The Weekly Sift

Monday, July 13, 2026

Arms and Wisdom

Arms are of little value in the field unless there is wise counsel at home.

- Cicero

This week's featured post is "Graham Platner's exit, and the debate it leads to".

Ongoing stories

Trump's assault on American democracy. He has used the new powers the Supreme Court gave him to get rid of everyone on the Election Assistance Commission, which used to be bipartisan. The EAC mostly advises states on election practices, but has no power to force them to comply.
Climate change. Ocean surface temperatures are now higher than they've ever been. And Pacific gray whales are dying out, probably because lost sea ice in Alaska is wrecking their food supply.
Iran. The war seems to be back on. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is down. Oil prices are up. It's still not clear what objectives our air attacks are supposed to accomplish. Trump's various stated goals -- opening the Strait, ending Iran's nuclear program, regime change, etc. -- require either a negotiation that offers Iran things or a ground invasion. He doesn't want to do either. So we'll pointlessly destroy things again for a while.
Ukraine. Phillips O'Brien's weekend update makes three points: Ukrainian missile attacks are shutting down Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov, isolating Crimea. Attacks on Russian oil refineries are still rising, creating gas shortages in Russia. Trump has begun making Ukraine-friendly noises, but his actions still support Putin.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about Graham Platner

Platner leaving the race and the process for replacing him are covered in the featured post. A few points that didn't fit in that article:

In choosing a new candidate, Maine Democrats shouldn't forget what made Platner attractive to begin with. Sebastian Junger explains.

I had breakfast with Platner two months ago - shortly before a blizzard of lesser accusations by other women - and was impressed by his taste for economic and political reform. His view that the political and economic systems of this country are designed to benefit elites resonated with me. It’s been a long time since Democrats had a candidate who worked with his hands, has been to war and wanted to overthrow the economic elite, and that was clearly something Mainers voters were waiting for: He won the Maine Democratic primary by a landslide. ... Meanwhile, it’s vitally important to continue upholding the kind of anti-war, anti-corruption, anti-corporatist platform that Platner so brilliantly articulated. His is a strain of American populism that goes back more than a century and could just as easily fit a Democratic candidate as a Republican one. A lot of things can be extracted from Platner’s painful implosion, but perhaps the most important is the realization that most Americans crave economic justice. Our society has created a small number of grotesquely wealthy people, but we are somehow all discouraged from discussing that with our political adversaries. Platner’s brilliance was that he did not see that boundary; he saw no boundary except the one between the vast majority of decent, hardworking people and the political elites.

Whoever runs against Susan Collins can't afford to lose sight of this: Collins is the candidate of the billionaires. The Maine Monitor has identified 97 billionaires and billionaire-spouses who collectively have donated $9.8 million to re-elect Collins. So far. If polls look close as we get into the fall campaign, expect the money spigots to open wide.

An attitude that seems completely wrong-headed to me is epitomized by what Neera Tanden posted to X:

People who got us into this mess - who vouched for this candidate after 3 different scandals and kept telling us there were going to be no more - may want to take a break from Maine strategizing.

This seems like a good way to get Platner's voters to stay home in November, sending Collins back to the Senate for another six years. Whatever you think of Platner's behavior in his personal life, he won the primary. Maine voters endorsed his message. The ideal replacement, I think, would be somebody who can authentically carry that message into the fall campaign without also carrying Platner's personal baggage.

One thing Platner's withdrawal points out is that Democrats are expected to live by higher moral standards than Republicans. Kevin McCarthy tried to make the opposite claim on Fox News (in the last 15 seconds of his interview), producing a clip that I think Democrats shared far more than Republicans. Referencing when Matt Gates was nominated to be attorney general after being accused of sex with an underage girl, McCarthy said:

The one thing I know about Republicans: When we had a very bad candidate and found out, we walked away from that person.

Of course, their party is led by a guy who has been accused of sexual offenses by more than two dozen women. Two different juries in New York found it more likely than not that he was lying when he denied raping E. Jean Carroll.

Walk away from Trump, Kevin. Then we can talk.

Adam Kinzinger remembers other cases, like Roy Moore in Alabama, who Trump and the Party stuck with all the way into the November election after we found out that he repeatedly tried to pick up underage girls at the mall.

The billionaire-agenda Washington Post lends its spotlight to a "brave" Democrat who criticizes his party.

“The Party’s gaze has drifted beyond the basic needs … and has settled on a culture war that includes gender identity, racial quotas, DEI, and bathrooms,” [former South Carolina Rep. Joe Cunningham] wrote. “It has cost them swaths of voters who may never come back.”

He points out that a tiny percentage of people are transgender and asks what percentage of those want to play sports. Victory for a minuscule slice of the population may fill the virtue cup, but it’s not a win for the country.

Which party has been focusing on gender identity and bathrooms? Late in the 2024 campaign, that was virtually all Republicans talked about. You remember: "Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you."

If Democrats want to abandon trans rights, they can't just stop talking about it. Harris did that. To get credit on this, Democrats will have to actively target people with gender issues. It's kind of like junior high, when you try to join the popular crowd by helping them bully somebody even less popular than you.

Do Democrats really want to go there?

and another ICE murder

As I'm writing this morning, I'm seeing reports of ICE being involved in another killing in Biddeford, Maine. I don't do breaking news, so it's too soon for me to say more.

