Uncategorized | The Casual Blog

November 26, 2025

Some backyard birds, and a few words on our energy policy

Last week I drove down to Clemson, SC, for a nature photography weekend sponsored by the Carolina Nature Photography Association. My main interest was to take some pictures at The Nut House, a marvelous birding oasis created by Carl Ackerman. It has three blinds where photographers can sit concealed and watch birds come to various tasty attractions.

The weather was chilly, and the birds were neither uncommon nor numerous. Still, it was fun to watch those that appeared, as well as the scurrying squirrels and chipmunks. I also enjoyed meeting some nice CNPA members.

As usual, it was a bizarre week in Trumpworld, with too many terrible things happening to think carefully about them all. It was particularly terrible that Trump called for death by hanging of members of Congress who’d pointed out that armed services members should obey the law and the Constitution.

Who knows how many Trump believers might take this seriously as a call to action? We learned from the January 6 insurrection that such people exist. But thankfully there are still responsible Republicans who support free speech and oppose political violence. May their numbers and their voices increase.

In other news, Trump staged an elaborate fawning tribute to a murderous Saudi Arabian tyrant, Mohammed Bin Salman. This was, on its face, shameful and disgusting. Why, I wondered, did he do it?

In an interesting piece in the NY Times, Noah Shactman proposed some interesting possible explanations. Shactman says that Trump has long viewed with envy the Persian Gulf petrostates, with their great luck in having lots of oil and their autocracy. Now, he’s collecting billions in crypto and other business deals from the Middle Eastern autocrats, which is another reason for trying to please them.

On top of all that, or underneath it, is Trump’s view of fossil fuel as a source of power and means of domination. As a historical matter, this is not crazy; oil and coal powered the major industries of the 20th century.

But it’s crazy now. Renewable energy (solar and wind power) have dropped so much in cost that in many places they are now as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels. And the CO2 from burning fossil fuels is on course to destroy the world economy and upend human civilization.

As most people now know, climate change is not hypothetical – it’s here. Average temperatures are hitting new highs, with disasters occurring as predicted – huge storms, floods, fires, droughts, eroding coastlines, along with failing farm systems, economies, and governments.

But Trump still claims that climate change is a hoax, and that efforts to address it are scams. He proposes instead to increase the very programs that are root causes of climate change – more burning of coal, oil, and gas – while trying to undermine renewable energy alternatives that would mitigate the catastrophe.

Through tax breaks and subsidies, Trump has conferred huge windfalls on the oil and gas industries, while the costs of electricity have gone up substantially. And absent a change in course, there’s worse to come. A recent study ound that Trump’s energy program, if pursued until 2055, could result in 340,000 premature deaths and $6.7 trillion in additional healthcare and energy costs.

Somehow Trump’s horrific climate policy is still not high on the public’s discussion agenda. But that too may be about to change, as climate change hits the housing market. In a recent piece in the December issue of the Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II reports that insurers are pricing in rising climate risks, and so homeowner’s insurance in some areas is becoming prohibitively expensive.

If insurance becomes too expensive or unavailable, homes become unmarketable. See also this NY Times report on this same issue. Where homes become unmarketable, a cascade of problems follow – retirements undone, generational wealth eroded, community businesses closed, public services ended, and ghost towns.

With all the risks we now face, Newkirk reminds us that all is not lost: we may yet wake up and take action. In ringing tones, he finds hope.

[P]erhaps Trump, through his very extremity, has provided a galvanizing opportunity. In his reflexive culture-warrior rejection of climate change, he has backed into a climate policy of his own, and has linked that policy to his power. With his single-minded, bullying determination to reverse course on renewables—which are part of life now for many people of all political stripes—and to dismantle programs people rely on, Trump has essentially taken ownership of any future climate disruptions, and has more firmly connected them to oil and gas. In advancing this climate-accelerationist policy alongside an antidemocratic agenda, he has sealed off fantasies of compromise and raised the political salience of dead zones, where devastation and exclusion go hand in hand. Trump’s intertwining of climate policy and authoritarianism may beget its own countermovement: climate democracy.

Climate democracy would be aided by the gift of simplicity. At present, the only way to ensure that America avoids the future outlined here will be to win back power from its strongman leader, or possibly his successors. The places facing existential climate risks—especially those in the Deep South—are mostly in states that have long been considered politically uncompetitive, where neither party expends much effort or money to gain votes. But they could form a natural climate constituency, outside the normal partisan axis. Poor and middle-class white communities in coastal Alabama, Mexican American neighborhoods in Phoenix, and Black towns in the Mississippi Delta might soon come to regard climate catastrophe as the greatest risk they face, not by way of scientific persuasion, but by way of hard-earned experience. Some of them might form the cornerstone of a new movement.

With the right message, plenty of other people may be persuadable: those upset by higher electric bills, or poorer storm forecasts, or the coziness of Trump with the oil and gas industry, or weather-related disruptions in everyday life. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, Americans learn best from catastrophe, and they will learn that the help they once took for granted after disasters might now be harder to come by. Autocracy takes time to solidify, and building popular support in opposition to it takes time as well. But in the reaction needed to build climate democracy, perhaps heat is a catalyst.

November 16, 2025

To Southeast Asia with love, and reading Goliath’s Curse

It’s now two weeks since we got back from a two-week trip to Southeast Asia. The travelling was tough, but worth it. There was lush tropical beauty, ancient culture, and vibrant trade. Once I got over the severe jet lag, I felt changed in a good way.

We flew from Raleigh to Seattle, and then to Seoul, and then to Hong Kong, where we boarded the Viking ship Orion. After a day of sight-seeing in Hong Kong, we set sail for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.

