Treating a state as a god is a very frightening endeavor. It confers upon mortals a level of veneration that we do not deserve and will always abuse.
- Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
This week's featured post is "An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy". As an experiment, I've cross-posted that article on Substack. If you're on Substack, take a minute to comment. As on WordPress, subscription is free.
This week everybody was talking about Trump rigging the 2026 elections
At the moment the standoff in Texas continues: Texas Republicans want to give Trump the five extra congressional seats he wants by redrawing the district boundaries. (I mean, why bother trying to convince voters to support you when you can just rearrange your supporters and get the same result?) Democrats can't vote the proposal down, but do have enough seats to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a vote.
If Democratic legislators were in Texas, the state police could hunt them down and drag them to the Capitol. So they've left the state.
Like many observers, I suspect the Democrats can't stay out of Texas forever. In Texas, the legislature is considered a part-time job, and paid accordingly. Most of the Democrats have other jobs that they will eventually lose, or businesses they can't run from a distance. Many have children who will need to start school soon.
So eventually, Trump will get his new map and probably his five seats.
Because Democrats believe in democracy more than Republicans do, most Democratic states can't be as easily gerrymandered or re-gerrymandered as Texas. Governor Newsom has come up with a somewhat bizarre plan to gerrymander California, but we'll see if he can pull it off.
While I sympathize with the urge to fight fire with fire, the gerrymander wars are bad for democracy.
To see why, imagine a state that has 5 congressional districts, each with six voters. In the beginning, every district has 3 Orange voters and 3 Purple voters. Now imagine that we create a sixth district by plucking one Purple voter out of each of the original five.
We still have 30 voters, but now we have five districts with a 3-2 Orange majority and one district with a 5-0 Purple majority. The parties still have 15 voters each, but Orange now gets a 5-1 advantage in its congressional representation.
Now think about what that change does to the internal politics of each district. In the original configuration, each party has three voters. So the only way to get a majority is to get somebody from the other party to cross over. Both parties then are motivated to run candidates as close to the center as possible, or ones who have some other appeal to opposition voters. (Maybe they're just well-known trustworthy folks.)
But in the gerrymandered configuration, Orange's only motivation is to hang on to its base. If it gets all three of its voters to show up, it wins 5 out of 6 districts. Meanwhile, any Purple candidate in the sixth district is a sure winner, so there's no reason not to run the most radical Purple they can find.
Here's the lesson: The more balanced the districts are, the more likely it is that the winners will have cross-party appeal and feel motivated to work across the aisle when they get to Congress. The more gerrymandered districts there are, the more important party loyalty becomes.
Robert Hawks sees the gerrymandering wars as a step in the direction of civil war. Some states have always been redder or bluer than other states, but now states are self-identifying as members of the red or blue team.
In the meantime, Trump has another shortcut planned: Redoing the census so that red states can get more representatives and blue states less.
I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
As with so many of Trump's executive orders, doing this legally would require a constitutional amendment, because the 14th Amendment says representatives "shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed."
The word used is "persons", not "citizens" or "legal residents".
The point of all these shenanigans, and the ones undoubtedly still to come, is that Trump knows he's unpopular and that his party will lose any honest election at this point.
and Gaza
The escalation continues:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that his plan to seize control of Gaza City and the remaining sliver of Gaza not already under Israeli control will involve displacing the population and taking control of the entire Gaza Strip.
In other news, Israel targeted and killed a well-known Al Jazeera journalist.
Anas al-Sharif ... one of Al Jazeera’s most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed while inside a tent for journalists outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night. Seven people in total were killed in the attack, including the Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and the camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster. ... The Israel Defense Forces admitted carrying out the attack, claiming the reporter was the leader of a Hamas cell – an allegation that Al Jazeera and Sharif had previously dismissed as baseless.
This week I read Peter Beinart's new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I found it to be an excellent analysis of the folly of the policies of the Netanyahu government, as well as the political attitudes that make those policies possible.
The objection I always run into when I try to discuss the Palestine/Israel conflict is "You're not Jewish, so you can't possibly understand." And while there is some truth to that -- nothing in my personal or family background is comparable to the Holocaust -- I can't accept the idea that only Jewish opinions are valid.
Beinart, on the other hand, is Jewish, and is well educated in his religion and its culture. He criticizes Israel's Gaza war, and the Jewish-over-Palestinian supremacy that this war is the culmination of, from the inside. He is aware of the Holocaust, he was deeply affected by the horror of Hamas' October 7 attacks, and he wants to be able to raise his Jewish children in a world where antisemitism (in all its forms) endangers them as little as possible.
And yet he is horrified by what is happening in Gaza, and even more horrified that it is happening in the name of Judaism.
A central message of the book is that Jews need to change the story they tell about themselves. The self-image many Jews have of being history's perpetual victims (and never the victimizers of someone else) has never been true, even within the Jewish tradition itself. He notes that even the Biblical Book of Esther, one of the classic stories of Jews surviving attempted genocide, ends with the Jews themselves killing 75,000 of their enemies. Joshua's conquest of Canaan is quite bloody, with little indication that the Canaanites deserved their fate.