Tuesday, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had been living in the US for 35 years. He had no criminal record, ran a small construction business, and sent his three sons to college. He was driving a van at the time, so ICE claims he was trying to run over the agent -- which is what they always claim when they shoot someone in a vehicle. They were lying when they said it about Renee Good and Marimar Martinez and Ruben Ray Martinez, so there's no reason to believe them now.

Three of his workers were in the vehicle at the time. They are all in ICE custody and reportedly are being pressured to self-deport. Through their attorney, all deny the ICE account. The agents, they say, were shooting from the sides of the vehicle, and no agent was in front. None of the agents were wearing body cameras.

The Mexican government is beginning to get pissed off.

Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said Mexico has recorded 17 deaths of Mexican nationals linked to ICE since the start of the current U.S. immigration crackdown: 14 in detention centers and three during enforcement operations, including Salgado Araujo.

Sheinbaum said her government would no longer rely solely on diplomatic protest notes. "We are going to do everything in our power," she said, adding that Mexico could not fail to act in response to the deaths of Mexicans during ICE enforcement operations or in detention centers run by private companies contracted by ICE. She said Mexico would continue providing consular support to families and detainees, especially Mexicans "whose only crime is working honestly in the United States."

BBC reports:

Salgado Araujo is at least the eighth person to die during the Trump administration's immigration operations, according to the Associated Press. No immigration officers have been charged in the deaths.

Of course not. Under Trump, ICE thugs have license to kill. In the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the murder was on video. The murderers have suffered no consequences and are still at large.

ICE not only employs murderous thugs, it is also extremely thin-skinned -- another characteristic of a totalitarian force like the Gestapo or the KGB.

David Streever is a US citizen from Rochester, NY. After ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Streever sent a critical email to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. The subject line was "What's Next?" and its full content is this:

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

DHS decided this email was a "threat". (To do what?) It sent two agents to Streever's home to deliver an official warning notice that his email may be in violation of federal law, and that he should "discontinue the aforementioned behavior". He wasn't there, and his wife (an Episcopal priest) arrived home to find the agents on her porch. DHS then tracked Streever and his seven-year-old daughter to a hotel in New York City, where they were staying after flying in from Finland. The hotel wouldn't let the agents go to his room, so an agent left a card.

He is now suing DHS. The suit alleges:

Streever fears, as any objectively reasonable person would, that if he continues to engage in expression sharing his views about and to government officials, he will be subject to further coercive activity and retaliatory acts, including through issuance of further “WARNING NOTICE” demands, surveillance, unwelcome visits from federal police, and continued threat of arrest and/or prosecution.

He is asking for reimbursement of his legal fees and an injunction blocking any further harassment as he exercises his constitutional right to criticize the government.

and Mitch McConnell

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell's office released a statement and a photo of the senator in a hospital bed.

McConnell, 84, said in a statement that he was “briefly unconscious” around the time he was first taken to the hospital and has undergone a battery of tests to try and determine what led to his fall. He said he was also treated for mild pneumonia and has been moved to a rehabilitation facility.

“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages,” McConnell said, adding that he is now “regaining my strength.”

This came in response to conflicting claims that he was alive or dead or existing in some machine-driven state in between. Many commentators seem to be assuming we have heard the last from him, and so are summing up in the way we do when someone important dies.

Here's my contribution: When this fascist era is over in America, whether that happens soon or decades hence, historians will focus on three main villains:

Trump, obviously, as the personality at the center of the fascist personality cult;
John Roberts, who ran roughshod over the Constitution to enable Trump's power grabs and protect him from accountability under the law;
Mitch McConnell, who played hardball to get Roberts a conservative majority on the Court, and who protected Trump during his two impeachments, when it was still possible to head off the decisive turn towards fascism in Trump's second term.

While we're on this subject of senators dying, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died unexpectedly Saturday night. He was 71.

Josh Marshall sums him up:

Graham was a natural follower. He needed a top dog, a daddy figure he could arrange himself around.

The recent Trump-following Graham had little in common with the John McCain-following Graham that preceded him. If Lindsey had any core beliefs, I never figured out what they were.

Democrats are bending over backwards to say good things about Lindsey, in accordance with the old rules that Republicans abandoned long ago. Adam Schiff, for example:

He had ... a wonderful sense of humor that he used to cut through the tension.

By contrast, what I remember about Senator Graham is his snarling defense of Brett Kavanaugh. It was such a blatant expression of male privilege. If Diane Feinstein had responded with the same level of anger, she'd have been roasted as an unhinged women.

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Remember the airliner that Qatar's royal family bribed Trump with? Well, it's Air Force One now, sort of.

Wednesday, though, as Trump was leaving the Ankara NATO summit, he flew in the old Air Force One because of "security concerns". Apparently the hundreds of millions taxpayers have spent to retrofit the bribe jet wasn't sufficient.

Like the no-bid contractors who screwed up the reflecting pool, this story pulls together the two main aspects of the Trump administration: corruption and incompetence.

West Virginia voters are getting what they voted for: 70% of them voted for Trump in 2024, and he carried every county. Now, thanks to the Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, 14,000 West Virginians have lost food assistance, and the state will have to come up with an additional $27 million to fund SNAP benefits next year.

