, making it impossible to shoot each other, or anyone else.

For many decades, China had a one child policy. A couple was allowed to have only one child. This was an attempt to slow the growth of the country’s population. A few years ago China allowed couples to have two children. A news item in the last few days was that China has raised the limit to three. The reason given was that the birth rate had dropped too low. Soon the younger people wouldn’t be able to support the retirees. That reasoning has also been used in America and in other developed countries. Dratler of the Kos community explained why this is a dangerous myth. These local or country-wide predictions are based on abstract speculation. And they miss the big picture by a mile. That big picture – meaning the whole globe – is that there are too many people. We have a hard time feeding that many, giving everyone the standard of living we all want, and handling the pollution. A slower population growth is a good thing and, in the long run, vital to human survival. The alternative is catastrophic decline from such things as war (including nuclear), pandemics, and famine. Any of these could be made worse through climate change. Dratler added four reasons why controlling the population is good. Quality of life matters more than the quantity. Who would want to live in teeming ghettos? More people does not mean more good ideas. Sparsely populated Greek city-states came up with the fundamentals of democracy, justice, and civic virtue. Many great thinkers of more recent times – Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein – came from classes or came to places that allowed room to think. Increased population density leads to increased distraction and delusion, which prevent deep and original thinking. And automation means not so many youth will be needed to support the aged. We don’t need a race to see which nation can grow the fastest. John Burke discussed a simple intervention that could make our cities much better, that is line our streets with trees. Street and sidewalks are cooler. Trees reduce rain runoff. They support wildlife, linking isolated habitats. People who live on tree-lined streets need fewer antidepressants. For every 10% increase in the urban canopy there is a 15% decrease in violent crime and a 14% decrease in property crime. Trees also scrub pollutants from the air. Burke cited studies that support these claims. A half-minute video showing a bird’s-eye view of juggling. I can manage to do what happens in the last second.

This feeling of being overrun

Stephen Miller is an immigration advisor to the nasty guy. He’s the one who came up with the idea that children should be separated from parents at the border and housed in cages. So, yeah, quite obviously racist. Miller is in the news because a batch of leaked emails shows how thoroughly racist he is. Reaction has ranged from: Oh wow! Look at that! to: Sheesh, where’ve you been?

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR, first talked to Chelsea Stieber, a scholar of French literature at the Catholic University of America. She teaches the book Camp of the Saints, a novel (as in fiction) about an invasion of hordes of migrants who come to the West and bring about its end. Stieber uses the book to teach how students can detect the language of far-right groups.

Garcia-Navarro also talked to Kathleen Belew, who teaches history at the University of Chicago and wrote Bring The War Home, about white power movements. Belew spoke of an aspect of white nationalism:

Most political issues of the day are, at bottom, about the reproduction of the white race and the birth of white children. This is why you see people focusing on the birth rate, right? We see the birth rate appearing in manifestos of violent actors.

But to people in this movement, white reproduction is not just about sort of a peaceful demographic transformation, but it's about this feeling of being overrun by immigrants, about being threatened with forced integration and about the idea that the white race is under attack. And I think that sense of emergency that is depicted and works like "Camp Of The Saints" and "The Turner Diaries" explains how white nationalism becomes such a captivating and kind of world-consuming way of thinking about politics.

Again, I note that overpopulation, which causes so much societal and environmental damage cannot be solved until ideas of supremacy are eliminated.

Belew says there are laws and policies that oppress people as a side effect. There is also personal racial animus. And then there is organized supremacist ideology.

It has a coherent worldview that is not only deeply racist and xenophobic and anti-immigrant, but also, at times, un-American and dedicated towards war on the state. I think this represents a real difference in intent than a policy that's simply enacted with an after-effect of harm. This is about deliberate construction of a white nationalist public policy coming from the halls of power into our laws and into our nation.

I’m dubious of this notion of policies that have a side effect of oppression. I’m quite sure throughout American history the oppression was intentional, well understood, and why a policy was enacted the way it was.

Garcia-Navarro noted that Miller referenced Camp of the Saints. Belew replied that shows the nasty guy’s immigration policies are not in the category of unintentional harm, but is a deliberate and intentional attempt to impose a white supremacist society.



In my post last Sunday I forgot to acknowledge that it was 12th anniversary of the start of this blog. Yes, that was back when Bush II was masquerading as the president. This post is number 4150. I certainly plan to keep going.

Stroke his worst campaign instincts

Donald Trump expanded? shook up? his campaign staff. The new guy at the head of the campaign staff is Steve Bannon. His most recent job was to run the Breitbart News website. And Breitbart News is a hard-right site that promotes conspiracy theories. It even makes some of them up. Bannon and Trump should get along just fine. Hunter of Daily Kos said the move

is tailor-made to stroke Donald Trump's worst campaign instincts, most ridiculous claims, and most reckless behaviors.

Many conservatives are wondering if this is an admission that the campaign is over and for the next two months Trump will take out as many friends and foes as he can. There will be conspiracy-peddling, hostility towards immigrants, howls of election rigging, and all the rest, carried at a much higher volume.



