Trump | 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 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.

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.

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.

December 30, 2024

Being with geese, The Dawn of Everything, and what to do about nukes

It’s been a busy travel year for me, which has been great, but wearing, so I’ve been enjoying not traveling in these last weeks of the year. To keep up my photography skills, I’ve been dragging myself out of bed when it’s still dark and cold and taking my gear down to Shelley Lake.

I like sitting there with the Canada geese as they paddle about, honk, and eventually take off for their morning flying exercises. I’ve been trying to capture the wildness of their take offs and landings, with only limited success. The actual events are really exciting, but for photographic purposes the birds are usually too far away, heading in the wrong direction, or in suboptimal light. Or I commit one of a thousand possible operator errors. Anyhow, I’ve yet to get the perfect shot, but here are a few that I liked.

We’ve had a happy holiday season with family gatherings, and I’m conscious of many things to be grateful for. In the background, though, I’ve been struggling with how to think about our new political reality. It feels like we’re entering into a dark period.

One of the gifts of reading history (or for me more recently, listening to history podcasts) is perspective: our species has made it through many dark periods. We know that the Romans had a good number of terrible rulers, as did medieval Europe. The same is almost certainly true of more ancient civilizations. In spite of everything, we’re here.

For more perspective, I heartily recommend The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I’ve been re-reading (actually, listening to). The main subject is the development of human civilizations beginning around 10,000 years ago. The book draws on recent scholarship to challenge the standard narrative that there was a linear progression from hunter gatherers to early farmers to urban settlements to the modern world, with increasing levels of hierarchy and authority at each stage.

Instead, Graeber and Wengrow draw on specialist research to demonstrate that there were early societies that organized without relying mainly on farming and without settled hierarchies. Other societies adopted authoritarian forms and later abandoned them. They show that, at least until relatively recently (as in, say, the last three hundred years), the nation state was not the primary form of societal organization. Rather, societies experimented with many different systems.

This analysis has a hopeful aspect. Although some of our prehistoric ancestors were cruel and violent, people continued to innovate. Our food production system and other technologies do not necessarily dictate a certain type of political organization. Fundamental change is possible.

A plausible understanding of the election of Donald Trump is that there is deep dissatisfaction with our existing system and a hunger for change. It seems unlikely to me that Trump will satisfy that hunger. It may be that we will eventually find our way to a new era of social innovation, with better solutions to our serious challenges.

One of those pressing challenges is what to do about nuclear weapons. I know this is not a pleasant topic, but it’s vitally important that we deal with it. The possibility of accidental nuclear accidents and nuclear war is very real. Indeed, as a recent article pointed out, a highly classified U.S. war game in the 1980s found that any nuclear war scenario inevitably led to escalation and finally annihilation.

On this score, I want to highlight a recent opinion piece in the NY Times by Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. She fully recognizes the strength of the common belief that nuclear weapons are, if not sensible, an inevitable fact of life, but she effectively challenges that belief.

Fihn writes,

Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are remarkably inefficient tools of war. They are clumsy, expensive, and lack practical military utility. Their use would result in catastrophic destruction, potentially wiping out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and spreading radioactive contamination across borders and generations. It is hard to envisage a scenario in which a state would be better off choosing to use a nuclear weapon over a conventional weapon, given the significant harm it would cause both to that nation and to its allies. Even nuclear-armed nations openly acknowledge that these weapons should never be used.

Change is possible, as Fihn demonstrates. The international order has largely reached consensus on banning chemical weapons, and nuclear stockpiles have been greatly reduced since the Cold War. Most nations have chosen not to create nuclear weapons, and most have signed the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. But we stand at a moment when the United States, Russia, and China seem to be committing to a new nuclear arms race.

Fihn contends that we as individuals can meaningfully contribute to addressing this terrible situation. She writes,

So how can individuals contribute? First, recognize your power. A key tool is to change the way we talk about nuclear weapons. Instead of thinking of them as magical tools, we should talk about them as being irrational and useless for any real life military situation. Instead of discussing nuclear weapons in terms of abstract theoretical concepts like strategic stability and mutually assured destruction, we should center conversations on the facts and scientific evidence of what happens when these weapons are used or tested. We can all start questioning common assumptions that these weapons are designed to keep us safe and expose the irrationality of a national security strategy based on threatening to commit collective global suicide.

If you’re a student, organize campus discussions. If you’re a professional, engage through your networks. If you are an artist, use your skills to address these issues.

Get in touch with your elected representatives but don’t forget to also engage with city councils, state representatives and community groups. Cities and local authorities are becoming more involved in statecraft and diplomacy. Getting your city or state on board with the growing number of local authorities that are taking action on this can help build a new generation of political leaders taking on this issue.

Fihn also proposes confronting the major corporations that are responsible for nuclear weapons, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. She cites the divestment campaigns against big tobacco and fossil fuel companies as possible models.

For Fihn, the path off of the nuclear precipice requires a change of attitude, and that can only happen through “persistent, collaborative effort.” We might as well give that a shot.

