Our one-and-one-half week of winter

This is a follow-up to my previous two posts in which I showed that even as very cold Arctic air was pushing deep into parts of the continental United States, abnormal warmth was occurring around much of the globe, including in the Arctic itself.

That cold Arctic air pushing southward sometimes happens when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes gets disrupted and allows cold air to escape and push far south of where it would normally be. That can happen because the jet stream that controls the vortex gets "wavy" and bulges in spots or gets otherwise disrupted. And that in turn can be caused by an abnormally warm climate that affects the jet stream. So paradoxically, the kind of transient deep freeze we saw in the U.S. might itself be more likely thanks to global warming. Whenever conditions are unusually cold in one region, it's always a good idea to look around and see that's happening in other regions. That's what my previous two posts did.

Whatever the reason for that burst of cold Arctic air, it's now over. That didn't last long. The graphic below (click on it for a larger view) shows that pretty much the entire U.S. is now experiencing abnormal warmth, as is most of Canada and some of the Arctic. Same for the northern half of Africa and most of Asia.

Temperature anomaly 2026-02-12

 

As I previously explained, the graphic shows not absolute temperature but rather temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. In this case "normal" is defined as a 1979-2000 baseline. Colors map to the scale on the right, which is in degrees Celsius. As is standard for measuring surface temperature, this refers to temperature 2 meters (about 6 feet) above the ground.

See my previous two posts for more information about this and where the data comes from. The images are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's happening around the globe.

I would just finally note that the short-lived influx of Arctic air occurred in the context of a very mild winter, and that's an increasingly recurring phenomenon. The serious cold of winter I remember from my childhood now seems to last just two or three weeks. Late December was quite warm, with a high in the upper 70s in southeast Kansas on Christmas day. That's bonkers. Now that the Arctic air has departed, we're having a long run of temperatures in the 60s. In February, for gawdsake. This hardly even counts as winter.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here

Abnormal warmth persists

Abnormally cold temperatures remain in a good bit of the continental United States and southeast Canada. Abnormally warm temperatures remain and have expanded in the far north, including Alaska. I wrote about this phenomenon six days ago, as the disrupted polar vortex was pushing deep into the southern U.S., bringing abnormal cold. As is often the case in these situations, the Arctic was simultaneously experiencing abnormal warmth.

The map below shows the situation as it is today. See my previous post for an explanation of where the data comes from. I would just add here that the displayed temperature anomaly is relative to a 1979-2000 temperature baseline, chosen because it represents the temperature record prior to significant warming observed across the Arctic since the early 2000s. The earth's climate has been warming rapidly in recent decades, with the Arctic warming far faster than the planet as a whole.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-30

 Below is a map of the entire globe. Note the abnormal warmth covering much of Africa, Europe, and Asia. You can click on these images for a larger view.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-30

 

 Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here

Abnormally warm temps are happening right now

Here we go again. Another "disrupted polar vortex" pushing brutally cold temperatures deep into the southern states of the continental U.S. The last memorable one was the deep freeze of 2021, which came within a gnat's eyelash of taking down the entire Texas electrical grid. (Gov. Greg Abbott dishonestly blamed wind turbine failures, when in fact the most significant failures were with natural gas power generation.) Officially 246 Texans died in that event, but excess mortality statistics suggest the real toll was more like 700-800 dead.

This one won't be quite as bad, but it's still plenty cold. Our house in Kansas is working hard to stay warm right now.

If this leads you to think global warming is bunk, think again, for multiple reasons. The first is that it's January, i.e., winter. Winter is when it gets cold. Occasionally in winter it gets really cold. And even though the climate overall is rapidly warming, winter hasn't yet been canceled.

More enlightening, though, is what we see when we look around, at other parts of the planet. If we were to look right this moment at the high Arctic (including, um, Greenland!), where in the dead of winter we expect it to be extremely cold, what we'd find is that it's abnormally warm. The image below shows what's going on. Click on the image for a larger view. Use your browser's back (<-) button to return and continue reading.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

It's often the case that when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes is disrupted or stretched, cold Arctic air escapes and is pushed far southward, while at the same time warm mid-latitude air is pushed northward, causing the Arctic, or parts of it, to become abnormally warm. That's what we're presently seeing. Jet stream "waviness" is involved in this pattern, and climate change might produce wavier jet streams, potentially amplifying outbreaks. The Arctic is warming far more rapidly than lower latitudes, and Arctic warming narrows the temperature gradient driving the jet stream, slowing it and promoting deeper waves, which can cause cold outbreaks farther south.

It's important to understand that the image above doesn't show absolute temperature but, rather, temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. The scale on the right maps colors to temperature anomaly (in degrees Celsius). Thus deep blues mean much colder than normal, and bright reds mean much warmer than normal.

The source of the image is the Climate Reanalyzer tool from University of Maine, which you can view here. The climate maps are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's going on around the world. Various kinds of information is shown; be sure to select (mouse over) "2m Temp Anomaly" from the left side of the page to view what I'm showing here. This is a really useful tool. I keep it bookmarked and refer to it from time to time.

