Reminder: Indiana Voting

Just in case anyone reading this actually lives in Indiana:

1-minute voter guide: Indiana's 5th Congressional District (Axios Indianapolis)

You’re not crazy. Voting in Indiana is intimidating. (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

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What I Agree About Originalism & What I Disagree With Judicial Review

 I have put my research project into Indiana's Bill of Rights on hold as I await feedback. One issue that arose is originalism. As I see matters, Indiana has silently adopted the United States Supreme Court's theory on originalism. What is the problem with originalism? Selecting the source for the original meaning determines the outcome. It does not mean that the court has roamed through the whole of the historical record. In Indiana, the court went looking for abortion in The Debates of the 1851 Convention. A legislative subject not one for constitutional debate. I argue what should have been looked for was the meaning of liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the words that were actually debated as being rights.

 But this paragraph from Brian Fitzpatrick's Originalism: What it is, what it isn’t and why it’s the most democratic option for the Supreme Court from The Conversation, I do agree with.

Originalists think the Constitution can be changed only by the American people through the amendment process. Conversely, living constitutionalists believe it can be changed by judges through reinterpretation of the existing document. 

It is also disingenuous at both the federal level and in Indiana. At the federal level, the amendment process is so arduous that it is easier to pack the court with ideological judges. When the Indiana Supreme Court suggested abortion should be put to the people as a constitutional amendment, it ignored the amendment process needed the cooperation of the very legislature that passed the abortion ban.

Cute. Not to be taken as a cure-all.

Now, about judicial review, the power of a court to determine a law unconstituional. I have a problem with Who Is Supreme, the People or the Court? (Los Angeles Review of Books). Maybe two. The first issue is the focus on the federal level. 

Just as the folk story of Brown is simple enough to state, so too is the basic thesis of Supremacy. Bowie and Renan take on the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, meaning the court’s power to decline to enforce federal laws. Bowie and Renan contend that judicial review, so defined, is fundamentally inconsistent with the republican, democratic foundation of the Constitution, and also that, in practice, judicial review has been weaponized for antidemocratic, illiberal ends. Indeed, judicial review has consistently been opposed on those grounds by abolitionists, labor organizers, and other progressive groups. It would be impossible to recount the entirety of the story that Supremacy covers, so I will merely highlight some of its key claims (while begging readers to get the book as soon as they can.) 

The states might have given a different answer - the amendment process is easier at the state level and there are states still electing their appellate court judges. An Indiana Supreme Court case held that judicial review was meant to protect citizens rights against a despotic legislature. That opinion emphasized the final judges of natural rights were the people. 

However, I cannot argue with this. 

Would a ban on judicial review—or even targeted restrictions on judicial review—fix everything at the Supreme Court? No, and I don’t take Supremacy to suggest otherwise. For one thing, I’d bet almost anything that this Supreme Court, which is full of judicial supremacists, including Chief Justice John Roberts, would invalidate any federal law that attempted to limit the court’s power.

And yet, Bowie and Renan make a powerful argument against judicial review. Don’t let this review displace your own review—you should dig into their case.

 

sch 10/4 

Indiana Secretary of State Debate; Trump I s Corruption; Donald J. Trump Making Us A Laughingstock; Let's Live In Carmel!

 Sharp divides in Indiana secretary of state debate over noncitizen vote, spending audit (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Okay, foreigners cannot vote. In Indiana, there are people from the precinct who can challenge voters; the voter registration office requires driver's licenses; the ID needs to come out when voting; and so I just do not see why the Republican candidate is retailing MAGA scare tactics. Unless he thinks we are as dumb as MAGA politicians seem do do.

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Demand for Cash Off the Books Exposed - drain the swamp? No way. Where else could people like this breed?

If Trump Steals an Election, Here’s What to Do (The New Republic)

Naked Trump Statute Goes on Display in European Parliament (The New Republic)

Carmel, Indiana, ranked by WalletHub as third best small city to live in    

sch 10/8 

Yes, We Elected A Deluded Idiot Child To President

So we need to do something about it - vote Democrat in the midterms. The only chance we have is with a feckless donkey. Still, better than staying with an elephant rampaging and smashing what made America great. Time to close the door to the padded room for Donald J. Trump.

