Coming to Believe

How do people come to believe in things that are esoteric, unprovable, and not widespread in the culture? The best book I know on this question is anthropologist T.M. Luhrman's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). I used this book way back in graduate school, but one of the drawbacks of that kind of scholarship is that I was just diving into it for use in one particular argument and never read it cover to cover until now.

Luhrman investigated the world of British magical practitioners, both Wiccans and the neo-Hermeticists who follow the "Western Rite." She did a staggering amount of work. She somehow got invited into the meetings of a dozen different schools and covens, participated in many rituals, interviewed hundreds of people, and read a library's worth of books. She found that the people who were drawn to magical practice were not crazy or poor, but were on the contrary educated, middle class folks, many of them from the computer world. How did they come to believe in the efficacy of magic?

Luhrman introduces a concept she calls "interpretive drift", a

slow shift in someone's manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world. People do not enter magic with a set of clear-cut beliefs which they take to their rituals and test with detachment. . .  Rather, there seems to be a slow, mutual evolution of interpretation and experience, rationalized in a manner which allows the practitioner to practice. Magicians did not deliberately change the way they thought about the world. Becoming involved in magic is exciting, and as the neophyte read about the practice and talked to other practitioners he picked up intellectual habits which made the magic seem sensible and realistic. He acquired new ways of identifying events as significant, of drawing connections between events, with new, complex knowledge in which events could be put into context. (12)

Luhrman also noted that the vast bulk of accummulated magical lore and the difficulty of mastering certain techniques gave adepts a sense of being real experts.

I would argue that the rift between magician and non-practitioner is carved out by the very process of becoming a specialist in a particular kind of activity. Becoming a specialist often makes an activity seem sensible. The specialist learns a new way of paying attention to, making sense of and commenting upon her world. The important point is that the significant features of becoming a specialist can be identified. There are new ways to define evidence which offer grounds to the expert that the non-specialist cannot see, and ways to order event so that the specialist sees coherence where the non-specialist sees only chaos; there is a body of specialist knowledge which given discrimination and depth to the specialist's interpretations; there is a semi-explicit philosophy which creates the assumptions which frame most conversations. . . .

The striking observation is that in the course of practising magic the magic comes to seem eminently reasonable to the magicians, and that rather than realizing that their intellectual habits have changed they feel that they have discovered that the ideas behind magic are objectively true. (114)

I think this model explains a great deal of human belief. 

Cesar Chavez and the Problem of Good and Evil

NY Times:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. . . .

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

Martin Luther King was a serial philanderer, heading a lost list of crusaders for good who did the same. Thomas Jefferson was a monstrous hypocrite, not just about slavery but also concerning personal morality and financial probity. Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, a hero to many of my female friends, was a Stalinist who justified all the dictator's crimes.

I after pondering this problem across my whole life, I have decided that it is usually a mistake to say people are good or bad. They are good or bad in particular ways. Chavez was an excellent advocate for the farm workers he represented, but an abuser of girls. He joins the vast panoply of people were extraordinary in one area of life – politics, art, science – while being monsters in others.

George W. Bush on George Washington

A barbed Presidents' Day tribute:

Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility. I have studied the corrupting nature of power, and how retaining power for power’s sake has infected politics for generations. Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to. His life, with all its flaws and achievements, should be studied by all who aspire to leadership. George Washington’s humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics. . . .

The young republic was in crisis. The Articles of Confederation were failing, with the federal government virtually powerless. In 1787 Washington was called back to public life, where he presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was asked to serve because he was a national hero and a unifying figure, trusted by all, and unmatched in his ability to forge consensus. He could be given power because of his character; because everyone knew he would not abuse power.

Out of the Convention emerged a new Constitution and a new office, the presidency. Washington was the obvious choice and twice was unanimously elected – the only president so elected in American history. He accepted the presidency because the office needed him, not because he needed the office. . . .

The question we must all ask is, how did he accomplish these things? By most historian accounts, one of the reasons Washington achieved all of this was by admitting he might not be up to the task. He summoned experts and let debates play out in front of him. . . .

As America’s first president, Washington knew “the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent.” So after two terms in office, with a distrust of long-seated rulers still fresh on America’s soul, Washington chose not to run again for president. And by once again relinquishing power rather than holding on to it, he ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.

Our first leader helped define not only the character of the presidency but the character of the country. Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition. He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.

