Burlap! Camellias! Verdi!


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I regularly order wheat berries and hulled barley from Amazon, five pounds at a time, to grind into flour. This time the wheat came in a beautiful burlap bag. It’s a tiny burlap bag, but I haven’t seen a burlap bag in years.

My camellias are blooming. Camellias in bloom always make me think of La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, which I read in French some years ago. Verdi turned the story into an opera, La Traviata. It’s a tragic story, but Verdi included a happy piece, which also is a waltz.


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Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism


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The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, 1951. There is now a new edition from The Library of America, 2025, 880 pages.

As the United States spirals downward into fascism, we come across more and more references to Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. I decided to have a go at reading it.

It is dense reading. The book is too long for many readers (including me). I scanned quickly through parts of it in which I found (to me) excessive detail in areas with less application to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Even so, there is much to be gained in historical perspective and political philosophy.

I asked ChatGPT to write the briefest possible summary of the book, with attention to how her themes are relevant to what is happening today:

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1. Antisemitism, Imperialism, and the Roots of Totalitarianism

Arendt begins by tracing antisemitism and imperialism in 19th-century Europe—not as isolated prejudices but as structural forces that eroded political equality and civic belonging. She argues that racism and economic domination abroad habituated Europeans to hierarchy and dehumanization at home.

→ Relevance: In the U.S., decades of racial hierarchy and overseas militarism have similarly normalized seeing groups of people—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—as “less real” citizens.

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2. The Decline of the Nation-State and the “Right to Have Rights”

With World War I and the collapse of empires, millions became stateless refugees, losing legal protection because “the Rights of Man” depended on belonging to a political community. Arendt called this loss “the right to have rights.”

→ Relevance: When U.S. officials strip voting rights, demonize migrants, or create categories of people effectively outside the law, they reproduce this condition of rightlessness within a nominal democracy.

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3. The Rise of Mass Society and the Collapse of Truth

Totalitarian movements arose not among fanatics alone but from atomized, isolated individuals who had lost trust in shared reality. The destruction of class, community, and factual discourse left people craving certainty and belonging, which demagogues supplied with ideology and conspiracy.

→ Relevance: The disintegration of civic trust, online propaganda, and “alternative facts” in today’s America are textbook examples of Arendt’s insight that loneliness and meaninglessness breed authoritarianism.

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4. Ideology and the Logic of Total Domination

Totalitarian ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism) claim to explain all events through one “scientific” process—race or history—reducing individuals to functions of that logic. Once accepted, facts no longer matter; only ideological consistency does.

→ Relevance: The MAGA movement’s self-contained mythology—“the deep state,” “stolen elections,” “invasion at the border”—illustrates this same replacement of reality with narrative necessity.

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5. Bureaucracy, Violence, and the Banality of Evil

Arendt’s later notion (developed from this groundwork) is that totalitarian systems rely less on monstrous villains than on ordinary people performing evil through obedience and routine.

→ Relevance: The bureaucratic enforcement of cruelty—family separations, deportations, targeted disenfranchisement—shows how moral numbness within institutions can sustain authoritarian power without overt tyranny.

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6. Her Core Warning

Totalitarianism, for Arendt, is not a foreign aberration but a modern temptation: the desire to escape freedom and uncertainty through ideology, conformity, and the worship of strength. It emerges when citizens stop caring about truth, abandon solidarity, and let politics become spectacle.

→ Contemporary parallel: When a public tolerates lies, applauds humiliation, and trades citizenship for tribal identity, the preconditions of total rule are already present.

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In brief:

Arendt’s central message is that freedom depends on truth, plurality, and political participation—and that when these erode under loneliness, propaganda, and cynicism, democratic societies drift toward totalitarian habits long before the camps or purges appear.

It was propaganda, not politics, that got us here


No Fox News, no Facebook, responsible media, and decency in politics. They even cook from scratch! Source: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Once again, Ezra Klein, one of the smartest fools in the American media, is telling Democrats what’s wrong with them. The piece is “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism.”