White House: Trump will not reimburse government for TV ads

New Brunswick’s Trade Ties with Maine Could Sway the US Midterms (The Walrus)

And now to really chill your guts:

There is zero doubt Hegseth and Trump want a military more loyal to them than the US Constiution. A glaring example is when Trump’s DOJ sought to prosecute six sitting members of Congress for reminding active-duty members of the military that they have an obligation to not follow “illegal orders.” Even though charges were ultimately not brought, Trump called the Democratic lawmakers--all who served in military or intelligence agencies --”traitors” and suggested the video was an offense “punishable by death.”

But what we are seeing is Hegseth transform the military not to reflect Trump’s values—but his own. The most glaring example is Hegseth’s efforts to turn the military into a right wing, devoutly Christian fighting force. We all know Trump doesn’t care about religion—but Hegseth--who belongs to a far right Evangelical church--proudly has a crusader cross tattoo on his chest and another Latin tattoo on his arm that translates into, “God Wills It.”

 Impeach Hegeseth.

sch 10/6 

 

Thinking: George Saunders on AI & Drew Calvert on Self-Help Books & Writing Is Hard!

 I did not mean to pair these two articles. Only the time I finished the first paragraph, I decided they belonged together.

Read  Model Behavior, an interview with George Saunders, if you want to know why we should not be using AI for writing and why writing matters. Maybe you will not agree with me that George Saunders is a genius, but there is enough common sense for those think about Saunders differently than I do.

Drew Calvert's Literature Is Not About You (Commonweal Magazine)is here because how he takes down self-help books relates in my mind with this bit of Saunders:

When I read a novel or story, what do I want? I want the writer’s full experience, as expressed in the subterfuge of a made-up story. I want her life experience, her aesthetic feelings (and even biases); I want that subtle record, that is there in her prose, of every book she’s read and where and when she read it, and how it subtly altered that younger version of her—how it moved her and changed the voice in her head—I want all of that, and I want it from a person. That’s its whole value, that it comes from another person. She and I are in communication....

What Calvert wrote was:

In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.

Encounter. Experience. Communication. Life as a mystery. 

Several weeks ago, the instructor of my Friday class (my group “therapy”) mentioned he thought cars would be all self-driving in the near future. I have been chewing that since then. These two pieces seem supportive of my conclusion that we want lives without experience, without any need to learn skills, to be self-contained in our own fantasies, to have things done to us rather than us doing them. The world of Wall-E made flesh. That should be enough to make me queasy, but is not such a world the promise of AI? Could  AI be meant to be our ultimate self-help literature?

I will close with Writing forces your brain to discover what you really think (Big Think) and points I agree with and tie in with the preceeding.

Writing can be tedious. It can be tiresome to sit down with pen and paper. Your hand cramps. The pen bleeds ink. Or you start typing and notice your posture is truly and utterly poor. My grandmother would be horrified.

Orwell likened writing a book to a “long bout of some painful illness.” As Rose Horowitch put it in The Atlantic, writing “is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard.” It instead “exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.”

But the hard part of anything does something good for your brain. I saw it up close as a Spanish tutor. Someone was trying to recall the word for soldier, soldado. They couldn’t get it, and I wouldn’t give it to them. I asked them to think about what they were doing when they first learned the word. It probably took five minutes of this word being on the tip of their tongue, which is excruciating. There is a fine line between being a teacher and being an asshole.

***

Good writing forces logic. To write clearly for you, the reader, I have to be clear to myself first. Do I have a good thought process? Is there good logic? What counterarguments can people make against my points? Have I thought through my counters to those counters?

I often write about topics under the larger umbrella of wisdom, in the hopes of helping people live lives aligned with meaning and purpose. Well, what is wisdom? The psychologists Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger called it “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” Monika Ardelt read that and said, essentially, no. Wisdom “should not be reduced to expertise.” It’s “an integration of cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics.” One camp says wisdom is something you know. The other says it’s someone you are.

Oh, how I agree with wisdom is more than expertise. And I agree this is what we should be working on as human beings. This I came to by being unwise.