Trip highlights included Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, where there are hundreds of dramatic limestone islands; Hoa Lu, an ancient capital where we visited a temple and took a lovely row boat trip; Hoi An, where we saw the grimier aspects of the country, a traditional medicine shop, silk manufacturing, and temples; Ho Chi Minh City (a/k/a Saigon) with modern high rises, teeming markets, and waves of hundreds of motorbikes; Siem Reap, Cambodia and the enormous temples of Angkor Wat, Thom Wat, and Ta Prohm; and the huge, modern city of Bangkok. The Orion was like a first class hotel, beautifully appointed and serviced, and Viking provided good tour guides.

Based on our short encounters, we found the Vietnamese people to be generally friendly and helpful, but business-like and hardworking. Cambodians seemed more relaxed and laid back, though the street vendors were surprisingly aggressive. For Bangkok we were mostly touring by bus, so we didn’t have many close personal encounters.

I was interested in learning about the local religions. I’ve long been interested in Buddhism, but I quickly figured out that Buddha’s original teachings, as they’d come to me, were barely recognizable in the religion as practiced in Southeast Asia today. The local versions seemed to combine worship of Buddhist icons with elements of other traditions, including Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and animism. The temples, with their elaborate ornamentation, seemed undogmatic and undemanding.

This was less true of Angkor Wat, which is the largest religious complex on Earth. Built in the 12th century, it’s now mostly a ruin, but enough is left to show that its builders were highly serious about their religion as well as their armies. A later generation of Hindus destroyed many of the icons, and most recently many statues of Buddha were decapitated by looters and the heads sold abroad.

During the trip I read Saigan, a historical novel by Anthony Grey. (Thanks to my friend J, an old Vietnam hand, for recommending it.) It resembled a James Michener novel in good ways, with a broad overview of Vietnam’s history in the 20th century woven together with some interesting characters. Grey taught me some new things about the brutality of the French colonial regime, and brought key battles of the American war to life. As with Michener, the prose was not especially beautiful, but I still found the book quite worthwhile.

I learned a bit about the current Vietnamese system of government, which is managed by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Opposing political parties and criticism of the CPV is not permitted. But much economic activity is indistinguishable from the mostly free markets of the West. At street level, it doesn’t look particularly unfree. In fact, in places it looks highly energetic and dynamic.

During the trip, I also delved into an important and fascinating new book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp. Kemp, who is affiliated with Cambridge, examines the archaeological evidence of earlier large states and empires (“Goliaths”) looking for the factors that led to their collapse. Like Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, Kemp challenges the conventional narrative of orderly human progress beginning with agriculture, and the assumption that increasing size and complexity of government is natural and unavoidable.

Kemp finds that a key predictor of societal collapse across the centuries is extreme inequality. Increasing inequality generally arises from domineering elites extracting resources (such as minerals, crops, and taxes). Elite domination and corruption results in resentment and rebellion. Combined with other factors, such as exhaustion of natural resources, war, disease, or climate change, extreme inequality can result in societal collapse.

Goliath’s Curse is a timely book. If Kemp is right, the extreme inequality in the U.S. and many other countries is a flashing red danger sign. Dissatisfaction with this inequality has already begun to undermine our traditional democratic institutions by ushering in the age of Trump. Kemp suggests that there is a possible path out of our current crisis: reducing inequality and increasing democracy.

On the long (31 hour) trip home, among other things, I watched for the second time Don’t Look Up (2021), the dark satire about two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) trying to warn of a comet on a collision course with the planet. Merryl Streep is a hoot as a Donald-Trumpish president who tries to profit from and divert attention from the coming catastrophe. As Trump continues to lead the insane battle against addressing climate change, the movie remains very much of the moment.

September 23, 2025

Alaskan brown bears, and a few thoughts on history

A couple of weeks ago I went back to Alaska for a week to photograph brown bears. It was an epic trip, and I came back with several thousand images to sort through. After a first pass, these are some of my favorites. I made a short slide show with a few others, which is here.

The trip was led by Jared Lloyd and Annalise Kaylor, world class photographers, teachers, and naturalists. We were based on the Kenai Peninsula in the town of Soldatna. Each morning, weather permitting, we flew out by float plane to Lake Clark National Park, where we landed on a beautiful glacial lake with luminous green water surrounded by forest and jagged mountains. Off the plane, we loaded onto a skiff and went out to look for bears.

Part of what’s interesting to us about bears is that they are so big and strong. They’re also agile and graceful, and can run almost as fast as race horses. They have unbelievably keen senses of smell, very good hearing, and eyesight about like ours. They’re smart, with good memories, and they’re talented at figuring out bear-proof containers and other puzzles. And, obviously, they’re smart enough to thrive in harsh environments without the help of grocery stores, hospitals, pharmacies, houses, electricity, etc.

I loved seeing the bears at Crescent Lake, though there were some rough episodes. I got there a day after the rest of the group, and on my first day it rained almost nonstop. As we cruised on the boat or stood in the shallow water wearing waders, I managed to keep my camera equipment dry enough, but my body was totally soaked and shivering by the end. Back at the airport, I found that the key for my rental car had also got soaked and wouldn’t work, and I had to get a ride back to Soldatna and get another rental car hauled up from Anchorage.

The weather improved the next day, but the day after that it was too stormy to fly to the lake. I had some other tough moments, including getting stuck in quick sand and needing some help to get loose. And some fun moments, like riding in the co-pilot’s seat of a De Havilland Otter float plane.

Anyhow, it was great to have some quality time with the bears. This time of year they’re in hyperphagia mode, trying to put on as much weight as they can before hibernating for the winter. There were, however, fewer around than we’d expected. Jared’s theory was that some of them were gorging on newly ripe berries instead of the salmon in the lake. Most of the ones we saw were females, including several with first or second year cubs. There were plenty of fish for them to eat.

