Is science fully up to the coming challenges?

New issue of Science up online.

 

And, of course, as is my Jones, I head straight for the book reviews.

Bergson is all but forgotten today, a situation Emily Herring hopes to redress with her new biography, Herald of a Restless World. Herring points out that Bergson’s ideas, which included subjective experience, nuance, and open-endedness, appealed to a populace frightened by the increasing mechanization quickly transforming everyday life...

Indeed.

...A few years after his fateful decision to study philosophy, Bergson started his first teaching job. He was asked to give a speech before an assembly of students and teachers during the traditional end-of-term awards ceremony. Barely out of school himself, the young man invited the students to reflect on the “severe disadvantages of what we call ‘specialisation.’” He argued that great men of science of the past, such as the illustrious Frenchmen Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, and Louis Pasteur, had made sure to consider problems from all sorts of different angles and perspectives, using methods from a variety of disciplines. But as the nineteenth century ended, this became more and more difficult to do. The accumulation of knowledge seemed to have reached a tipping point that fragmented the sciences into increasingly narrow fields and subfields and drove a wedge between science and philosophy. In his speech, Bergson warned that this fragmentation, this loss of big-picture, synthetic thinking, impoverished human knowledge as a whole. Bergson conceded that the impulse towards specialisation was a natural one, prompted by the “miserable discovery that the universe is greater than our mind; that life is short, education time-consuming and the truth infinite.” But he urged the students to resist this impulse, to put off committing to one specialised subject for as long as possible, and instead to broaden their minds as much as they could.

The young Bergson’s aversion to specialisation had started at some point in the late 1870s, when he discovered that, unlike other academic disciplines, philosophy was not limited to a specific object but opened up an infinity of theoretical avenues. It represented an opportunity to encompass all areas of knowledge, to look at the biggest, most important problems, to embrace every aspect of reality in one sweeping gesture. By choosing philosophy, he would not have to abandon any of his interests but could keep them all under investigation. Conceivably, Bergson had also realised in that moment that mathematical problems, though fascinating, were too narrow for his intellectual ambitions. By specialising as a mathematician, he would be willingly cutting himself off from whole areas of human knowledge, whereas, as a philosopher, the entirety of human knowledge would be his subject matter.

A “BAD” SCIENTIST
Desboves was devastated when he found out about Bergson’s decision. His young prodigy, the teenager who had bested his hero Pascal, was squandering his incredible mathematical gift, and for what? To pursue his interest in an inferior subject. The teacher wrote to the boy’s parents, stating in no uncertain terms that their son was committing an irreparable folly. But Bergson did not budge, and his parents stood by his decision. The next time Desboves caught sight of Henri, he grumbled: “You could have been a mathematician; you will be a mere philosopher.” Of course, the teacher could not have foreseen that his student would in fact grow up to be anything but a “mere” philosopher.

Desboves’s comment nevertheless ended up haunting Bergson. Throughout his career, Bergson would find himself repeatedly accused of being a philosopher who rejected science because he misunderstood it. As the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote: “Though his thinking has been about biology, mathematics, and psychology, people call Bergson an artist.” Such misconceptions about him would stick. In a scathing article published in the Monist in 1912, the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell would paint Bergson as mathematically illiterate and accuse him of promoting “anti-intellectual philosophy” that led to the absurd view that “incapacity for mathematics is therefore a sign of grace.” This view, Russell added sarcastically, was “fortunately a very common one.” In 1922, Albert Einstein dismissed Bergson’s interpretation of relativity, claiming that the philosopher did not have a sufficient grasp of the physics at play. The following year the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote that Bergson was a “good poet, but a bad scientist.”

Of all the misconceptions about his philosophy, the idea that Bergson was promoting an anti-science agenda was the one that exasperated him the most. Although he was critical of certain aspects of scientific thought, he did not reject science through and through. Just because he found limitations in the methods of science did not mean that his understanding of these methods was limited.

Bergson viewed science and metaphysics as two different but complementary forms of knowledge, each limited in its own way. The perspective on reality offered by science would always be relative to its own symbols. Metaphysics, on the other hand, could aspire to absolute knowledge but would never produce the practical results of science. Yet, if both forms of knowledge came together in a way that recognised their fundamental differences, they could progress by pushing each other forward.