He cuts through many of the myths and fallacies that justify keeping the Palestinians subjugated. Israel's "right to exist", for example, does not imply a right to Jewish supremacy within the state of Israel.
He makes a distinction between Judaism (a religion) and Israel (a state), and argues that criticism of Israel need not imply antisemitism. Conversely, conflating Judaism and Israel makes an idol of the state of Israel. (That's the source of the treating-a-state-as-a-god quote at the top.)
But most importantly, he argues that the current policies are a very bad way to keep Jews safe.
Ziad al-Nakhalah, who at the age of three saw Israel murder his father when it massacred Palestinians in Khan Younis in 1956, currently heads Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has already killed more than one hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza in this war as it killed back then. How many three-year-olds will still be seeking revenge sixty-nine years from now?
As I have argued in this blog before, Hamas is not an organization, it is an idea. It embodies Palestinians' urge for revenge and distrust of any possible peace with Israel. No matter how many Hamas militants Israel kills in Gaza, its ranks will be refilled by those who survive when their friends and relatives did not.
Seeing this, Beinart argues that he and his children (and Jews everywhere) are less safe because of the current war. I fear, though, that as realistic as Beinart tries to be, he has missed the full horror of what's going on in Gaza.
Yes, some of the Gazans who survive will hate Israel with an undying passion. But what if there are no survivors? That's where Netanyahu's logic leads.
and Ukraine
Trump is meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, with the goal of stopping the Ukraine War that Trump said he could end in 24 hours.
This is a bad idea for any number of reasons. First, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, accusing him of responsibility for the war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children. If Putin comes to the US, we should arrest him, not hold a summit meeting with him.
Second, Ukraine is not part of these talks, raising the possibility that Trump and Putin will work out a deal that Trump will then demand Ukraine implement, despite having no role in negotiating it.
Putin comes to the meeting with a "peace" plan that is like all his previous proposals: If Ukraine gives up something real (sovereignty over Ukrainian provinces that Russia doesn't fully occupy), Putin will agree to something ephemeral (a ceasefire he could break at any moment). People throw the Munich analogy around far too often, but this is a case where it really applies: In the Munich agreement of 1938, Czechoslovakia gave up territory to Hitler, only to be totally defenseless when Hitler decided to seize the rest of the country a few months later.
Ukraine's European allies have already supported President Zelensky in rejecting such an agreement.
But the final reason this is a bad idea is that we know what will happen: Whenever Trump meets with Putin, he comes out repeating Putin's talking points. Recently, Trump has made noises about being "disappointed" with Putin's intransigence about Ukraine, but nothing ever comes of his disappointment. He recently let an ultimatum deadline go by without any action.
Putin is the alpha in this relationship and Trump is the beta. That's been true ever since they met in Helsinki in 2018, and Trump came out saying that he trusted Putin's account of events more than that of the US intelligence services. He will come out of Friday's meeting saying that Ukraine needs to give Russia territory, without any guarantees from the US or anybody else that Putin can't just start the war up again as soon as he thinks he can win.
Ukraine will rightly reject this proposal, and then Trump will once again paint Zelensky as the obstacle to peace, returning to where Trump feels most comfortable: by Putin's side.
and you also might be interested in ...
Jay Kuo looks at the cushy offers ICE is making to new recruits, and deduces that they must be having a hard time finding people who want to sign up.
NASA has two satellites specifically devoted to monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the leading cause of climate change.
NASA staffers who work on these two carbon dioxide monitoring missions have been asked to draw up plans that NASA could use to terminate those missions, and that's according to current and former NASA employees. And if NASA were to put those plans into action, which could happen as soon as early October, one of the missions would likely burn up in the atmosphere, so it would be completely destroyed permanently.
The satellite data also turns out to have other uses.
But these missions can also measure plant growth, which is totally unexpected and super powerful. NASA has turned that into maps that are used for agriculture, like, to predict crop yield. So farmers actually use this information as well, and they rely on it.
There's nothing wrong with the satellites, and the missions they support cost about $15 million a year, a small fraction of what it cost to build the satellites and launch them. The motive to ignore (and in one case destroy) them seems to be that the Trump administration doesn't want us to know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere.
mRNA technology is a huge recent advance in vaccine production. mRNA vaccines are quicker to invent and quicker to produce than standard vaccines. They saved millions of lives worldwide during the Covid pandemic.
But RFK Jr. has decided (for no apparent scientific reason) that they're unsafe. So 22 federal contracts worth half a billion dollars just got cancelled. One of the cancelled contracts is for a bird flu vaccine. If that virus should happen to mutate in a way that spreads human-to-human, we could be in big trouble.
and let's close with something above and beyond
I think I've mentioned the Smithsonian photo contest before, but this week I notice the drone category. This photo, titled "Dragon", is an aerial view of badlands in Utah.
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