My own working definition, from scribblings back in August, argues that wisdom is the craft of living well — a skill and expertise in dealing with the fundamental, uncertain, value-laden (inevitable) problems of life — which, I realized while writing this, means that wisdom can be learned. Possibly true. Certainly a position to test. And ultimately a realization that I still don’t totally know how to define wisdom. Maybe those experts were on to something.

As I agree with this advice:

Write more often. Journal in some shape or form. Eat your word vegetables. You don’t need a perfect leather-bound book, the smell of rich mahogany, or the zen of Malte Marten handpan music to find five minutes to put words on a page.

This blog exists as my journal as well as a source of information for whoever deigns to read me. My writing projects in prison straightened out my thinking. What I write now maintains that streak.

 People need to be creative, doing otherwise stunts us. Seek wisdom because that belongs to humans. For all the vaunted abilities of AI, no one speaks of wisdom.

 

sch 10/4 

 

Indiana Politics - There's An Election Coming

 I assume since no one ever comments to these posts that they are not read. It's better than admitting this blog and its posts suck! This post feels especially useless. If anyone is reading me, I doubt they are from Indiana.

But I cannot help myself.

See, I am utterly opposed to changing Indiana's Bill of Rights on bail. First, it is unnecessary. What no one will mention is that if a judge and a prosecutor want someone to stay in jail before trial, then they will stay there. The bail could be cash only. Try to raise even a $10,000 bond if it is in cash. As Right to bail: Amendment asks voters to rewrite pretrial detention rules (Indiana Capital Chronicle) points out the stats do not show any need for this change. Please vote against this.

This feels like it ought to be more isgnificant: Former GOP lieutenant governor endorses Ballard in secretary of state race  (Indiana Capital Chronicle). Could this a reaction to Trump's gerrymandering stunt?

 I did post another article on this but when it comes to Rokita, once is not enough:  Indiana AG Todd Rokita sues disciplinary officials, alleging retaliation over political speech  (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Finally, Indiana Voters - all the info you require for voting in Indiana.

Ah, well, maybe this will make it all feel better:

 

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Your Republican Party Doing What It Does Best

 Vance Says People Are Too Focused on “Little Things” Ahead of Midterms (The New Republic) - like how to keep paying the bills.

US judge finds law criminalizing noncitizen voting unconstitutional (Reuters).

Leibowitz wrote that under the US Constitution only states can set voter qualifications, not Congress. Every state requires US citizenship to vote, and Leibowitz said ​it was up to Florida, not the Department of Justice, to prosecute her for violating that requirement. 

"Can the State of Florida prohibit and punish the exact conduct Defendant Cox allegedly engaged in ​here? This has already been decided elsewhere and is not addressed here: Florida can and does," Leibowitz wrote. 

Trump, who falsely claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election, has said stricter enforcement of documented citizenship is needed for election integrity. His critics say the administration's highly publicized crackdown on noncitizen voting exaggerates a rare problem and could undermine confidence in election results.

 Trump team is now looking to see if DOJ committed misconduct in investigating Richard Nixon’s Watergate is just eaht Tricky Dick needs. Trump and the Republicans  have a fetish for rewriting history, don't they?

 sch 10/4

 

 

 

Todd Rokita Fighting Ethical Problems

I do not know the specifics of the underlying case and my i will keep my anti-Rokita bias in check, but most lawyers do not go to federal courts to fight disciplinary complaints. Indiana AG Todd Rokita sues disciplinary officials, alleging retaliation over political speech (News From The States).

All I can say is that Democrats do not dominate Indiana's judiciary, including the Disciplinary Commission. The Indiana Supreme Court is filled with Republicans; that is the final arbiter of  attorney ethics questions. Which leaves me wondering how one person can pose such a threat to Indiana's Attorney General. 

sch 10/4 

Lizard Brains Endangered!

 Admit there is something tempting about having a lizard brain. Like you might tempt Eve with an apple. That you can slither around and stick your tongue out. That under the fat and the sagging muscles you are a secret T. Rex.

If this is how you feel, then do not read Do humans really have a ‘lizard brain’ lurking beneath our rational minds? from The Guardian.