On my way home, I drove along the beautiful Seward Highway through mountains and valleys to Anchorage. After I turned in the rental car, I had a few hours before my night flight, so I visited the Anchorage Museum. I found the exhibits of crafts of the First Nations moving. Several different cultures were thriving in Alaska when Europeans arrived, and then those cultures were nearly destroyed. But not entirely. Some still maintain their languages and customs.

Those First Nations people surely had and have their problems, but they lived and live more in harmony with nature. From what I could learn, their value system at its best involves respecting the natural world and taking from it only what they need to live. This system is quite different from the one most of us inherited, which encourages ever more consumption and exploitation of nature. We could learn some useful lessons from them.

It’s a long way from Anchorage to Raleigh. Long trips are tough, but one of the things I like about them is the chance for some nonstop reading. On this trip, I made good progress in The Fate of the Day, the second volume of Rick Atkinson’s new history of the Revolutionary War, which I highly recommend. Atkinson is both a scholar and an engaging writer, and brings to life key actors and actions on both the American and British sides of the conflict.

The death and destruction that brought the American republic into being were worse than I realized. But Atkinson reminds us that war is not just carnage. He writes about trying to recruit, arm, and train an army, then trying to find enough food and clothing for it. Shoes, it turned out, were a big problem. A lot of continental soldiers, who did some long marches, didn’t have any.

One reason to learn about history is to better understand and care for ourselves. When I went to get the latest flu and covid vaccines this week, I had to answer a few questions about my medical history. It struck me that not knowing anything about that history could lead to bad treatment decisions.

So Trump’s program to rewrite American history is not very smart. His idea seems to be that we’ll suppress unflattering and uncomfortable information and just keep the episodes that make us feel good and reinforce our prejudices. Thus he and his minions have pushed the Smithsonian museums, the National Park Service, and other institutions to get rid of references to slavery and racism, as well as gender and LGBTQ+ issues and other social injustices.

But just as we can’t take proper care of ourselves if we don’t know about our past serious health problems, we can’t address our current social problems without knowing about our past ones. Without knowing something of our history, a new visitor would have a hard time understanding the American racial caste system, which is a product of hundreds of years of legal slavery and the Jim Crow apartheid system.

There are no doubt some people in MAGA-land who look back fondly on the slave system and view oppression of minorities as a good thing. But I think that most Republicans would agree that we should have equal treatment under the law for everyone. Surely many would agree that our tolerance and acceptance of diversity – racial, religious, cultural, sexual – is a source of our vitality, creativity, and strength. They might also agree that we still have some room for improvement in the areas of tolerance and respect for all.

Will that change? I admit, I’m worried. Even without the Trump anti-history program, a lot of us aren’t well informed about our own history. Our major news organizations, which create the first draft of history, are becoming less resistant to Trumpism – paying him millions of dollars to settle his absurd lawsuits, altering their editorial policies, and silencing leading voices of dissent.

Trump’s new program could make us more ignorant, and more accepting of exploitation and oppression. We’ll likely have to work harder to learn what is going on, and to communicate with each other about it.

September 4, 2025

Some butterflies, and an idea for improving our democracy

The first thing I’ll note is, no matter how many problems we have in America, there are still a lot of beautiful things, including flowers and insects. I enjoyed taking these pictures last week in Ernie B’s garden, and hope you enjoy them, too.

Otherwise, it was a difficult week. There’s a lot going on with Trump, so it’s challenging to get a grip on, and that may be part of the design: the sheer mass is exhausting and numbing.

According to a recent Pew poll, it seems that a majority of Republicans don’t see any big problems with Trump’s major initiatives. It’s possible nowadays to live in an impermeable information bubble, with unwelcome information blocked out, and I assume that accounts for some of the differences in our worldviews. Anyhow, especially for my Republican friends and loved ones, here’s some of what I’m seeing.

At the start of the Trump presidency, the new initiatives made some sense, even if they were deplorable. It seemed mainly about fearmongering and cruelty toward immigrants and minorities, while favoring the rich by dismantling business regulation and other laws. Then new, weirder initiatives came into view, including cutting agencies performing basic governmental functions. With no clear explanation, Trumpists began undermining federal law enforcement, military readiness, public health, education, disaster relief, environmental protection, legal procedures and courts, foreign aid, foreign intelligence, diplomacy, and revenue production.

Meanwhile, we started to see corruption on a scale never seen before, with billions of dollars flowing from those who needed favors to the coffers of Trump Inc. Wealthy donors, like oil and gas companies and crypto magnates, started getting the goodies they’d requested. We also began seeing a barrage of policies that seemed plain crazy, like attacks on wind and solar power, threats to take over other countries, self-destructive trade wars with former allies, abandoning health research, and cutting holes in the social safety net that protects, among others, the MAGA faithful.

This all seems terrible for those tens of thousands who have lost their freedom, hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs, those millions who lost nutrition and health care, and hundreds of millions indirectly affected, as well as sad for us all. But that’s not all.

Some things that we thought couldn’t happen here have already happened. Kidnappings in broad daylight by masked government men in unmarked vans, military troops turning out in force to intimidate protestors in key blue cities, raids of the houses and workplaces of regime opponents, establishment of new torture detention centers, blatant defiance of court orders, and open promises of rigged elections. And now President Trump is darkly teasing, “Maybe we would like a dictator.”

I’m pretty sure that that’s not true for the majority of us. We can see that, contrary to Trump’s crazytalk, we are in most respects not in any crisis or emergency, other than ones he’s creating. We can see that immigrants are not subhuman animals, and opponents of Trumpism are not evil traitors. The values that animate the MAGA-verse, like greed, willful ignorance, hatred, and cruelty, are not the values most of us want to see defining our culture, or want to cultivate in our lives.