Whoever actually wrote this, amen to all of it.

What You're Buying this Year

Source: Sandboxx News

While most Americans have been distracted by other political matters, the Pentagon has quietly gone on a missile-buying spree. Spurred by wargames that show US forces running out of key weapons in a week or two of fighting, the Pentagon has done (at least) the following:

• Increased buys of Patriot surface-to-air missiles from 600/year to 2,000/year, and THAAD interceptors (for shooting down ballistic missiles) from 100/year to 500/year, both by 2030.
• Signed five new missile-related contracts with Raytheon, including increasing production of Tomahawk cruise missiles from 90/year to 1,000/year and tripling production of AMRAAM air-to-air missiles and SM-6 surface-to-air missiles.
• Made a billion-dollar direct investment in two companies that make rocket motors to increase production.
• Paid Lockheed-Martin to set up a second production line for the JASM-ER air-launched cruise missiles, with the aim of increasing production from 500/year in 2023 to 2,200/year by 2030. 
• Simultaneously made huge investments in both cheap offensive drones and anti-drone systems.

This on top of our ongoing programs to build two new fighters, the F-47 the Air Force and the FA-XX for the Navy, and our very expensive new B-21 stealth bombers.

I don't blame the Pentagon or the Trump Administration for this; we seem to be in a new era of global war, and they are responding to the threats they see. The waste of war just makes me sad sometimes. 

The Conspiracy End Point

Turning Point USA seems to be in crisis, with several firings, because many staffers believe Candace Owens' accusations that TP had some role in the assassination of their founder, Charlie Kirk.The Bulwark:

Laitsch is just one of several Turning Point staffers who has been fired amid what’s been dubbed a “purge” of employees. While it’s not clear how many have been let go, Owens has played audio on her show of another staffer who claimed to have been fired without explanation. Owens also claimed that a TPUSA executive showed up at a third staffers home to fire her and demand the immediate return of her company devices. A GoFundMe for staffers booted in the “TPUSA Purge” has raised more than $71,000 as of Thursday morning.

It’s hard to say if these firings are being driven by the (very sensible) disapproval of staff talking about their company killing its founder, or paranoia about Owens having credible information about internal TPUSA activities—or both. But clearly, someone within the organization is leaking to Owens. Just this year, the highly controversial podcaster posted videos of Erika Kirk on internal videochats in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that were interpreted on the online right as insufficiently mournful.

The young people one presumes are the future leadership of MAGA believe Candace Owens.

Sigh. 

And poor Erika Kirk; first her husband is murdered, and now members of her own organization think she did it. The very definition of "adding insult to injury."

Americans Think Everyone is Corrupt Because it Can't Be Their Own Fault

Matt Yglesias has a good piece today on why so many Americans think all politicians are "corrupt." For one thing, Americans have a very broad view of "corruption":

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

My views are obviously correct, so everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt!

You see this all over the discourse. E.g., people pushing for more housing construction instead of rent control must be taking money from billionaire developers. (People say this on Twitter/X a thousand times a day.) Or doctors pushing vaccines must be on the take for Big Pharma. To some people the idea that, no, other people actually disagree with you is beyond conception.

The basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites.

To get to one of my own themes, people often blame politicians for not solving problems because they think our problems would not be hard to solve:

Most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

I once had an extended argument with an engineer who insisted that we know how to fix American education and the only reason we haven't is the power of teachers' unions. Even Elon Musk seemed to think for while that we could balance our budget by eliminating "fraud and corruption" from Social Security.

But I would take this even deeper. I think many people see the world as cleanly divided into US the THEM, and since WE are good, all our problems must be caused by THEM.

For a while we were supposed to tell kids about "stranger danger," as if wandering psychos were the biggest threat to their well-being. Actually most children who are sexually abused are abused by people very close to them – parents, step-parents, coaches, teachers – and most children who are murdered are killed by their parents.

Millions of Americans seem to believe that immigrants commit most of our crimes; two white Americans have flat out denied to me that a majority of American felons are white. Many Republicans believe that felons vote for Democrats, but so far as we can tell felons vote just like everyone else of their own sex and race, so a group that is majority white men of course votes for Republicans.

So if our budget is out of balance, it can't be because of good hard-working heritage Americans. It must be because of corrupt Somali refugees or Mexican cartels or so-called allies who won't pay their share or sinister billionaires just back from Epstein Island. The solution is to punish the villains and put good, honest people in charge.