Ian Millhiser, in a series of tweets, takes a look at GOP myths. First myth: conservatives make up a majority of voters (so who is in the White House now?). Second myth: Speaker Paul Ryan has a mandate to implement his ruinous budget even though he is essentially supported by only corporations. Third myth: The winner runs the show and everyone else is a loser. There is no such thing as a coalition.



Good to see the Department of Justice is recognizing that prisons run by corporations are less safe and less effective in providing correctional services. They also skimp on housing, food, and medical care. In addition the cost savings is a lot less than predicted. Because of all that the DOJ use of corporate prisons will be phased out.

Shares of two corporations that run prisons dropped sharply and became volatile. But don't worry. Most inmates in these places are placed there by the states. And I'm sure a lot of GOP governors are not going to tear up their contracts.

Prisons should not be run for profit. Same for health care and education.



Travis Rieder, a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics ad John Hopkins University, is working to convince students and other young adults to limit the number of children they have. Zero would be good. He says it is a moral issue. As the climate heats up things will get pretty severe over the next two decades. During that time the human population is expected to grow by a couple billion. The reasons: Do we really want to subject our kids to that kind of a world? We could go a long way towards mitigating the worst effects of climate change simply by having fewer kids. Is it ethical to have an American child, who will use up lots of the earth's resources, when it is a child in a poor country who will face the greater consequences of a world with a hot climate?

It doesn't look good for Americans to tell other countries to not have kids. So some ideas: put family planning ideas in the plots of soap operas. Pay women to refill birth control medications. Replace tax breaks for children with a penalty – a carbon tax on kids.

So what is easier? Engineer clouds and oceans to suck carbon out of the air? Overhaul the global system of capitalism? Make fewer babies? We actually know how to do the last one.

The dark side

Religions promote many fine ideas and virtues. The Wisdom Commons lists perhaps a hundred of them. Click on an item in the list and you get a description of the virtue and many quotes about it. Some virtues shared by many religions are: Acceptance, balance, compassion, contentment, enthusiasm, forgiveness, generosity, honesty, humility, integrity, justice, love, loyalty, mercy, patience, peacemaking, repentance, responsibility, sacrifice, stewardship, trust, and wonder.

But there is a dark side to religion, one that I've experienced and documented in this blog. Valerie Tarico lists a dozen of the worst ideas from religion.

Chosen people: only a claim of superiority.

Heretics: a way to dehumanize as heretics are seen as "a threat that needs to be neutralized by conversion, conquest, isolation, domination, or—in worst cases—mass murder."

Holy War: Declare a holy war and you gain permission to do any vile thing you want.

Blasphemy: Declare an idea is off-limits to criticism or question and when that is violated … see holy war.

Glorified suffering: This is the idea that if one endures suffering (perhaps even inflicting it on oneself) long enough an evil can be undone. Instead, people willing to inflict pain on themselves also inflict it on their enemies and the helpless.

Genital mutilation: In men it is a sign of membership and test of commitment. In women it establishes submission.

Blood sacrifice: Fortunately abandoned by nearly all religions. Even so, Christianity still focuses on Jesus as being the ultimate blood sacrifice.

Hell: a way to satisfy a desire for justice has become a tool to coerce behavior and belief.

Karma: promotes passivity in the face of suffering and also promotes blaming the victim.

Eternal life: I'm reminded of the phrase, "He's so heavenly minded he is no earthly good." A focus on heaven means less effort given to cherishing and taking care of the world we have.

Male ownership of female fertility: women are reduced to their ability to bear children and in this time of overpopulation the quality of a man is still defined by the number of his children.

Book worship: understanding of the world becomes static, and believers of a perfect faith are developmentally arrested in the Iron Age, a time of violence, slavery, and early death.

We must acknowledge religion's worst ideas to be able to fully embrace the best.

Feeding the world

I've been reading yet another booklet from my nutritionist. This one is only 30 pages and doesn't go into the scientific details. Much of this is the same (though condensed) as in the previous two handouts. But there are a few things that I learned.

If your teeth show signs of crowding or your teeth are a bit crooked it is because your parents abandoned a healthy diet and adopted the Western diet of processed foods.

This booklet devotes three pages to the dangers of soy. Yes, it is used in Asian cooking, but mostly as a flavoring, not a source of nutrition. In addition, the traditional diets in Asia used fermented soy, which removes some of its harshness. It is a mistake to use it as a primary source of protein or a replacement for milk. A problem is that soy contains isoflavones, which are a form of estrogen. That speeds up maturity in girls, delays it in boys, and otherwise plays havoc with a person's endocrine system. All that is why the first thing my nutritionist told me is to eliminate soy.

In booklet's section of mythbusting it says vegetarians do not live longer than carnivores and do not have less heart disease. Another section stresses there are nutrients that are available in animal fat that aren't in plants. This got me thinking. Several books have said that unless all humans aim for a vegetarian (perhaps even vegan) diet we won't be able to feed the world's growing population. Now this booklet says we would be undernourished on a vegetarian diet. Which implies we cannot properly feed the world's population and that the world is now overpopulated. Are we aiming for a population crash?