When interacting with the Climate Reanalyzer tool you can click the map to see other parts of the planet, or scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entire globe. Each click displays a different region. If you did so right now you would see that most of Africa is warmer than normal, as is much of Asia. So is a lot of Australia and most of Antarctica. Which puts the central U.S. into a larger context.

Indeed, that's my main point. I'm not an expert on polar vortexes or jet stream circulation patterns, but I do understand that the conditions I'm experiencing in the moment in my own location don't say a lot about the global climate. It's useful to realize that the continental United States comprises just 1.6% of the total area of the planet, and what's going on with us isn't representative of the planet as a whole. There's usually even significant variation within the U.S. itself. Presently the western third of the U.S. is experiencing warmer than normal temperatures. The image below provides helpful global perspective. To my eye, it appears that more of the planet is abnormally warm than abnormally cold right now.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

While we're on the subject of "planet as a whole," I should note that there are tens of thousands of monitoring stations around the globe and aboard ships and ocean buoys that take daily measurements used to compute global average temperature. These give us a very accurate view of how the temperature of the planet is changing, and unfortunately it's warming at an unprecedented rate—far faster than it ever would under "natural" conditions. Last year was the third hottest year in the instrumental record. 2024 was the hottest by a large amount. 2023 was the second hottest. The ten hottest years in the instrumental record, going back to the 1800s, all occurred in the past decade.

While I'm on the subject, I should mention that I have a book about global warming consisting of essays from this blog. 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here

For the taking: The world is Trump's smorgasbord

In a 2021 interview, Trump explained his thinking on Greenland. "I said, ‘Why don’t we have that? You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’"

As massive as Trump's vanity. Or nearly so.

In an interview this month, Trump framed it in terms of personal desire. Asked why ownership was important instead of just fortifying Greenland, he said,  "Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success." Asked if he meant psychologically important for himself or psychologically important for the country, he said, "Psychologically important for me."

Always the narcissist, our president.

Trump the narcissist wrote this on Sunday to Norway's president: "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America."

A slight rewording: "Considering you didn't stroke my vain cravings for adulation, I'll stroke them myself by taking Greenland." Except he would have insisted on having Greenland regardless.

It's remarkable how much Trump has spoken of taking this past year. Canada, for example, which Trump opined should be the 51st state.

Or Gaza, which Trump insisted the U.S. would own and develop. "It would be a beautiful piece of land," he said. "The Riviera of the Middle East." Trump acknowledged that the actual owners of the land would have to go elsewhere. Forcing them out, of course, would be ethnic cleansing, which I wrote would be a criminal monstrosity.

"Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity," wrote The New York Times. "The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime."

Or the Panama Canal, about which in his inaugural address Trump said: "We didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back." Trump has falsely claimed that China is operating the Panama Canal. Now he claims China will take Greenland if we don't take it first.

And of course Trump recently took Venezuela. For the oil. He actually said so. Trump has indicated the U.S. will have to "run" Venezuela for years.

One Trumpian idea is to take money from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, and use it to buy Greenland. At one point, according to an administration official, Trump suggested the U.S. just trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, because "Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor."

Our NATO allies are having none of it. Asked what was his higher priority, obtaining Greenland or preserving NATO, Trump said "it may be a choice."

Which, in the context of all Trump's blathering about security, is really really moronic.

In a recent column Maureen Dowd noted that Trump, when asked if there are any limits on his power, replied, "My own morality, my own mind."

To which Dowd simply said: "God help us all."

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here

 

And burn it will

6 ½ years ago I wrote that "Trump's narcissistic hunger for adulation sucks goodness and light out of the environment and annihilates them. The president is a parasite who feeds off hatred and division."

My description has been validated innumerable times over the years.

In my piece I quoted George Will saying "Trump doesn’t just pollute the social environment with hate. He is the environment."

I quoted David French, writing in National Review, saying "Trump is fully employing malice as a political strategy. It’s not clever. It’s not shrewd. It’s destructive and wrong."

I quoted Rod Dreher saying "Where does he think this is all going to go? Where does this cycle stop? I don’t see how it fails to end in violence."

Dreher was right about the violence, but wrong about the ending. It hasn't ended.

I quoted Ross Douthat describing a "dark nihilism" that permeates Trumpism. Douthat said Trump and mass shooters (this was after the El Paso and other shootings) are "connected to the same dark psychic forces."

These are all conservative commentators.

I myself wrote that "a president's job is to tamp down such flare-ups, but Trump does the opposite, throwing gasoline on the fire and watching it burn. And burn it will." The title of the piece was "The Arsonist-in-Chief".

Trump's goon squads are presently rampaging through Minneapolis, and the city is metaphorically burning. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car, Trump surged an additional thousand federal agents into the city. Instead of calling for calm in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he lied that Good "violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer." She was neither violent nor vicious, and he was not run over. Trump lies continually.

