Trump the Socialist, The Turks & The Israelis, American Regionalism.

 My youngest nephew when we last spoke of the Democrats as socialists, and he was having no part of them. He, like his mother, is a Trumper. And now Trump is calling Democrats Communists. I wonder if that old world still holds many in its superstitious awe. Then I consider my youngest nephew. I wonder if he considers Trump's own warming to socialism.

 Why Trump’s ‘golden shares’ are enticing progressives (POLITICO)

Starting with Trump’s surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10 percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.

That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

The new approach has sparked a mixture of support, criticism and confusion across both parties, with libertarian conservatives pointing out the irony of Trump’s attacks on Democrats as communists and some elected Democrats pledging to investigate equity stake arrangements involving ties to Trump family or allies if they win back power in the midterms. Critics dispute the administration’s authority to take equity stakes in private companies at all.

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Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Trump Says to Vote for Ken Paxton Even Though He’s Dumb and Ugly (The New Republic)

Decades ago, a friend of mine who was a Marine captain often talked about the Turks and the Israeli armies as being on parity. He wondered what would be the outcome if they met. Too bad he died eleven years ago.

The coming Turkish-Israeli struggle for supremacy (Engelsberg ideas)

That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one. The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in the region.

Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures, and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago, Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the region.

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A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region, partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so. A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand, could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.

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The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably, American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt, generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity returning to form.

David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed”: Revisiting a revisionist blockbuster. (The Hedgehog Review)

Detached from their ethnic and regional origins and attached to class-based cultures, the British-American traditions Fischer identifies may endure, as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants assimilate to multiple melting pots along educational and occupational lines. Already in the US, college-educated Hispanics tend to share the liberalism of other college-educated Americans, reflecting the New England roots of today’s academic culture, while working-class Hispanics are more socially conservative, and many convert to evangelical Protestantism, with its Scots-Irish influences.

Meanwhile, the nativism of today’s “Heritage Americans” on the right is much more inclusive than that of the Anglo-Protestant nativists of a century ago, with Irish Americans and German Americans now considered “Heritage Americans.”

I wonder if there is not a bit of the regionalism mentioned above in the regionalism of Soft Secession? (Sheila Kennedy). 

Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public property and data.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and stockpiled abortion medication.

The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22 was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia are net recipients.

Midterms are but 9, 10 weeks away. Maybe we end this silly season of American politics, maybe we can restore American greatness, but I think rejoicing needs await January if the Democrats take enough seats they take over Congress.

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Weirdness

Enjoy, a bit of fun is intended. 

“Weird” is a weird word - by Colin Gorrie 

 On the Fact and Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut’s Dresden (Literary Hub)

The notion of Dresden as an “innocent” city, devoted strictly to culture and the arts, whose factories manufactured mostly porcelain figurines and dinnerware along with other luxury goods, such as cigarettes, cameras, sewing machines, and bicycles, is a myth as well. Almost all of these factories had been converted to support the war effort. Cigarette-making machines were adapted to produce bullets. Companies that made camera lenses focused on creating better, more accurate bomb sights. Radio, bicycle, and sewing machine makers produced precision machine tools key to war technology. Even a famous artist’s colony and school in the northern part of the city had ceased making furniture and crafts, instead building wooden tail assemblies for planes as metal became scarce. The colony’s well-known Festival Hall had become an SS barracks. By 1944, Dresden contained at least one hundred and twenty-seven factories that manufactured war material, and most Dresdeners were employed in war work or armaments factories. 

Why Dragons Appear in So Many Cultures ( HISTORY)

The last days of David Hume (Engelsberg ideas). 

My Own Life was published posthumously in 1777 along with his close friend Adam Smith’s Letter to Strahan, which, with Hume’s blessing, completed the account of Hume’s final period of illness, in a public letter addressed to Hume’s publisher, William Strahan. Hume and Smith had been in close contact for over 25 years and, because they lived in different cities, many of their letters have been preserved. In January 1776, the famously rotund Hume informed Smith that he had lost five stone, or 70 pounds. Hume’s doctor, Joseph Black, told Smith that his patient suffered from night fevers, internal bleeding and severe stomach problems. The evidence indicates, however, that despite his failing health, Hume continued to host dinners and visit friends. The Scottish playwright John Home commented that ‘[Hume] talks of his illness, of his death, as matters of no moment… I never saw him more cheerful, or in more perfect possession of all his faculties, his memory, his understanding, his wit.’ 