What are the values we prefer? Kindness and compassion, for starters. Generosity and honesty, too. Tolerance. Curiosity. Rationality. All these are foundational to American culture. We all, or almost all, learned them as children, and teach them to our children.

But MAGA has put the alternative values into sharp relief, and we need to make some choices: kindness or cruelty, generosity or greed, tolerance or hatred, rationality or ignorance. We can also choose courage or fear. We definitely need to find our courage.

One good thing Trump has done by undermining and exploiting American democracy is to highlight longtime problems in the system that badly need fixing. For example, over generations, we’ve allowed too much power to accumulate in the presidency. We’ve allowed Congress to become less and less representative, and more and more dysfunctional. Our Supreme Court has become highly politicized. Our government has become oligarchical, with little consideration or support for ordinary working people.

Now is a good time to start working on an alternative vision for our democracy – perhaps a Project 2029. It would be sort of like Project 2025, but in the public interest, rather than the kooky kleptocrats’ interest. It’s a big job, but we can start simply, by deciding what direction we want to go. I suggest that we agree to make the objective of our government this: helping others.

That is, instead of designing a government primarily to help the rich exploit everyone else, we should design it to serve the common good, and to help those who need help. Our system should be oriented toward giving, rather than extracting. Does this sound impossible? It’s not a new idea. Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha would all support it. JFK seemed to be for it, when he said, we should ask what we can do for our country.

August 17, 2025

Kayaking at Robertson Mill Pond, in a warming world, with our new “energy emergency”

Last Monday I took my kayak to Robertson Mill Pond Preserve, which is just east of Raleigh. The park is basically a swamp shaded by cypress and other trees, with a kayaking course laid out with numbered buoys. I was the only person there. I paddled gently in the shallow water and listened to the birds singing. It was very peaceful and soothing, except when I couldn’t find the next guide buoy and got lost for a bit.

I didn’t take my big Nikon camera, which I’d hate to drop in the water, but I made a few snaps with my iPhone. It wasn’t too hot that day, and it didn’t rain while I was paddling. But the heat has made it tough to do very much outdoors on a lot of days this summer. I played golf on Wednesday afternoon, when the temperature was in the low 90s, and was sweating profusely after walking hole number 1.

Global warming has been on my mind this summer, because it seems to be coming at us hard. Hotter and hotter weather, more intense storms, floods, fires, and other climate-related disasters are a fact of life. I’d have thought that there could be no denying it for anyone who can’t always stay in the air conditioning.

Large populations are already facing droughts, crop failures, wars, displacements, and other disasters related to higher temperatures. At the micro level, hotter temperatures cause increases in crime and domestic violence. All the science tells us that unless we take action, all these problems are going to get a lot worse.

So why aren’t we doing everything we can to mitigate our crisis? Well, part of the answer is, follow the money. It’s no secret that those who profit from the fossil fuel system are always keen to make more money, and highly resistant to having less. President Trump promised the fossil fuel moguls that he would be their boy if they gave him enormous campaign contributions. They did, and in at least this one instance, he kept his promise. See this article.

Climate experts are being fired or sidelined and agencies organized to protect public health are being dismantled. Rules discouraging fossil fuel emissions and encouraging EVs are being dropped. Subsidies for green energy have been undone, and new subsidies for fossil fuels enacted. The endangerment finding that is foundational for EPA regulation is being reversed. There’s even a plan to shut down satellites that measure CO2.

This is truly perverse. How could it be justified? Why of course: just say there’s a national emergency! As with other Trumpian outrages (like militarization of the border and starting a trade war with tariffs), the President, with no factual basis, declared a national energy emergency.

Like autocrats before him, Trump cynically exploits the blind spots and weaknesses of the citizenry. One of his trademark moves is to sound the alarm: we have everything to fear! By raising the panic level, he lessens the chance that people will be able to engage in critical thought. Thus we learned that immigrants are generally rapists and killers, that peer nations are deadly drug dealers, and that Democratic leaders are Satanic pedophiles. And now, he says we have an energy crisis — not too much fossil fuel usage, but too little!

None of these claims has a grain of truth, but that hasn’t stopped them from propagating on right wing media. And the flood of truly frightening things, like widespread cruelty to immigrants, imposing militarization in our cities, attacking our universities, betraying our allies, undermining the rule of law, fomenting stagflation, and halting vaccine and other scientific research, is exhausting. There’s hardly enough time to get up to speed on one outrage before there’s a new one.

So even for a well educated and dedicated progressive, it’s tough to keep up with the news, and with everything there is to worry about, to stay engaged on climate change. But the consequences of not doing so could be disastrous, as in, the end of civilization as we know it.

One other aspect of this problem, and then I’ll stop: most Americans are not well educated. Fewer than half have more than a high school degree. More than half read at below a sixth grade level. This is not a bug for MAGA; it’s a feature. Ignorance is a key enabler of the Trumpian movement. This partially explains the attacks on universities and public education.

So it’s not surprising that a lot of people have trouble processing the science of climate change, or even understanding what science is. And it’s not surprising that they’re preoccupied with the price of gas and other daily necessities. Most don’t have enough money for a major health emergency, and many can’t fund a car breakdown emergency. Climate change is, for them, not the most immediately pressing issue.

The widening of the income gap between the well off and everyone else over the last several decades is a big part of the explanation for Make America Great Again. Working class people really were better off, relatively speaking, in the mid-twentieth century. There were more unionized jobs, and more respect for such jobs. Various institutions, like unions, churches, social clubs, and sports, gave a sense of community and connectedness. We’ve lost a lot of that. It’s understandable that working people feel they’ve gotten a bad deal, and it’s not fair.

As many others have noted, it’s truly ironic that a make-believe-super-rich-guy-failed-businessman-grifter like Donald J. Trump could successfully win the love of masses of the not well off. Yet he did, by acknowledging their anxiety and sense that the system was unfair, as well as by appealing to their prejudices. Can he keep their love as he makes sure the economy worsens, the housing crisis worsens, the health care system worsens, and the planet heats up? Probably not.