My 2019 piece is as relevant today as it was back then.

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here 

 

Thing One: Get out of the way. Thing Two: There is no "Thing Two." Just get out of the way.

The very first thing that must be said about the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent is this. Video of the incident shows the agent had two choices in the moment Good's vehicle began to move forward. His choices were (1) move to the side to get out of the way, or (2) move to the side to get out of the way, while simultaneously firing his weapon into the face of the driver. He chose the second option.

Video evidence shows that moving to the side to get out of the way was accomplished without a lot of difficulty. (The New York Times produced a detailed analysis consisting of synchronized and annotated videos from multiple angles, for you to peruse. The Washington Post said "the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, according to the analysis.")

The evidence also shows that, from the standpoint of self-defense, discharging the weapon was entirely superfluous. It yielded the agent zero additional protection from harm.

This needs to be the baseline reality for all further discussion of the incident, about which much more can and should be said. Such as, for example, the observation that the vehicle's front wheels were turned (to the right, whereas the officer was positioned to the left) suggests the driver was simply trying to depart the scene, rather than run anybody over. Or that once again hot-headed law enforcement in this country is all too ready, willing, and able to use lethal force rather than do something more sensible and responsible.

Whatever the Renee Good's intentions may have been, and at some level we just can't know, the officer was readily able to get out of the way. Any reasonably nimble person without a gun could have done the same, and been equally safe from harm. He moved to the left, she to the right. The gun added nothing useful; if anything it would have slowed him down. And notice what should be obvious: In that particular situation, a side-stepping human is far more maneuverable than a motor vehicle. Had she actually wanted to run him over, it's unlikely that she could have done so, especially since he was positioned at the front corner of the vehicle, not directly in front of it.

It shocks the conscience that at least two of the three shots were fired with the officer positioned well to the side, where there's no way he could have been struck. The car was moving past him, not at him. In that sense his actions seem more punitive (or maybe just reflexive) than defensive. Had he kept the gun in its holster, as he should have, reflex wouldn't have become an issue. And it demonstrates another sad truth we've seen many times over the years: That once the first shot is fired (which happens all too readily), an officer seems committed to maximum lethality, intent on emptying as much of his clip as possible.

There is, alas, a long and sorry history of law enforcement having a seeming hair trigger with regard to the use of lethal force. We've seen it over and over. In this country it's not uncommon for police to shoot innocent and/or non-threatening people purely by reflex. One commentator noted with rueful irony that simply trying to obey police commands, which are often contradictory, is not a sure way to save your life in encounters with police. Police are actually trained that they are the ones in peril, and that they need to act fast or die. This is perverse, but it's nothing new.

As the present incident demonstrates, acting fast with a gun is not a justifiable strategy, and sometimes ends in tragedy. Getting out of the way was all that was needed. And yet, this officer's un-holstering of his gun was rapid and instinctive, and once it was in his hand the obvious thing to do was to fire it.

Another crucial observation is how quickly reality becomes manipulated and distorted. This is an unfortunate feature of the broken political, social, and ideological environment in which we live. It's also a feature of autocratic governments, which deem it more essential to wield power and control the narrative than to elucidate truth. We unfortunately live in a world of made-up realities.

And so we have the president of the United States saying the deceased woman "violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer." She did no such thing. She was not violent. She was not vicious. And the ICE officer was not run over. Trump wrote on social media that it's "hard to believe he [the officer] is alive." He called the woman a "paid agitator"—a baseless, scurrilous claim he made up on the spot. (I have previously referred to Trump as a "bullshitter," in the technical meaning of that word. Yes, there's a technical meaning.)

Stop and think. If the president of the United States is allowed to claim the ICE agent was run over when he wasn't, then reality itself is up for grabs. What a dismal situation for a highly inflamed country, where so many of us will simply believe what we want to believe rather than what is. If we can't trust the president to convey basic information truthfully to the public, how can we expect the system to hold at all?

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the woman had committed an act of  "domestic terrorism," first disobeying officers’ commands, and then weaponizing her SUV by attempting to "run a law enforcement officer over." The preponderance of evidence shows she made no such attempt. And not only is disobeying police not terrorism, but civil disobedience is an established noble feature of American civil rights protest. A leader who so reprehensibly misuses the word "terrorism" relinquishes moral and governing legitimacy. Such assertions and labels are unworthy of leaders in a free society.

For his part, vice president J.D. Vance said "other angles of the video show the woman clearly hit the officer with her car while accelerating." Clearly, he said. They do not. One fuzzy low-resolution video shot from a distance seems to show that he might have been hit, but a clearer, closer video from a better angle shows that he was not. I should not have to say this, but both things can't be true, and you don't get to pick whichever video suits your preferred narrative. Either he was hit or he wasn't, and you go with the most definitive evidence. That the officer deftly dodged the car, and then walked around the scene for more than a minute afterward with no apparent difficulty, backs up that conclusion.