I mean, somebody had to pay for those billionaires' tax cuts. Sadly, though, West Virginia appears to have no billionaires. Forbes identified the richest West Virginian in 2025 as Intuit's Brad Smith, clocking in around $900 million.

and let's close with something derivative

What if they based a sitcom on Marco Rubio?

Monday, July 6, 2026

Unfit

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

- the Declaration of Independence

This week's featured post is "Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious."

Ongoing stories

Trump's assault on American democracy. Courts are blocking Trump's efforts to use the postal service to cheat in the midterms. He wants to force states to turn over their voter databases, and compile a federal list of eligible voters, so that only those voters could receive mail-in ballots. This plan would shift power over elections from the states to the federal government, contradicting the Constitution.
Climate change. Last week's European heat dome was answered this week by one covering the US east coast. World Weather Attribution assesses the (large) role climate change plays in these heat emergencies.
Iran. Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Sort of. Tanker traffic is picking up, but is nowhere near normal.
Ukraine. The two sides have very different strategies. Ukraine is targeting Russia's oil industry, which undermines both the Russian war effort and civilian morale. Russia is stepping up missile attacks on civilian targets. More Russian missiles are getting through because Trump stopped sending Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about America's 250th birthday

This week has been a sad time for those of us who remember the 200th birthday in 1976. That was truly a national celebration. As Paul Krugman recalls, then we celebrated in spite of widespread pessimism about the state of the nation:

This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.

But we celebrated together as a country. One reason was that President Ford -- who was facing a tough reelection race in the fall -- largely stayed out of the way. Whatever you thought about Ford made no difference. Have you ever watched New Years at Times Square on TV, or even gone there yourself? It's a party, not a referendum on the Mayor of New York. That's how the bicentennial was. Republicans and Democrats celebrated together, because we were all Americans.

But this year Trump had to be Trump: He made the 250th about himself, turned it into a grift, and screwed it all up. I've seldom seen the National Mall as empty as it has been during his Great American State Fair. It got so embarrassing that Fox News stopped broadcasting from the site.

Kevin Elliott posted on Bluesky:

The reason America as a whole is going to walk on by its 250th birthday with nary a thought about it is that it is profoundly embarrassed, ashamed, and angry at what we've allowed to happen to our country

Thinking about what we have to celebrate shines a spotlight on the whole right-wing effort to whitewash our history. Here's an inside look from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello mansion. For years, the staff went to considerable effort to present a rounded picture of Jefferson, which included Monticello's slaves (and particularly Sally Hemmings) in addition to all the evidence of Jefferson's genius. I saw it myself during this period and was impressed.

Then began the right-wing denunciations of Monticello "going woke", which resulted in the harassment of staff and ultimately turning over the museum's leadership.

Again and again, you will hear about how woke teachers want to make students "ashamed of their country". To me, this accusation is a confession: The people who make it are so ashamed of America that they have to cover up the nation's true history.

I think American history invites us to embrace complexity. Yes, Jefferson was a slaver who even enslaved the children he fathered on one of his slaves. That's just as bad as it sounds.

But Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia, purchased the Louisiana Territory from France and sent Lewis and Clark out to explore it, started the Library of Congress, and had many other noteworthy accomplishments. He is sometimes put forward as the world's "last Renaissance man", who was up-to-date in all human knowledge before it began to splinter into specialties. JFK once quipped to a group of Nobel laureates he was hosting: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

You don't have to choose between the hero-Jefferson and the villain-Jefferson, or between the Jefferson you admire and the Jefferson you despise. He was all of it.

American history is like that. We enslaved people and then fought a war that ended slavery. We saved Europe from Hitler while sending our own Japanese citizens to internment camps. We extended freedom further down the social ladder than any previous nation, but we still haven't finished the job.

We are one of history's great nations, not because we were founded by saints under God's special attention, but because we have never stopped struggling to overcome our flaws.

The struggle continues.

In contrast to Trump's ridiculous denunciation of "communism" as "the greatest threat to our country" (see the featured post), Saturday saw a march of masked White nationalists in the nation's capital. Patriot Front is a group that formed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the one where Trump found "good people on both sides".

I suspect that if a similarly masked Black Power group marched, Trump would sic the National Guard on them. But White nationalists are on his side, so he will never acknowledge the threat they pose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLoRgPbpKwY

The Declaration of Independence seems oddly relevant today, as Trump repeats the offenses of King George. Robert Reich brings the specifics.

and birthright citizenship

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump's executive order refusing to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented. The three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) were joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett in respecting the plain wording of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The Trump regime has tried to make a loophole out of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof", and three justices (Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch) were sufficiently craven to follow their master this far. But this phrase has always been interpreted as applying to children of foreign diplomats, and to Native American tribes before they were fully incorporated into the United States. There's a simple rule of thumb: Suppose an American law enforcement agency (town, state, or federal) wants to arrest you. Do they have to deal with some foreign government first? If so, then you are not fully "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

Undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You can't round up people and put them in camps, and then claim they aren't subject to your jurisdiction.

Kavanaugh tried to have it both ways: He voted against the executive order but didn't find a constitutional right; instead, he based his judgment on immigration laws that Congress could repeal at any time.