This had not, however, always been Bergson’s belief. In 1878, when he became a student at the prestigious École normale supérieure, he leaned towards the side of those who placed absolute faith in the power of science, thanks in large part to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer…

Herring, Emily. Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (pp. 25-27). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

Just getting fully underway. In Chapter 4 now.

Love it.

BLUESKY UPDATE

Also in the Science Magazine issue.

Very cool.

I continue to build my bsky.social footprint.

 

BACK TO MUSING ON SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY...

 

 

 

OK, is it "provably unprovable" (Scientific American article) that "perception is an illusion?" (via "Big Think")

 

Lordy Mercy. Recall the tiresome subjectivist bane of undergrad Phil101—"there is no such thing as objective truth."

More shortly...

_________

  

Klaas is back in session yet again

“Passionate, insightful, and occasionally jaw-dropping, Corruptible sets out the story of the intoxicating lure of power—and how it has shaped the modern world.” —Peter Frankopan, internationally bestselling author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“We know power corrupts, but how exactly? Is it a quick moral collapse or a slow rot? Dangerous as a drug addiction, power changes both those who have it and those who just want a quick fix. Klaas gives us a new, insightful, and seditious road map to this primal urge to dominate, which, thankfully, not all of us share equally.” —Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent of NBC News

“The power-hungry don’t ask why, they only ask why not…. Keeping such people far from the levers of power is at least half the battle, as Brian Klaas explains so well in Corruptible—a GPS system for navigating a world increasingly full of illiberal democracies, modernized dictatorships, and populists who care only for power.” —Garry Kasparov, chairman of both the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation and former world chess champion

“A brilliant exploration… This book builds Brian Klaas’s reputation, offering an essential guide through our world of democratic decay, corruption, and cronyism.” —Dan Snow, bestselling author of On This Day in History

Brian Klaas rocks. I am havin' too much fun, deeply into this one. Just as with his prior book Flukes.

 

Could not be more timely, in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory.

 

The book is packed with cool observations.

 

More...

Baby Faces and Bigotry

In your daily life, you likely encounter dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of strangers. Even in places you frequent, such as the grocery store or your office building, you’ll cross paths with people who are completely unknown to you. If you’re a frequent flier, or if you live in a major metropolis, encountering people who speak a different language, wear different clothes, or come from different cultures is routine.

But for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, such encounters were exceedingly rare. Because of territoriality, venturing into unknown land was akin to playing Russian roulette. The biologist and author Jared Diamond, in his book The World Until Yesterday, argues that hunter-gatherers classify everyone into three groups: friends, enemies, or strangers. Friends are those dozens of families that make up your band, or who are from bands you’re on good terms with. Enemies are people you recognize, but are from a rival band that lives in the same area. The third camp—strangers—are rare. But, to be safe, you must automatically assume they’re potential enemies. In the prehistoric past, hunter-gatherers would never meet someone who was from halfway across the world, meaning that encounters with people from different races were effectively close to zero. As a result, racism couldn’t have been reinforced by psychological evolution over hundreds of thousands of years the same way that biases for height and gender were. Plus, given the origins of our species, most Stone Age hunter-gatherers didn’t look remotely like modern Europeans or Americans. So, is all racism culturally learned?

Unfortunately, our Stone Age brains produce serious biases about people who look different. For survival, our social species has evolved to quickly use cues to identify whether someone is like us, and a friend, or unlike us, and a potential foe. This impulse gives rise to what social scientists call sorting between “in-group” and “out-group” individuals. In-group individuals are to be embraced, while out-group individuals are to be shunned, driven off, or even killed. Crucially, those from an out-group are more likely to be people that we see as potential threats—a point that we’ll return to momentarily.

Today, many people still rely on these arcane, bigoted sorting mechanisms as a cognitive shortcut, even though it’s completely irrational…

…Our prehistoric templates for determining in-groups and out-groups shift our behavior, even when it’s irrational and damaging to our best interests. We trust those whom we identify with. But we’re suspicious of those who don’t seem to be “one of us.

In the modern world, those templates from ancestral brains intersect with centuries of explicit and implicit culturally learned racism to create even more biased assessments of those who are from a different, particularly minority, ethnic group. That’s demonstrated with some depressing research that shows white Westerners sometimes behave as though black people are “strangers” who are potential threats—a phenomenon that further compounds the systemic institutional racism that plagues modern societies.

