Discordia Ascendant (Chaos Rules)

Reading the news is not necessarily the best way to start your day…

“Big, beautiful” tax bill would add $2.4 trillion to US debts, CBO says.

Trump bans 12 countries’ citizens from entering the US.

Emergency Abortions: The Trump administration announced that it had revoked a Biden administration requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortions to women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned.

Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors. Selfishness Is Not a Virtue David French NYT 6/5/25

The consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble said on Thursday that it would cut 7,000 jobs globally over the next two years, or 6 percent of its total work force, as it seeks to reorganize amid uncertainty caused by President Trump’s trade war.

A federal judge in Colorado on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting the wife and children of the Egyptian man charged with attacking an event in Boulder, Colo., honoring hostages in Gaza….“Punishing individuals for the alleged actions of their relatives is a feature of premodern justice systems or police state dictatorships, not democracies,” (Eric Lee, Attorney for the family)

But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian’s federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to “any city, any university I want,” he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years…Applications from China and Europe for graduate student or postdoctoral positions in the United States have dropped sharply or dried up entirely since President Trump took office. The number of postdocs and graduate students in the United States applying for jobs abroad has spiked.

When the current Congress was convened in January, there were nearly 120 members who were 70 or older — 86 in the House, including nonvoting delegates, and 33 in the Senate. This number, which is unmatched in modern history, included 14 octogenarians in the House, five in the Senate, and 91-year-old Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.“Big, beautiful” tax bill would add $2.4 trillion to US debts, CBO says.

Snapshot

Pickleball: where tennis players go to die. (Seen on t-shirt)

“Kamala holds the hopes of a lot of people in this country who are praying that she doesn’t fall on her face in the next 72 days. She can take heart that she’s driving Trump crazy. He is jealous of her looks, her crowd sizes, her star power and her vivacious, bodacious vibes. That’s a good start.”

Daffy Donald, Turning Pea Green With Envy NYT Maureen Dowd

Planning a wedding has become so expensive that some couples are asking their guests to pay to attend their special day…Matthew Shaw, the founder of Sauveur, a wedding planning company in London, said that selling tickets “introduces a strange relationship between you and your guests, turning your guests into customers.”

He added, “You’re no longer hosting — you’re offering them a paid experience, which introduces a very different narrative in terms of what guests are expecting.” (NYT)

NYT Hardcover Non-fiction Best Sellers

SHAMELESS by Brian Tyler Cohen

2. MEN HAVE CALLED HER CRAZY by Anna Marie Tendler

3. THE ART OF POWER by Nancy PelosI

“School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California.”

Are Republicans losing the culture wars? Politico

Babe Ruth ‘called shot’ Yankees jersey fetches record $24M

Dow 41,175

S&P 5,634

Nasdaq 17,877

Miscellania

“The saddest thing is to be

a minute to someone,

when you’ve made them your eternity.”
Sanober Khan

I speculate that nonfiction books are headed down the path of academic journals. They will be useful for academics positioning themselves for tenure, but they will be too slow and ponderous for communicating ideas. People who really care about ideas will turn to reading and writing substacks instead of books and journals.

Books are not Information Dense

Substack is much better

Arnold Kling

A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory: 1. Pay more attention. 2. Find regular everyday memory challenges. 3. Read more novels. 4.Beware of technology. 5.Work with a mental health professional if you need to.

Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health

“The average American — even if they’re a highly sophisticated college graduate or a law school student — really doesn’t know an awful lot about the many different ways in which even innocent people can regret for the rest of their lives the biggest mistake of their lives, the decision to waive their Fifth Amendment right and agree to talk to the police.”

James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School in Virginia

Resonance

Words, phrases, ideas and thoughts of resonance…

“Moving on, after all, is the favorite American activity. And technology has exacerbated our twitchy consciousness and sensationalist culture. We now live in a world of nothing but distractions, with a blizzard of stimuli.”
Kim and Pete, or Vladimir and Volodymyr? NYT Maureen Dowd 4/10/22

“Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson today became the first Black woman to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, in case you’re wondering why the flag over the Fox News building is at half-staff.” — SETH MEYERS

“Today’s today’s housing market has become a game of musical chairs due mostly to the significant inventory shortage,” said Ken H Johnson a real estate economist at Florida Atlantic university. “No one wants to be holding equity, but the trade-offs, moving to a lower cost part of the country, overpaying to own or over paying to rent, are not very attractive.”