As for Vance's "while accelerating" claim, the most rapid acceleration happened after the woman had been fatally shot in the face. The car crashed further down the street. I'd imagine the woman wasn't even conscious when her foot slammed down on the accelerator pedal in the final convulsion of her life.

It's shameful that officials justify the shooting in part by claiming the woman was acting illegally. Vance said officers "are approaching her vehicle because she is violating the law: namely, she is obstructing a lawful enforcement operation. You're not allowed to walk up to or drive up to people who are enforcing the law to make it harder for them to do their jobs." Noem spoke of the woman "disobeying officers’ commands," as if getting shot is a rightful consequence of such disobedience. These are morally weak arguments in defense of a killing. None of this justifies deadly force, and only a sick society holds that it does.

One witness reported that ICE officers had issued conflicting orders, which is itself a common occurrence in police stops gone bad. One agent told her to drive away, the witness said, while another told her to get out of her vehicle.

A newly released video from the officer's own phone (he'd been recording the scene) adds some additional details. Just before the shooting, Renee Good's wife, who was standing outside the vehicle, told her to drive away, which she seemingly then attempted to do. "She then looks down as she shifts the vehicle into drive," says a Washington Post analysis of the new video. "She looks up again as she turns the steering wheel to the right, away from Ross [the ICE agent]." We'd already seen the rightward pointed wheels from earlier video.

After three shots are fired, says The Post, "A male voice — it is not clear whose — can be heard uttering two expletives: “Fucking bitch.” "

One can be forgiven for concluding that the speaker of that epithet, in the instant after Renee Good's face had been blown apart, believed she'd gotten what she deserved—as did our highest governing officials who worked so shamefully to justify the shooting and, more broadly, as does the right wing commentariat. We live in very ugly times.

I want to finish where I started, and reemphasize that from the standpoint of self-defense, discharging the weapon was entirely superfluous and completely unhelpful. It yielded zero additional protection from harm for the officer. Shooting Renee Good achieved nothing other than ending her life. It ought to be trivially self-evident that if you're a few feet in front of a moving vehicle whose driver intends to run you over, you will not stop it by shooting the driver. The only useful thing you can do is get out of the way, which is what the officer did. Unfortunately, he took the opportunity to shoot and kill a 37-year-old mother as he was doing so, ensuring she got her comeuppance for all the whistles and taunts and indignities he'd had to endure.

 

---

Update 01/13/26 - As reported by The New York Times yesterday, Trump was asked by a reporter if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. Trump replied: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

That's his answer? They were disrespectful? And their disrespect justified deadly force?

In another report yesterday, The New York Times quoted Trump as saying Renee Good, the deceased Minneapolis woman, was "very violent" and "very radical," even though there's not the slightest whiff of violent action or intent in the video we've seen, and nothing in the extensive reporting of her personal life suggests otherwise. Nothing reported by the media or released by the government demonstrates any proclivity for violence. The Times said its video analysis (which you can view) suggested she was likely trying to drive away from officers when she was shot. Thus does the president of the United States lie continually and despicably. It's beyond my comprehension why so many of us tolerate that.

Renee Good's "violent" crime was stopping her car in the middle of the street, and then trying to drive away. Others in the neighborhood were blowing whistles to alert neighbors of the ICE presence. Renee Good's only interaction with the shooter was when she said this through her open window as he was taking video of her and her vehicle: "That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you."

"This is classic terrorism," said vice president J.D. Vance.

"If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is," said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, "it completely fits the situation on the ground."

Stop it! We can't allow those wielding power to attach the "terrorism" label to nonviolent protest and civil disobedience and monitoring of law enforcement. If we do, we are living in a police state under authoritarian rule. 

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here 

No, really: It's now the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts"

There are all kinds of coups. Here's one.

In an unprecedented move in February, Donald Trump fired 18 general trustees of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (commonly known as the Kennedy Center) who had been appointed by President Biden.

The Kennedy Center, which is the national arts and culture institution, has a board of 36 general trustees, who are appointed by the U.S. president and who serve six-year terms, as specified by law. The board also has some ex-officio members, such as certain cabinet secretaries and holders of other offices. Presidents appoint new general trustees when the terms of existing trustees expire. Never before has a president dismissed trustees without cause or resignation prior to the completion of their terms. Now one has.

Trump replaced the fired Biden-appointed trustees with loyalists. He also appointed himself as one of the trustees. Board members who were appointees from Trump's first term were retained. Ex-officio members in Trump's cabinet were of course also loyal to Trump. Thus Trump gained control of the board. The newly constituted board fired Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter, and also elected Trump himself as board chairman to replace the previous chairman who had been one of the 18 fired by Trump.

Federal statute specifies the 6-year trustee terms. Whether or not the president can legally execute mid-term removals is a matter of dispute. While the law might not prohibit such removals, norms of conduct, historical precedent, and basic decency do prohibit them, but of course carry no legal weight. The notion that Trump would consider himself bound by norms of conduct and governance long ago became laughable.