In our time this might be the most dangerous fantasy in the world. 

You Think this is Criticism, but —

NY Times:

Trump Is a Global ‘Wrecking Ball,’ European Security Experts Say

I know Trump supporters who would say, YES!!! The global order is a grotesque disaster and we elected Trmp to wreck it.

Support for Trump is driven precisely by the belief that things are terrible. Calling him a "wrecking ball" only encourages him and his fans.

What is needed is to somehow convince people that things are not bad and don't need wrecking. Assuming that is true does not help.

Americand Sour on Both Parties

Voters are telling pollsters that both parties are "too extreme."

My Presidential Platform

I can sum up my platform with one noble word from a past era of American politics: normalcy.

After the woke madness and then the MAGA Madness, after January 6 and the George Floyd riots and the ICE assault on America, I promise to get America back to normal. No more video of fighting in our streets. No judicial persecutions, no threats to our electoral system, no trying to get people fired for their views. 

I will promote a legal regime with no special privileges for anyone. If being a regular old American isn't good enough for you, go somewhere else.

My goal will be that unless some foreign crisis pops up, my name will appear in headlines only once a year, for my state of the union address. In those addresses I propose to talk about things like how many miles of highway have been repaved, how many acres of solar arrays have been installed, how many houses have been built. Otherwise I will devote my time to things too boring for most people to notice, like NEPA reform, improving the power grid, fixing our naval shipbuilding mess, and reducing corruption in Medicare and Medicaid.

I promise to pass a budget every year, on time. I promise to get the budget deficit headed downward.

I promise to appoint judges devoted to defending the constitution.

I promise to stay off social media and instruct my administration to do likewise. We will post only to make Americans aware of important developments, like changes in Medicare rules.

I promise that every activist in the country, of whatever stripe, will complain that my administration is not doing enough. 

Thank you for your attention.

Immigrants and the US Budget:

Study from the Cato Institute:

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:

1. For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
2. Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
3. Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis. 

Epstein and the Blood Libel

Matthew Schmitz at First Things:

The Epstein myth updates these lies for the age of Jewish statehood. It presents Epstein as blackmailing American leaders—not on behalf of a shadowy world Jewry, but on behalf of the Jewish state. And it recasts Jewish ritual sacrifice in terms of child sexual abuse. The anti-Semitic implications of the Epstein myth may not be widely acknowledged, but they are understood by many of the myth’s most important promoters.

Take Maria Farmer, an Epstein accuser who has been interviewed by MSNBC and respectfully profiled by the New York Times. She remarked in a recent interview, “All the Jewish people I met just happen to be pedophiles who run the world economy.” She is an adherent of David Icke, the UFOlogist who has promoted the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] and suggested that the world is controlled by shape-shifting alien “­reptilians” that merely appear to be human, including the members of the Rothschild family.

Similar claims are made by another Epstein accuser, Juliette ­Bryant. Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of Ghislaine Maxwell, submitted a victim impact statement from Bryant at Maxwell’s ­sentencing hearing. Apparently, the government regards Bryant’s words on Epstein as credible. This is a remarkable judgment. Earlier this year, Bryant declared on social media that she had “witnessed Epstein turn into an alien reptilian creature.”

Certain facts about Epstein are well established and incontestable: He committed sexual crimes against minors. He deserved to be punished, and more severely than he was. What goes beyond the facts is the Epstein myth. This myth is a synthesis of conspiracy ­theories: satanic panic, blood libel, the ­Protocols, UFOs. It generally presents its assertions in a respectable guise, but as its most enthusiastic adherents reveal, it tends toward the demonization of Jews. 

I would say that the constellation of accusations floating around Epstein island lends itself to the demonization of all sorts of things, which makes it irresistible to many malcontents. For example, various female reporters seem interested because the story demonizes male sexuality. Populists see the global elite partying together on a secret island, the perfect metaphor for their view of the political world. Anti-semites see secret Jewish influence. Socialists see billionaires flaunting their immunity from the law. Nervous Christians see Satanic power; nervous crazy people see reptilian aliens.

Epstein was a sleazeball, a convicted sex offender who got rich helping billionaires avoid taxes. As the list of visitors to his island shows, there are a lot of sleazy men in the world, including two American presidents and a British prince.