All human faces can be scored by how baby-faced they appear (the technical term is babyfaceness). Countless experiments have demonstrated that we instinctively pay attention to this trait when assessing others—and judge them based upon it. In the criminal justice system, there’s evidence that judges and juries treat baby-faced defendants as less responsible or culpable for their actions than less baby-faced defendants, even if they’re the same age. We seem to automatically believe that babyfaceness is a proxy for innocence. As a result, those who are more baby-faced are often perceived as less threatening than those with more hardened, adult facial features.

But there’s a disheartening twist.

Studies have found that whether babyfaceness helps or hurts you gain power is dependent on race. Here’s what the research seems to show: Black people are more likely to be viewed by white people as threatening. That’s partly because of the “strangers” template in our Stone Age brains and partly due to a long, grotesque history of learned and internalized racism. No surprise there. But just as white people are more prone to viewing black people as threats, they’re less prone to viewing baby-faced black people that way, according to experiments. Further research has shown that, in a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. White people view black people with more adult faces as a threat, leading to reduced career advancement. According to this research, this relationship is inverted for white people. In similar studies, baby-faced white CEOs were perceived to be weak rather than threatening. In a white-dominated society, it seems that having a baby face helps you if you’re black and hurts you if you’re white. It’s horrifyingly bonkers. But it seems, on aggregate, to make a difference that compounds preexisting racial biases in society. The point is this: irrational evaluations of faces based on archaic threat instincts still seem to be entrenching inequality in our modern world.

This could partially explain (but never excuse) why highly qualified people from ethnic minorities often get passed over for leadership positions in favor of less qualified white people…

Klaas, Brian. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (pp. 79-82). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Indeed.
 

DIGRESSING FOR A MOMENT

Brian has a Substack site he's named The Garden of Forking Paths. I'm a paid subscriber. Snippet below from a recent post:

How I write
I, like everyone else, learned to write by reading. Brains are pattern detection machines, and we intuit how those patterns should look by observing them elsewhere.

But creativity requires recombination that breaks patterns; if we only recreated the world as we observed it, nothing new would ever be produced. The Middle Ages captured this dynamic by giving the world florilegia, or “gathered flowers,” which were bound anthologies of various snippets of wisdom or creativity.

All ideas are built on life’s florilegia, and a writer’s brain, like a flower, can only grow if it is given the right sustenance. That sustenance is some combination of life experience and observation, interaction with clever and passionate people, and, of course, reading.

Every writer, like every human, is a sort of mind thief—not due to plagiarism or dishonesty—but simply because our brains cannot produce a purely “original” idea. Creativity is little more than interesting, novel synthesis. Just as a musician is swayed by the tunes they feed their minds, so too is a writer shaped by the authors they deliberately consume. If I am writing a whimsical essay, I might sit down and read Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut for an hour before I start typing, an offering of time to my playful muse as much as a subconscious prime for the mind.

As I’ve written previously, every good idea I’ve ever had has sprung, at least in part, from someone else’s good idea.

If you want to write, you must do at least two things relentlessly: observe the world and read. Crucially, though, you must observe and read what you don’t know, because otherwise the soil around you becomes overly stale. I have decidedly strange interests, so my bedside table is currently occupied by a teetering stack of books: one about plant consciousness; another about consumerism in modern Christianity; one on the history of ignorance; a Slow Horses thriller for good measure; and a delightful tome about the decline of belief in magic...

Be Yourself
When we converse, we are allergic to inauthentic interaction. You know what I’m talking about: the office bore who is always networking, always saying aggravating phrases like “let’s connect,” but never actually connecting with anyone. Our minds come, I happily note, fully equipped with bullshit detectors, and this aptitude for sniffing out fakery carries over into the realm of the written word. There is a lot of inauthentic same-y sludge out there, which has an astonishing tendency—at least on the nonfiction side of the ledger—to always appear, like an obscenely wealthy but dimwitted demon, on the bestseller lists in airport bookshops.

Even non-fiction requires characters. It’s obvious that fiction is character-driven. But conveying any idea in a compelling way for us—The Storytelling Animal—requires narrative, and narrative often works best when it flows, at least in part, through intriguing people...

Great advice. You ought read that entire essay.

 

QUICK REACTION

I was a rather unremarkable "B" student through high school. But, I always loved to read, from early childhood. I have routinely read multiple books and periodicals ongoing throughout my entire adult life. When I finally entered undergraduate school at the age of 34 in 1980, I first took the CLEP exam (College Level English Proficiency). The national 99th percentile score at the time was 920.