I have a lot to say about this, but Atlantic's Adam Serwer has already said it: In 1898, an era of widespread lynchings, the same racist Supreme Court that created the separate-but-equal loophole for Jim Crow laws affirmed the plain text of the 14th Amendment 6-2. No one has challenged that ruling since, and it was not the least bit controversial until Trump's executive order. But now, four justices can't find a constitutional right here. We are one vote away, not just from a Republican Congress repealing birthright citizenship, but from Trump being allowed to define the Constitution however he wants.

Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents. ... Thomas observed in his dissent that “the President’s initiative generated a groundswell of new scholarship.” Indeed it did, to the extent that you can call it such. That some right-wing legal academics rushed to fabricate a justification for Trump’s goals is not to the credit of the scholarship or those scholars, nor to the justices who embraced them.

Serwer echoes what I wrote last week in "Immigration is about Race": that the goal here is a nation by and for White people, especially conservative White Christians. The objection

is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

He also echoes what I wrote in 2014's "Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party": When today's conservatives claim to be following the Founders, they are actually following slavery-advocate John Calhoun's misappropriation of the Founders.

One measure of how Republicans have changed during my lifetime is summed up by this quote from Ronald Reagan:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."

and trans athletes

Predictably, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia and Idaho against transgender athletes. The two states have enacted bans against trans girls and women in public schools participating in female sports leagues.

At this point in our cultural evolution, trans people, especially male-to-female transitions, still seem strange to most Americans, with a high ick-factor. That's why it's so hard to have a rational discussion about their lives and their rights. Many people don't want to hear about the challenges faced by actual trans people. They just get to "ick" and their brains shut down.

If you are old enough or from certain parts of the country, you may remember when gays and lesbians had a similar ick-factor. Two men holding hands or two women kissing could make large numbers of Americans feel physically nauseous. If you ever experienced that sense of nausea, it didn't even register as bigotry. They seemed to be the aggressors. They were making us feel ill.

What changed over the decades is that more and more gays and lesbians came out, and same-sex couples became a fact of everyday life. Gay men stopped being seen as some sinister underground trying to undermine Western civilization. They lived next door and had that garden you envied. The woman who was your ally at the PTA went home to a wife, not a husband.

It may seem hard to believe at the moment, but the same evolution of attitudes will happen with transfolk. You can see it already in the national debate: The people who want to persecute transfolk are talking about abstractions, while the people who defend trans rights are talking about people they know. Outrageous claims tend to fall apart when you try to apply them to a real person. Eventually, we'll all know somebody.

The column I wish everybody would read is "The Four Fallacies at the Heart of SCOTUS’ Decision on Trans Athletes" by George Theoharis, a Syracuse professor who has been a public school principal, teacher, and coach. His four fallacies are

trans youth are pretending to be trans
the harm of exclusion is acceptable
anti-trans bans protect girls
trans athletes create an urgent fairness crisis in school sports

Theoharis applies these fallacies to a trans athlete he actually knows, Cal. Cal is not "pretending" to be female in order to compete unfairly. Cal took drugs to avoid changes in puberty that would produce an unfair advantage. Her presence in a female locker room harms no one (beyond perhaps producing an occasional "ick" response). Athletes like her are not rewriting the record books or making it impossible for cisgender women to compete. If you ignore "ick", it's hard to find any harm at all that results from her participation. Conversely, it is easy to see the harm she would suffer from exclusion.

It's also easy to see the harm female athletes in general will suffer. These bans are about putting more restrictions on women, not freeing them from unfair competition.

What I find more trying than the underlying issue is the political case many are making: Democrats shouldn't criticize the Court's act of bigotry, because most Americans agree with it.

Arguments like this should disturb anybody whose rights might become unpopular at some point in the future. It's saying: "We don't have any principles. If your rights are violated, we'll have to take a poll before we decide whether to defend you."

It is undeniable that an avalanche of money ($215 million, by one estimate) was spent late in the 2024 campaign to push the slogan: "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you." Harris never responded, and damage was done. Maybe that's why she's not president.

But I think never-take-an-unpopular-position is the wrong lesson to learn. It looks timid and unprincipled -- because it is.

Republicans don't behave that way. They have a long list of unpopular positions: tax cuts for billionaires, raising the retirement age, sending long-term residents with no criminal records to concentration camps, outlawing abortion, and so on. But does any Republican ever say: "We have to stop talking about abortion"?

The right lesson is to be ready to defend your positions, even if the majority disagrees with you. You have to stand by what you believe and refuse to act as if you are ashamed. 2028 hopefuls like Gavin Newsom may hedge their bets, but I think Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has it right:

I know there are transgender people right now, looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will. And we want them to thrive.

I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our democratic institutions, it's easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it.

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My need to stay on top of the national conversation causes me to subscribe to publications I don't necessarily recommend. I've been been a Washington Post subscriber for many years, but I've also been down on it ever since Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos started interfering directly in the paper's editorial positions, like when he blocked its endorsement of Kamala Harris. I watched him toady to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and make the sycophantic claim that second-term Trump is a more "disciplined" and "mature" version of first-term Trump. I have occasionally noted on this blog how the WaPo editorial page has turned into the voice of the billionaire agenda.

But Saturday I finally cancelled. Their editorial criticizing the Supreme Court for one of the few good things it did this term -- reading the plain text of the 14th Amendment and protecting birthright citizenship -- pushed me too far. (It didn't help that they then published a call to abolish the National Institute of Health.)

There's a free press in this country (at least for billionaires), and Bezos can print whatever he likes. But he can spend his own money on that. I have better things to do with mine.

