How’s the uprising going? Have the revolutionaries managed to kill enough fascists to make a difference? Or are Bernie and AOC still our only hope?
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
The NYT said, in the above article, “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust.” What could account for low levels of trust? The political science nerds in the 2020 paper, below, say “We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies.” (i.e., a random assemblage of humans via asylum-based immigration will result in a low-trust society).
Could AI perhaps update this classic “To the barricades” image to show young American progressives wearing Antifa T-shirts and carrying avocado toast?
Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Each of these infrastructure projects had received federal aid, sometimes after officials spent years pleading in Washington — only to see that money halted as President Trump has looked to punish Democrats over the course of the fiscal stalemate.
The projects include new investments in clean energy, upgrades to the electric grid and fixes to the nation’s transportation infrastructure, primarily in Democratic strongholds, such as New York and California.
The article goes on to describe parts of the U.S. that are much richer than average, e.g., New York City, and Chicago, and where nearly 100 percent of those in power say that they want inequality in the U.S. reduced.
I can’t figure out why these haters of inequality asked for the money to begin with. The only position that would be consistent with their stated principles would be “We’ll pay for what we need ourselves. Don’t even think of giving us federal money until Buffalo, Providence, and Detroit have been lifted up to an equal level of per-capita income.”
A few photos from my August trip to the Mamdani Caliphate (there were about 15 marijuana stores within two blocks of my Lower East Side hotel and the density fell to 0 once one got to Chinatown (Asians don’t want to maximize their health?)):
The last photo in the series is of the Vladeck Houses, a public housing project on prime Lower Manhattan land (note the luxurious amount of land devoted to green space; no non-government development in Manhattan has anything like this). The city could sell this land to a private developer, give each resident enough money to buy a single-family house almost anywhere in the U.S., and might still have enough money to fund all of the fancy infrastructure projects for which they’re trying to feed at the federal trough.
I posted the above idea as a comment on the article and it drew at least 12 angry replies. The righteous agree that the rich hard-working Blue states should keep 100% of their money and stop subsidizing lazy unproductive Red states. Inequality, apparently, isn’t something to fight against when Blue is richer than Red. Here are some of the responses:
These places also contribute far more money to the Federal coffers than they get in return unlike the majority of red states that receive far more in federal aid than they contribute. Maybe it’s time to stop the free loading. If blue states are going to get cheated by the federal government perhaps we should stop funding it. See how the red states feel about it when there are no blue state dollars coming to their aid.
since they pay the vast majority of the taxes, they’ve earned it. Blue states: makers; Red states: takers
There would BE NO federal funding without these states. They supply almost ALL of it, and the red states leech off that. Residents of the states paying in deserve federal funds as much as the freeloaders.
A migrant who enjoys a fully taxpayer-funded lifestyle in NYC is not a “freeloader”, but everyone in a Red state is a “freeloader”.
(Separately, much of the data on maker/taker states is distorted by retirement moves. A person might pay into Social Security and Medicare through age 65 while living in New Jersey, for example, and then collect Social Security and Medicare benefits in Florida or South Carolina after a post-retirement move. This makes it look as though NJ is subsidizing SC/FL even though it is just the younger self of the older beneficiary who is paying (assuming that we accept the accounting fictions of Social Security/Medicare).)
Finally, how’s everyone’s shutdown going? The media is reporting a complete meltdown of Air Traffic Control. However, we did a flight on Sunday to Tampa International and ATC was apparently fully staffed because they cheerfully gave us (optional for them) VFR advisories. The only drama was that 2/3 runways at KTPA were closed for maintenance, leaving only 1L, which requires a 12-step program to reach from the FBOs. The ground controllers would give single-pilot piston aircraft Russian novel-length instructions and then be surprised when 1956 Cessna 172 flying club pilot couldn’t follow them correctly. For someone leaving Sheltair, the directive from ground control might be “Romeo 2 to right turn on Sierra to left on Sierra 2 across 28 to November 3 to left turn on November to hold short 1 Right then right turn Lima then left Juliet then left Victor then right Victor 1 then left Whiskey to 1 Left” (the “hold short 1L” is implicit).
(On arrival, the ground controller said “You’re going to Signature, right”, referring to the Gulfstream-fueling operation substantially owned by Climate Change Alarmist Bill Gates. I responded “Are you kidding? I can’t afford Signature.” We actually did go to Signature TPA once (see Merry Christmas to the Sea Turtles).)
How did your blog host do on the 12-step program? I didn’t even try it! The magic words: “Request progressive.” (progressivism is always great, as I’m sure everyone will agree)
Oregon’s governor has been posting her opposition to the federal government’s plan to clean up mostly peaceful Portland, e.g., this tweet:
Not having previously heard of this person, I visited her official web site to learn something about her background:
On November 8, 2022, Tina Kotek made history along with Maura Healey of Massachusetts, becoming the first openly lesbian governors elected in American history.
