Political issues – Page 2

Hacks in a time of fascism

With the United States in a tailspin into fascism, the New York Times’ star columnists work ever harder to change the subject. The subject is never fascism. Anything but that! It’s always: What’s wrong with the left?

Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein have slightly different ways of doing this. But the very idea of their doing a “show” together reveals that their purpose is the same: Distract from the mainstream media’s catastrophic failure to perceive where the U.S. democracy stands from a historical perspective. Try to keep a conversation going about how the left, not the right, is to blame for what is happening in the U.S. today.

Douthat: I also think that there’s a way in which at the peak of progressive cultural power, there was a sense that progressives were censorious scolds who certainly didn’t like populists and conservatives, but seemed to not like a lot of people generally. Today, I feel like it’s almost — and this is, again, impressionistic — but do progressives like themselves?

Klein: You really want to put them on the couch. But the answer is no. [Laughs.]

Douthat: The answer is no, right? And in a way, that’s always been true — nothing like a self-hating liberal.

What kind of minds does this nonsense come from? And why is it in the New York Times? Neither of these two hacks is half as smart as he thinks he is.

They want a monopoly on violence

White supremacists clash with police in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017. One person was killed and 35 people were injured when a car rammed counter protestors. Two state troopers died in an accidental helicopter crash. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Fascists love violence and the rhetoric of violence. We liberals are “snowflakes” and “soy boys” who can only shed pitiful and helpless tears when they “own” us. We’re so feckless and confused that we can’t even prove them wrong.

So when a mere soy boy can outshoot most fascists and take out a fascist activist at 150 yards, as Tyler Robinson is accused of doing, fascists react with spit-flying rage (see below). In their minds, it’s supposed to be the other way around.

Fascists can win for while, and a few fascist governments last for a generation or more. But eventually, free people always rise up to teach them a lesson (which they always forget).

The right-wing response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been violent rhetoric from top to bottom — from Trump, from Kirk’s wife, to all the sickening right-wing mouths in the media.

The response of the mainstream media has been almost as ugly. I understand why all the mainstream punditry hasten to condemn political violence. It is entirely right that they should do so.

But they did not have to make some kind of saint out of Kirk. “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way,” said the headline on Ezra Klein’s piece in the New York Times. Really, Ezra? There’s a right way to market fascism and hatred? But at least you get to keep your job at the New York Times. There already is a long list of people who lost their jobs for daring to take a different view of what Charlie Kirk was.

We’re supposed to get the message that fascist dominance is inevitable and that resistance is futile. They suppose that we should love them and submit to them. I’m afraid I’m not Christian enough to manage that.

The 2025-2026 flu and Covid vaccines (updated below)

The “check in” kiosk at a CVS MinuteClinic, where no staff was visible for up to half an hour at a time.

It took some effort this year to get the new Covid vaccine. I needed to get that taken care of this week, because starting next week I’ll be on five different airline flights through four different airports, not to mention several train trips in Scotland.

The friction, of course, is caused by the Robert Kennedy Jr.’s deranged tampering with the American health care system. The situation varies from state to state. Here in North Carolina, most people get vaccines at pharmacies, particularly CVS. However, a state regulation does not allow pharmacists to do vaccinations unless the vaccine has been approved by the federal Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices (ACIP). Back in June Kennedy dismissed all seventeen members of that committee and has been appointing his own goons to the committee. The committee doesn’t even meet until September 18. Who knows what it will do?

I had to do some asking around to figure out how to get the vaccine before the ACIP meeting. The solution turned out to be CVS MinuteClinics. The MinuteClinics have nurse practitioners, and nurse practitioners are not affected by North Carolina’s limitations on what pharmacists can do. I had to wait an hour to get the shot. There weren’t all that many people waiting. But the MinuteClinic was grossly understaffed.

Stories in the media were absolutely no help in figuring out the situation in North Carolina. I found out about the MinuteClinic solution through a Facebook group for the Democratic Party. Is this an indicator of how even accurate information will become politicized as the fascists push propaganda and call everything else fake news?