Mainstream pundits like Klein would not be able to keep their jobs unless they kept to the now-standard centrist narrative. According to that narrative, Trump is in power because Democrats “lost touch” with voters. Here one can fill in the blanks about why that happened — “too preachy,” too far left, etc., etc. The pundits all have different answers according to their pre-existing politics.

But the question is not what’s wrong with Democrats and liberals. The question is: What’s wrong with voters? How does someone like Trump actually win a fair national election?

People are not more stupid than they used to be. But many things have changed since the days families gathered around their radios in the evening and tried to understand what was happening in the world. I would name four critically important — and I think obvious — things that help to explain where we are.

1. The world is much more complicated, much harder to understand, and changes ever faster.

2. The dark arts that are used to deceive people have made huge advances, and technologies have made the cost of deceiving people vastly cheaper than it used to be.

3. Changes in the world have eroded the privileges and status of millions of people. They’re not happy about that, they don’t really understand how it happened (because it’s complicated), and they are vulnerable to deceptions that offer easy answers that play on their prejudices and ignorance.

4. Those on the right are willing to do whatever it takes to get, and to keep, power and wealth. Deception, scapegoating, destruction and perversion of any institution that stands in their way — they don’t care. First they broke through the norms. Now they’re breaking through the law.

Though there are roots in the Reagan and Gingrich eras, this really began with Fox News in 1996. Fox News wasn’t a mere conservative outlet. It intentionally practiced deception. It featured rage as entertainment. It monetized anger. It drove moral panics. It fused right-wing politics and identity for white Americans, who had real grievances because of changes in the world. Back in cable days, academic studies found that voting patterns shifted to the right in counties where Fox News became available on cable.

What Fox News pioneered, social media industrialized. It weaponized the grievances of susceptible white people with deception fueled with rage. It enabled terrible people to win fair elections.

Now we need to ask: Who was not susceptible? Klein helpfully reminds us who that was in the piece I linked to above: “The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period [2012-2024] was college-educated white voters.”

Why might that be? Again, I think the answer is obvious. Education exposes people to multiple ways of seeking and testing knowledge — scientific reasoning, media literacy, probabilistic thinking, openness to complexity. Aggrieved people with modest educations were never able to gain the tools needed to see through the right-wing deceptions. They were, and very much still are, systematically and intentionally misinformed. Their prejudices, their ignorance, and their religiosity make them eager believers, blind to another thing that is obvious to those who are not susceptible — that the right-wing centers of power and wealth that developed new ways to control the little people actually don’t give a damn about them.

Where we are today did not come about because of failures by the Democratic Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has made mistakes and might have done better. But some mistakes are inevitable in a fragile coalition with a faulty and self-blaming understanding of why right-wingers have been winning elections. Where we are today is, rather, the success of a decades-long project of epistemic capture by an unprincipled and ruthless right wing. Klein’s centrism is nothing but a comforting fable for elite moderates who don’t want to admit that one side has been waging cognitive war while the other kept insisting on reality, civility, fairness, policy.

No one in the mainstream punditry is anywhere near saying what I think is rather obviously true: There can be no real solution until the people who are being deceived somehow start caring whether what they believe is true. Right-wing centers of wealth and power are not going to stop lying and refining the industry that delivers the lies.

So here’s the problem, and it’s a huge problem: How do you teach people who have been taught otherwise that the solution to their grievances is the solution that Democrats propose: Reality, civility, fairness, and policy. Education can manage that. Propaganda can only tear it down. Education is hard, and expensive. Propaganda is dirt cheap.

Deplorables at Whole Foods? Yeah, right.

The New York Times had a completely silly story yesterday with the headline “Whole Foods, MAHA and the Battle Over Healthy Eating in America.” What battle? And what in the world does Whole Foods have to do with it?