(Example: As I write this Trump has ordered 30 ambassadors, all Biden appointees, to leave their diplomatic posts around the world and return home. Basically, they've been fired. These are career diplomats. "A standard tour is three to four years," said the New York Times. "The union representing career diplomats said this was the first time that such a mass recall had taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission." A union spokeswoman said the method of removal was "highly irregular." Which is to say, an egregious violation of norms.)

Once the dust had settled at the Kennedy Center, Trump had a compliant board of which he himself was chairman, and a compliant president of his choosing. He then proceeded to overhaul the Kennedy Center's programming, which he declared had been too woke. Trump himself had never attended a Kennedy Center performance, not even the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala, which by tradition U.S. presidents have attended. "Prior to 2017," says Wikipedia, "there had been three occasions in which the president did not attend the gala performance [due to pressing matters of state -mb]."

The Kennedy Center was conceived in the Eisenhower years as the country's "national cultural center." Authorized by the National Cultural Center Act of 1958, and opened in 1971, the Center has hosted, according to Wikipedia, "many different genres of performance art, such as theater, dance, classical music, jazz, pop, psychedelic, and folk music. It is the official residence of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera." It is sustained mainly through ticket sales and private donations. The federal government pays for building upkeep. The building is administered as a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.

Since Trump's takeover, the Kennedy Center’s 2025 season has been turbulent, more politicized, and financially weaker than in prior years. Ticket sales and subscriptions have declined, several major artists and productions have withdrawn, and the programming mix has shifted away from some of the more progressive and experimental work that characterized recent seasons. There were waves of staff firings and resignations.

According to The Washington Post, fired president Deborah Rutter had led the Center "through a decade in which it had diversified its offerings, endured the 2020 lockdown and emerged to boast robust ticket sales and, according to publicly available tax filings, steadily grown revenue."

Previously the Center's board had been decidedly bipartisan and apolitical, with a genuine mission to promote the arts as broadly conceived. No more. It's now dominated by Trump loyalists. "Nearly 10 months in," says The Post, "a picture of a transformed institution has come into view. Standbys of the Kennedy Center’s stages like the National Symphony Orchestra have been strained by plummeting ticket sales and organizational uncertainty. Traveling productions and acts have pulled out. And a new kind of right-leaning programming has begun to take root." [links in the original]

The building has gotten an imperial Trumpian makeover too, with new marble (of course) and portraits of the first and second couples hanging in the Center's Hall of Nations. Performance themes are less diverse and artistic, and more patriotic. Trump, says The Post, "routinely refers to the building as 'the Trump Kennedy Center.'"

This year Trump chose himself to host the Kennedy Center Honors, the building’s marquee annual event. He also chose the honorees. "All went through me," Trump said.

Originally named in its authorizing legislation the "National Cultural Center," the Center was renamed the "John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" in 1964, following the assassination of President Kennedy. President Lyndon Johnson signed the joint resolution renaming it as a living memorial to the slain president, who had supported the center's development through fundraising efforts.

A living memorial. Never one to miss an opportunity to profane the sacred, the always self-aggrandizing Trump has recently bigfooted himself into the Center's formal name. The Center's loyalist board voted on December 18 to rename the storied institution the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," a.k.a. the "Trump Kennedy Center." Because the previous name had the force of law, the board has no legal authority to change it. No matter. The Kennedy Center began updating signage on the exterior of the building the following day. The coup was complete.

We should of course not be surprised by Trump's vainglorious self-exaltation, in this or anything else, because it's long been on continuous display. This is the man who has heavily lobbied without embarrassment for himself to receive the Nobel Peace Price, which is itself surely a moral disqualification. Not achieving that, the U.S. Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., became the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, announced by the State Department shortly after Trump's Nobel advocacy. According to PBS, "the takeover of the Peace Institute was also anything but peaceful, with his administration seizing the independent entity and ousting its board before actually affixing his name to the building." Sound familiar? Independent entity. Illegal or improper board ouster. Trump takeover and renaming.

Trump has also been long interested in his face appearing on Mount Rushmore, which (thankfully) is almost certainly physically impossible due to geological considerations.

The examples are almost endless. Trump has just announced the construction of a new "Trump class" of naval warships. 

As I'm writing this, a New York Times headline says "Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level."

"Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch," writes Peter Baker of the Times.

"He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term," says Baker. "Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court." [links and italics in the original]

All this is reminiscent of authoritarian regimes elsewhere, where government is equated with the cult of the leader. In America, we used to believe that we were different, profoundly so. A nation of laws, not men. No ubiquitous portraits of presidents gazing down on us from buildings and billboards, and attaching their names to our institutions even during their tenure in power. We were a different kind of country. A beacon of possibility.

