What is all this stuff? Its the links I emailed to myself in recent days after reading the NY Times, WAPO or NPR because they were worthy of comment. Every few days going back five or more years I have done the same thing but only a very few ever get commented on in one of my blog posts. I’ve made short italicized comments about these to give you a sense of things I deem worth of note. I pay close attention to the world and have since I was in Mr. Jones seventh grade English class sixty years ago. The links are mostly behind paywalls. I’ve written brief descriptions in italics of what’s behind the wal. Of course, its unlikely any of this has been presented on Trump’s Fox News.
Our sequoia sized middle finger to the world WWJD
A good title for an apt blog post
You can fool all of the people some of the time….
Another good title of the beginning of a famous quote by Lincoln that perfectly describes what lots of Maga supporters may be experiencing now.
A column that led me to order a book it recommended about the flu epidemic of 1918 which laid the foundations of modern health monitoring of dangerous illnesses…..which at the moment is being dismantled by Trump, Kennedy, Corporations and Republicans in general
What Ben Franklin knew about climate change — in 1740
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/03/climate-change-inventions-technology-ben-franklin/
Acknowledgment that what the Koch brothers are dismissing has been understood since before the United States by people not getting richer by denying the damage oil production is causing
The Urgent Supreme Court Case That’s Not Getting Enough Attention https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/school-catholic-supreme-court-constitution.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
A new attempt by Republicans who hate the separation of church and state to get taxpayers to pay for religious education
Brooks, https://youtu.be/QSa52TR9tCA?si=0wcl0Ji7A3VMlZeR
Not sure which recent David Brooks piece this is but its certainly about Trump’s assault on truth and decency
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/newyork/news/trump-administration-cancels-400-million-columbia-university/#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17414634252780&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
One of my recent blog pieces notes that UMD doesn’t want to let Indivisible hold a meeting at our public university. They are afraid of an attack by Trump like this…..who can blame them. This is how fascists won Germany for Hitler
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/05/world/asia/xuzhou-china-chained-woman-incident-activists.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
How the Chinese Government bends over backwards to hide ugly truths in this case about how women are being kidnapped and made breeders for Chinese men suffering from the female infanticide of Mao tse Tung…..but how news still leaks out to decent Chinese who find ways to keep other Chinese in the know.
My Father Spoke to Me Only Once About Why He Led This Nation https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/opinion/trump-reagan-father.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Opinion: “How does a nation overcome the seductions of the magnanimous leader? Abraham Lincoln offers a model. When he was 28, he gave a speech in which he warned that if the American system toppled, it would be because of homegrown men of overweening ambition. Historians have surmised that Lincoln was conscious of his own unchecked ambition as a political threat.
Lincoln argued that we can counter this kind of ambitious tyrant by cultivating a “political religion” based on reverence for law. He also confronted and regulated his own personal ambition by cultivating the virtues that stand in contrast to it — humility, kindness, respect for the equal dignity of all human beings. Lincoln emerged, by his 50s, as a man who reconciled power and humility.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/opinion/trump-speech-approval.html
Butterflies in the U.S. are disappearing at a ‘catastrophic’ rate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/06/butterfly-decline-research-population-crisis/
Nickel boys and Sugarcane graves
Neither of these movies made a big stir during the Academy Awards but together they spell out the woke history truth Republicans don’t want anyone to know about. The Nickel boys is potent novel about a Florida boys school that kept abusing boys to death burying them in the back and telling their parents they ran away. Twenty years ago or more their graves were dug up exposing the Trump like prison system of that era leading to the book and the movie. And in both the US and Canada children were ripped away from their Indian tribal families and forced to attend schools like those the Chinese are forcing Uighers to attend to kill their language customs and to take the fight out of them with the same consequences. They buried the children who were abused or committed suicide often with the story to grieving families that they died running away. Claudia and I saw both movies.
Trump talks out of both ends of his gastro intestinal track. Another title for a column.
Miracle years This is a German series, a soap opera really that we are watching with English subtitles. It is about the post war years in West Germany starting in about 1948 three years after war’s end and a family trying to keep its wire production facility running. It gives the viewer a strong sense how the German people are woke unlike Trump zombies. As a kid I remember watching the TV series Hogan’s Heroes which was a comedy about Americans in a German prisoner of war camp in which they really ran the camp headed by nincompoop German officers. I was very embarrassed to learn it was being watched in Germany. Obviously, unlike Trump zombies the Germans can take the truth.
House Rebukes Wilson for Shouting ‘You Lie’ https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/us/politics/16wilson.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
One handed economist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/04/delaware-corporate-law-elon-musk/
Until recently, Delaware’s grip on that status seemed secure. Most Fortune 500 companies are incorporated there, bringing in some $2 billion a year in corporate franchise taxes — more than a third of the state’s annual revenue and a big reason it has no sales tax. The state courts denied Musk a billion pay package and now Musk want to take away the state’s regulatory monopoly of corporations incorporated in the state. I might add that however this court case turns out Musk is getting hammered from every direction by bad news as the economy being forged by a President more stupid than the commandant in Hogan’s Heroes tanks America while starving children all over the third world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/03/04/carl-dean-dolly-parton-jolene/
Time did not mellow Parton’s feelings toward the fictitious Jolene, either: Asked in 2020 what she would give the woman for Christmas, Parton responded: “The finger.”)
Opinion: “BSL-4 labs are the ones featured in movies where scientists walk around in what look like spacesuits with air hoses and shower in decontamination chambers when their work is done. BSL-3 labs limit access to specifically trained staff members, have locking double doors for enhanced security and specific air handling and sterilization systems. Workers wear head-to-toe personal protective equipment and are under medical surveillance for signs of laboratory-acquired infection that could pose a risk to others.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/risky-virus-research.html My son who knows a hell of a lot about scientific labs and who manages one has been convinced forever that the Chinese Government’s disease lab in Wuhan is where Covid escaped from. I think more people in the US government are coming to this conclusion. My wife and I were visiting Wuhan, China, not long before all hell broke loose there.
Lech Walesa, Polish Labor Leader Who Fought U.S.S.R.’s Power, Joins in Horrified Letter to Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/lech-walesa-trump-letter.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
The Government Knows A.G.I. is Coming https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-buchanan.html?smid=nytcore-android-share One of several recent articles about how Artificial Intelligence is racing ahead to where even the best scientists and fiction writers have no idea.
Opinion: “that Trump is among those who think well of themselves not in proportion to their accomplishments but out of a congenital sense of entitlement.” When reality intrudes, as it inevitably will, such narcissists treat the bad news as a personal affront, and its bearer, who is endangering their fragile reputation, as a malicious slanderer.
People who fit this model, Pinker wrote, are characterized by a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. It’s common among street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, and hate-crime perpetrators, and several historians have noted it’s common among tyrants. Indeed, our Madisonian checks and balances are in large part designed to contain would-be tyrants.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/opinion/trump-imperial-presidency.html
“Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out
As China’s government worries about the falling birthrate, some private employers have ordered workers to do their part, or else.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/world/asia/china-marriage-companies-childbirth.html Like a preceding article about the women kidnapped to bear single Chinese men babies, this story offers one more example of how a Trump/Mao like tyrant can turn a nation into a dystopia for some people.