November 10, 2024

Visiting Yosemite, and some thoughts on lies in America

Last week I visited Yosemite National Park, which had resplendent fall colors beneath its towering granite peaks. There I was part of a photography group led by Gary Hart. Gary was the nicest guy, and he did a great job directing us to some beautiful places and helping us improve our work. Then I went by myself to Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon to see the giant sequoia trees and mountain vistas. The pictures here are a few of the ones I liked.

My flight from Los Angeles to Raleigh was a red eye that arrived the morning of election day. I was tired and jet lagged, and underprepared for the election of Trump. I’d done some phone-bank work for Harris, and managed to convince myself that most likely she would win. But, of course, she didn’t. It was a painful disappointment.

The pain is still raw, but I’m trying to be mindful and curious as to how a majority of American voters could have decided that Trump was the better choice. The pundits I’ve been reading and hearing have various theories, and no doubt there are many factors at play. But so far I haven’t heard much about what looks to me like the most important one.

There seems to be general agreement that a big part of the Trump success was serious dissatisfaction with the current establishment. The price of groceries, gas, and housing made people unhappy. It wasn’t surprising that people wanted those problems addressed.

But why would anyone think that Trump would be the guy to do it? His prior handling of the economy and other real world problems was erratic and inept. His policy statements in this campaign were either extremely vague or kooky. His mental capacity, never great, showed signs of major deterioration. He was not only untrustworthy; he was constantly and shamelessly dishonest.

Amazingly, though, Trump’s shameless dishonesty accounted for much of his success. His lack of any sense of shame made him immune to criticism, and willing to lie on a massive scale that overwhelmed all efforts at rational thought.

Of course, some people felt insecure and frustrated about their economic circumstances. But Trump managed to turn those understandable feelings into fear and rage. He relentlessly presented the message that America was a hellscape of economic failure and crime. Just as relentlessly, he blamed those supposed problems on invading immigrants, whom he characterized as criminals and rapists.

This was all a preposterous lie. Crime rates are down from the Trump years, and the economy has by most measures improved. Immigrants are not invading en masse, and those who are here are more law-abiding than the native born. Indeed, immigrants are a big part of our economic success story, and that has been true throughout our history.

So how did the lie work? Most of us are suspicious of those who look and sound different from us. Our natural suspicion as to differences in skin color, language, and customs is usually manageable. After all, we live in a multi-racial, multi-cultural society which in many regards works well. But Trump stoked normal anxieties into a raging fire of xenophobia and racism, and proposed a wonderfully simple solution to all those unpleasant feelings – get rid of the scapegoats.

This was certainly not a new idea. Through the last five hundred years, Jews have been treated as scapegoats by various demagogues. And of course, various other out groups have been treated as sacrificial victims to solve political problems.

Indeed, Trump made clear enough that immigrants were not his only scapegoats. There were scapegoats to fit with a potpourri of resentments and prejudices: people of color, Jews, Muslims, women, gays, journalists, scientists, lawyers, teachers, liberals, government bureaucrats, and anyone who opposed him were attacked directly or indirectly as enemies of the state.

Possibly the saddest and most ridiculous scapegoating was on our tiny minority of trans people. Could anyone actually believe that trans folks were a serious threat? The Trump people clearly thought so, since they spent many millions of dollars on anti-trans political advertising. Watching those ads playing over and over, I assumed that most people would see through them as cruel and absurd. I’m afraid, though, that a lot of people didn’t.

We live in an age of misinformation that we haven’t yet understood how to correct for. A great many of our traditional newspapers are no longer in business. Right-wing media, such as Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, certain podcasts, and talk radio in the vein of Rush Limbaugh have become the primary news sources for many. By and large, they amplify Trumpist lies and stay silent as to the truth.

At the same time, social media such as Twitter/X, TikTok, and Facebook are virulent sources of conspiracy theories and confusion. Traditional, fact-based journalism has a hard time competing. It’s hard for unwelcome truths to compete with exciting lies.

Trump’s people appear to have grasped the value of these new opportunities for spreading big lies. They also learned from twentieth century fascist movements that even obvious and transparent lies may come to be seen as true if repeated often enough.

To begin to address Trumpism, we can start by calling out the big lies, rather than pretending that all this is normal and acceptable. It was disheartening that the Harris campaign failed to do this with Trump’s dystopian immigration narrative, and instead adopted a dialed down version of that narrative. Perhaps they concluded that correcting that scapegoat narrative couldn’t be done in the short time before the election. In any case, there’s no doubt that it would have been difficult. Big lies are powerful.

Now we’ve got a large population infected with the culture of Trumpian lies. They view actual journalism as fake news, and Trump opponents as Satanist pedophiles. Arguing with them probably won’t help. We can and should give them respect, compassion, and kindness. We should gently and gradually reassure them that we are not Satanists or pedophiles. Will that, plus measured doses of actual truth, be enough?