Neuroanatomically and behaviourally, if not yet in the popular consciousness, the idea that we all have a lizard brain has been thoroughly discredited. Yet despite the mounting evidence, and the success of more recent frameworks, the triune brain endures. Shockingly, it is still being widely taught in introductory psychology textbooks (as one journal article mischievously titled “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside” showed). The study also highlighted some of the pitfalls of allowing the hypothesis to go unchallenged, which include giving students a false sense of how evolution unfolds, and promoting the idea that human beings have a monopoly on “rational” actions such as deferring gratification – sacrificing a short-term reward for a longer-term gain.

And speaking of lizards, Jacob Rees-Mogg accuses Tucker Carlson of ‘verging on defending Hitler’ (The Guardian).

In the lengthy debate on foreign policy and global tensjons, the US commentator repeatedly goaded Rees-Mogg over the smallness of the UK armed forces and suggested Russia was more powerful. Rees-Mogg explained that the UK economy was bigger and made the case that Britain and western allies had to support Ukraine and deter Russian aggression.

***

The interview has raised eyebrows in the US as well as Britain, with Mike Huckabee, the Republican and US ambassador to Israel, posting on X: “When it seemed impossible for Toxic Tucker to descend deeper into the sewer here he goes opining that UK should have let Nazis take over. Forget that Hitler murdered 11 million people? I thought Tucker was against killing? He needs help. Serious help.” 

 That Tucker Carlson does need.

But between simplistic ideas about the brain and simpletons like Carlson, I want to bring up something that has been bothering me. That is that size matters always. Carlson seems to equate Russia's size with might. Ukraine has shown size is easily turned into the status of stumblebum. 

It is all about how you use that size. Trump and Hegeseth are just as confused by that idea as was Stalin about the pope's divisions. If size were all that counts, the Spanish Armada would have beaten the English; the Persians defeated the Greeks; and the English would never have ruled India.

 sch 10/4

AI Going Rogue! Which Way Gasoline? Saving Democracy!! Educating Hoosier?

 Exclusive-OpenAI works to understand full scope of agent activity as user data leak emerges

Two months after OpenAI disclosed the accidental hacking of Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker is still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The latest example came on Friday when OpenAI said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. OpenAI declined to say if the images were AI-generated or identified real people. It also declined to say when the ‌images were posted.

The intelligence war is turning against the Houthis (Al Jazeera), but this does what to oil prices?

The Saudi-led JFC’s broader transformation in C6ISR – the systems connecting command, communications, intelligence and combat capabilities – target development and faster sensor-to-shooter integration has changed the military equation since 2015. At the same time, sustained Houthi escalation has exhausted the restraint that governed Saudi policy for years. The major Saudi-led campaign now taking shape will therefore begin against an adversary whose external command support is already under sustained attack.

That is the decisive difference. The Russian-Iranian system sustaining and amplifying Houthi military power is being degraded before major Saudi-led air, land and naval operations are fully under way, while the tactical failures exposed at Mokha are being corrected within the Saudi-led JFC. The Houthis exploited a compromised command system once; they are now being forced to fight while the external system that magnified their own effectiveness is systematically dismantled.

The wrong prescription for liberal democracy's ills (Engelsberg ideas)

That’s a comment worth pondering as the political class around the world tries to figure out what happened to moderation. Leaders who do not hide their disrespect for democratic institutions are in power from Turkey to India to Argentina, while parties towards the middle of the ideological spectrum seem mired in trouble almost everywhere. Two thirds of German voters support none of the three parties that have framed political debate in Germany for nearly 80 years, even as Israel is torn by a debate about whether its government is becoming authoritarian. An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that elected officials don’t care what they think. As Daron Acemoglu asserts: ‘What we are witnessing isn’t a failure just of democracy but of liberal democracy.’

Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is well known for his work on political economy. His 2012 book Why Nations Fail, written with economist James A. Robinson, then at Harvard University, became a best-seller, and he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with Robinson and Simon Johnson, also of MIT, for their research on how social institutions affect prosperity. Acemoglu’s new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, goes further, laying out the shortcomings of modern liberalism and offering ideas about how to avoid a slide into authoritarian rule. ‘Liberalism is worth saving and remaking,’ he insists.