But it turns my stomach when media outlets that ought to know better print allegations from Epstein "survivors", even when these women have had to recant their charges under oath. These professional accusers, all of whom were adults when they went to the island, got paid to party with rich men. Nobody forced them to sign up as island escorts. Now they play the victim for cash and attention. Maybe somebody was coerced into going to the island; maybe some of them were effectively raped once they got there. I have seen no evidence of this, but let's allow it is possible. The women in the news as accusers were not coerced and were not raped. They are just displaying the same kind of unstable mania for attention they showed when they went to the island in the first place. Reporters who quote them are indulging in outrage for its own sake.

Given all the important things that are happening in the world, can we please talk about something else?

Break the Cycle

Hate drives hate.

Violence feeds on violence.

Rage and fear shut down thought, making rage and fear grow all the more.

To change the dynamic you must break the cycle. Refuse to hate, refuse to fear, refuse to commit violence.

 You must believe that the world can be made better by love.

The Temptation of Violence

Back in 2003, I tried to join in the protests against Bush II's looming invasion of Iraq. I fulminated against it on my old web site and attended a huge rally in Washington. I did not enjoy the rally.

The message of the day was "No Blood for Oil." I thought and still think this was entirely the wrong framing. What I wanted to protest was the belief on the part of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz & company that the world can be changed by spasmodic acts of extreme violence. We were confronted with a deep and complex problem, the confluence of economic misery and political oppression across the Middle East that seemed to be spawning mass terrorism. Faced with this deep and complex problem, Bush & company opted for a very simple solution: smash somebody. They pretended that Saddam had some connection to 9-11, but administration insiders later admitted that this was a pretext. They wanted to change the Middle East. They fantasized that the way to do this was with tanks and stealth aircraft, by blowing up buildings and killing people.

I am not a pacifist; I supported, for example, the first Gulf War. Reversing Saddam's conquest of Kuwait seemed to me like the kind of thing that a military can accomplish. Revolutionizing a whole region, not so much.

Vladimir Putin saw Ukraine drifting ever closer to the EU and NATO and decided that he could revolutionize its politics with a three-day Special Military Operation. Have a hard problem? Just send in the tanks! But he didn't have the US Air Force, and he did not even achieve his minimal goal of taking Kyiv and installing a new government. If he had, I suspect he would have found that in solving that one problem he had only created a million more problems. He fell for the fantasy of violence, the dream that the world can be changed by smashing things. Russia is paying a terrible price for his mistake.

Although I have spent my whole adult life protesting against police violence, I hated the George Floyd riots. Bad relations between the police and the community they are supposed to serve is not the kind of problem that can be solved by smashing things.

Looking at the violence of ICE, I see the same fallacy at work. The world is not going the way you want, so smash somebody. Some of you may thing that this is a specific response to immigration, but I disagree. I think people like Trump hate immigration because they see immigrants as dirty, disgusting people who degrade the country be being here; they are just one aspect of a nebulous threat by the hippie/communist/unwashed/disgusting/gay/trans/criminal/terrorist consortium. Some of you may think it is just racism; but then why do MAGA people especially gloat when ICE beats up white protesters?

I see the fantasy of violence in action. If the world is not great, if your life is not great, you imagine that this is because of enemies, and things can be made better by smashing those enemies.

This is all wrong. It is wicked, stupid, and will drive America in exactly the direction people like Stephen Miller claim to hate: toward anarchy, turmoil, conflict, and economic decline. 

If you want an orderly society, a cohesive society, a peaceful, productive, thriving society, you must start, not by smashing people, but by listening to them.

Do Doctors Get Rich Off Vaccines?

Jess Steier, Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph, Jen Covich Bordenick, and David Higgins: 

Recently, the Texas attorney general launched a formal investigation into what he called “unlawful financial incentives” for childhood vaccines, saying that he would “ensure that Big Pharma and Big Insurance don’t bribe medical providers to pressure parents to jab their kids.”

The timing was uncanny. The four of us had just completed a six-month investigation into this exact question: Do pediatricians get rich from vaccines? 

Our answer, after analyzing available commercial reimbursement data from four major insurers across all 50 states, reviewing state Medicaid fee schedules, and interviewing pediatricians about the financial realities of vaccine delivery: no. . . .