I was able to get the flu shot at a pharmacy last week because the flu vaccine is not being held up by the ACIP meeting. My Humana Medicare Advantage insurance paid for both vaccines.

All of a sudden, getting vaccines (and figuring out whether insurance will pay) has become an obstacle course, a political statement, and an act of resistance. Republicans are politicizing the health-care system, putting politicians in charge of public health while marginalizing medical people.

We can only hope that we don’t have a pandemic while know-nothings are running the government. If know-nothing people who like know-nothing governments want to exercise their freedom to die of preventable diseases, fine and good riddance. But they’re going to make things as hard as possible for the rest of us.

Update:

The Washington Post does a somewhat better job of describing the Covid-vaccine limbo we’re in: Virginia makes it easier to access covid vaccines as virus cases rise. The story adds a fact I wasn’t aware of that puts even more blame on Kennedy. He delayed the ACIP meeting.

Traditional values??

From my morning walk: a happy goat

David Brooks

Show me a conservative intellectual and I will show you someone who is insufferably morally smug, with blind spots half a galaxy wide.

I do give David Brooks credit for halfway recognizing that everything he has flacked for for many years has gone to the devil. Still, he identifies as a conservative, and periodically he writes a piece intended to sustain his moral smugness and to flatter conservatives and conservatism.

His column in the New York Times this morning is a masterpiece of self-deception: Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks writes: “As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

It is conservatism, he would have us believe, that knows how to nurture this human capital. Then he shoots himself right between the eyes by citing a study on how Swedish culture protects people of Swedish descent from poverty, even though Sweden is always at or near the top of the list of the world’s most liberal countries.

Because of his blind spot, it doesn’t occur to Brooks to ask himself who conservatives throw money at: the rich and the super-rich. Did the trillions of dollars redistributed upward, and the creation of hundreds of American billionaires, make the rich virtuous? Is it more virtuous to throw money at the rich than at poor people who can barely afford to feed their children?

I have a fantasy of running into Brooks in an airport restaurant while he’s having his $78 hamburger. “You’re a pretty nice man,” I’d say to him. “But you’re an idiot.”

Ken is in the New York Times again

Ken has an article in the Aug. 30 New York Times, The Era of the American Lawn Is Over. On his Substack page, he also has a short video showing his wee front and back gardens near Edinburgh.

The price of silver

One often hears it said that people who grew up during the Great Depression remain frugal for the rest of their lives. Those of us who remember the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s will never forget it. I’m convinced that I can smell a financial calamity well before it happens, because of the irrational exuberance and the obvious unsustainability. That unsustainability never unwinds gradually. It always comes crashing down.

On January 17, 1980, silver reached a high of $49.95 per ounce. Two months later, the Hunt brothers (who were trying to corner the silver market) missed a margin call, and the price of silver fell to $10.80 per ounce.

This morning, as I write, silver is priced at $41.46 per ounce, having risen by around $10 an ounce in the past few months. If you have some silver, that’s nice. But it is not a good economic indicator. Irrational exuberance continues in the stock market, but many warning signs are flashing in the bond market and in gold and currency markets.

As I see it, there is a calamity in our near future. Irrational exuberance tends to last much longer than a rational person can understand. When bubbles will burst is impossible to predict.

The August jobs report was just released. “U.S. labor markets stalled this summer,” writes the New York Times. Yet the stock market is up, apparently because the weakening labor market means that the Fed will reduce interest rates. We should ask ourselves: Who benefits more from low interest rates than from a healthy economy? (Hint: people who play with other people’s money — the people who always cause financial crises.)

To my lights, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts and prepare for turbulence. A financial crisis is never good, even when governments are wise and rational in managing it. But we Americans are now passengers in a ship of fools and con men, who, given choices, will always choose the worst, then double down.