***

Against that background, Acemoglu calls for a ‘working-class liberalism’ that pays less attention to ‘thought policing’ and more to building community, using narratives that bring people together rather than polarising them. ‘Shared moral principles are more likely to emerge when people see themselves as having agency in choosing such principles and when they feel that they are part of both local communities and a broader shared identity,’ he asserts.

Acemoglu is far from alone in his critique. Many trees have fallen victim to ruminations about the shortcomings of liberal democracy. As befits a book by an economist, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? draws more heavily on the economics literature than most books of this genre, but its conclusions are far from unique.

Here’s What California Is Learning From Solar Panels Built Over Irrigation Canals (KQED ) and what I got out of it was they are using marginal space for solar panels. Why not here?

The future of Indiana depends on educating its future, so what have we got? Education is being underfunded. 

Indiana superintendents say they're cutting jobs because of property tax reforms (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

The survey went out to 290 superintendents throughout the state in August; 144 responded.

Other solutions raised in the report are creative: one superintendent said they planted prairie grass instead of mowing to save money on fuel, removed televisions to save on electricity and launched a student-run business to generate new income.

Nearly all of the respondents said they anticipate negative financial impacts from SEA 1, while a clear majority expressed similar concerns about universal school choice and the level of funding the General Assembly will allocate to public schools next year.

Schools would need anywhere from 1% to 25% in one-time funding increases to maintain the level of services expected by the community, plus an average of 6% in ongoing increases thereafter, the report found.

 ***

Others are considering delayed maintenance, reduced staff raises, cuts to transportation services, electives and field trips or consolidation. One raised the possibility their district won’t be able to sustain student internships, career pathways or dual-credit offerings.

In rural districts, superintendents say they worry lawmakers are pressuring them to consolidate or close schools.

“I feel like funding is bleeding the small schools dry,” one superintendent wrote. “I am skeptical that this is simply a push to consolidate.”

The people running Indiana: About - CEOs of Indiana Corporate Partnership.

Snow Globe Palimpsest (Los Angeles Review of Books) shows the history of Zionism is not simple and that anti-Zionism has its Jewish roots.

 

Even the Irish think Putin pulls Trump's chain: Donald Trump acts as Putin’s puppet for reasons shrouded in secrecy (The Irish Times ).

Something for me, us, to think about: How Weimar Germany’s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power. I favor proportional representation. Frankly, I assume the proportions being divided between our same-old main parties. One silver lining from the essay:

As the divided Weimar government continued to prove itself incapable of dealing with the myriad economic problems facing the country, more Germans began to search for radical solutions. By 1923 the Nazi Party had attracted more than fifty thousand members, among them the widely admired World War I general Erich Ludendorff. Hitler and Ludendorff believed the party was powerful enough to stage a revolution. 

“Divided.” Nationally, here, a multitude of parties seems unlikely. Maybe in the states, but even then not so many. Still, a reminder not to trust in one solution to a complicated problem. 

So, allow me to point you to STAR voting (Wikipedia).  We cannot change the type of representation without changing how we vote. This seems a better choice than instant run-offs, which interested me for over a decade.

Get moving:

sch 9/28

  

 

 

 

News; Indianapols Mall Rehab, Iowa Diesel, Ball State Innovation, Sharia Law

 Indianapolis councilor hopes to redevelop Washington Square Mall

I was there in May and I was shocked. You can see my photos of the place here.

There is something creepy about the decrepitude of the malls. Strangest may be that I was never one for malls - too many people milling around like cattle awaiting for the cute to open at the stockyard. Still, there is a loss of energy, jobs, companies that they seem to memorialize.

I would turn the Anderson Mall into a park for solar panels. Maybe Indianapolis will have a better idea.

High fuel costs strain Iowa's agricultural economy. The people of Iowa did go for Trump and he always does right by his friends.

Ball State University - Profile, Rankings and Data | US News Best Colleges 

Center for Innovation and Collaboration ( Ball State University )

 The Center for Innovation and Collaboration connects Ball State University’s people, expertise, and resources with community and industry partners to solve real-world challenges through innovation. Serving as a hub at the intersection of education, community, and industry, the Center fosters collaboration, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and learning grounded in media, technology, design, and art. Through applied research, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and hands-on training, the Center will support regional economic growth and talent development across East Central Indiana.

