No Kings 2
Holding a sign in the rain
I went to a No Kings (#nokings) protest today. I’m glad I did. It means I got counted; not everyone can afford to take a saturday to go, even if they want to. One more person on the street implies five more people in the wings, pissed off enough to vote but not pissed off enough (yet) to take a day off to protest.
I’m also glad I was out there seeing thousands of other people in my relatively small city. In my little town, 2-3% of the population was out carrying signs. That’s pretty good. It reminds me that the Republican Administration is unpopular and that they are doing unpopular things.
I prefer to talk about the Republican Administration rather than specific people. It’s very clear that the whole administration is horrible, its nominal leader is not the one in control, and the whole party supports it. The republican party has enabled an administration to regard the legislative and judicial branches of government as advisory roles. And that is antithetical to the American character. The Republican party should pay an electoral cost for a generation after this.
The speaker at No Kings 2 reminded me: we need to write our reps. Tell them not to capitulate to republicans in the shutdown negotiations. We want a deal that saves medicaid and rural hospitals. Mere assurances won’t do. It needs to be legally binding.
What I’ve enjoyed recently
Re-read the Black Box of Doom
Epic thriller that plays with ideas of privacy, sensationalism, internet hate mobs, and our anxieties about the future. Absolute perfect book for our time and it makes me laugh.
A Crushing Year for Science in America
Why dismantle science? There are a few times in history when civilizations gave up on science. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia come to mind. Both ended badly. There’s still time to fix this. But right now it looks grim for science in the USA.
The “Dual State” Theory Was Invented to Describe Nazis. The Supreme Court Could Take Us There.
This political theory of the Dual State was originally invented to describe and discuss Nazis… but seems relevant now in 2025. The Dual State is a way to hide totalitarianism behind a thin veneer of performative rule of law. Authoritarian control grows, but for the privileged few, the sense of normalcy is preserved.