There is no battle, and Whole Foods has nothing to do with it. Instead, the Times went out and found some right-wing kook and associate of Charlie Kirk who would give them the quote they wanted to whip up a fictitious element of controversy. You’ll have to wait for the 14th paragraph to get to the quote and the made-up premise of the story:

“They do notice Whole Foods’ lack of voice in this movement and wondering where their leadership is in this. … This is the moment that you guys have allegedly fought for your entire existence. Why are you slowing down when you should be ramping up?”

Whole Foods has been fighting for this MAHA moment for its entire existence? Whole Foods is slowing down? I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods for thirty years (starting with the San Francisco Whole Foods back in the 1990s), and somehow in my lefty blindness I failed to notice that this was a right-wing thing all along.

This kook, by the way, says she was at Chick-fil-A “like, four times a week” until she had a “conversion.” Sure she did. All fanatics have conversions. Then they consider themselves an enlightened elect while those of us who’ve been there for fifty years (my roots are in the hippy era) are insufficiently pure and have to be purged. Clearly MAGA wants Whole Foods to endorse MAHA. The New York Times has been foolish enough to help a fascist movement with corporate intimidation, something that all fascist movements have to do.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge and commitment required to actually live a healthy lifestyle with a healthy diet. Instead it’s a right-wing movement of Pharisees, and, like all right-wing movements, it’s based on demonization and derp. Does anyone think that Robert F. Kennedy is going to teach the deplorables to stop buying ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks, to shop healthy, and to go home and cook from scratch for the rest of their lives?

Of course not. They just don’t have the wiring that would take. Rather, they think that condemning vaccines, fluoride, seed oils, Tylenol, and Red Dye No. 40 will make them healthy again. It’s really just a different kind of scapegoating and a new genre of derp.

If I start seeing deplorables in MAGA caps at Whole Foods — there are plenty of them around here — I’ll let y’all know what they’re buying.

Dick Cheney on the trash heap of history


Dick Cheney with some Saudis, 1990. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Krugman’s Substack post this morning is about Dick Cheney’s “drill baby drill” energy report from 2001. Krugman quotes from the report:

By 2020, non-hydropower renewable energy is expected to account for 2.8 percent of total electricity generation.

As of March 2025, 50.8 percent of American electricity came from renewable sources.

Even though George Bush and Dick Cheney were boy scouts compared with Donald Trump and JD Vance, we must never forget that they were wrong about everything, and that the ways in which they were wrong did enormous harm in the world while making the super-rich richer and setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. In 2016, the Brookings Institution wrote: “Looking back, one could argue that this ‘oil escalation’ strategy failed on all counts, exacerbating instability in the Middle East and setting the U.S. and the world back a decade and a half in the fight against climate change.”

It was a huge relief when at last we saw the helicopters carrying Bush and Cheney out of Washington for the last time. I’d have thought that with Bush/Cheney we had hit rock bottom. Now we know that the global oligarchy was just getting started. And this time they don’t intend to give up their power because of a mere election.

Barley pancakes, and two mysteries

Why is it that grains that are so difficult to make into bread — barley and buckwheat, for example — make such perfect pancakes?

And why is that so much barley is grown — especially in Europe — but that so little of it is eaten? Most of the barley goes into beers and ales and whiskeys, while trendy but inferior grains such as quinoa get all the attention.

I’m a barley evangelist, as regular readers know. I can’t imagine not keeping organic hulled barley in stock, with an electric mill to grind it into flour.

The pancakes in the photo are made from fresh-ground barley flour, a little olive oil, a little baking powder, and nonfat milk.

Getting by in a pub-deprived culture


Vegetarian fake chicken pie. Click here for high-resolution version.

To those of us born into a Northern European culture, there is no food more magical than a pie. Pies have ancestors in the ancient Mediterranean, but I suspect that it was in medieval England where the magical pies of fairy tales (and now, pubs!) came into existence.

Regular readers know how much I like the British and Irish pubs, and how deprived I feel because America does not have a proper pub culture. And, in pubs, it’s not just about the drink. It’s also about the food. I’m recently home from Scotland, and fall weather has arrived. So I can’t stop thinking about savory pies.

