Of cultural interest
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The climate change catastrophe: India edition
All 50 of the hottest cities in the world were in India recently (temperatures of 110 degrees farenheit and up are not uncommon right now). Ghastly. And Modi is still pretending… (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)
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With Trump, there is no bottom to the corruption
Just the latest. If this criminal and his political movement is ever defeated, the government will need to undertake legal proceedings to disgorge millions if not billions of ill-gotten gains. UPDATE: As if to prove the point, Trump and his family are now given immunity for their tax cheating by the Department of Justice. What…
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“The end of the road for Dr. Disgrace”
That’s Dr. Jeremy Faust’s take on Senator Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Republican primary yesterday in Louisiana. It was Senator Cassidy’s craven vote for the imbecile Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services that enabled the imbecile’s war on public health. As Dr. Faust writes: Cassidy will go down as a…
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“Oligarch watch”
Grimly amusing, and also informative about these dangerous people.
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Of all the malign actions of the right-wing super-legislature posing as a court…
…gutting the Voting Rights Act–one of the most decent and successful pieces of legislation aimed at counteracting the sorry history of American apartheid–on the basis of a “race neutrality” detached from reality may be among the worst. Justice Kagan’s dissent makes a lot of the correct points. What a disgrace. UPDATE: A useful critique by…
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On the perils of comparing per capita GDP: the case of Canada and the U.S.
Capitalist ideologists love per capita GDP, and it inevitably comes up in discussions of the economies of Canada and the U.S. This essay makes some important points (including that most of the higher per capita GDP in the U.S. is due to greater wealth inequality and to Americans having to work about three weeks more…
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Profiles in real courage: Andrée de Jongh
She helped hundreds of downed airmen escape from Nazi-controlled territory, and even survived Nazi capture herself.
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Statement by the DC shooter
Here. It is surprisingly cogent, considering that his actions were not.
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The problem for parents in America is that “America hates people”
Yes, indeed, a nice takedown of a bit of sociological idealism in the NYT: The article mentioned that policymakers need to focus on supporting parents, but in equal weight, if not more so, was the argument that America’s culture of parenting was the problem. Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and…
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More on “left” moralizing
A propos last week’s post, this remark from Jake McNulty’s very good book on Marcuse (in my Routledge Philosophers series) is also apt: A final observation: Marcuse’s profound investment in psychoanalytic thought appears to have no parallel among the analytic critical theorists [e.g., Haslanger, Manne, Stanley]. In leftist thought and practice, psychoanalysis has often served…
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Israeli law professor sued for defamation in small claims court…
…for basically calling (with ample justification) a racist far right Israeli settler a student of the Nazis. The small claims court, remarkably, foudn in favor of the plaintiff. Professor Harel of the Hebrew University, the defendant, kindly shares this account of the case and what it tells us about the state of Israeli society: Not…
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36% decline in student visas issued under Trump…
…during May and June 2025 (crucial months) according to CHE. The decline was even higher in some countries, like India. This is probably a combination of foreign students rethinking their interest in studying in the U.S., given the serial violations of the free speech rights of foreign students by the Trump Administration, and more vetting…
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Americans more likely to view fellow citizens as “morally bad” compared to citizens…
…in two dozen other countries. Great job Rupert Murdoch!
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When a prominent U.S. politician who blows with the political winds starts calling Israel an apartheid state…
…then Israel is heading for real trouble.
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Profiles in real courage: Yanir Mohammed
She fought for the rights of girls and women in Iraq against religious fundamentalists and the other forces of partiarchal reaction, only to be murdered by them. One is reminded, once again, of what RAWA said on the second anniversary of 9/11.
Porphyry of Tyre on Theology and Theurgy (Harvard University Press & Center for the Study of World Religions, 2026) Permanently…