Mine was 965. It saved me a year of Freshman English classes.

You just gotta read.

Now nearing age 79, I continue to average 2-3 books a week, 6 subscribed periodicals, and the broad raft of online prose.

Brian is right. Read. Explore. Be awake. And, learn to compose stories.

We'll take this riff up more fully later.

BTW, Klaas was back in earlier session on Nov 7th.

DEC 1ST UPDATE

.

I finished reading Corruptible. Marvelous. You owe it to yourselves to read and enjoy.

On to the next topics...

______

  

Day 1,000

of Vladimir Putin’s 3-day Conquest of  Ukraine.

 

 Day +14 of Donald Trump's now-"successful" 9 yr effort to conquer the United States.

     

 

UPDATE, NOV 21ST

60 days til Inauguration Day...

No AG for you, son.

_________

  

The post-election microblog migration away from Elon.

Will Bluesky become a viable alternative to "X"?

   

 I'm fixin' to find out.

 

Same handle as my TwitterX account. Just getting started. Still up on TwitterX for now.

Ran across Mike Caulfield on Bluesky. Intrigued by several of hiis posts, I looked into and bought his book. Just what I need—another title to study.

Glad I got it. 

Stay tuned...

_________

  

Burning Down Washington

to "save" America.

   

)

 

Kevin Roberts is President of The Heritage Foundation—a $100M/yr political lobbying business masquerading as a legit IRS non-profit 501(c)(3) "charity." This book had been scheduled for release in September 2024, but they delayed its publication until after the presidential election (likely owing in part to the "Forward" written by Trump running mate JD Vance, he of #HillbillyIshtar renown). They also altered the book cover art, removing the matchstick image and changing "Burning Down Washington" to the somewhat less, well—"inflammatory"—"Taking Back Washington."

 

Nonetheless, the incendiary allusions remain peppered throughout the pages.

 

Yeah...

 

He's on a roll with this riff.

 

 

The Dastardly "Uniparty" being all of us "Woke Libs" I guess.

 

Some encapsulatory le essense du Roberts:

The Permanent Things

What, then, are “the eternal rules of order and right” that Washington saw as being beyond a matter of opinion? They’re what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.”

Today, the assault on the American way of life is aimed not just at our Constitution and political traditions but more insidiously at the foundations of civilization, which is to say, the permanent things. There is no point in preserving certain political forms if the society they were meant to protect has died.

The Party of Creation needs to get over the old conservatism’s reluctance to “impose” its “values” on others [emphasis BG]. There is no way to avoid taking a stance on the practices that sustain the human race. We can say with certainty what the “permanent things,” the vital tasks of any culture, are. The aegis of every civilization protected them; the best of all that has been thought and said from each distinctive human culture has pointed to them.

Family: Men and women should marry (and do so younger than most do today). They should marry for life and should bring children into the world (more than most do today). Parents have the right and responsibility to raise their children, to educate them, to pass on their traditions, and to make important family decisions (including rejecting experimental medical treatments) in line with their conscience and values. Children owe their parents a measure of obedience and gratitude, and family members should take care of one another. The nuclear family is the foundation of the human order, but it should reach beyond itself to form the fabric of an extended family, community, and local place.

Faith: Mankind is made to worship, and our republic depends on the moral strength and habits of heart brought about by piety. We have in this country a glorious tradition of religious freedom, but it is not freedom from religion but freedom for religion. A man’s religious tradition is a matter of his conscience, but that we have a faithful people is a matter of public concern. Accordingly, the state must not discriminate against religious organizations in government programs, and freedom of religion should take precedence over the enforcement of other rights. Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Community: Americans’ pride has always been in their communities, the “little platoons” where citizens freely associate with one another and practice self-government. In communities, people from different backgrounds and walks of life orient themselves around the common good in its most concrete and practical form. Communities are places where we lift up one another’s burdens and practice the art of neighborliness, but also where we celebrate the holy days and feast together. If they are well ordered, our communities permit a feeling of comfort and safety at any hour of the day.

Work: Man is Homo faber, the animal that makes. By his labors, man provides for himself and his family. There is deep dignity in work, in the ownership one has of a job well done, that cannot be replaced by simply giving someone something they have not worked for or earned. Moreover, we know that the material prosperity that makes many of the other elements of the human order possible comes from productive human labor and the habits of discipline, skill, and care that undergird that productivity. At the same time, there is an appropriate time to rest from our labors together with our families and communities. The division of labor has also held political significance throughout human history. In the Western tradition, a republican government befitted only men who were masters of themselves, who were economically self-sufficient.