Throughout Tina’s professional career as an advocate for those in need, she has carried the value of service instilled in her by her parents to get real results for Oregonians.
Tina’s grandparents came from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century to find opportunity and a better life. Her parents were proud first-generation Americans. They believed in hard work, being informed citizens, and encouraging their children to follow their dreams.
Tina moved to Oregon from the East Coast in 1987, and fell in love with the beauty of the state and the openness of the people. She finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon, graduating without student debt because of a Pell grant, work study assistance, and affordable tuition.
Tina came out as a lesbian in her early twenties. While it wasn’t always easy, each experience coming out to others strengthened her resilience. While getting her graduate degree, Tina fought for and won domestic partnership rights for faculty and students at the University of Washington.
The word “lesbian” appears four times in this official biography, including in the very first sentence. The reader learns about the governor’s passion for lesbianism twice before learning anything about a job that the governor might have had prior to becoming governor (unless one considers “having sex with other women” to be a job?). In other words, the reader might reasonable infer that the governor’s primary qualification for being governor is lesbianism (or “identifying as a lesbian”).
It will be ironic if it turns out to be easier to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Gazans (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.) than it is to negotiate a settlement between Republicans and Democrats (a handful of Democrat Senators must agree to vote with Republicans in order to get to 60).
The militant group has told mediators it has reservations about some of the terms of the 20-point plan, including the stipulation that it disarm and destroy its weapons, a demand it has previously rejected. Hamas also says that releasing all 48 hostages within 72 hours, as laid out in the Trump plan, would be difficult because it has lost contact in recent weeks with some other militant groups holding a number of them, the mediators said.
We’ve been told that the Gazans are entirely without weapons. Israel has been waging a slow-motion genocide against a (growing) population of unarmed civilians. Now we’re told that a sticking point in peace negotiations is that the unarmed Gazans don’t want to give up their heavy weapons, rocket factories, rockets, etc.
We’ve also been told that Gazans are entirely peaceful humans. Perhaps 1 in 10,000 is a member of Hamas and this 0.01% of the population has been controlling the 99.99% and forcing them into a conflict with Israel that 99.99% of Gazans don’t want because they love and accept the state of Israel, according to the official narrative to date. Now we’re instead told that there are multiple “other militant groups” comprising peaceful unarmed Gazans.
I didn’t follow Charlie Kirk and had never seen one of his videos, but I was sad to hear about his death today. Sad/prescient post of his from five months ago:
Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.
In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.
Although I don’t have any personal theories about who might have perpetrated this assassination nor the political leanings of the killer, the statistics that Charlie Kirk put forward above seem right. At least half of my Democrat friends in Massachusetts would kill prominent Republicans, such as Donald Trump, if they thought they could get away with it. They would be doing it not to indulge their rage at people who disagree with them, though they have a lot of rage, but to protect our democracy. Note that most of them would likely prefer less extreme measures, e.g., outlawing voting for candidates who aren’t approved by the Democrats, deporting all Republicans to Eswatini, or making it illegal for Republicans to run for office (a simple measure to protect our democracy from January 6 insurrectionists).
The text of Charlie Kirk’s April 7, 2025 tweet, in case it gets memory-holed:
Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.
In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.
The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response.
This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.
A lot of Charlie Kirk’s recent posts on X were about Iryna Zarutska, murdered by a prime example of the heritability of criminality. Decarlos Brown Jr. is the perpetrator (recorded on video, but that’s not enough for his name to appear on the Wikipedia page as a potential suspect). His brother Stacey Dejon Brown is a convicted murderer (2014 article about a 2012 crime). Their father, Decarlos Brown Sr. is also a convicted criminal (NY Post).
Related:
Democrat thought-leader Rashida Tlaib, 2023: “Let’s not forget that Republicans are the Party of Insurrection” (i.e., it would be rational to kill Republicans in order to prevent our democracy from being subverted)
A response to the shooting by someone with a lot of experience in this area, below.
"The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his… pic.twitter.com/aM8Pz3TKml
As we all sit and think about the tariff decision today, let us all remember why this is being litigated in the first place. Anyone who has read a contract knows that the first part quite often contains definitions.
The law that is the Administration’s basis for the tariffs said that the President could “regulate” trade in certain circumstances. “Regulate” was not defined. So most of this was about whether the word “regulate” included tariffs.
All of this could have been avoided if any of the mediocre (or worse) lawyers in Congress had defined the word “regulate.” Instead billions of dollars of tariffs have been collected and industry has been put in turmoil because the idiotic mediocre lawyers in Congress could not define their terms.
So the next time you ask for these utter fools to pass a law to save the country, please remember this moment.