Wednesday, Air Force Major Jason Watson stood on the Capitol steps in full uniform and denounced President Trump, calling for his impeachment, conviction and removal. He was arrested.

To the extent that mainstream media covered this event at all, it focused on the wrong thing. Yes, what Watson did politicized the military (as Pete Hegseth does every day), and is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is entirely appropriate that he be arrested and punished. (Hegseth is still at large.)

But this isn't a somebody-trying-to-get-away-with-something story, it's a civil-disobedience story. Watson knew he was breaking the rules and knew he'd pay a price for it. When officers came to arrest him, he did not run or fight.

The story is that Watson, a man who had made a career out of serving his country, is willing to pay the price of his actions. That's how much he believes in his message.

This insight about using AI in education rings true to me:

Cognitive load theory has told us since 1988 that the productive struggle — the moment a student has to reach, fail, and reach again — is exactly where learning happens. Vygotsky called it the zone of proximal development: not too hard, not too easy, the precise difficulty that requires a human to stretch.

What the causal evidence shows is that AI, deployed as a general-purpose answer machine, collapses that zone. Students feel better. They learn less. They enjoy the session and can’t recall it the next day.

Elon Musk can't handle the truth.

This particular episode started on June 21, when Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called him out for gutting USAID, which "possibly sentenced to death" 4.5 million children around the world. Musk threw a fit on X -- it's easy to act out on a platform you control -- saying it was "time to sue this liar".

There is not even a single dead child! ... They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has a long history of calling attention to the plight of the desperately poor, particularly in Africa. So he began giving Musk the names he asked for.

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

"I could go on," he wrote. And then he challenged Musk:

Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.

Musk seems unlikely to accept the challenge.

Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.

Trump is refusing to renew the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA. The agreement, which replaced the Clinton-era NAFTA, was promoted as a diplomatic triumph of the first Trump administration. The agreement does not automatically lapse now, but has to go through annual reviews, creating uncertainty for any company looking at long-term investments.

It's a bad time to be a Russian oil refinery.

and let's close with something messy

Lately I've been looking into wedding rituals, for reasons I'll explain in a couple months. In Hinduism there's a haldi ceremony that is held before a wedding. Friends and family assemble to smear the bride and groom with an orange tumeric-based paste. The photos make it look like fun, but I have my doubts.

Monday, June 29, 2026

Just Say No

If you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
responding to Republican fears of investigations by a future Democratic Congress

This week's featured post is "Immigration is about Race".

Ongoing stories

Trump's assault on American democracy. In Texas, people who engaged in some fairly normal protest mischief got sentenced to decades in prison because one guy shot at a cop.
Climate change. The European heat wave has caused 1300 excess deaths so far.
Iran War. It's very hard to tell what's going on. We have an agreement but we're still talking. We have a ceasefire but we're still shooting at each other.
Ukraine. Russian oil refineries keep burning. Russia has a fuel shortage now, in spite of being one of the biggest oil producers in the world. Maybe this war-of-choice wasn't such a good idea.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

The Court made several important decisions this week, all 6-3 votes by the conservative majority. I discuss the two immigration-related ones in the featured post. The bloodstained gavel is a reference to sending refugees back to Haiti and Syria, which the State Department says is unsafe. A third Alito opinion the same day threw out Hawaii's law requiring people to get permission from property owners to carry concealed weapons on their property.

The gun law had to be evaluated under that standards established in the the 2022 Bruen decision, the one requiring any gun restriction to be consistent with the history and traditions of gun laws in the US. No one really knows what that means, so in practice it turns into the Court's conservative majority cherry-picking the historical examples that justify the conclusion it wants.

Today's rulings just came out, so I haven't looked at them. It appears to be a more mixed bag, with Trump winning some cases and losing others. To be honest, this worries me. Roberts likes to orchestrate the release of rulings in order to give himself cover. If he's releasing some Trump losses today, I worry about what he has in store next.

The Texas Board of Education clearly understands that this Supreme Court will never enforce the separation of church and state against Christians. The Texas Tribune reports that an extensive list of Bible readings are now part of the K-12 curriculum. Meanwhile, the new standards cut back education about diversity and eliminate material that they think shines a negative light on US history.

They approved a lesson this week that requires students to learn about the Prophet Muhammad in the context of “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.”

“Let me be very clear: Islam is not a religion,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, testified before the education board Monday. “It is a totalitarian theocracy, not unlike totalitarian systems of communism, Nazism and globalism.”

Asked if he had ever visited a Muslim-majority country, the senator responded no.

If you live in Texas and are thinking about raising children, you might want to reconsider your choices.

and Democratic primaries in New York

The big news of Tuesday's Democratic primaries was the defeat of incumbent congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, by challengers from the left backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani backed five candidates in the primaries, and they all won. These results were widely trumpeted as advancing the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

Centrist Democrats (in the words of several headlines) "freaked out". James Carville said on a podcast that he couldn't be in the same party with some of the Mamdani candidates.

I’m done. I’m not in that fucking political party.

Conversely, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) wrote the Mamdani candidates out of his party.

Many of us believe, as I do, that if you're a socialist, you're not a Democrat.