“For years, exercise scientists tried to quantify the ideal “dose” of exercise for most people. They finally reached a broad consensus in 2008 with the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which were updated in 2018 after an extensive review of the available science about movement, sitting and health. In both versions, the guidelines advised anyone who was physically able to accumulate 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week, and half as much if it is intense.”

Is 30 Minutes of Exercise a Day Enough? NYT Gretchen Reynolds 4/6/22

“Liberalism’s most important selling point remains the pragmatic one that has existed for centuries: its ability to manage diversity in pluralistic societies. Yet there is a limit to the kinds of diversity that liberal societies can handle. If enough people reject liberal principles themselves and seek to restrict the fundamental rights of others, or if citizens resort to violence to get their way, then liberalism alone cannot maintain political order. And if diverse societies move away from liberal principles and try to base their national identities on race, ethnicity, religion, or some other, different substantive vision of the good life, they invite a return to potentially bloody conflict. A world full of such countries will invariably be more fractious, more tumultuous, and more violent.”

A Country of Their Own:Liberalism Needs the Nation Foreign Affairs Francis Fukuyama

History Repeating Itself

The similarities between the invasions of Poland in 1939 and Ukraine in 2022 are striking…

September 1, 1939	February 23, 2022
Poland	Ukraine
Hitler	Putin
rationale: revenge for Versailles; reparations	rationale: revenge for 1989; NATO expansion
Final Solution	Denazification
Allies Strategy: “Peace in our Times”	NATO Strategy: Sanctions
Start of World War II	Start of World War III???
Father Coughlin	Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Candace Owens
Charles Lindbergh	Donald Trump
Propaganda: Joseph Goebbels	Propaganda: RT and Fox News
compliant German military and citizens	compliant Russian military and citizens

EAB

These are the “Times” We Live In

Bits and pieces from the August 1, 2021 edition of The New York Times…

From Maureen Dowd’s Why Do Republicans Hate Cops

“He (Trump) turned Republicans upside down like a snow globe, and suddenly the party that loved to rah-rah for family, morals and religion was in the grip of a thrice-married, grabby, foul-mouthed Tartuffe. The party that prided itself on supporting those in uniform, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had to go along with Trump’s crooked ways and Deep-State vilification of the F.B.I. and the intelligence community.

We’re still learning the extent to which President Trump tried to strong-arm the Justice Department into helping him purloin the election. As the Times’s Katie Benner reported Friday, as late as Dec. 27, Trump called officials at Justice and, according to their notes, told them: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” assuring them that his congressional allies would help.”

*****

“This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which those accused of rioting were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.

Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.”

*****

“Bidding wars are frustrating buyers. Agents are struggling to navigate frantic competition. About half of small bankers in a recent industry survey said the current state of the housing market poses “a serious risk” to the United States economy. Lawmakers and economic policymakers alike are hoping things calm down — especially because frothy home prices could eventually spill into rent prices, worsening affordability for low-income families just as they face the end of pandemic-era eviction moratoriums and, in some cases, months of owed rent.

Industry experts say the current home price boom emerged from a cocktail of low interest rates, booming demand and supply bottlenecks. In short, it’s a situation that many are feeling acutely with no single policy to blame and no easy fix.”

Collage de Coup

Sage

While perusing through today’s headlines, I may be reminded of some ancient or recent adage that reflects an appropriate understanding or analysis to the news as shown below:

News Headlines	Wisdom and Analysis
Health officials make their final pleas for holiday caution as coronavirus cases spike. Washington Post Weekend air travel hits pandemic-era record, despite health officials’ pleas to stay home CNN	“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” George Carlin
Man leaves $3K tip for a beer as restaurant closes for virus AP	Wishing good, merely, is a lukewarm charity; but doing good is divine. James Lendall Basford
Fresno bishop warns Catholics against stem cell-based COVID vaccines, including Pfizer’s Fresno Bee	All religions promise a reward for excellence is of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding. Schopenhauer