I'm reminded, too, of how it was in the 1990s and early 2000s when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy. Back then I imagined the utter embarrassment that country must have felt at being ruled by such a self-evident buffoon. I could never have anticipated that such buffoonery could claim the American presidency, with all its assumptions of competence, dignity, and decency rising in this office above human shortcomings.

Yet here we are.

We have found to our surprise and dismay how much our institutions have depended on fidelity to norms that everybody more or less implicitly agreed  to follow (although Mitch McConnell also busted a number of important norms).

Before now we have in very large part not needed to legally specify every minute detail in statute in a way that explicitly anticipates and defends against presidents who act in continuous bad faith. When the law says trustees are appointed to six year terms, we should be able to assume that, barring something extraordinary, they serve six year terms. We ought not even have to argue about whether the specification of term lengths in the statute itself implies that a president cannot normally interrupt those terms. But now we do, thanks to Donald J. Trump. The combination of a rogue president, a compliant Congress, and an enabling Supreme Court has done much damage to our system of governance.

Will that damage endure? The development of an imperial presidency has turned our country's founding principles upside down. What remains is to wonder whether we will learn from this dismal experience and somehow reaffirm and renew our earlier commitments to constitutional governance, the rule of law, and—not least—basic character and decency. Whether or not that happens ultimately depends upon an informed and engaged citizenry. Us. I'm sorry to say that I'm not very hopeful. 

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

The complete archive is here 

I have a book

I've recently published a book. It's available on Amazon.

The book's title is Does It Hurt To Think about Climate? The subtitle is Essays on Global Warming. It's a collection of essays from this blog, with some updates and some additional material.

It would be my great honor for you to own a copy, but I'm a little dismayed and embarrassed by the price. I set it as low as Amazon would allow, which means no proceeds go to me. That's fine. I never intended to make money from this project.

The reason for the high price is I opted for white paper and premium color ink—the most expensive combination. Cream paper, and black or standard color ink, were also available and would have been far cheaper. My choice was motivated by a couple of color photographs and some color graphics that I wanted to reproduce as well as possible. I'm quite pleased with the overall production quality.

Publishing a book on Amazon KDP was an interesting experience, with a somewhat steep learning curve. There were lots of little details to sweat to get everything just right. I estimate I spent 80 hours with design and preparation of the manuscript plus design of the cover. For the cover I used a couple of colors that appear on the blog.

For paperbacks such as mine, Amazon keeps 40% of the listed price to cover its site selling overhead and its profit. The remaining 60% covers actual printing costs and, if any is left over, author royalty. The printing costs on my book are $11.27 per copy, which eats up the entire 60%. Yikes.

The link above is for Amazon.com in the U.S. market. The book is also available in certain other Amazon marketplaces: 

Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Germany,

Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland

 

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

The complete archive is here. 

Does he actually believe it, or is he just bullshitting?

Donald Trump has said on multiple occasions that each (alleged) drug smuggling boat destroyed off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 American lives. Does he really believe that, or is he just bullshitting? And which—the believing or the bullshitting—would be worse?

As of early December, the U.S. has destroyed around 22 such boats, killing over 80 persons. Do the math: 22 x 25,000 = 550,000 lives saved.

Official estimates put the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. at around 105,000 (actually now a lot less) annually. So Trump's 3-month boat-destroying campaign has already saved five times as many lives—over half a million—as are lost to drug overdoses in a year.

Which is a truly impressive accomplishment.

The majority of U.S. drug deaths are caused by fentanyl overdose. Trump himself has long decried the problem of illicit fentanyl. He even used the minuscule amounts coming into the country from Canada as a nonsensical excuse for tariffs on that country. Most fentanyl entering the U.S. is produced in Mexico from chemical precursors produced in Asia, and then smuggled across the southern border.

Venezuela is not a fentanyl-producing or fentanyl-trafficking country. It is a transit country for, but not a primary producer of, cocaine. Most cocaine is produced in Columbia, an ostensible sometimes ally of the U.S. Some is also produced in Peru and Bolivia. Because of its geographic location, Venezuela is well positioned to export cocaine out of South America. But most of the cocaine exported through Venezuela to the Caribbean route is destined for Europe, not the U.S. Cocaine bound for the U.S. more commonly travels via Pacific/Eastern Pacific and Central American routes that bypass Venezuela.

To restate it succinctly, the claim of 25,000 lives saved is on its face absurd. The drug possibly (no evidence has ever been produced) being interdicted, cocaine, isn't the one that causes most U.S. deaths. And Venezuela and the Caribbean aren't the transit routes for U.S. bound cocaine but rather for Europe bound cocaine.

So I ask again: Does Trump really believe his 25,000 lives saved claim, or is the president of the United States just bullshitting? And again, which would be worse?

The incongruities abound, and and go beyond what I've already laid out. If Trump is concerned about cocaine, then his primary focus should be Columbia, not Venezuela. The U.S. has had an often-strained relationship with Columbia. In September, the U.S. decertified the country as a cooperating partner in counter-narcotics efforts.