I'm very disappointed in these reactions. I'm a blue-no-matter-who Democrat, and I'm going to stay that way as long as the Republican Party represents fascism. For the last decade, maybe even as far back as the 2000 presidential race (where Ralph Nader's voters could have tipped the election to Al Gore), I have argued that progressive voters should line up behind moderate Democrats who win the primaries. If you can't win the Democratic primary, I said, you can't win the general election. The way to get the progressive candidates you want is to win in the primaries, not to sabotage the moderate Democrats who do.

Well, now progressives are winning primaries in New York and a few other places. This is the way the game is played. The way to change the party is to win primaries.

What's disturbing in the Carville/Gottheimer response is the attitude of entitlement. The Democratic Party belongs to them, because it just does. Democratic voters have no say in the matter. Rebecca Solnit writes:

It's weird the way the Democratic alleged leadership (Jeffries too) think that the party is a club with rules rather than something the voters choose. It's….undemocratic.

It would be one thing if the Democratic Party had a clear philosophical definition, the way that the Republican Party of the 1850s was the anti-slavery party. But one common complaint about the Party in the current era is that it lacks definition. I don't see any basis for saying that socialists can't be Democrats.

The Party establishment has made several large mistakes in the last few years. Obama let the big bankers off the hook after the Great Recession of 2008. Biden uncritically kept feeding weapons into the Israeli war machine as it committed genocide in Gaza. Maybe a few others leap to your mind.

Even at its best, the Democratic establishment drifts into nostalgia about the Obama years, as if America would be fine if we could just undo what Trump has done to the country. But Trump rose to power because a lot of Americans already felt left behind. I agree that I'd rather have Obama back than stick with Trump, but it's not like that was some kind of golden age.

There has to be a reckoning. Leaders who backed those mistakes need to make their case to the voters and face judgment. They aren't entitled to keep their jobs just because.

and Tulsi Gabbard

Last Sunday, WaPo published an expose about Tulsi Gabbard. In particular, it focused on the Hare Krishna group she was raised in and the influence its leader, Chris Butler, may have had on her while she was in Congress and possibly while she was Director of National Intelligence.

I've never been much of a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, either when she was progressive Democrat or a MAGA Republican. But I'm not inclined to pile on to this story, for a number of reasons: First, the accusations in the story are not that extreme; it always seems to be building up to something it never delivers. For many years, some anonymous emailer who seems to be Butler gave Gabbard detailed political advice, including what positions to take and how to defend them. She seems to have taken much of that advice. But WaPo has no evidence, for example, that Gabbard ever discussed classified information with Butler, or that she otherwise abused the power of her various offices for his benefit. Gabbard just had a religious leader whose guidance she took very seriously.

And that brings me to the second reason I'm playing this down: In political stories concerning religion, strangeness often gets misinterpreted as danger. When Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright became in issue in the 2008 campaign, clips of Wright's sermons went viral. To people whose image of church came from mainline White denominations, Wright's speaking style seemed scary, even though it was perfectly normal in Black churches.

Hare Krishna is strange to many Americans, so the Gabbard/Butler connection seems suspicious in a way that a similarly close connection between Marco Rubio and a Catholic priest would not.

Maybe there is a newsworthy scandal somewhere in the decades-long conversations Gabbard had with Butler. But I haven't seen it yet.

and you also might be interested in ...

To nobody's surprise, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said inflation was up in May, to 4.1% year-over-year. Even excluding food and energy (i.e., the more volatile parts of the index), it was up 3.4%. The only time since the 1980s that it was higher were 2021 and 2022, when Covid interrupted supply chains.

It's sad that Trump has made America's 250th birthday center on himself rather than the country. He undercut the bipartisan America 250 planning committee by creating his own Freedom 250. He opened Freedom 250 with a UFC cage match on his own birthday, then kicked off his Great American State Fair by giving a political speech.

The State Fair itself has become a sad affair, with mostly red states represented and no crowds worth mentioning. The concert fell apart as artists realized they were contributing to Trump's greater glory.

The Duckpin blog describes how the GASF devolved from something that sounded kind of fun to its current manifestation. Originally it was going to be on the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Then it was going to move from state to state, eventually reaching the National Mall like a musical arriving on Broadway. Then just the National Mall part of the idea survived.

When Trump did kick it off Wednesday night, only about 1000 people showed up, and many of them left while Trump was still speaking. So he lied about it and claimed 45000 people instead.

It didn't have to be this way. A president with less ego, like Gerald Ford in 1976 or an alternate-timeline President Harris today, could have stayed out of the way and let the country celebrate itself. There might be a real festival happening, with a concert lineup similar to what President Obama arranged to open his presidential center in Chicago on Juneteenth.

Instead, we're looking at each other and wondering how long the country can go on this way. How much past 250 will "freedom" survive, if it's still surviving now?

Pete Buttigieg had to endure being separated from his children for 24 hours because someone called in a false complaint to child protective services.

and let's close with something

One of the more whimsical YouTube channels is the musical "There I Ruined It", which promises to "lovingly destroy your favorite songs". In this selection, a new country-and-western song is constructed out of 50 country songs that all mention "cold beer".

Monday, June 22, 2026

Shared Values

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

- Barack Obama, opening the Obama Center Friday

This week's featured post is "Story Games".