Nation: Man’s gratitude toward all the “little platoons” of human order culminate in his devotion to his broader nation and homeland. In a republic, this is experienced as a duty to safeguard the res publica, literally “the public thing” but better translated as “the common good.” The nation is cemented by a shared national origin story, according to which all citizens are “brothers, and children of the self-same earth” (literally or figuratively). Our deepest traditions about the purposes of government are reflected in the ancient ceremony for crowning England’s kings, when the archbishop of Canterbury hands to his sovereign the Sword of State with these words: “With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God and all people of goodwill, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order.”

Mix in a bit of blinding-glimpses-of-the-obvious Norman Rockwell-isms (cosplaying at profundities) with Cat 5 Aggrievedness and off you go.

 

Kevin takes some poignant past-their-sell-by-dates stabs at snark.

 

 

What can I say/tweet?

 

apropos, see Project 2025:

A breadth of sneering anti-"Woke Cultural Elites" vitriol. One Convenient Location.

 

JD Vance's "Forward" to Kevin's Burning Down Washington. "Wagons" and "muskets," 'eh?

 

BLOGGER'S NOTE

I typically personally buy at retail and fully read the hundreds of books I cite / excerpt / review here. I rarely get a publisher's comp pre-pub "galley." I then cite lengthy, complete, relevant passages from the works under review. My readers can decide for themselves the worthiness of the content. Implicit in this approach, to be sure, is that my very choosing of the excerpts I do implies my assessment of their value (good or bad).

I don't do this for money, never have. I fall well within "Fair Use."

The Kevin Roberts excerpts set forth above, however, come from the Amazon "Look Inside" preview. I have better uses for the $14.99 Kindle edition, given the breadth of excellent volumes out there, and my extensive prior study of Mr, Roberts (Mr. No-Life here even read his doctoral dissertation. Seriously, I did that.). It can't be defamatory. They're HIS words. And, within his writing you will find no shortage of recurrent, sharp-elbowed, condescending MAGA-resonant vitriol. More broadly, his microphone and video camera lens affinities are matters of ample, lengthy partisan public record.

 UPDATES

"There is no time—or room—for an insurgency. The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace. We must wage a frontal assault. A swift counterattack, in broad daylight. If we wait for nightfall, they will regroup. If we retreat from the system to rebuild, it's gone. And building another American military is not an option. We have only one Pentagon. One secretary of defense."

Peter Hegseth, Donald Trump's Nov 2024 nominee for US Secretary of Defense.

 

 

TRUMP AG NOMINEE MATT GAETZ

 

 

RFK JR, HHS SECY NOMINEE

 

ODNI

Tulsi Gabbard, nominated for Director of National Intelligence. ZERO experience in the intel field.

The anti-science / anti-intellect cohort is going to wreak havoc for Donald Trump.

Is it too early to start drinking? More in a bit. Crazy news week...

_________

  

On the post-Nov 5th election loss circular-firing-squad recrmiinations

"Can't we all just get along?"

 

 

Some good stuff in The New Yorker this weekend.

 

 

From George Saunders' piece.

Thought Experiment No. 1

Imagine a baseball stadium. Fill it with twenty thousand Americans. Require Democrats to wear blue and Republicans red. At a podium at second base, have a person make a speech about, say, immigration.

Soon enough, fights break out.

Rewind.

Same twenty thousand people. Let them dress however they like. Instead of the speechmaking guy, put two baseball teams out there. Instantly, it’s a different energy. Among the fans for Team One will be both liberals and conservatives, suddenly united in common cause. Ditto Team Two. There will be disagreements, sure, but because we’ve been taught about acceptable baseball-game discourse, these will tend to be relatively good-natured.

Questions for Discussion:

Regarding the first example:
Who put out the order to wear red or blue?
Who dragged that podium out there?
Who selected the topic? And from what list
___

Thought Experiment No. 5

There’s a parable, recounted in Paulo Coelho’s novel Veronika Decides to Die, among other places, about a kingdom whose well was poisoned by a wizard, such that a person drinking from the well would be driven insane. Everyone in the kingdom drank from the well, except the king and queen, who had a separate well for their use. Alarmed by the madness of the people, the king tried to issue edicts to control their behavior. To the insane populace, these edicts sounded like nonsense. The king’s problem was this: If he refused to drink from the poisoned well, which would make him insane, the people, believing he was insane, would dethrone him.