I think that I found the full text of the One Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by Congress, but I can’t figure out what is in it. Has anyone here dived into this Tolstoy-scale document? I assume that whatever we read about this in the media is a lie. For example, we’ve been told that the bill cuts taxes so I assume that tax rates will either be the same or maybe increased, at least via inflation (every year with inflation means more fictitious capital gains taxes are owed and also more taxpayers ensnared by the Obamacare NIIT). We’ve been told that the bill cuts Medicaid so I assume that Medicaid spending will increase and that the eligibility expansion during Coronpanic will be maintained at least for another year or two (at which time the expansion can be extended by another act of Congress; I refuse to believe that an expanded welfare state can ever be shrunk because Americans who get accustomed to free stuff are going to be forever dependent on that free stuff).
One area where I’m confused relates to the Medicaid fight. The states that want to put everyone on Medicaid, e.g., California, are richer than average. These same states have a majority of their population agreeing with the idea that inequality is bad. Why wouldn’t they therefore be delighted to use state funds to keep everyone and his/her/zir/their brother on Medicaid? Even more confusing, California says that it is “cruel” for Trump and the Republicans to “cut” Medicaid (meaning that spending actually increases but not as much as hoped/dreamed?) while also cutting Medicaid spending at the state level. Medicaid cuts bad when Republicans do it (X, June 27, 2025):
Medicaid cuts good when California Democrats do it (nytimes, same exact day):
Health care is a human right, but only if federal taxpayers are covering it? It is not a right if Californians have to fund it with their own money?
Another recent fun news item from California, in which Democrats eliminate environmental protections established by Ronald Reagan (nytimes):
As governor, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the environmental act into law in 1970 at a time when his party was much more aligned with environmental protections than it is today. It reflected a consensus among the state’s leaders over the need to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources — forests, mountains and coastline — from being spoiled by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion and suburban sprawl.
What does a gathering of diversity advocates who’ve chosen to live in the whitest part of America’s whitest state look like? June 11, 2025, Bangor, Maine:
The U.S. quasi-embassy in Taiwan explains, using your federal tax dollars, that these official city-purchased flags are missing the intersex circle:
I hope that the Taiwanese, thus educated, won’t make the same mistake as the City of Bangor!
Within a block of the rally, a “Pride Proud” church that believes Black Lives Matter even if no member of the congregation has seen a Black person lately (not shown: a guy coming out of the church wearing a “Let Gaza Live” button; the IDF would have a tough time indeed if Maine progressives turned their words into action!):
A fabric/yarn store a few steps away:
President Trump apparently sent tanks to Bangor to quell any unrest (spotted the next morning):
As a keen follower of The Science, my main take-away from the Democrats’ nationwide anti-Trump mass gatherings was “Why aren’t they wearing masks?”
A sea of old white people crammed together (source), none of them masked:
These are the same people who demanded that public schools be closed for 18 months, and that peasants be ordered to wear masks outdoors. Old white Democrats demanded that, except for mostly peaceful BLM protests, the subjects would be forbidden to assemble more than 25 people outdoors (Maskachusetts December 2020), or no more than 3 households (California, October 2020), or no more than 10 people from 2 households (Colorado, October 2020)).
Happy International Asexuality Day to those who celebrate (i.e., 50 percent of of people in heterosexual marriages (measured at or after four years)).
Below are some highlighted books from Books & Books, an independent bookstore that started in Coral Gables, Florida in 1982 and now has five locations around Miami.
(There were no Black customers or workers in the store when I visited. On March 31, the book was ranked #4,783,207 in sales among all books by Amazon.)
The front door:
(All of these “banned” books could be purchased within the store or checked out for free at the nearby Coral Gables branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library.)
A book about slavery that ended in 1865 is featured in a part of the country that wasn’t settled until 1891 (Coral Gables was incorporated in 1925; Miami in 1896):
Books to teach children about the miracle of open borders:
Coral Gable residents favored closing U.S. borders in 2024 by voting in a narrow majority for Donald Trump.
A book deploring climate change and wealth inequality:
A house right at sea level on the water in Coral Gables will cost $10-20 million. How many of those folks would like to see everyone’s wealth equalized so that we all live in 2BR apartments? Some additional private poolside reading:
Here’s a 4400-square-foot $8.5 million apartment one block away from the bookstore in which a person can read about the horrors inflicted by the privileged and the propertied:
More about Blackness in a store free of Blacks:
If the Black-White conflict isn’t large enough…
Since transwomen are women I can’t know if there were any in the store when I visited. None of the people getting in and out of the passenger seats of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, G-Wagens (“the new Corolla”), and similar cars were uttering feminist slogans or wearing T-shirts like this one from Target:
During my brief visit, nobody in the store either browsed or purchased any book like the above. A book featured in the window ranked #4,783,207 at Amazon and I don’t think that customers in Coral Gables are either more Black or more Queer than Amazon customers overall. The function of these displays, therefore, has to be something other than motivating people to buy the displayed books. What is the commercial function, then? Customers of independent bookstores like to think of themselves as part of the #Resistance during visits whose primary purpose is getting a sandwich and coffee or maybe a cookbook for their never-used dream kitchen?