Ongoing stories

Trump's assault on American democracy. The attack on California's elections as "fraud" are a preview of what we'll see when Trump's party gets pounded in the fall elections. The charges are a clear example of "truthiness". No one has any evidence of fraud, but the charges just feel right to the MAGA faithful. "It’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here," says Speaker Johnson.
Climate change. The Trump regime continues to pay money to cancel wind-power projects. The total bill has reached $2.5 billion. It's hard to imagine a more wrong-headed policy.
Iran War. For months commentators have been saying that Trump was losing the war. The agreement he signed to end the war proves he did. Now we get to see whether the US can control Israel and Iran can control Hezbollah, because the Lebanon front is key to maintaining the ceasefire.
Ukraine. The war continues to shift in Ukraine's favor. The video below of the roof flying off of a Moscow oil refinery is striking. Putin's war has followed him home.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump's Versailles Agreement

The full text of the US/Iran memorandum of understanding finally came out. I don't know what's more striking: What a bad deal this is for the United States, or how many people are surprised it came out this way. What did they think was going to happen? The phrase that springs to mind is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Pentagon simulations had consistently demonstrated two reasons for avoiding a war with Iran:

Air power by itself won't topple the theocracy.
When Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, we have no effective answer short of a costly land invasion or nuclear war.

We've now had four months to watch those two obvious truths play out. Sure, we can destroy a lot of Iranian stuff and kill a lot of their people, while using up a lot of weaponry it will take years for us to replace. But no one in the Trump regime was ever able to explain how destruction and killing by itself could lead to some positive outcome for the US. Wednesday,

Trump said that “the alternative would be a worldwide depression”, arguing that if he had not struck a deal, “the strait [of Hormuz] would never have been opened."

Of course the Strait was open before Trump attacked, so maybe he could have thought about worldwide depression then. But he didn't, so he ended up making a number of concessions to Iran in order get it open again. Avoiding a bad outcome is an explanation for why you sign a bad deal, not something to crow about as an accomplishment.

Is the Strait of Hormuz open now? Kinda-sorta. Some ships are getting through, but the traffic is limited.

If you want to mix some laughter into your tears, watch British pseudo-journalist Jonathan Pie recount the course of the war.

For an example of the kind of military cluelessness that got us into this war, look at WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen's reaction to the Versailles agreement. He thinks Trump had achieved a "historic victory" on the battlefield, which the peace agreement mysteriously screws up.

What victory is that? Well, we destroyed things and killed people. And if we'd just kept doing that for two more weeks we wouldn't need an agreement at all.

I have been clear about my view from the start: Trump would be better off ending the war without a deal, with a final 10-to-14-day bombing campaign that completes the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities — and then declaring victory, ending combat operations and launching a covert effort to arm the Iranian people and help them overthrow the regime in time.

Where does that 10-14-day estimate come from? From "the target list [Admiral Cooper] was assigned at the start of Operation Epic Fury".

Yep, that's how war works: You make a target list before the shooting starts, and when you finish it you've won. Easy-peasy. Why didn't anybody think to do that in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq?

and Obama's new library/museum

When an ex-president who is widely respected and admired throws a party, people show up. Friday, on Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Every living president other than Trump was there, along with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Dwayne Wade.

The musical line-up put Trump's Freedom 250 effort to shame: Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Common, Christina Aguilera, John Legend, Bono, and others. But the highlight was President Obama himself, who can still give a great speech:

[T]he exhibits here focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible, a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust, free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time. And a belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

The word "Trump" did not appear in his text. It didn't have to.

and masculinity

The combination of the UFC bout on the White House lawn, a match winner telling an outrageous lie about Michelle Obama (who wasn't there and had nothing to do with the event), and neither the White House nor any of the sponsoring corporations making any statement about it afterward -- it started a lot of people writing about how the MAGA movement has distorted and corrupted the notion of masculinity. Mitch Jackson comments:

Here is the product Trump and his supporters are selling. Be loud. Be cruel and a male chauvinist. Racism is fine. Mock the weak. Call people names. Shout down anyone who corrects you. Repeat whatever Fox News told you this morning as gospel, even when you know nothing about the subject. Wrap all of it in a red hat and call it manhood. ...

Here is what the Trump manosphere salesmen do not want you to know. A man stands tall and tells the truth even when the truth costs him. A man keeps his word. A man protects the people who have no one else to protect them, the kid getting bullied, the worker getting cheated, the stranger getting hounded by a mob. A man stays calm when calm is hard. A man extends his hand to the person everyone else wrote off. Compassion is strength. Empathy is strength. Owning your mistakes out loud is strength. Shouting the loudest in the room has never once made anyone a man. Name calling is the move of a coward who ran out of arguments.

It especially burns me to hear the MAGA imitation of a man called a "cowboy". I grew up watching westerns on TV, and Mitch Jackson is describing the heroes of those westerns. Ben Cartwright, Matt Dillon -- they were the kind of men Jackson is describing. They were nothing at all like Donald Trump.

Here's a question: If, as right-wing ideology insists, there are only two genders, established by God and unalterably built into our bodies -- then why does masculinity require a performance like this? Can't MAGA males just be men? Why do they have to go to great lengths to perform their masculinity?

But if, on the other hand, gender is at least partly a performance, that opens up a lot of interesting discussions and possibilities.

Another example of MAGA "masculinity": Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing leader who had been one of Trump's few allies in Europe. Recently there's been some friction between them after Trump started attacking Pope Leo. (Popes tend to be popular in Italy -- who knew?)