The economics vary dramatically depending on where you practice and who you serve. In Colorado, commercial insurers pay a median of $42 for vaccine administration; Medicaid pays $21. In Mississippi, commercial rates hover around $22, while Medicaid pays just $11.68, well below what it actually costs to store and administer a vaccine.

That's why many doctors have stopped giving vaccines to adults; because it costs so much to store and administer vaccines that they lose money. Like most Americans I get all my vaccines at the pharmacy, because the volume of shots they give greatly reduces their storage costs, and they have lower overhead than physicians' offices.

The big numbers being thrown around about payments for giving vaccines relate to insurance company "quality programs," some of which do indeed pay doctors for giving vaccines. That's because they reward doctors for doing things that limit future costs to insurers, and giving people vaccines has enormous payoff in terms of reducing future hospitalizations etc. But those are broad programs that pay related to all sorts of metrics, of which giving vaccines is only one. And, remember, insurance companies do this because these programs reduce their costs in the long run.

Another point about the bogus numbers is that the people spreading them seem to think that the whole amount paid to the practice is income to the doctor, which is of course not true; again, many doctors actually lose money giving childhood vaccines, especially with Medicaid patients. They do it anyway because they know how important it is.

Something I wrote During the George Floyd Riots

The older I get, the more strongly I believe that the most important thing we can do is to defend civilization. There is no guarantee that this astonishingly rich world we have built will endure; plenty of other civilizations have collapsed or faded back into anarchy and village life. We have to defend it against all kinds of threats: random violence, police corruption, ethnic hate, divisive politics, environmental poisons, outside enemies with hypersonic missiles. We especially need to defend it against forgetting. We are too quick to forget dangers once they fade from the headlines, too quick to forget lessons learned in the fires of World War and violent revolution. I am a liberal, which means I think things could be better and support various reforms intended to make them so. But I never forget that my life depends, not on my party winning, but on the survival of our civilization in the face of a chaotic universe. 

Is This Good News or Bad News?

Chicago reporter Dan Mihalopoulos on Twitter/X:

We’ve covered lots of losing teams on the back page of the paper. But none with a record as bad as the Chicago DOJ during Operation Midway Blitz:

• 0 conviction
• 11 charges dropped
• 3 no-billed cases
• 1 jury acquittal

And James Queally of the LA Times:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A. has lost every case it brought to trial against a protester who allegedly attacked a federal LEO last year. A number of other cases were dismissed or rejected by grand juries.

If you want you can find whole collections of videos on TikTok or YouTube Shorts of judges angrily dismissing charges brought by various Trump lackeys.

As these people note, Federal prosecutors usually win most of the cases they bring, and legal insiders like to repeat the old joke that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. So this is a remarkably bad record.

Plus, Trump has threatened all sorts of political figures with investigation for their parts in opposing January 6 or other Trump "initiatives," but none of them have been convicted of anything. So far as I am aware, none of the lawsuits he has threatened against news organizations has ever led to a trial and a loss for his opponents, although lots of people have settled out of court.

What are we to make of this? Should we be reassured that Trump's people are so incompetent? Pleased that their clumsy crackdown is generating so much opposition?

If you really wanted to weaponize the law, would you make Pam Bondi the AG and put a complete idiot in charge of the FBI?

Is the point just harassment, intimidating people into silence by the threat of a few days in jail?

Or is it to wear Americans down until we no long react at all when Federal officers commit outrages? To make this into the new normal?

Is it just a reflexive burst of rage against immigrants and people who support them?

It feels like an extremely clumsy move to me, bad enough to generate widespread outrage but not so bad as to really intimidate the country.

Am I missing something? What, really, is this all about?

Generational Conflict and Taxation in America

Trump at Davos, on housing affordability:

Every time you make it more affordable for somebody to own a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses. I don't want to do anything to hurt the value of their house.

If I wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast that people could buy houses. But you would destroy people who already have houses.

This is just one of many ways that our economic questions intersect with generational issues. Trump is saying that protecting existing homeowners, most of whom are over 40, is more important than helping young people buy homes. You see claims like this being thrown around a lot in "affordibility" debates.

The question also comes up over property taxes. If property taxes are assessed on actual valuation, then people who own houses in areas where property values rise can get hit with high tax bills, and they hate this. The most famous response is California's Proposition 13, which drastically limits how much the assessed value of houses can rise under one owner. But that means the tax burden falls much more heavily on those who have bought their homes more recently, that is, the young.