Originally published September 5, 1957. Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Douglas Martin, the Charlotte News, via Wikimedia Commons. This photo was selected as the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year. Click here for high resolution.

The deplorables, an anniversary

The photo above was first published 68 years ago today. We must never forget who the deplorables are, what they are, what their values are, and what they are capable of. The photo is of Dorothy Counts, taunted by white students at Harry P. Harding High School.

Beans for breakfast?

A modest version of a Scottish breakfast: Barley scone, beans, fake bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried egg

It’s less than a month until my trip to Scotland, and that got me looking forward to those enormous and irresistible Scottish breakfasts. How did it come to pass, I wondered, how beans are served for breakfast (to tourists, anyway) in both England and Scotland? I even have had breakfast beans in a hotel on Connaught Place in Delhi, which made me wonder if the idea came from India.

Nope. According to ChatGPT, breakfast beans came from America.

The H.J. Heinz Co., said the AI, started shipping its tinned Boston baked beans to Britain as early 1895. “By the 1920s,” AI wrote, “Heinz had adapted the recipe for British tastes, making it less sweet and more tomato-forward. These beans were cheap, easy to store, and didn’t require cooking from scratch, which made them popular in working-class homes — and eventually a fixture in the full English breakfast after WWII.” Breakfast beans arrived in Wales and Scotland a bit later, AI said — the 1960s-70s.

When I was making the breakfast in the photo, I tried to figure out the minimum number of pans required — (two). In a commercial kitchen, I’m sure, those big British breakfasts are cooked on a griddle. That made me realize than an electric griddle would be a nice thing to have, if I had a place to store it.

Democrats always get blamed for what fascists do

If I made a short list of the biggest lies ever told, one of them would be that there are two sides to every story. But there are not two sides to fascism — not two truthful sides, anyway. But that’s not how the mainstream media play it. We have a word for it — “both-sidesism.” It’s an ugly cousin of radical centrism, and it’s a foolish and deadly way of describing a world that has wicked people in it. Both-sidesism requires that lies have to be treated as though they’re true, or at least might be true, or at least that some people think they’re true.

There is a huge industry that blames Democrats for what Republicans do. For example, how many times have we heard that “Democrats abandoned the working class.” But Democrats didn’t abandon the working class. Republicans won over the working class with propaganda and con men that appeal to the deplorables’ ignorance, their racism, their gullibility, their awful religion, and their meanness.

The moment someone dares to point this out, the propaganda and con men have a ready answer: See there! You call them ignorant, racist, gullible, and mean but you claim you didn’t abandon them! No wonder they don’t like you! This is thought to be a real clincher of an argument that really owns and bedazzles the libs.

This so-called clincher of an argument also belongs on a short list of the biggest lies ever told. That lie is that educated elites are the real cause of fascism and that the deplorables are really just wonderful, wonderful people, if only we understood them. As for educated elites, as much blame gets heaped on liberals for failures to stand in the way of fascism as on fascists for their fascism. But if the deplorables saw fit to hand both houses of Congress, and the White House, to Republicans, just what magic wands do we expect Democrats to use to exert control, especially since fascists have packed the courts? Gavin Newsom of California is finally getting some traction with ridicule and plain talk.

Those who blame liberals for fascism apparently think that there exists some political strategy in which the deplorables can be won back from fascism with flattery, sweet talk, and “understanding.” That is nonsense. We have passed the tipping point. The only solution is to remind the deplorables that there are more civilized people in the world than there are deplorables, and that civilized people have a bigger stick, once they decide to use it. If the deplorables want a war, then ask them whose side half the American people (the smarter half), plus Europe, Canada, and Mexico would be on. Gavin Newsom and Beto O’Rourke are now, at last, being heard above the noise of both-sidesism.

One of most beautiful things we’ve seen lately was seven European leaders — five of them heads of state — descending on Washington to let Trump know where some lines will be drawn. The American media pretended not to understand, because it would feel oh so very harsh to have to explain to the American people that they now live in a rogue country that the world is preparing to deal with. That visit was a warning.