If instead Trump is primarily concerned about fentanyl, as he has said many times in the past, and long before he became fixated on Venezuela, then his efforts should be directed at Mexico. Obviously there are difficulties and delicacies with this, but that is nevertheless the reality.

Other incongruities: You don't hear so much about the southern border wall as you used to, but it's worth mentioning while we're on the subject of drug smuggling that the long-held belief that the border wall would impede the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. is also patently false. Most of the drugs being smuggled across the southern border are hidden in vehicles passing through legal ports of entry. And most of that smuggling activity is conducted by U.S. citizens who go back and forth across the border frequently, and probably just want to make some extra money. So the drug/border wall connection was always bogus. I mention this to demonstrate how messed up our grasp of reality tends to be, and how we can't have intelligent policy conversations because many of us, including our president and politicians, don't know what's real.

One more complaint. The Trump administration refers to the Venezuelan drug runners as narco-terrorists. They are no such thing. Misappropriation of the word "terrorist" (which I've written about previously) is an egregious tendency of certain governments, usually in order to justify their own autocratic proclivities and actions. Simply put, terrorists want to terrorize, such as with attacks on civilians, suicide bombings, and flying airplanes into buildings. They terrorize with political intent, such as to compel attention to their cause, or to demand remedy of an injustice, or to fight an oppressor. Drug cartels, by contrast, are operating businesses, albeit illegal ones that cause much harm and suffering. Nonetheless, their intent is not to terrorize the populace, but rather to make money. The distinction is crucial. Not making it is another way we loosen our grip on reality, and poison the national polity.

Back to bullshitting. We ought to be able to expect that our president, at least, knows what's real, and accurately conveys that reality to the American people. It often appears that Trump genuinely does not, or at least doesn't care. The not caring is a definition of bullshitting, where the intention is less to knowingly lie (although Trump does plenty of that) than to assert whatever nonsense pops into his head, without any grasp of or concern about the underlying facts, whatever they may be. 

Trump has had an extraordinarily long bullshitting career, going back decades. That propensity has been plainly obvious to any intelligent observer. And yet he twice won election to the presidency. That says a lot about us. And so Americans gave gotten what they deserve, with dismaying results. This is no way to make a country great, or even to maintain a semblance of past greatness.

 Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here

 

Redheads are murderers and rapists

Which is true, but incomplete. Redheads are not just murderers and rapists; they're also terrorists, spies, insane asylum escapees, and drug smugglers. And more.

It's beyond me why we'd tolerate their presence in our country. I say get 'em out.

Immigrants, too, are murderers, rapists, terrorists, spies, insane asylum escapees, and drug smugglers—which should be clear to anybody who's paying attention.

Afghan immigrants might be the worst. You want proof? Recently an Afghan immigrant who had been granted asylum shot two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. One is dead and one remains in critical condition. What more evidence do you need?

It also demonstrates the ingratitude of these people.

Donald Trump said he wasn't blaming all Afghans for the shooting, but he said "there’s a lot of problems with Afghans." That should be obvious.

"Many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here," Trump said, alluding to the chaotic evacuation of Afghans during the U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021. And yet that incompetent Biden let them in. Now look what's happened.

Reporters pointed out that the Afghan who shot the two guard troops had worked for the CIA, and had been vetted. "He went cuckoo," Trump said. "I mean, he went nuts."

And isn't that the point? No amount of vetting will protect the country from rogue immigrants. The answer is to just not let them in. None of them. They're not worth the risk. They bring crime. They bring disease. Hell, they eat peoples' pets. Think how much safer, cleaner, nicer this country would be if we kept immigrants out.

Trump used the D.C. shooting as reason to say he'd "permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries" and denaturalize migrants "who undermine domestic tranquillity." Good for him. But for immigrants, especially third world immigrants, this would be an amazingly tranquil country. We have to get this situation under control.

Homeland Security secretary Krisi Noem gets it. After the D.C. shooting she recommended a travel ban "on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies." Amen.

Trump reiterated what he's been saying almost forever. "Many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here." He gave as an example, if you need one, that a large influx of Somali refugees is "taking over" Minnesota, bringing gang violence.

Last year Trump warned that the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, is taking over Aurora, Colorado. He was right on both counts. The D.C. shooting is all the proof you need.

Somalis now make up slightly more than one percent of Minnesota's population. That statistic should send a chill down your spine.

It is true that undocumented Hispanics make up far more, a whopping six percent of Texas's population. But at least those people are brown, not black, and they clean peoples' homes. Black immigrants are worse. Black Muslim immigrants are the worst of all.

Immigrant violence was a big theme at last year's Republican National Convention. Ted Cruz gave a moving speech memorializing Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Kate Steinle—all white women murdered by immigrants. Consider the names of the murderers: Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez. José Antonio Ibarra. José Inez García Zárate. 'Nuf said.