There was a small piece that mentioned the nutritional benefits of soups made with bones. So I bought a turkey drumstick, put it in the crock-pot with water, added a bit of olive oil and herbs, and let it sit all day. This evening I took the drumstick out, dumped in frozen vegetables to cook, pulled the meat off the bones, and dumped the meat back in the pot. For a first try without following a recipe it came out pretty good. And compared with my struggle to debone a drumstick at Thanksgiving this worked quite well.

A concentration of population

The Vlogbrothers produced a video of 42 fascinating maps. And since I love maps…

Alas, much of the 4 minute video is of the narrator and his every breath is edited out, making him seem rather frantic. But the YouTube page has links to all the maps online.

A few of my favorites:

A map that shows how 7 billion humans are distributed across the world:
1. North America, South America, Australia, and New Zealand.
2. Africa.
3. Europe and the Middle East.
4. Most of Asia (excluding below)
5. Southern India, Bangladesh, and Burma.
6. Central China.
7. Southern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Click in the little image towards the top-left of this page.

A map with a circle (projected onto a globe then flattened) that includes China, India, Japan, and Indonesia. More of the world's population is inside the circle than outside. The center of the circle is Guiyang, Guizhou Province in Southwest China. The radius is only 4100 km.

A series of maps where the size of the country is pumped up or shrunk depending on some measure, such as GDP. This collection has been around for a while and I wrote about it a long time ago.

I need kids?

Newsweek as a feature article by Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel about the slump in the American birth rate and how that isn't good for the country. More Americans, especially since the start of the Great Recession, have decided to not have kids. Many have also decided to not have life partners, preferring the life of "singlism."

Yes, that includes me, though I'm quite a bit older than the 20- and 30-somethings who are in their prime child-bearing age and not bearing children. Without a life partner (and I'm content not to have one) I thought it unfair to any kid I might adopt. In addition, I've long said (at least to myself) with seven billion people in the world, I need kids?

The big reason the authors give for why a falling birthrate is bad is that as the birth rate drops and the population ages the harder it is to sustain the retirement benefits that have been promised. There is also the belief that as the population becomes more doddering the less robust the economy will be.

There is a bit of a debate about the effect of a declining birthrate will have on politics. Those that remain single (or at least childless) tend to become more liberal. The single women's vote was a big part of Obama's win last fall. However, conservatives will tend to keep having children. Will childless singletons shift the country more liberal or will the comparative lack of liberal babies make the country more conservative?

To solve the problem of too few babies the authors suggest ways to tweak tax code and other laws to make having babies less expensive. A commenter replies: Like they did in Germany, which has had no effect? Another notes we can't fix a problem by throwing babies at it.

I found the article frustrating for a very big reason. Nowhere was there a discussion about how the world is already overpopulated, that overpopulation is a big reason why we haven't fix the climate change problem, and that in a global view a declining American birthrate is a good thing. That discussion didn't occur in the first page of comments either.

Use a condom, save the earth

Richard Cizik used to be a Fundie darling. But then he started disagreeing with their social statements and was ousted from being a vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals. But that didn't shut him up.

He's now doing such things as challenging the Fundie mantra that contraception condones sex outside marriage, undermines marriage, and promotes abortion. He has found that a woman dies in childbirth each minute, one in four births is unplanned, and contraception prevents 112 million abortions worldwide. In addition, it is good for the planet because it curbs overpopulation. Use a condom, save the earth.



Catholic Archbishop Sartain of Seattle has put out a "Policy Refresher" that Catholic priests cannot take part in Washington's newly approved gay marriage and their buildings can't be used for the ceremonies (and don't even think about a reception in the social hall). Yeah, it feels harsh, but we didn't expect anything different.

Here's why it is worth mentioning: Along with each piece of the policy he includes the appropriate section of the state law that affirms churches cannot be forced to perform marriages for which it has religious objections. That flatly contradicts campaign messages that said marriage equality would "endanger religious liberty" and that priests could be jailed for refusing to conduct gay weddings.



Andrew Belonsky of the blog Towleroad has assembled a list of the 50 most powerful coming out stories of 2012. A cool part of the list is how many times the announcement was no big deal and has had no consequences to the person's career. Each one of these stories has made lives for us a little bit better.



David Mixner has a post with his choice of the dozen best journalism photos of the year.

Ultimate energy savings

The best way to keep the world's carbon footprint from exploding? Have fewer kids. Fewer homes to heat, fewer miles to travel. Some countries, primarily in Europe (birthrate in Lithuania is 1.22 children per female), seem to have gotten that message and now face social problems due to declining birthrates. Africa hasn't. Mali has a birthrate 7.34 children per female. The birthrate in many other African countries, though still high, has come down. The best way to reduce the birthrate is to pursue what has worked before: education for men and women, information about birth control, and better health care so parents have confidence their children will survive to adulthood. Though America has a birthrate of 1.9, about a quarter of that in Mali, we can't be smug. One Texan has the carbon footprint of 31 sub-Saharan Africans.
Alas, Detroit Free Press articles are usually free for only two weeks.