What was a teacher's college is now a business school. 

America Needs No Sharia Law but American Muslims Deserve Liberty (Mustafa Akyol - The Dispatch), and no idea how it will ever affect us.

The good news is that the United States already has a brilliant solution to this tension. It is called the First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, so long as it is not imposed on anyone. So, Islam, too, should be freely practiced, as long as it is not imposed on anyone.

The bad news, however, is that there are voices on the American right today who explicitly argue that while their own religion is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, Islam is not—because, they say, it is not merely a religion but a “political system” that will always seek to subvert, conquer, and subjugate everything else. 

My Congresswoman must be getting worried: VERIFY: What those political attack ads in the Spartz-Hale congressional race are NOT telling you (wthr.com ). Good.

 sch 9/22

Closing Out Tuesday

 Went nowhere to my embarassment.

I did get the email thinned out.

Now for things I want to share.

The Mutants (Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal)

A Zeitgeist of the Bizarre (TAP Magazine)

Speckbohnen (German Green Beans) 

Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency (The New Republic)

 

sch 

 

Testing Reality: Diesel in Indiana, Trump & Greenland, Kash Patel

I am supposed to be the demented one, right? Fighting hard not to slip back into a depression that sees the world as disgusting and worth burning down that alters my take on reality, right? Yeah, well, I have got the depression under control and still I think myself standing outside the real world looking in. It's you people who are nuts.

Diesel prices surge past $7 per gallon, squeeze Indiana farmers as harvest begins (Fox 59) 

BOONE COUNTY, Ind. — According to AAA, Indiana hit its highest recorded diesel price average ever at $6.53 per gallon on Friday. Eye-popping prices are now appearing around central Indiana, some topping more than $7 per gallon.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense to go buy a whole bunch of fuel at $7 a gallon,” said Donnie Lawson, co-owner of Lawson Land and Cattle Company. “But maybe that’s the best thing to do because it may be at $8 a gallon here in a week or two.”

Corn and soybean farmers, like Lawson in Thorntown, are making some hard decisions to still turn a healthy harvest profit.

“This is the toughest it’s ever been in agriculture,” Lawson said. “And that’s from top to bottom.”

Thousands of gallons of diesel will be needed to fuel Lawson’s combines, tractors and other agricultural equipment. Last year’s harvest season in Indiana, the diesel average was $3.78 per gallon.

US and Denmark reach security deal after Trump’s threats to take over Greenland (The Guardian).

Even so, a Trump administration insider dropped a hint online that the US side intends to present whatever the deal actually is as an American triumph. Katie Miller, a former White House aide whose husband is Trump’s closest adviser, posted a map of Greenland covered in the American flag, with the caption: “ITS [sic] HAPPENING”.

Trump gets to claim he got a great deal which will probably be what we had before Trump started ranting. The same will happen with Iran. That is what you get when you and reality are not on speaking terms.

Maddow hits the mark: Trump is trying to rally his base. OTOH, more proof he has no concern for our rights.

 Vanity, vanity and we pay the price:

Are we Titanic passengers Having a good laugh about the iceberg?

  Trump voter interviewed. I really do not understand, I see such a gap between Trump's words and actions.

 This ought to be a SNL skit, not reality. Talk about your DEI hires.

Judge Luttig warns about the GOP’s plot to block Democrats from taking control of the House! 

 

sch 9/20

 

Beeves - Those With Four Legs, Those In Black Robes

 Some odds and ends I thought worth considering together.

Trump’s beef import deal: Small Hoosier farm sales boom; Indiana commercial sellers take hit (Fox 59)

However, the anticipated impact across all suppliers, big and small, is more complicated than a quick boost in sales.

Indiana is home to roughly 20,000 individual beef producers. That includes both commercial and local sellers, like RK Cattle Company in Danville – watching its freshly-fed, farm-to-fork flanks, steaks and more – fly off freezer shelves.

“There is a demand and a need and a want for quality, American-raised beef,” said Karissa Wyeth, owner of RK Cattle Company. “I think that’s just very important to people right now. You might not want to go out to a restaurant and eat because it’s expensive, but you’re willing to put good meat on your table for your family.”