Trump and company know that this is their last chance. They’re going to go for full-on fascism that no law and no election can depose, counting on never being held accountable, free to loot and to dominate. They don’t have the cards to do that. Someone should remind them of Nuremberg.

Summer is winding down

A spicebush swallowtail butterfly was kind enough to pose for me on a Mexican sunflower. Click here for high-resolution version.

After a hot and humid month, Hurricane Erin moved up the East Coast, followed by weather than feels like early fall, with nighttime lows in the 60s and even 50s.

What a relief.

Beto is right

Beto O’Rourke probably is an underdog for the Democratic Party’s 2028 nomination for president. But, as of now, he would be my first choice. I wish this video would go viral. It’s Beto speaking at the Netroots Nation meeting in New Orleans on August 8, 2025. He is not afraid to use the word fascist (which is the right word). He says that, if we are to avoid fascism in America, regaining some power in the 2026 midterm elections is our only hope.

The video in the link is 23 minutes long. All of it is worth watching.

Scotland will show Trump how much it hates him

Today’s front page of The National

The American media probably will underplay Trump’s five-day visit to Scotland. We can hope, though, that with Trump dogged by the Epstein scandal, the American media will keep up the pressure and give us a good look at the protests that are planned.

According to the best information I’ve been able to find, Trump will arrive at Glasgow Prestwick airport today at 8:20 p.m. Scotland time, which is 3:20 p.m. in New York and Washington. I believe he is to travel in a heavily armed motorcade from Glasgow to Aberdeenshire and Trump’s Turnberry golf resort.

Scottish media have reported that the presidential armed limousine, “the Beast,” has already arrive in Scotland. According to Sky News, “Turnberry, and its population of about 200 people, have this week witnessed a never-ending stream of Army trucks, terrorist sweeps, road checkpoints, airspace restrictions, sniper positions being erected and Secret Service agents roaming around.”

If the American media let us down on this spectacle, the British media won’t. You can check the web sites of at least four Scottish newspapers — Herald Scotland, the Scotsman, the National, and the Aberdeen Press & Journal. For video, remember Sky News, which you can stream from Pluto TV, and, as far as I know, on YouTube. And of course there’s always the BBC.

Update:

Yearning for hell to freeze over

Surely we must be in hell: March 19, 2025. Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

The news of late has been so surreal that it feels like living in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, set in a fascist America from which there is No Exit. How the hell do we get out of this place?

A lifelong criminal, con man, and creep of the highest order struts on the world stage like a king, dispensing commands to hellify the world. Half the population, eager and true-believing citizens of hell, are so depraved that they see this king as God’s agent on earth, even as he hastens to light their little lives, too, on fire. The other half of us see what is happening, stunned, bewildered, and near paralyzed by the spectacle of it.

In this hell, freedom is the right to dominate and exploit. Truth is whatever serves the king. Virtue means doing whatever the king wants done. Empathy is toxic. Justice is retribution and persecution. Fairness is at the top of the list of things that must be reversed because fairness can no longer be allowed. Any act of fairness is a crack in hell’s foundation.

In philosophy and literature, there is a well developed idea that this world is hell (even before Donald Trump came along). Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

Time after time people like me have bought into hopes that this criminal, con man, and creep would be neutralized and brought to justice. Time after time he has slithered out of it, not least because there are so many who are afraid of him or who long for a piece of the perks and power in a hellified world — hell’s courtiers, sold souls, connoisseurs of the practice of domination, exploitation, and cruelty.

A new hope?

The Epstein scandal gets more interesting every day. Dare we hope that it will be the Epstein scandal that finally causes hell to freeze over? This morning, the New Republic has this piece by Alex Shepherd: Is This the Turning Point of Trump’s Presidency? It’s early yet, but the Epstein story has all the makings of a defining scandal that could grind Republican rule to a halt.