I kick myself for neglecting to photograph the seafood pie that Ken and I had in a pub in Peebles, near the John Buchan museum. Every pub is different, of course. Many pubs don’t have savory pies with a complete top and bottom crust — a lazy compromise. Instead, the filling is poured into a baking vessel, and a round piece of crust is laid on top. The pie is still good, but the magic isn’t very effective. The best pies, really, come from high street bakeries.


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Cream of mushroom soup and whole wheat bread. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Bread and soup

And then there’s bread and soup. Somewhere in Scotland there must be pubs that can beat me at bread and soup. I haven’t yet found those pubs, though.

⬆︎ Wood for winter

The photo is from my morning ATV ride. An old oak up on the ridge had died. Neighbors sawed it up and split it for firewood. I wish I had the option of heating with wood. But I don’t have a chimney.

The awful 17th century


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Witch Wood. John Buchan, first published 1927.

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, 2025. 432 pages.

The history of witch-burning in Scotland is horrifying. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, far more than in England. The trials continued into the late 1600s, but the panic over witches had pretty much subsided by 1707.

How in the world do we understand how a century of witch trials in Scotland was so quickly followed — in the very same Scotland! — by a century of the Enlightenment? How was it that these prominent elements of Scottish history were mirrored so quickly in America?

I am no historian, and I don’t have any thorough answers for these questions. For one, the history of Scotland is bafflingly complicated. By comparison, it seems to me that the histories of England and America are much easier to get one’s head around. But I do think I can see just a glimmer of how the sudden transition from witch trials to the Enlightenment unfolded in Scotland.

I often read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. By coincidence, I was reading John Buchan’s Witch Wood at the same time I arrived at Chapter 4 of Silence of the Gods. (A hat tip here to Chenda, for recommending this book.) That chapter is about the 17th Century, with the title “Antiquarians and Witch-Hunters.”

Silence of the Gods limits itself to places farther north and more remote than Scotland. But it’s clear that, though Scotland excelled at burning witches, the witch panic was everywhere in Christendom during the 17th Century. But it’s only in Scotland where a particular zeal for witch-burning was immediately followed by the work of the Enlightenment. Surely one set the stage for the other, in some strange way?

I had a long discussion with ChatGPT about this. ChatGPT’s bottom line was: Religious zealotry built the roads that the Enlightenment ran on.

There are a couple of key points to understanding this. The first is that, during the 17th Century, Scotland’s kirk had far too much civil power. That is, as we Americans would understand it, there was very little separation between church and state. Scotland was divided by religious conflict and was in great turmoil. In ways that I don’t understand very well, the deposition of James VII, followed by William III and Mary II (1689) set the stage for important changes in how Scotland was governed. The Settlement of 1690 preserved the church but handed civil power in Scotland back to civil authorities.

Americans learned an important lesson from this. To quote ChatGPT: “Seventeenth-century Scotland showed what happens when a church (whether presbyterian or episcopal) fuses with state power—persecution, ‘enthusiasm,’ and civil strife. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated carried that memory and became key allies of Baptists in the push for disestablishment in the states (notably in Virginia).”

John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a fictional account of what village life was like in Scotland in 1644. Buchan knew this history. At the time he was writing Witch Wood, he also was writing a biography of James Graham, the 1st Marquess of Montrose, who figured prominently in Scotland’s religious conflicts of the 17th Century.

Buchan probably expected his readers of a hundred years ago to know much more about Scottish history than most of us do today. That lack of knowledge of Scottish history makes Witch Wood harder to appreciate. One thing that strikes me about Witch Wood, though, is Buchan’s harsh treatment of the kirk, its theologies, and the zeal of the men who held power in the church. To put it coarsely, Buchan did not find it necessary to kiss the church’s feet, which makes me think that by 1927 Scotland was well along in losing its religion. That draws our attention to yet another mystery about the problems of America: How was it that England, Scotland, and even Ireland lost their religion, while Americans are now dealing with an attempted takeover by Christian nationalists? In disturbingly many ways, what’s happening in America today resembles what happened in Scotland in the 17th Century (bitter, even violent division with the empowerment of fanatics), fused with some political innovations developed in Germany in the 1930s.

