values | The Casual Blog

January 14, 2026

Falklands nourishment, and disrespecting Trump

In my recent trip to the Falkland Islands, I took around 50 thousand pictures of the animals that live there. Reviewing them was a lot of work, but also enriching. I’ve been struck again and again at how amazing nature is.

Somehow all these wonderful creatures evolved and became perfectly adapted to thrive in their harsh environment. I particularly enjoyed seeing young animals courting and playfully rough housing, and the miracle of new life in the dense, noisy rookeries.

Although the weather was rough at times, spending time with these animals inspired a sense of wonder and inner peace, and I hope these pictures communicate that. In these dark times, we need to take peace and spiritual nourishment where we can find it.

In the past weeks, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation in the signature violence of the Trump administration. Several US cities seem to be coming under quasi-military occupation, including Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Portland. Protestors and bystanders are being attacked with chemical weapons, beatings, and bullets.

A massive US military force has anchored in the Caribbean and invaded Venezuela, while we’re bombing various countries in Africa and the Middle East. Now Trump is threatening to invade several more countries. European nations are making contingency plans to defend Greenland from the US, while our friendly northern neighbor, Canada, is considering steps to defend itself.

There’s a common thread between the violent attacks by Trump’s goons in our cities and the violence against other countries. Trump rejects the values and aspirations that we’ve taken for granted as essential for both civil society and international relations. Values like freedom, democracy, rule of law, and mutual respect are under siege. In their place, Trump is attempting to substitute greed and lawless violence.

Trump contends he isn’t bound by US or international law. Stephen Miller may have articulated the MAGA world view best when he declared this week that the real world is governed by force and power.

The Miller “realist” view has a grain of truth, of course: governments have and exercise power. But the Miller view is myopic and distorted. Throughout history, governments that are essentially despotic tyrannies have failed, because the governed resent and reject them. More successful governments incorporate non-despotic elements, including fair legal systems, representation through free elections, and checks on executive power, as well as systems for promoting citizens’ health, education, and welfare.

In the realm of international affairs, the notion that states prosper through pure brute force has been tested through two world wars and numerous other conflicts, and it hasn’t worked. Instead, the most prosperous period in human history has occurred since WWII, under a widely adopted voluntary framework of international law. Despite imperfections, this framework, which generally prohibits invading other countries and stealing their resources, has helped to minimize warfare and promoted more peace.

Trump’s recent move to steal the oil of Venezuela is brazenly criminal, and also idiotic. The demand for the sludgy oil is low, the practical barriers to development are high, and renewable substitutes for fossil fuel are getting ever cheaper. Plainly, the best thing for planet Earth is to leave that oil in the ground and move as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels.

So why is Trump spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on a smash and grab operation for that sludgy oil? For that matter, why threaten to seize the territory of friendly long time allies like Denmark or Canada? Or attempt to take control of American cities with armed masked thugs?

It’s obvious that Trump isn’t too smart, but dumbness alone isn’t an adequate explanation for his escalating wide-ranging threats and violence. There’s a persuasive explanation in Thomas Edsall’s latest NY Times column. It seems that Trump has become addicted to power.

Edsall quotes Professor Manfred Kets de Vries as follows:

It is possible to become addicted to power — particularly for certain character structures. Individuals with pronounced narcissistic, paranoid or psychopathic tendencies are especially vulnerable. For them, power does not merely enable action; it regulates inner states that would otherwise feel unmanageable.

Donald Trump is an extreme illustration of this dynamic. From a psychoanalytic perspective, his narcissism is malignant in the sense that it is organized around a profound inner emptiness.

Malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism and psychopathology. Because there is little internal capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation, he requires continuous external affirmation to feel real and intact. Power supplies that affirmation. Visibility, dominance and constant stimulation temporarily fill the void.

As Edsall explains, psychologists say that power stimulates the brain much like an addictive drug. The sensation can be intoxicating, but as with other addictions, the power addict develops tolerance, a need for ever increasing doses. It leads to poor decision making, as delusions of omnipotence are thwarted by reality. This causes feelings of frustration and rage, and impulsive and foolish behavior.

Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia, also explains some of Trump’s behavior as an attempt to address his insecurity and feelings of being disrespected. It’s telling that Trump attempted to justify the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by saying she was “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.” That is, he has proposed that police shootings can be justified by the victim’s disrespect. This is not the law in America. It’s lawless tyranny.

Is disrespect a central driver of the MAGA movement? David Frum, in the Atlantic Daily, writes “MAGA is many things, but above all it’s a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind).”

Frum says, “ICE is violence-prone in part because the agency has lowered its training standards and ditched much of its background vetting to meet the president’s grandiose deportation targets. But more fundamentally, ICE is violence-prone because its main purpose has become theatrical. Under present leadership, ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.”

This content, Frum suggests, is about demonstrating that disrespect will not be tolerated. In the MAGA framework, foreigners, racial minorities, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, women, and anyone else suspected of disrespect for white Christian males must either demonstrate subservience or face violent consequences.

So here we are: our leader is a rapidly deteriorating guy of barely average intelligence and way below average morality trying to compensate for his inner emptiness and unhappiness with more and more dramatic gestures of violence and domination. And his ardent followers share some of his worst traits and continue to support him.

Fortunately, the worm may be starting to turn. In the last few days, a few Republicans in Congress are starting to break ranks and speak out against the lawlessness. Public support for ICE and for Trump continues to drop. Thousands of Americans are daring to take to the streets in opposition to ICE violence.

Also, Trump, who hardly ever makes a truthful statement, said one reality based and encouraging thing this past week: that if the Democrats win the mid-terms, he’s going to face impeachment. Inshallah!

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.

December 12, 2010

A note on corporations and on a Porsche museum

Last week the Red Hat senior management team met for two days in Raleigh. We’re an international company with management that’s widely distributed, and so there were a few team members that I had not met before, and others I got to know better. They were for the most part lively and interesting.

So what is a corporation? In our meetings we spent some time discussing public ownership and shareholder value. But the profit motive is generic. Just as every human has to eat, every corporation has to make money. There are many ways to do those things. There are also many attitudes and activities that make a corporation, or a person, distinctive. The reason the workers get excited about coming to work (if they do) is something other than the excitement of enriching investors.

Red Hat has a lot of people who are passionate about their work, in part because of the exciting technological challenges, and in part because of a set of widely shared values. Our open source products grow out of values and customs that include transparency and collaboration. This is one of the things about the company that I find distinctive and inspiring, but it also presents challenges. In acting as an attorney, there are obvious limits to transparency, because attorneys must take account of and honor competing values, including confidentiality. There’s a built in tension in the value sets that’s challenging.

A special treat of the meeting was dinner at the Ingram collection in downtown in Durham. It’s a semi-secret institution that turned out to be a proper museum devoted to my favorite automobile, the Porsche. It had some 35 vintage and rare Porsches along with a couple of stray but also gorgeous new Ferraris. The Porsches included several historic 356’s, many variations of the 911 (though they didn’t have anything to line up with my particular 911s (Clara)) a Carrera GT supercar and a recent GT3. Some of the examples took years to obtain. They were all lovingly restored and displayed. One could trace the stylistic touches through the years that connected the designs organically, like DNA.

The Ingram collection could be viewed as conspicuous consumption that takes the category to a whole new level of wretched excess. But it felt more like the Rodin sculptures at the NC Museum, or the Frick collection in NYC. Frick’s former house, a mansion facing Central Park, contains a collection of old master and Impressionist art that is pound for pound one of the best in the world. I presume, without having studied the issue, that Mr. Frick was a robber baron with the worst of them. But whatever his personal failings, his collecting became itself a creative act. And so has Mr. Ingram created a sort of collective work.

It was interesting that the collection not only discourages photographs, but goes so far as to impound cameras from its guests. I can understand the need to be security conscious, but I wondered if anything else was going on. It did occur to me that if class warfare ever breaks out, the mobs with pitchforks might show up in a state of dangerously high excitement. But they might settle for a Porsche.