We won’t know for a while. Given that Trump lies about everything, it’s possible he won’t follow through on his deportation program, locking up his enemies, and the other Project 2025 ideas that would likely crash the economy and cause enormous misery. If he does, it’s nearly certain that MAGA folks will experience bitter disillusion and massive voters’ remorse. Perhaps a new and better politics will emerge from the ashes.

August 11, 2024

A week at the beach, dogs vs pigs, and the communist menace

Last week we rented a house at the Outer Banks and had a family gathering. We walked on the beach, played in the pool, rode bikes, read books, watched the Olympics, and enjoyed each other’s company. I also took some pictures of wild horses at Carova and shore birds at Corolla, a few of which are here.

In photographing the wild horses, I generally try to catch them in natural-looking settings, and avoid showing roads and structures. But that’s misleading, in a way. A lot of the time the horses are grazing in front yards and walking along the sandy roads. They’re really part of everyday human life in that part of the Outer Banks. It was good to see most of them looking healthy, and some had new foals.

Some mornings I walked on the Corolla beach looking for sanderlings and other shore birds. In places there were good-sized flocks of the little sandpipers running away from the waves, then speeding back and probing for edibles with their sharp beaks. Some of them were not at all shy of me. But they’d fly off when a jogger got too close, or a dog came bounding toward them.

Speaking of dogs, Nicholas Kristof had a thought-provoking column recently about dogs and pigs. He noted how much we love our dogs, which is great, but also odd, considering how cruel we are to farm animals. The similarities between these mammals seems pretty obvious – indeed, pigs are smarter than dogs – but somehow we’ve worked them into disconnected ethical categories. We would never eat our dogs, but many of us are quite comfortable eating pigs.

Kristof put it bluntly:

Just as today we wonder how people like Thomas Jefferson could have been so morally obtuse as to own and abuse slaves, our own descendants will look back at us and puzzle over how 21st-century humans could have tolerated factory farming and the systematic abuse of intelligent mammals, including hogs.

“Farmed animals are just as capable of experiencing joy, social bonds, pain, fear and suffering as the animals we share our homes with,” Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals, told me.

This is a lot more that could be said about this issue, but I’ll leave it there for now. Except for noting, I used to think people mostly agreed on the key differences between right and wrong. But Kristof reminds us that, at least in some important areas, such as animal rights, people differ amazingly in their basic morality. Another example of surprising differences on basic morality concerns human rights and the rule of law.

I used to take it for granted that almost everyone in the U.S. had high regard for our traditional constitutional rights (like privacy and freedom of speech and religion), fair elections, and equality under the law. The various authoritarian alternatives that empower a charismatic strongman leader and silence dissent, such as fascism and Soviet-style communism, were, I assumed, generally viewed as bad.

But with the ascendance of Trump, this assumption is now highly questionable. Trump has boldly declared his support for measures that are characteristic of authoritarian systems. These include his intention to pervert the legal system to reward friends and punish enemies, to use the military to quash political protests, vilifying minorities, dehumanizing immigrants, otherizing gender non-typicals, and attacking women’s bodily autonomy.

His support in the presidential election is currently around 50 percent. I’m hopeful that some of that 50 percent have not got round to examining what he actually stands for and will reconsider their support. But a significant portion plainly have no problem with his racism, his xenophobia, his transphobia, his rejection of fair elections, and his calls for violence. They may be fine people in certain regards, but they have very surprising views on right and wrong.

I just finished listening to a recent podcast series called Ultra (season 2) that puts our situation in a helpful perspective. Produced and narrated by Rachel Maddow, it concerns the aftermath of WWII, and focuses on the rise of Joe McCarthy and his movement.

Most of us were taught that McCarthyism was centered around an exaggerated fear of communism and false claims that communists were taking over the country. We might know that in the mid 1950s McCarthy as a U.S. Senator rose to power by leading an effort to persecute ordinary people for sympathizing with communism, and in fact destroyed careers and lives. But McCarthyism seemed relatively short lived. We, or at least I, didn’t know, before listening to Ultra, that it was a mass movement that was driven in part by Nazi sympathizers and ideology, and its spirit is still with us.

McCarthy was a corrupt politician, a compulsive liar, and a remorseless bully, and his dishonesty and brutality were plain to see at the time. But there were apparently millions who didn’t mind any of that. They considered him a great leader and supported his looniest ideas. Shortly before he died, a project began to move him into the presidency through subverting the election of 1956.

Ultra doesn’t bother pointing up the parallels between McCarthy and Trump, presumably because they’re so obvious (the lies, the corruption, the sedition). It is particularly striking that Trump and his team have been trying to label the Harris team as communists. Alarmist and baseless name-calling is standard operating procedure in Trumpworld, and sometimes, as in McCarthy’s time, it works.

But somehow I doubt it will work this time. For anyone not already deeply infected with the Trump virus, any acquaintance with Harris and Walz will put the lie to Trump’s attempt to label them as communists or otherwise wildly radical. It remains to be seen whether the great start of their campaign will hold up. It’s by no means clear that they will win. But things look more hopeful than they have for a long time.

Tag: Trump