In any case, we’re all here together on our one precious, fragile planet. We need to keep talking to each other, with patience, with respect, but also with urgency.

August 6, 2025

Sunflowers, and reconsidering nuclear war

A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time with the sunflowers at Dix Park. It’s been ungodly hot in Raleigh, so I went early in the morning to avoid the heat. Even then, I worked up a good sweat just walking around and taking pictures. Happily, the sunflowers and a cooperative tiger swallowtail butterfly cheered me up.

In other news, I finally published my first novel. The title is The Book of Bob, the author is Rob Tiller (unaided by either other human or artificial intelligence), and it’s available on Amazon as an ebook. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel in the form of short essays, which is to say it is not easy to categorize by genre. I hesitate to recommend it to the world at large, because some will find parts of it disturbing. But you might like it. It’s intended to be engaging, funny, easy to read, and meaningful.

Among other things, my book reexamines some bad ideas that have big impacts. Since today is the 80th anniversary of the world’s first attack with a nuclear weapon (the US attack on Hiroshima), it seems like a good time to think about an existentially bad idea of our age: the need to stand ready for nuclear war.

We live in a world where there are some 12,000 nuclear warheads – many more than enough to end the world as we know it. Nations with those weapons are now building still more, and some without weapons are working to join them. The nuclear powers are not visibly working on continuing and expanding arms control agreements. Last week, the President took offense at a Tweet from a Russian politician and threatened Russia with a nuclear attack by submarine. Almost certainly Russia raised its defcon threat level in response, bringing us that much closer to World War III.

The prevailing theory for having these weapons is known as mutually assured destruction. The basic idea is that our enemies won’t use them against us because we might reciprocate by incinerating their entire populations. We would take this horrific step even though it would likely be followed by their revenge – incineration of our entire population. That is, across much of the planet, entire populations, including citizens of the US, are forced to serve their own governments as hostages and human shields. The objective of our balancing on this narrow precipice is – guess what? Preventing nuclear war.

There are, to be sure, some other ideas about nuclear warfare that are slightly less crazy. Nuclear powers sometimes imagine that their weapons will allow them to dominate lesser powers. But that never works. The initial US monopoly on nuclear weapons didn’t stop the Soviet Union from taking control of eastern Europe for decades.

More recently, Russia thought that the threat of nuclear annihilation would bring Ukraine to heel. Of course, it didn’t. Israel’s nuclear weapons have not subjugated its enemies. India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have not prevented their continuing conflicts. The massive nuclear arsenal of the United States didn’t prevent us from losing wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, or discourage our adversaries in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Syria, or any other of our military actions since WWII.

So, it’s doubtful whether nuclear weapons have ever achieved any realpolitik objectives. What is not doubtful is that, even assuming the humans managing them are sensible, moral, and careful, accidents will happen. There have been several widely reported incidents of mistaken reports of nuclear attacks, communications breakdowns, plane crashes, submarine collisions, and other events that could have caused a massive disaster. Unless we can find our way to nuclear deescalation, a disastrous accident is all too likely.

Finally, if our situation weren’t already dire enough, the control of the US nuclear arsenal is in the sole and complete control of a single individual – the President. Without getting into the inadequacies of the current President, we can probably agree that even the best of us are subject to intellectual and moral failures. We all make mistakes, especially under intense pressure. In the event of a nuclear crisis, the President would have as little as 15 minutes to make a decision on whether to end the world.

A tiny bit of good news: There has been some good journalism on our nuclear peril recently, including in the Washington Post, which published this good overview and a description of a hypothetical nuclear crisis. There’s even been activity in Congress. Bills have been introduced in the House that, even if they aren’t likely to become law, show that some people are working on the problem.

H.R. 1888 is titled “A bill to direct the United States to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and convert nuclear weapons industry resources and personnel to purposes relating to addressing the climate crisis, and for other purposes.” As the title indicates, this bill would have the US would join the dozens of nations that have already agreed to the prohibition treaty, and would spend the vast resources now wasted on nuclear weapons to mitigate the climate crisis.

In addition, there’s H.R. 669, titled the “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2025.” This one addresses the problem of a runaway president by restricting his or her ability to authorize a first-use nuclear strike. It would require a declaration of war by Congress before such an action can be taken.

Finally, House Resolution 317 “calls on the President to … actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative; and … lead a global effort to move the world back from the nuclear brink, halt and reverse a global nuclear arms race, and prevent nuclear war ….” Trump seems like an unlikely guy to do this, but he really wants a Nobel Peace prize, and accomplishing this would surely put him in the running. So who knows?

H.R. 1888, H.R. 669, and H. Res. 317 are all pending in House committees. If you’re in touch with your Congressperson, please consider him or her them to support these measures.

May 20, 2025

Local birds, and Trump’s war on nature

Recently I’ve taken a couple of boat trips on Jordan Lake with the Carolina Nature Photographers Association to see some of the birds that live there. According to our guide, Captain Dave, there are some forty nesting pairs of bald eagles there now, along with many ospreys, great blue herons, woodpeckers, various ducks, and many smaller birds.

There was a lot happening. We saw eagles hunting for food and battling over territory. Ospreys were incubating their eggs. Wood ducks were shy and flew away quickly. Several tree swallows had a battle royale over a strategic perch. At one point hundreds of cormorants were flying and diving together in a coordinated hunt of the local small fish.

I’ve also been enjoying listening to the springtime songs of the birds in our backyard. A few years ago I invested some energy into learning common bird songs and calls from recordings. Lately I’ve been expanding my repertoire with Merlin, a free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Listening along with Merlin to the birds from our back deck, I’ve discovered several species whose songs I didn’t know and who almost always hide behind the leaves. It’s a great little app!