Wyeth tracked a 44% spike in sales last week after Trump’s temporary tariff pause announcement. Since then, she suspects consumers are losing trust in grocery store meats.

'Starship Troopers' director confirms Donald Trump's space uniforms are Nazi-inspired (Euronews). Of course they are; Trump does like a man in a good-looking uniform.

John Roberts’ role model shows everything wrong with the Supreme Court.

Reconstruction’s opponents drew a different lesson. They insisted that the president needed a court powerful enough to protect him from “the meshes” of Congress. As the nation abandoned Reconstruction, a generation of politicians and historians recast Johnson as a martyr to congressional tyranny. Their remedy was to articulate and entrench a new doctrine: that the Constitution makes the court supreme over Congress. They encouraged the court to void any statute that hems in presidential power.

It took 50 years for that doctrine to triumph. It arrived carrying a grudge. In 1926, Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote that studying “the injustice that the radical Republicans did to Andrew Johnson” left him “humiliated as a Republican.” He then used a case before him, Myers v. United States, to condemn the Tenure of Office Act and strike down a Reconstruction-era regulation of the presidency. Admirers cheered that the court had at last vindicated Andrew Johnson.

Today’s court has resurrected that project. Just this term in Trump v. Slaughter, the court invoked Myers to shred century-old statutory protections that kept public servants from being replaced with loyalists. Afterward, on Substack, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote admiringly that Taft’s leadership not only protected the president from Congress, but also helped to fend off congressional efforts to rein in the court.

 When I was younger, so much younger, the conservatives were complaining about the liberality of the Warren Couurt. That the unelected court had too much power. Over the years, I have been convinced by the sonceratives that what they really wanted was not a more democratic court but a court that was under their power. This article is just more proof that a strong court is just fine if it is run by conservatives. Where are you now, Alexander Bickel?

Today my mother's mother would have 128 years old.

sch 9/17

Indiana - Keeping Democracy Alive! Vote!

One surprise I had this year was learning that my oldest sister did not know who laws are made. I learned that in high school. That made me want to share these two pieces from the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

Democracy Day: A guide to how Indiana makes its laws

All the information you need to participate in Indiana's democracy

sch 9/16 

Normalization (Sheila Kennedy )

As we prepare to go to the polls, I would suggest that we focus on several that he omits–and especially on the growing normalization of multiple bigotries by this administration and by MAGA and Trumpism generally. We need to understand what that particular area of normalization is doing to America’s civic fabric and to our common understanding of what I’ve called “The American Idea.”

What happens to our understanding of America when certain groups of people are so constantly targeted and marginalized that media simply reports the latest attack on “wokeism” along with other news of the day?

 sch 9/17

Trump Mania

 It is not Iran who is jacking up gas prices, it is Ukraine!

 Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel fuel, citing a global shortage 

Remember this: America's economy is booming & great! 

Trump urges rapid interest rate drop after Fed announces quarter point hike 

What alternate reality? 

How MAGA Bewildered Voters Into Its Alternate Reality 

Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place. It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.

sch 9/18 

 

Washington Irving; A Movie Review; Chuck Todd About 9/11

What I was doing on 9/11, other than reading and researching and working on my research project. 

Starting off with a film review: ‘Hope’ Review  by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark). 

Washington Irving is making a slight comeback. Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate’s “A Washington Irving Sketch Book”  (Cleveland Review of Books) is the second review I have seen of this book. I first knew of Washington Irving from the Authors game. Looking back, it was an antique game when I was a kid. My mother's mother gave it to us. It seems it was a game she had played when young. Anyway, I did read The Knickerbocker Stories while in prison. All I can say is that I prefer Irving to James Fenimore Cooper - Irving has more humor. As to this review:

Lopate’s A Washington Irving Sketch Book is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It’s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving’s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving’s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don’t call Phillip Lopate a “minor writer” in order to demean him. It’s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: “I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.” And it’s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: “I didn’t imagine [as a young person] being a successful ‘minor writer.’ I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it’s respectable.” He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers? 