From the RNC we learned that not only are immigrants murderers and rapists, as Trump has long pointed out, but they're also coming to the country to vote illegally. They're smuggling in drugs. And they're coming for your jobs. A soup-to-nuts pestilence.

All of this should be self-evident. It's easy to see that this country would be far, far better without these people.

Which brings me back to redheads. Immigrants are getting a lot of the recent attention, and rightly so. But redheads are a real problem too. Can you really doubt that it would be trivially easy to find a redhead who had committed each of the kinds of crimes I have just described? Can you?

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

On the economy, Trump says he "inherited a mess"

Donald Trump recently said this of Argentina's president, Javier Milei: "He, like us, inherited a mess." Argentina faces persistent economic challenges, including slow growth, very high inflation, and financial instability. The U.S. is bolstering the Argentine peso with a recently announced $20 billion currency swap.

Yes indeed, Donald Trump inherited an economic mess. How big a mess was it?

On October 19, 2024, in the waning months of the Biden administration, The Economist produced a special issue with the headline "The envy of the world."

"The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust," proclaimed one of the issue's headlines. Another was "American productivity still leads the world." A third was "What can stop the American economy now?"

This was just a couple of weeks before the presidential election. After Trump took office we have been getting a pretty good sense of what could stop the American economy.

The "mess" that Trump says he "inherited" included declining inflation. As Trump took office, inflation was slightly above the Fed's target, but was on a downward trajectory. The Fed accordingly cut interest rates three times in 2024, by a total of one point. Recall that prices had soared a few years earlier as a consequence of pandemic-related supply chain issues, but had been steadily falling since then under the Fed's monetary supervision.

As Trump was being sworn in, Biden had created two million jobs in 2024, for a monthly average of more than 167,000. He created 16.1 million jobs over his four years in office, a feat unmatched by any other American president in history. That's a jaw-dropping monthly average of 336,000. Over four years.

That was the mess that Trump inherited.

In point of fact, the U.S. led the world in the post-pandemic economic recovery during Biden's presidency. That was the endowment bequeathed to Trump. So what has he done with it? He created a total of 487,000 jobs in his first seven months. That's a monthly average of just 70,000. The unemployment rate has risen from 4.0 percent in January to 4.3 percent now. The inflation rate has bottomed out and is now edging higher once again. Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs that are already causing consumer prices to rise, and we're just in the early stage. It will get worse.

According to The Hill, a new Goldman Sachs analysis says that American consumers will pay 55 percent of the tariff cost this year. American businesses will eat 22 percent of those costs, and foreign exporters will eat 18 percent. Tariffs are an extremely regressive tax on consumers, because low and middle income persons pay a far higher proportion of their income on such taxes than do rich persons. The Yale Budget Lab estimates the short-run price increase from tariffs at 1.7%, which represents a $2,400 annual average cost per household.

The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by approximately 10 to 11 percent during Trump's second term so far. This decline is the steepest for the first half of a year since 1973. The drop reflects a weakening dollar against a basket of major currencies, including the Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona, and Swiss franc. Whatever your opinion about this—Trump actually wants a weaker dollar—it does represent less buying power for U.S. consumers at a time when prices are already rising for other reasons. Reasons for the dollar decline include uncertainty over Trump's chaotic and frequently shifting policies (especially on tariffs), plus the large debt increases baked into Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" that overwhelmingly benefits the rich. Other concerns include Trump's meddling with the Federal Reserve. All these factors make investors jittery and less inclined to hold dollar-denominated assets than they otherwise would be.

And whatever you think of Trump's immigration policy (which Pope Leo recently suggested involves "inhuman treatment of immigrants"), mass deportations undeniably make the economy smaller by removing both workers and consumers.

Trump has always made assertions about the economy that are untethered from reality—assertions that aggrandize his own imagined accomplishments and deflect blame from his failures. He would have you believe that bad things are thrown into his lap and he heroically fixes them in unprecedented fashion. His "inherited mess" excuse is more of the same. In February 2019 I wrote of the absurdity of Trump's claiming he had launched an "economic miracle" (Trump's words). Not only did Obama consistently create more jobs than Trump, but GDP growth during Trump's first term was quite unspectacular as well, approximately matching Obama's second term performance. (I wrote several times about job creation during Trump's first term. Here's a summary.)

Indeed, Trump's first term was basically a continuation of Obama's economy, except Trump created far fewer jobs, and I'm not even counting the massive Covid-related job losses in Trump's final year. One way of observing that there was no Trump "miracle" is to consider a graph of the unemployment rate since 2010. Note the steady decline under Obama's two terms from high financial crisis levels. (And indeed, it was Obama who truly inherited a mess, with job losses of 800,000 per month when he was sworn in.) The rate flattened slightly under Trump, but the very long term trend continued. Contrary to his claim that he did something amazing, Trump actually got in at the end of one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history.

There was no Trump miracle. Never was. But to accept that you have to live in the reality that is, not the one in Trump's mind.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.