With American democracy in crisis, and a wide array of related disasters in process, it isn’t surprising that bird song and nature generally are not top of mind for most people. But I find their strength and beauty inspiring, and a source of strength.

What’s more, the welfare of nature is the welfare of us all. It’s such a mistake to think that the world is all about humans, and nature is of secondary concern, or no concern. We humans are just one part of the grander scheme of nature. We can’t destroy nature without destroying ourselves.

It’s both bizarre and tragic that part of the Trump program seems aimed at just such destruction. I’ve puzzled over why this could seem like a good idea to anyone. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, offered a possible answer in a recent free email newsletter.

Krugman usually writes on economic subjects, and I’ve found him helpful in illuminating some of the leading stories coming out of Trumpworld. In writing about the tax plans now in process, he pointed out that part of the program for funding tax cuts for the rich is cutting government support for clean energy and increasing subsidies for fossil fuels.

Krugman notes that the reason surely has a lot to do with our system in which campaign contributions buy policy decisions – a system that seems to me a sort of legalized bribery. The fossil fuel industry contributes much more to Republicans. But he notes, there seems to be more than just money at stake.

Why does MAGA hate renewables? They consider them woke because they help fight climate change, which they insist is a hoax. And they’re cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which means that they aren’t manly.

It’s all kind of funny — or would be if it weren’t so tragic.

Krugman writes that the dramatic progress in renewables technology has made it possible for us to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. The price of wind and solar power has been falling quickly. But Trump has opposed these technologies and taken aim at the Democratic programs to advance them.

David Gelles of the NY Times has a good new piece on several aspects of the Trump approach to our climate crisis. He gives a pithy summary of our basic situation:

Average global temperatures last year were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that nations had been working to avoid. Every fraction of a degree of additional warming raises the risk of severe effects and possibly irreversible changes to the planet. Nations must make deep and fast cuts to pollution to avoid a grim future of increasingly violent weather, deadly heat waves, drought, water scarcity and displacement . . . .

Can nothing be done? In fact, a lot can be done, as demonstrated around the world. Gelles explains that the current administration is unique among major world powers in its preposterous denial of climate change and refusal to act.

Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.

Here in the US, we’re taking a different approach, as Gelles explains.

The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.

At the same time, per Gelles,

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled to end those functions. The administration is shredding the E.P.A.’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Mr. Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”

But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems and premature deaths.

Trump is also cutting federal disaster relief programs led by FEMA.

As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. There were just three billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 1980, but that total increased to 27 last year, according to data collected by NOAA. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.

Finally, Trump is undermining the research at the foundation of past efforts to anticipate emergencies and mitigate climate change.’

Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.

In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”

NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.

There’s more; Gelles’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. There are a lot of reasons to stop Trumpism, but the war on the health of the planet is enough by itself. State and local officials are the next line of defense, and they need our encouragement.

May 2, 2025

Birding at the Nuthouse, and some benefits of reading

Last week I drove down to Clemson, SC to do some bird photography. I spent a day and a half at The Nuthouse, where owner Carl Ackerman has created the ultimate backyard birding destination. There are three blinds for sitting, watching, and photographing birds in different settings. Carl provides meal worms and other treats for the birds, and there are a lot of them that clearly appreciate it.

I’d hoped to see lots of migrating songbirds. Although a good number had come through earlier in the week, my timing wasn’t in alignment with theirs. But it was really a joy to spend a good block of time with common resident birds. Even though I was very familiar with all the species that came by, I saw them in new ways – eating, gathering food for the chicks, bathing, and investigating. I also saw a lot of chipmunks, squirrels, and a groundhog.

It was both peaceful and exciting. Giving nature some respectful observation can be spiritually nourishing. Especially in these fraught times, I take peace and serenity where I can find it.

I’ve also been getting a lot of pleasure out of revisiting some great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. My ability to read and delight in literature, which I cultivated as a young person, went downhill in my middle years, as work and family responsibilities took so much time. But I’ve got it back! All it took was some practice.

I recently finished re-reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian about the British Royal Navy in the early 19th century. I was once again totally captivated. O’Brian was a master novelist and also a historian who delved deeply into ancient archives and other sources for his material. His main characters, officers on British warships, were multi-faceted and engaging, and their adventures were epic.

I’m now about halfway through David Copperfield. Charles Dickens said that this was his favorite of his books. My edition has the ultimate cover blurb: Leo Tolstoy (a pretty good novelist) said it was the greatest novel by the greatest novelist. The story has significant autobiographical elements, richly rendered. There’s a huge canvas, but I’ve been especially struck by Dickens’s respect and sympathy for mentally ill and otherwise struggling people. If you read this book as a young person, you might want to consider reading it again. I can almost guarantee you’ll get more out of it the second time.

Along with literature, I’ve been reading a lot of current journalism. I used to think most everyone must be doing this, trying to keep abreast of so much rapid change. An essay in the NY Times by Rob Flaherty this week pointed out that this is quite wrong.

Today’s culture is no longer a creation of executives in New York City and Los Angeles. Thanks to algorithms and an endless set of media choices, what you see, read and hear is a personalized reflection of your own interests. It’s like a city with a lot of different neighborhoods. . . .So if you don’t care about politics — or more precisely, don’t trust our politics — you don’t have to hear about it at all. A voter can turn on, tune in or opt out.

It was these voters — opt-out voters — who decided the 2024 election. It’s the same voters Democrats are struggling to reach today.

At their core, opt-out voters generally don’t trust politicians or the mainstream media. Many assume the system is rigged, the media is biased and neither party is actually fighting for them.