She's also a comparatively young and good-looking female head-of-state who stands out in a graybeard meeting like the recent G-7 in France. So of course Trump had to comment to an Italian TV interviewer about how Meloni "begged" to have her picture taken with him, as (no doubt) all good-looking younger women beg when overwhelmed by his manly presence.

She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.

Meloni, and apparently all of Italy, took offense at this comment. The Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the US. Meloni said that Trump had "fabricated" the interaction and said "Italy and I do not beg."

Trump make something up? Heaven forefend. Just the other day, someone said to him "Sir, you are so honest. You never invent conversations that didn't happen." But I think Meloni should count her blessings. At least he didn't grab her by the pussy.

and the reflecting pool

This is the kind of trivial thing I usually ignore. The $14-or-so million Trump spent to repaint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool isn't significant in any fiscal way, and the resulting mess isn't something I walk past on any regular basis. Even the fact that the job was done on a no-bid contract awarded to somebody Trump had hired at one of his clubs -- it's barely a drop in the bucket of Trump regime corruption.

But the series of incompetent moves -- the huge cost overrun, not understanding the biology of algae, awarding the no-bid clean-up contract to another crony, dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae without realizing it might cause the new layer of paint to peel up, and then blaming all his failures on "vandals" -- it's just too typical of the whole regime. Trump ignores expert opinion, pats himself on the back for his brilliant solution, siphons taxpayers' money off to insiders, and then blames somebody else when it all goes wrong.

Like the Iran War, in other words. Max Boot comments:

I’m sure Trump will catch the vandals desecrating the Reflecting Pool just about the time that Captain Queeg catches the thieves who absconded with his strawberries.

Sadly, though, law enforcement in the capital now serves the Mad King's fantasies. People are being arrested for vandalizing the pool, including an ex-Olympian who stopped by in the middle of his morning bike ride. Prediction: None of these cases will go to trial. Either grand juries will refuse to indict or judges will throw the charges out for lack of evidence.

but I want you to read an essay

"Winning the Story Game" by A. R. Moxon. I discuss it in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in ...

Most stunning video of the week: During a massive Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow Thursday, the city's largest oil refinery literally flips its lid. The roof is blown off and turns over in the air. Later, it turned out that the refinery wasn't hit by a drone, but by a misfired Russian anti-drone missile.

The anti-ICE protests outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey are continuing. The latest: video of a protester getting hit by a car.

The $400 million bribe Trump took from the Qatari royal family is now ready for service as Air Force One.

Sci-fi TV shows like "For All Mankind" sometimes feature nuclear-powered rockets. Russia has one now, but it's "wildly expensive and very dangerous".

Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, the number of abortions nationwide has nearly doubled. Nobody knows for sure why, but one possibility is that women in remote areas did not realize before that they could get abortion pills through the mail. NPR reports that even if telehealth clinics are banned from sending mifepristone through the mail, the companion drug misoprostol will work by itself, but with more discomfort.

I'll repeat something I've pointed out before: Christian abortion opponents can stretch certain Bible verses to claim that the prophets would have banned surgical abortion if they'd known about it. But drugs to induce miscarriage are as old as time, and the Bible does not mention them. Mifepristone and misoprostol are just more effective modern versions of folk remedies that go back to the Egyptians.

Paul Waldman asks why Trump's increasing mental and physical infirmity isn't being covered the same way Biden's was.

While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it. ... There’s no way to know for sure [how age has affected Trump's judgment]. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in Vanity Fair is headlined: "Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?", but it's also a meditation on the long-standing American conflict between democracy and human rights at home vs. empire abroad.

Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.

Coates describes "survivalist democracy", when the lesser evil of a leader who protects many groups within America allows many Americans to ignore brutality against the groups left out.

So Georgia won't be redistricting to kill its majority-Black districts. At least not this year.

Using solar panels to create needed shade always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Now California has a pilot project to cover its canals with solar panel canopies to avoid evaporation while generating electricity. Next we need to do big retail parking lots.

UCLA Professor of Medicine Robert B. Shpiner pulls together a bunch of Trump initiatives that don't look nearly so ominous when you see them one-by-one.

The schedule of newborn vaccinations has been cut back from 17 to 11. One of the missing vaccines is hepatitis B, a disease which turns chronic in 9 out of 10 infants who catch it.
The monthly food stamp fruit-and-vegetable benefit for small children has been cut from $26 to $10.
About four million people are being pushed off food stamps, many of them parents.
Two million fewer children are covered by Medicaid or CHIP than were at the end of the Biden administration.
A program that bought locally-grown produce for school lunches has been cancelled.
Enforcement of the law guaranteeing an education to children with disabilities has been moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice.
The federal government is no longer gathering data that might show the effects of these changes.

He concludes: "I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately."

Pete Hegseth cancelled the Pentagon's requirement for flu vaccines. Now there's been a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Over 220 cases have been reported so far.

The military forces people to live in close quarters that facilitate the spread of disease. Such diseases are often have military significance. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century (an early version of the Black Death of the Middle Ages) put a stop to the Byzantine Empire's attempt to reconquer the western territories that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

Requiring vaccines is just military good sense.

and let's close with something twisted

Occasionally I've managed to glimpse a hummingbird before it flitted away. But my eye has never been sharp enough to see one's extended tongue.