But even that is not enough for some grouchy oldsters, who are campaigning to avoid paying property taxes altogether. According to Google's AI, sixteen states have programs to reduce or eliminate the property taxes of people over 65. I have seem several online comments to the effect that it is "unfair" for people who have paid off their mortgages to have to keep paying property taxes, which strikes me as bizarre; why should you not have to pay taxes on your property now that you actually own it?

All of this seems to assume that old people are poor, which is simply not true. Some old people are poor, but on the whole people over 65 have vastly greater wealth than those under 35. The notion that the nation's richest cohort should have their property taxes slashed strikes me as absurd.

A compromise approach that has gained steam recently is called the "circuit breaker," which limits the property taxes of those over 65 to a certain percentage of their incomes, protecting them if their incomes collapse or their property values soar. Which makes some sense to me, but why should this only apply to people over 65?

But basically I just hate it when people launch campaigns on the assumption that they and people like them suffer in some unique way that demands the government's attention. We are all Americans and we should all ask, first, what is the best policy for everyone.

Henry VIII and Donald Trump

Diarmaid-MacCulloch on Henry VIII:

Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. I think we may have seen some in modern politics. The thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. Henry VIII was talented at making good people, such as Cranmer and, I would say, Thomas Cromwell, do bad things. 

Ongoing Turmoil at UATX

Like just about everyone else who seriously considered the various statements made about the new University of Austin, I worried that its clashing goals would undermine its academic mission. The university's web site offers these two key goals:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.

But if you know the truth, why do you support the freedom of professors and students to question it? Would the university be truly devoted to freedom, or would it focus on being a conservative bastion?

According to Evan Mandery, these struggles have broken out into the open across campus, leading to shouting matches and at least one high-profile resignation. 

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

Steven Pinker, who was one of the original board members but soon resigned, put the situation like this in an email to Mandery:

Dissociation was the only choice. I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education. . . . UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.

Mandery's article is long and interesting, especially on the experience of UATX students, so I recommend it. 

But my basic response is to fear that in America, escaping from politics is pretty much impossible, and the only way to create an anti-woke university is to wallow in conservative grievance.

Donald Trump's Agenda is to Dominate the News

Ezra Klein interviews Yuval Levin about the first year of the Trump administration. They are exploring the notion that Trump prefers "retail" to "wholesale" governance. For example, rather than try to pass a law mandating changes in how universities receiving Federal funding can operate, Trump perfers to do individual deals with each university in turn.

Klein: 

There’s an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn’t. People do not know one-tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for that matter. Much more change is happening in legislation than people realize.

But you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into a dozen. And people’s attention span — particularly as we’ve gotten down to social media — things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals — they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan — they actually fit. Maybe not everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable: They made a deal with this university, they intimidated this person, they launched an investigation here. Everything is the size of a news story, functionally.

I have never covered an administration before where the problem was not that we have a communication problem, where people don’t know how much we’re doing. Every administration — Biden, Obama, Bush — they all felt that way.

Whereas Trump, in a way, it’s almost at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, the opposite — that the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

Levin:

Yes, absolutely. There’s more said than done. There’s more above the surface than beneath the surface, and it is very well suited to a telling of the story.

One way I think about it is that the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. So if something going on in the world is troubling or challenging, at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem.

One way to think about that is he wants to do everything. He wants to control everything. But it’s actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do, and it’s not using most of the powers as the chief executive of the American government. But it’s absolutely true.

It’s not just legislation. Regulation, too, works this way. There’s never a moment when you can say: We’ve done this. When you’re moving regulatory action, there’s a proposed rule, and there are comments, and it’s years, and at the end of the day, you’ve done something that’s going to endure — but it’s not an easy story to tell, and it’s very dull and lawyerly.

If you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia, then you can just say it that day, and there’s the C.E.O., and he says it, too, and something big is going on.

So I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

Here is another reason to worry about the future of democracy. Governing a huge nation is hard and complictaed, and laws intended to make real changes are long, complex, and often take years to bear fruit. It seems like most of the voters who want more manufacturing in America went for Trump, even though the Biden administration made that its biggest focus, and the CHIPS and Science Act may end having very important long term effects. But you can't explain it in a two-minute news segment, or a tweet.

We may find out that a nation with a 5-second attention span gets governed only in ultimately ineffectual sound bites.