Flaherty contends that most of those who aren’t in the educated elite get their news from social media and friends, which seems to come at them in friendly random snippets. He sees the right as much more successful in building alternative communication channels and creating appealing narratives, while Democrats are still trying, not very effectively, to reach the public through traditional media. He recommends revising this strategy to be more social-media savvy.

This might help, but it also might help to help people improve their reading abilities. According to a recent report, most Americans read at a 6th grade level or less. Think about that! Standardized test results show reading levels of school children getting worse. College professors report that their students can no longer read as much or as well as they used to. This all begs the question, how many people just aren’t capable of reading a newspaper with a fair level of comprehension?

What is the Trump administration doing about all this? It’s dismantling the Education Department and threatening to cut federal funding for public schools. It’s also attacking universities by threatening them with huge funding cuts and loss of tax-exempt status, and threatening foreign students with deportation. It has pulled the plug on scientific research in health and the environment.

Just as worrying, Trump is increasing his attacks on traditional media. He’s forever inciting his followers against fake news, which is any news he doesn’t like, and insufficiently obsequious journalists. He’s barring certain journalists from access, bringing baseless lawsuits against journalists, and threatening broadcast licenses. He’s dismantling Voice of America and this week ordered that federal funding be canceled for NPR and PBS.

The Trump program seems designed to worsen our illiteracy and ignorance. Perhaps he’s thinking that by lowering our competence in reading and critical thinking, he’ll reduce our resistance to his domination. If reliable news sources can be weakened or eliminated, his epic dishonesty may go unexposed.

There are so many Trumpian disasters-in-progress that it’s hard to keep track of them all. But there was some good news this week: Trump’s poll numbers are at historic lows and trending down. There’s a real chance that the next midterm election will diminish his power, and the next presidential election will allow for a new beginning.

In the meantime, there are increasing signs of courage and resistance. Although the natural world hasn’t been at the forefront of the battle, it still has its champions. Per the NY Times, Trump, continuing his war on nature, recently scuttled the National Nature Assessment. The Assessment was an effort “ to measure how the nation’s lands, water and wildlife are faring, how they are expected to change, and what that means for people.” Some 150 scientists and other experts had spent thousands over hours on the project.

But some of those experts are working on continuing their work and publishing it outside of government channels. They view their work as too important to the country to give up on.

Blessings to those experts, and the other scientists, politicians, educators, lawyers, judges, federal workers, journalists, non-profits, unions, businesspeople, and ordinary folks who are showing courage in this dark moment. They remind the rest of us that Trumpism is not invincible, but it must be actively resisted.

April 20, 2025

Hiking in Big Bend and countering the Trump project for dominating the Earth

I recently got back from a ten-day trip to Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas. I expected to do a lot of hiking and off road driving, and did. Spending time there was a powerful experience. These pictures are from the trip. I also made a short slideshow, available on YouTube here.

Big Bend is a long drive from El Paso, which accounts for its getting relatively few visitors. It’s big – more than 800,000 acres – and strange, with rugged mountains, canyons, and lots of desert. I used to think of deserts as places where nothing lives, but actually there are a lot of flora and fauna that make their living there. Nature is amazingly resourceful.

Along with the vivid direct experience, I enjoyed learning something of the complex geology of the area. It’s not as old as it looks. As recently as 83 million years ago, it was the floor of an ocean, and as recently as 17 million years ago, it had active volcanoes. After that the crust stretched and fractured – basin and range faulting. Since then, water and wind have created many fascinating shapes. Nature is remarkably creative, and patient.

My mates were good-humored friends from the Raleigh Ski and Outing Club who are keen hikers. We found plenty of trails, including some rough ones with substantial elevation gains. I also enjoyed four-wheeling on some challenging unpaved areas with a Jeep. We stayed just outside the park in Terlingua, a hardscrabble little town. The Airbnb house we rented was a minor disaster, with appliances that worked poorly or not at all, but we made do.

With Trump and MAGA continuing to wreak havoc on our country and the world, it was good to have a few days to enjoy nature. It’s important to address our problems, but also necessary to stay sane and healthy, and immersion in nature helps.

I’ve been trying to understand the theory of MAGA – that is, the reasoning that accounts for so many bad ideas. Some parts are comprehensible, though mistaken, like panicked fear of minorities and foreigners and resentment of educated elites. But others are simply bizarre.

A case in point is the multi-pronged effort to worsen global warming. Trump wants to increase greenhouse gas emissions with fossil fuel burning and to cut out green energy. He calls global warming a “hoax.” With so much evidence of climate change staring us in the face, what kind of craziness is this?

The brilliant and courageous Jamelle Bouie wrote an essay recently discussing the crazy tariff policy that suggests a possible answer,

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

Before Trump, we were doing a poor job as a civilization of addressing our environmental challenges. Scientists consistently warned for years that, without dramatic changes, we were on course for a global climate catastrophe in the coming decades. Now, obviously, we’re here.

Yesterday NPR reported that Trump has proposed to change the rules protecting endangered species so as to kill more of them. The rule change would make destroying habitats of such species legal. This, like other parts of the war on the environment, seems like bloody-minded craziness. How to explain it? Greed and corruption are surely part of the answer. But maybe Trump’s drive to dominate extends to non-human creatures, plants, and the earth itself!

This sounds a lot like madness – King Canute supposing he can command the tide. At the same time, it suggests a total absence of compassion. Indeed, recent comments by Musk and other MAGA-ites suggest that the Trumpist war on everything includes a fight against empathy.

As the Guardian reported recently that some evangelical Christian leaders are preaching against the “sin of empathy.” The idea seems to be that natural feelings of concern for creatures less fortunate should be stamped out so that the MAGA project can advance.

There is, at least, a kind of honesty in this. The MAGA project is in many respects wantonly cruel, and the hypocrisy of MAGA-ites who claim to believe and follow the teachings of Jesus is obvious. One way to straighten this out: give the love-thy-neighbor idea a radical revision. Hate thy neighbor!