It’s asking a lot of MAGA fools to comprehend that reality is pretty much a complete reversal of all the lies they have believed. A thousand smoking guns pointed right at their tiny brains may not be enough. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, even if Trump manages to slither out of this, the subversive beauty of the truth trying to come out, while the king and his court struggle to keep the scam going, is a sight to see.

The media and some of the punditry, bless their timid little hearts, are ganging up now to come up with scoops that fry Trump’s ass in the grease of his own guilt. Here’s an example of a good one this morning, from Midas Touch. The link is below.

A screen shot from the video at Midas Touch.

Writers worth remembering

The Prisoner of Zenda was published in 1894. But it was very popular and went through many editions. This appears to be a book club edition, published, I think, in the 1920s. There were movie versions as late as 1979.

In every generation of writers, there are only a few writers who write classics that remain in demand and are kept in print. Everything else falls into obscurity. These books, some of which may even have gone through multiple editions, continue to exist only in the surviving copies, which no doubt become fewer and fewer decade by decade.

I am hardly the first to complain that I find the fiction that gets published these days to be pretty much unreadable. On June 25, the New York Times ran a piece touching on this, Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear? David Brooks’ column on July 10 was When Novels Mattered.

When looking for fiction to read, I rarely find book lists helpful. This neglected fiction is not on anybody’s radar screen, and besides my taste in fiction matches poorly with that of people who compile book lists. But I have found that an AI can be very good at finding neglected fiction to read, if you explain in detail what you like. I have been using ChatGPT’s 4.1 model for this. My to-be-read stack, which was empty for a while, has been replenished.

⬆︎ The Thirty-Nine Steps was published in 1915. Alfred Hitchcock based a movie on the book in 1935. The copy above was a Reader’s Digest book published in 2009. Though it’s a Reader’s Digest book, it contains the complete text.

⬆︎ Sword at Sunset was a bestseller after it was published in 1963. It’s one of the fortunate old books that has been reissued in Kindle format and a new paperback edition.

⬆︎ It seems that the biggest bookstore in Scotland for used books is in Inverness, not Edinburgh. That’s Leakey’s Bookshop. I will be in Inverness for a couple of days in late September, so Leakey’s definitely will be one of my stops. Before I go, I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me make a list of books and authors to look for.

⬆︎ I have been greatly enjoying Slow Horses, which can be streamed on Apple TV+. There have been four seasons so far, with a fifth and sixth season in the works. The TV series is based on a series of novels, Slough House, by Mick Herron. It seems there is no end to the humiliation heaped on Slough, a town about 20 miles west of London. I wrote about Slough in a post in April 2024, The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere. Be sure to read the comments!

⬆︎ I ran into a friend a couple of days ago who told me that he has completely cut himself off from the news, to protect his mental health. I don’t advocate going that far. But I do think that we need to keep our heads above it and realize that what we’re living through is a disgusting pig circus directed by idiots. The New York Times lifted the lid just a little in a recent guest essay, The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller. In this piece, someone is quoted as saying that Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, doesn’t know or care much about policy and that “She’s producing a reality TV show every day.” In the photo, that’s Trump, of course, with Jeffrey Epstein. Though we know that Trump flew on Epstein’s plane seven times, we’re expected to believe Trump’s denials that anything naughty or illegal happened.

Trump proudly visits new concentration camp

Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

I wonder: Is it because contemporary Republicans don’t know anything about the history of Nazi concentration camps that they are so eager for photo ops in front of cages, and that thus they just don’t understand how foolish it is to strut their depravity for the historical record? Or is it something like the opposite, that they are truly proud to be what they are?

They own it now. They own everything that ever happens in these places. The fools who voted for them own it, too.

Often it’s impossible to get public domain photos for current events. For Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz,” though, dozens of official White House photos were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The Trump regime, clearly, wants the photos to be seen by as many people as possible.

I find that I just cannot comprehend how people like this think. And I’m afraid we’re going to learn much more about what this kind of people are capable of.

Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.