I’m only halfway through Silence of the Gods, but one thing is perfectly clear. The Christianization of the far north — Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania — was just as violent and ugly as what happened to the south.

All of this is horrifyingly relevant today, because it’s still going on, in America at least. What will it take for people to remember that to be governed by zealots is to be governed by the devil?


Witch Wood, Chapter 2. Click here for high-resolution version.

You’re just a peasant now


Peter Thiel. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It was back in 2021 when Fiona Hill wrote, “Russia is America’s ghost of Christmas future.” And now here we are.

Fiona Hill’s words might have been just a metaphorical warning back in 2021. Now it’s obvious not only what Trump’s intentions are, it’s equally obvious that the Republican Party, Republicans in Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court are fully on board. They want a Putin-like head of state with unlimited power. The country will be run not for the people, but for the billionaire oligarchy and the elite but incompetent hacks who are corrupt enough, and loyal enough to Trump, to be a part of the government.

We’ve had Elon Musk’s number for quite a while now. But even more chilling is how tech billionaires who formerly supported Democrats have now gone over to Trump. And why wouldn’t they? The American economy, as in Russia, is being allocated out to its billionaire oligarchs. They all want their piece of it. For example, in Politico: “‘Slap in the face’: Marc Benioff’s Trump turn stuns San Francisco.” Benioff’s wealth has doubled in the last five years.

Those who now control the power of government can give the oligarchs a choice: Come on board and get your share, or be targeted, corruptly, by the law, like George Soros.

Trump could never have gained power without the help of the deplorables’ machinery of religion, so Christian nationalists also are getting their share of the government. Kevin Roberts, a Christian nationalist and president of the Heritage Foundation (which is behind Project 2025) said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

We’re past the point at which billionaires had to be discreet about their intentions. They talk openly now. We can see clearly now what they are and what they want. If they stay in power, it’s clear what America is to be.

Peter Thiel actually gave a series of four lectures to the Commonwealth Club of California. The title of the lectures was, “The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series.” Recordings of the lectures were leaked. You can read about what Thiel said here, in the Washington Post; and here, in the Guardian.

So we know what these people want. We also know what they are afraid of. What they are afraid of is democracy. In a democracy they would be heavily taxed, and their power would be curbed. Thiel has been explicit about this, as when he says that democracy is incompatible with freedom. He thinks only of his own freedom, of course. The freedoms (and rights) of people like us mean nothing to him. To him, we are not free people with rights and freedoms. Rather, we are dangerous threats to his freedom.

It’s really pretty terrifying what great wealth can do to people. We’ve reached another point in history in which a few people with great wealth believe — and it may be true — that they have more power than the people and that they have a right — God-given, no less — to use that power, bloodlessly or not.

21,000 steps before supper


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Probably the most written-about hotspot for food in Edinburgh is the Sheep Heid Inn, especially their Sunday roasts. This inn lies some distance from the more trafficked parts of Edinburgh. If you walk down the Royal Mile to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, you’ll be right at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, a high, steep hill with stunning views. The walk up Arthur’s Seat will burn some calories.

Then if you descend from Arthur’s Seat in just the right direction, you’ll find the Sheep Heid Inn, hidden among some trees and a high stone wall. According to my watch, I had gone more than 21,000 steps in Edinburgh that day before we had Sunday roast at the Sheep Heid Inn.

Dunrobin Castle


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Most of Scotland’s castles are in varying stages of ruin. An exception is Dunrobin Castle, which is about an hour’s drive north of Inverness. The castle is in beautiful condition, and it’s fully furnished. It must cost a fortune to maintain.