 Rights (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Delaware county shots fired arrest is here because of 

 In an interview with witnesses, officials claimed that Weaver was inside a home, pointed a pink handgun at them and fired around six to 10 shots inside the home. A video of the incident reportedly showed Weaver holding the gun and firing multiple shots.

Who owns a pink handgun? 

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Thesis: The Midwest Produces More Of Great American Literature

I start with the American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota), Thomas Stearns Eliot (Missouri), Ernst Hemingway (Illinois), Saul Bellow (Illinois), Toni Morrison (Ohio), and Bob Dylan (Minnesota).

 List of winners of the National Book Award is more difficult to discern the writer's origin, but like this list for the Pulitzer Prizes,  A State-By-State Survey of Literary Masterpieces (Literary Hub) I think it suffices for my thesis that the Midwest is a potent source for American literature. 

Now for what is going on now: Midwest: A Regional Spotlight on Independent Publishing (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses)

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Wendell Berry, Great American Writer

 I read Wendell Berry while in prison, and he impressed me. Another American writer who needs more attention.

Wendell Berry, Son of Kentucky (Jake Meador, The Dispatch): 

But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.

But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”

That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life. 

Among the several things that helped turn my life around and gave me the means of putting together the shards of myself, it was Thoreau. The above essay ties Berry with Thoreau and that now makes sense to me and gives depth to Wendell Berry’s Nine Rules by Ted Gioia.

Gioia's essay provoked this response from my friend KH:

It is an age of specialization. I used to be able to work on my car, now I can’t. OTOH, they’re much safer, fewer people are killed in them and they’re spaceships compared with 25 years ago. 

We used to think pagers were amazing. Now we have a computer in our hands. 

I’m concerned with Big Tech but that’s a failure of government to regulate. Standard Oil and the railroads were once big tech. Then came TR. 

If you want to move to a farm in Kentucky and live off the land, you can probably eschew all of this. The rest of us have to live in 2026. 

Nick Offerman on the Essential Wisdom of Wendell Berry (Literary Hub)

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A Small Man's Delusions Diminish Us All

Is America Now an Imperial Populist Oligarchy? - Paul D. Miller (The Dispatch) had to be written long before Trump told us the Department of Defense was buying into Venezuelan oil. It does not undercut the essay.

Remarkable US oil deal puzzles analysts - and angers many Venezuelans (BBC)

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and presidential hopeful, María Corina Machado, may choose not to publicly criticise President Trump, whose support she needs if she hopes to come to power. Others, though, have been more forthcoming.

"You chose to use the power of the United States not to liberate Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors," said Venezuelan economist, Ricardo Hausmann, on social media, directing his comments at the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

"You opted to push through an asset seizure, an unconstitutional agreement with an illegitimate and oppressive government, instead of using the leadership of the United States to first restore constitutional order and democracy," he said.

The lack of an imminent election in Venezuela – or, indeed, any clear plan towards one – strikes many opponents as a betrayal.

Democrats concerned over Trump's massive Venezuelan oil deal 

Untested in court, Trump's new tariffs on Canada raise legal questions 

Pentagon Erupts Over Report on Classified Warnings Against Iran War (The New Republic).

 

How Trump Uses Dormant Laws to Amass Power  (The New Republic) both scares me and makes me pause at the efforts made by the Administration's lawyers to find obscure laws to bend to their purposes.

 The Trump administration’s enthusiasm for reviving moribund laws to accomplish its policy goals should inspire Congress to consider repealing or revising them. Trump and his allies have inflicted plenty of harm by violating federal laws during his second term. Another important problem is when he abuses and misuses existing laws. If Congress is interested in restoring its own primacy in our constitutional order, it should reconsider its own past missteps, as well.