 The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? (Los Angeles Review of Books). I tried reading Campbell while in prison. He was one of the few books I did not finish. There was something about his thesis or his writing that I found tedious. It is good to find my dissatisfaction is shared by others.

Like many tales of compulsion, Campbell’s Hero brings dangers to those who put their faith in it. The first is a serious misunderstanding of how myth works. Myths and traditional stories function in specific environments for reasons bounded by time and place. Common traits are interesting, but the differences — what we might call variations or multiforms — cannot be ignored.

The second is the existence of an ideal form in myth. How we talk about and choose to accept differences is important. Calling one version of a story a “variant” implies, wrongly, that there is an authoritative and original form. This is a top-down version of storytelling that often misses the significance of the differences themselves. Famous things we think we know about ancient myths are mere possibilities contingent on their time and place. In many stories, Medea did not kill her children. In a majority of tales, Oedipus had children with someone other than his mother.

The Monomyth is the ultimate example of this simplifying of narrative patterns. It reminds us in a way of the Greek myth of Procrustes, the criminal hotelier who cut guests up or stretched them out to fit the bed of his choosing. Campbell started with a thesis and a fictive metric and then cut global myths to fit his Odyssean bed.

Another challenge comes from what audiences know and expect. As defenders of Campbell will argue, much of what he suggests is meant to be allegorical. The hero’s journey is not supposed to be a simple narrative pattern; it is instead a psychological, even mystical, exploration of the self. But his language, which is derived from myth, is slippery — and due to its outsize influence it affects how people understand ancient traditions. Modern notions of the word “hero,” for example, assume essential goodness or imply selfless deeds on behalf of others. Ancient heroes and figures from myth are anything but essentially good. Within ancient myths, heroes are young people in their full strength; they are part of a generation before the “iron” age of modern humans, marking the transition from a time when gods and people shared the earth. They can also be exceptional figures who follow a pattern of withdrawal and return to their communities, suffering pain and inflicting suffering in turn.

 Twenty years after 9/11, Chuck Todd asks if we have harmed ourselves.

 sch 9/11

Competing For the End Of The World!

 Trump downplays the need to check AI development, second federal judge freezes Trump mail ballot order (AP News)

President Donald Trump told reporters Sunday that the United States is leading China in the development of AI. He added, “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.” While Trump acknowledged the need for some regulation, he provided no specifics about potential rules. Read more. 

Er, what do we win? The ability to destroy humanity? This AI thing makes nukes look like a sorry excuse as a means for human extinction. After all, somewhere a human being decides to start a nuclear war. AI takes away human choice.

AI Is a Test of Our Maturity. *Gulp* (The Bulwark)

Mike Johnson says AI companies should ensure safety, not Congress 

Who then should ensure the safety of Americans? AI? It makes me wonder who is paying off whom.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that artificial intelligence developers, not Congress, bear responsibility for ensuring their products are safe and rejected a national moratorium on AI buildout during a Sept. 13 appearance on CNN's "State of the Union."

The Louisiana Republican said there was an "obvious corporate responsibility" but pointed to competition with China as a reason to keep Congress from imposing regulations.

"We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge," Johnson said. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American."

The very people who designed this monster that cannot be controlled and are making big bucks from it are to be trusted with the safety of the country? 

 Think about it. The Republicans are blithely leading the charge into AI that may bring about the end of the species. No way not to see a vote for any Republican other than as an endorsement of irresponsibility and mass suicide.

sch  

 

Politics - Indiana, Gold, Ukraine

I am thinking these will be self-explanatory. Maybe changes in Indiana. So much money for providers and Hoosiers being kicked off Medicaid and SNAP.

There is voting at elections and then there is voting by moving one's feet - or in moving a country's gold. If the US isn't safe for the other country's gold, what is it for us?

Trump likes Putin. Putin is locked in a futile war with Ukraine. Is this why Trump has us in a futile war with Iran - Putin-envy? 

What's the Lincoln Party? Ballard's secretary of state run could expand Indiana ballot access • Indiana Capital Chronicle

$68 billion is up for grabs in Medicaid. Who wants it? • Indiana Capital Chronicle  

 

Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?

 

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Sept. 8, 2026 | ISW  

sch 

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

sch 9/3