Just to be clear, I don’t think that’s the way to go. I think there’s still a lot of empathy and compassion out there, which may yet get us through. But we’ve reached a perilous pass. It’s time to do whatever we can – speak up, march, call our politicians. One of my Big Bend friends told me about 5calls.org, which gives good advice and templates for calling political leaders and expressing dissent. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but I’m trying to make calls every day.

P.S. In case you’re interested, the Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comments on its proposed gutting of the Endangered Species Act until May 19.

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March 16, 2025

Skiing in Canada, and trying to articulate some of the problems with Trump

Last week I got to ski in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. It was amazingly beautiful there, with vistas that rivaled the Alps. There had been less-than-average snowfall, but there was enough coverage for many excellent runs through varied and challenging terrain. I sampled the Lake Louise area, and spent the majority of my time at the Sunshine resort.

The trip was organized by the Raleigh Ski and Outing Club, which I recently joined. As a new member, I found the group friendly and welcoming. There were quite a few very good skiers, and it helped my skiing to hang with them.

I was a little worried that the Canadians would be upset with American visitors, because of the recent threats by Trump to punish the country economically and possibly take it over. Happily, the Canadians we met were nice as could be, though I’m sure that a lot of them are distressed at the new Trump policies.

Since returning to the USA, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the news, trying to understand what’s happening to my country. There’s so much to process that it can be overwhelming.

It feels as though we’ve had a coup, with a small group seizing power and upending the existing order. This is not extraordinary, in the sense that it has happened in many countries before. What’s unusual is that we (that is, a bare majority of us) elected the coup instigators, and this is the USA, which has a long history of political stability.

The new Trump administration has moved with lightning speed to dismantle the existing framework of government and put in place values and policies antithetical to our laws and traditions. Recent polls show that a lot of these initiatives are not supported by the majority, but there’s still a substantial minority that continues to approve of Trump.

The remaining support for Trump confirms that, despite being stupid in many ways, he has a remarkable talent for propaganda. He labels his ideas very simply and keeps repeating them. It matters not if his labels distort or reverse the original meaning of words. The constant repetition, like water on rock, tends to erode critical thought.

To successfully resist the new Trump program, we resistors need to call out the distortions, and also to communicate better by simplifying our language. Where possible, we need to be direct and uncomplicated. With that in mind, I’m offering the following seven-question quiz to highlight a few of the most alarming new initiatives, including some words in boldface that might serve as touchstones.

QUIZ – ARE YOU OK WITH TRUMP?

Are you in favor of tanking the economy? Prices of groceries and other necessities are going up, as Trump is driving us toward an economic disaster with his bizarre tariffs. The stock market has dropped like a rock. Business leaders are scared of what he’s doing and scared to object.

Do you support corruption in government? Trump has fired officials who served as watchdogs for government misconduct and has declared a non-enforcement policy for anti-bribery laws. This makes sense if one intends to loot the state and reward cronies by allowing them to do likewise, as authoritarian regimes often do. Likewise, Trump is encouraging business fraud and corruption by shuttering the Consumer Finance Protection Board. See Sen. Murphy’s recent speech for more on this: https://youtu.be/hycoCYenXls?si=CJqnRPXx5OUaqw6J

Are you opposed to free speech? Trump is threatening and punishing traditional media that displease him. Media outlets are writing him checks to settle his baseless lawsuits (see previous question on corruption) and toning down their critical coverage. He’s previously proposed to shoot peaceful protestors. His people have just arrested a foreign-legal resident for protesting the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. He has promised there will be more arrests to come.

Are you in favor of white supremacy? The Trump initiative to suppress diversity, equity, and inclusion is simply a rebranding of old-fashioned racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. Repeat: his anti-DEl program is really barely disguised pro-racism, pro-misogyny, and pro-xenophobia. Trump’s DEI bans, blaming airline disasters on DEI, and his firing of accomplished black and female military leaders shows that this initiative is both serious and crazy.

Do you prefer cruelty to decency and kindness? Trump has cut off aid to starving children. He’s stopping medical care for HIV and other patients. He is gutting agencies that serve those less fortunate. He is imprisoning migrants who have lived productive lives here for years or decades. He is denying the humanity – indeed, the very existence – of transgender people.

Do you think it is better to address serious problems based on ignorance or science? Trump is declining to endorse vaccines to prevent preventable serious diseases. He’s shutting down scientific research into fundamental health issues. He denies the reality of climate change that threatens civilization. Indeed, he is pushing for producing and using more fossil fuels that will accelerate global warming.

Do you support brutal autocrats and the betrayal of democratic allies? Trump has withdrawn support for Ukraine and threatened to withdraw from NATO. He’s threatened to seize territory in Canada, Panama, and Greenland. Meanwhile, he expresses continued affection for kleptocratic war criminal Vladimir Putin.

END

Pencils down. How did you do? Of course, this list doesn’t hit every Trump disaster currently in progress, but you get the idea – the indecency and outrageousness of a lot of the Trump initiatives can be stated in pretty simple terms.

There are also some Trump initiatives that are harder to simplify, like upending the constitutional order by refusing the directives of Congress and the courts, undermining the rule of law through baseless pardons and baseless prosecutions, and decimating the federal workforce that’s foundational to our system of justice, our defense, protection of our environment, and many basic services. But for those too, simpler is better, at least as a starting point.

Admittedly, it will probably never be possible to persuade committed MAGA-ites that Trump’s program is disastrous. There are those whose minds are made up, and sadly for them, they’re likely to be among the first to face serious adverse consequences from their leader. But there are still plenty of folks who voted for him who will consider changing horses at the next opportunity. Let’s see if we can improve our communications to help them see that changing is a good idea.

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