Questions for Discussion:

Is it possible that, in our culture, we each have our own customized, algorithm-enforced poisoned well? And that certain “wizards” have learned that lies are an especially potent form of poison? And that, therefore, the wells to which those “wizards” have access are more full of lies than others? And that even the wells that are full of truths aren’t great, since the method of delivery tends to enlarge one truth (one way of seeing) at the expense of others, thereby making it difficult to sustain such fragile things as ambiguity, doubt, sympathy, complexity, or genuine curiosity?

Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?

What might we do about this?

Provide specific examples.
____

"Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?"

 

Hmmm... basically "Nihilism?"

 

ERRATUM

.

Surely you jest?

 

Don't get me started on Dubya 

 

_________

  

Now streaming: The Oaf of Office, Season 2

 

This appeared on TwitterX today, posted by a Trump insider:

1. Restoring Presidential Authority
Trump intends to reissue an executive order from 2020 which would restore the president's authority to remove federal employees, thereby allowing for the aggressive management or dismissal of federal workers.

2. Overhauling National Security and Intelligence
Trump's plan includes removing individuals from national security and intelligence agencies who have engaged in corrupt practices or have used these agencies against political adversaries.

3. Reform of FISA Courts
He proposes a comprehensive reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to address issues where judges have ignored misleading information in warrant applications.

4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Plans to establish a commission to declassify and make public all documents related to alleged deep state activities like spying, censorship, and corruption.

5. Crackdown on Leaks
Trump plans to pursue legal actions against individuals involved in unauthorized leaks that contribute to misleading media narratives.

6. Independence of Inspectors General
Ensure that inspector general offices are physically separate from the departments they oversee to maintain objectivity and prevent them from becoming part of the entrenched bureaucracy.

7. Independent Auditing System
Establishment of a system to continually monitor intelligence agencies to prevent unauthorized surveillance of citizens or disinformation campaigns.

8. Geographic Redistribution of Bureaucracy
Continue the initiative of relocating federal offices outside of Washington, D.C., to other parts of the country, reducing the concentration of bureaucracy in the capital.

9. Ban on Post-Government Employment
Prohibit federal bureaucrats from taking positions at companies they previously regulated or dealt with to prevent conflicts of interest.

10. Term Limits for Congress
Push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, aiming to reduce the influence of long-term incumbents and refresh the political landscape.

Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. We'll see...

_________

  

Klaas is again in session

"Do I recognize my own country any longer?"

   

 

From Brian Klaas's Garden of Forking Paths Substack: "The Tattered Republic"

The most salient divides in contemporary American politics are about how we react to one man, not policy disagreement.

First, there are those, like me, who experienced immediate revulsion at the personality traits—the narcissism, the abusive punching down, the gleeful cruelty—unapologetically dripping from every cell in his body. In this group are people who are True Never Trumpers, who would rather chew glass than vote for him.

Second, there is the Hold Your Nose Brigade. These voters may find Trump distasteful and immoral, but they want a tax cut, or a secure border, or they don’t want a woman in charge, or they are just pissed off about the price of milk. For this group, cognitive dissonance exists—they may object to the cruelty and the crimes—but that discomfort is not overpowering enough to sway their vote. (Trump beat Harris because this already substantial group expanded. It’s that simple).

Third, there are the people for whom—in the words of Adam Serwer—“The Cruelty is the Point.” This bloc cloaks itself in welcoming iconography of the flag and charitable symbols of religion while rejoicing at callous jokes about minority groups and fantasizing about treason trials and mass detention camps. For some, Trump’s narrow escape with death in Butler, Pennsylvania was proof that God had sent a fresh messiah, delivered straight to us from those most ascetic of earthly bastions: reality television and a golden penthouse.

It is easier to function as a democracy when the divides are about ideas, not individuals. After all, the sentiment that many Americans are expressing far more often—both on the Trumpian right and the Democratic left—is this: “I truly don’t understand how you could vote for that.”

But today, for those who have little reason to feel personally scared about being targeted or made to feel unwelcome by the resurrection of MAGA might, many are facing a different kind of fear, captured by more abstract uncertainties. What kind of world will my kids grow up in? How do I live in a community where half the people either celebrate cruelty or at least endorse it with their vote? Do I recognize my own country any longer?