Both of the court revivals illustrate the problem. While federal law authorizes the use of prize courts, they have not meaningfully existed since the Civil War. The Union Navy blockaded Southern ports throughout the war and seized military and civilian vessels alike. Once captured, the ships were typically brought to Union-held ports for disposal by prize courts. In 1863, the Supreme Court rejected legal challenges to the Southern blockade and upheld President Abraham Lincoln’s authority to seize and sell ships and goods acquired from it.

As Bloomberg noted when it reported on the prize courts’ revival earlier this week, the courts fell into disuse after the Spanish-American War ended in 1900 and were moribund after World War II. They reflect a nineteenth-century understanding of naval warfare where both a nation’s navy and private citizens acting as privateers could capture vessels on the high seas. The changing nature of naval warfare helped render these tactics obsolete: The average American boat owner these days would have an easier time sailing to the moon than capturing an armed enemy warship.

A Congressional Research Service report in 2024 noted that Congress abolished prize money for private citizens in 1899, and any proceeds from prize court cases now go into the Treasury’s general fund instead. The Trump administration’s plans, though still vague, appear to be centered on creating a faster, easier legal pathway to sell captured Iranian oil. This may be riskier for the administration than it looks, since it will give federal courts an opportunity to directly consider whether the ships and goods were lawfully seized. As Lincoln’s own experience showed, such cases can allow judges to consider legality of the war itself. The sixteenth president prevailed; the forty-seventh might not.

 Mark Carney: Why I Rejected Trump’s Trade Deal (The Walrus) left me thinking Carney is doing more to save us from MAGA stupidity than American voters.

We’ve been under no illusions. We recognized, from the start, that America has changed. Early last year, I observed that the decades-long process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was over. Our government understood before many that America would transform all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies, and use economic integration as a weapon. We recognize that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.  

Why do we have a President who has no respect for free speech? Trump vows to report NBC's Kristen Welker to the FCC over endorsement record report. Even more urgent, how did we let a man with such thin skin and gross self-regard into the Presidency?

Trump wrecked everything he ever touched; now he is doing to America's economy what he did to our standing in the world.

Convulsion in credit markets (Kitco News)

 

 No single solution exists for the mess we have created. There will be work, and there is no gain without pain.

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Belated Tim Curry Post

 Like everyone else, I first met Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was also the reason to watch Times Square, Congo and Earth Two. He almost salvaged The Three Musketeers. Here are the items I collected for this post from last week.

‘He could arch both eyebrows and curl his lips in every direction all at once’: Tim Curry’s five best screen roles (The Guardian)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show review – the campfest that became a cultural colossus | Movies (The Guardian)

Tim Curry (The Guardian) 

Tim Curry, 1946–2026 - by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark)

An Ode to the Gleeful Terror of Tim Curry’s Pennywise (Literary Hub)

 

Back in the day, I picked up his albums on the advice of Sheila Brown. I did not see these mentioned in his obits.

 

 

 

 And what might have come close to a hit for him:

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Indiana The Cost of Living, Religion & Politics, Reliable News Sources, A Clueless General Assembly

Why do we put up with how the Republicans run this state? Ask Sheila Kennedy wrote, time for a change. Before they sell us off entirely.

Mapped: The Cost of Living in Every U.S. State (2026) makes me wonder why it is so cheap to live in Indiana that everybody seems to be having a hard time making a living.

The hardest-working states in the US, ranked 

CONTESTED HISTORY: League of Women Voters’ event examined meaning behind ‘separation of church and state’ (THE INDIANA CITIZEN) embarrasses me because I had no idea it was happening in Muncie. People are not buying Christian nationalism, and the least interested seem to be Christians.

Is Indy news biased? Here’s my advice for finding reliable sources (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

Indiana asked about new SNAP rule. Here’s what people said. (Free Press Indiana).

Indiana’s abortion ban has ‘chilling effect’ in the ER. 

Doing Business (Sheila Kennedy)

A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce. Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.

A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and women considering employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit workers–male or female–from families still in their childbearing years.

Flooding devastated swathes of Indiana but response is hampered by politics  (The Guardian) 

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