The Flapping of Angry Butterfly Wings, August 14, 2026

Wrote these exceptionally angry Bluesky posts over the past few days

• We seem to be suffering—the world seems to be suffering—a moral apocalypse. USAID cuts. Slavery in China. Genocide in Sudan. Environmental destruction. The list goes on and on. The wealthiest tech CEOs—Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuck—as well as many lesser figures are moral voids.

• Iran is attacking Jews worldwide. This is not going to affect Israel, or global policy towards Iran. I am left thinking they’re just antisemites. Iran as a world power is going to be horrific. Thanks, Donnie and Petey.
• No, autocorrect, I did not mean “vampire.”
• I remind everyone yet again that anything Benjamin Netanyahu says in English is propaganda.
• Could we please have opposition media already?
• Eric Lipton (NYT): “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt & members of her team have been extremely helpful in responding to questions I raise.” Yeah, so is ChatGPT. Eric Lipton and Peter Sagal are revealing themselves as courtiers of the Trump White House, regardless of their other virtues.
• Could we stop platforming rapists and child abusers? Please?
• The Maoists and antisemites who are putting their oars into this discussion are disgusting.
• In reflecting on the Obama Presidential Center, I think we have to recognize that this is a monument to the first Black president, on the south side of Chicago, a Black neighborhood, in the most American major city at the ancient portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. The symbolic weight of the location and the history is powerful. As to the architecture, I think we’re going to have to wait and see. Any major work that that isn’t in a common style will have initial detractors. Who knows what people will think in another generation?
• We have not had a free press in the USA since the second Bush administration, and perhaps longer. See Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly.
• If the world was going to step up to cover the US foreign aid cuts, it would already have done so. China was most able and did not step up. The UN is deadlocked, the way it has been since its inception, and has no taxing authority. The EU… No one is actually willing to pay, though it would not be expensive relative to major national budgets.
• Joe Biden was right.
• Senate votes are choreographed and have been for more than 200 years. Collins supported the OBBBA; Factcheck dot org is ignoring this to exonerate her of complicity.
• The claims of fraud are an appeal to American miserliness, and it will succeed with some voters; miserliness is a powerful force in US politics.
• Meidas Touch: “Lawler defended Miller, calling it a ‘private family matter.’” This sort of language ought to be a flag for the local child protection agencies.
• Avoiding any attempt to deal with Beijing’s use of slave labor, the whole world looks the other way.
• If the world had a conscience of any function, Elon Musk would be in jail and distrained of his property.
• They always believe they’re the ones who are going to avoid the shiv.
• The Kennedy Center board members, the DoJ people trying desperately to bury the Epstein files, would probably fold up like so much wet cardboard if some of them were jailed on contempt charges, even for a few days. These are not brave people.
• Senator Measles (R-LA) and Senator Rollover (D-IL) are looking to cut Social Security.
• Time for some f****** impeachments, if not actual jail time.
• The courts, unwilling to rock the boat, are unlikely to jail the Kennedy Center Board for contempt, but they certainly ought to.
• What the judge is doing is making it absolutely clear, on the record, that the DoJ is unwilling to comply with the Court’s order. I don’t know if the judge is willing to actually jail the DoJ lawyer for contempt, but if the judge wants to, they’re making the case for it.
• People get tired of educating naive questioners and with some reason. But telling them to Google it is not useful; even before Google went “AI” crazy, Google was a search engine not a fact engine.
• “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”—Gould
• If your ideology leads you to commit atrocities, your ideology is evil.
• To be replaced by, I suppose, Iranian imperialism. Iran was a relatively constrained regional power. Now they’re out in the wider world and I do not think we will like how they will conduct themselves. The US always was strongest in soft power and Trump is throwing that away. But I don’t think everything is lost. I think everybody is going to be horrified by how Iran will conduct itself as a world power.
• Decolonialism slides too easily into blood-and-soil nationalism. I favor federal multiculturalism myself.
• When we get finished reforming the Supreme Court, we need to do something about the 5th circuit.
• Trump, of course, is a physical coward.
• The party of rape and treason.
• There isn’t enough alarm about Hasan Piker’s fondness for mass murdering dictators.
• If we can’t implement a progressive tax structure or raise the minimum wage, we also can’t burn billionaires. Most of the violent uprisings against the wealthy I can think of have ended up, not with the establishment of a more egalitarian order, but rather a more oppressive order. Practically, it’s a lot easier to organize people for non-violent action than to put together a paramilitary.
• When I see someone talking about AIPAC nowadays, I suspect antisemitism and I’m often right.
• These guys. They think they’re John Galt and actually they’re Scrooge McDuck.
• Yes! Bring back the OTA!
• One thing you don’t do is let them come back into power as was done after the 1877 election in the United States. A lot of the story in the United States, though, is the Supreme Court and the pardon power. It was that way after the War Of The Rebellion and it’s that way now.
• Is this from the “build a super villain” kit?

I had to cut this off. Bluesky tends to focus on bad news, but even so this was an exceptionally bad week.