Do I recognize my own country any longer?

 

Not so sure this week.

 

Now, I have scant rational reason to feel "personally scared of being targeted" in light of my age (soon to be 79) and ailments (Parkinson's, artificial aortic valve), but I have loved ones, including offspring all the way to my glorious great-grandson Kai...

But, Trump et al and Heritage Foundation, y'all too can kiss my irascible Irish ass. And you poignant Theobros as well.

Do yourselves a favor and read Brian's excellent book.

Notwithstanding that I find Substack to be a relatively shitty authoring platform (right down there with Medium, lol), I subscribe to Brian's stack (as well as several others). His latest post is a gem.

UPDATE

Click

…[A] majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa…

Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

 

NY TIMES' FRANK BRUNI

 

As Election Day neared, Democrats’ hopes soared. I know because I saw it and heard it all around me — the widening smiles, the brightening voices. Vice President Kamala Harris was ascendant. Donald Trump was done. People could just feel it.

They were reacting to polls, though they were picking and choosing: To listen to them, that outlier survey in Iowa, which augured a Harris victory in a red state that she ended up losing by about 13 percentage points, was some amalgam of the burning bush and the Rosetta stone.

They were reacting to momentum, which is a word as squishy as a wet paper towel and a concept beloved by dreamers whose yearning outstrips actual evidence.

But they were reacting above all to Trump. To how epically awful he was being. In his increasingly saturnine and serpentine remarks, he imagined Liz Cheney facing a fusillade of bullets, he called Democrats “demonic,” he said that he should never have left the White House after the 2020 election. All of this was characterized by many observers as the most self-destructive, disastrous conclusion to a presidential campaign that they’d ever beheld. And all of it was identified by the optimistic Democrats around me as the last straw.

Americans—at least the ones whose minds weren’t firmly made up—would surely abandon Trump now. There was a limit to the cruelness and craziness they’d abide.

That judgment, of course, was terribly wrong…

UPDATE

 

Apparently, Heritage Foundation Tough Guy Mike Howell has some post-reelection testosterone competition.

 

 I give you MAGA Mike Davis.

'Think long and hard': MAGA ally issues ominous threat to Dem prosecutors over Trump cases

Attorney Mike Davis, who has long been rumored as a candidate for attorney general under Donald Trump’s new administration, issued an ominous threat to New York Attorney General Letitia James and “Democrat prosecutors” on Thursday: “proceed accordingly.”

The Trump ally made the intimidating remarks two days after Election Day during an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, where James, who oversaw Trump’s New York fraud case, became the center of the attorney’s scorn.

“Let me just say this to Big Tish James: I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term because, listen here, sweetheart, we're not messing around this time and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights, I promise you that,” Davis said at the beginning of his dark rant against prosecutors who pursued criminal cases against the now-president-elect… [via Rawstory]

 

Ahhh... The Manly swagger.

 

Surf their website. You easily find links to the "Donate" page, and no contact links going to the preening Principals.

 

More to come...

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Dear President Joe Biden:

An open letter.

November 6, 2024
DEAR PRESIDENT BIDEN 


cc: Vice President Harris

You remain our incumbent President until 12:01 pm January 20th, 2025—75 more days as I write and post this on November 6th.

Donald Trump’s collaborators (e.g., former AG William Barr most notably today) have wasted no time DEMANDING that the serious current federal criminal cases against him—involving his asserted January 6th, 2021 insurrection complicity and illegal possession of Classified documents—be summarily dropped forthwith by our Department of Justice.

Your Oath to the Constitution remains binding. Your obligation to see that our rule of law remains intact and functional until you are succeeded in Office remains binding.

Donald Trump has repeatedly evaded honorable dealings and lawful accountability since the Days of Bone Spurs. It may very well now be the case that he can use his hand-picked judiciary operatives to continue to Melt Clock so that he might escape consequences yet again.

The American people deserve to know ALL of the details comprising the foregoing (redacted where appropriate). The realities of clock and calendar may indeed mean he will again evade his days in courts. Nonetheless, you must NOT let the full record of these proceedings be spiked and buried—by all necessary and lawful means within the scope of your Official Duties (as recently indemnified by the Supreme Court).

Thank you, sir, for your service.

Sincerely,

Robert Gladd
Baltimore, Maryland

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