Month: September 2025

Between the party that believes in government and the party that hates it, the risks of a government shutdown are asymmetrical. Why would the Democrats, for example, shut down the national parks and take the blame for it? It might create a short-term high for the blue base, but that would wear off very quickly.

But there are parts of Trump’s government which clearly do more evil than good–the DOJ and ICE are the obvious examples. Why not limit the shutdown to them? That kind of shutdown would actually create some leverage against the administration on critical issues such as impoundment.

I don’t know if such a limited shutdown is practically possible, but if it is, it should be tried.

An article in the NYT last week that was equal parts accurate, poignant, and depressing told us how Disney uses information it gets from smartphones to craft an extremely enjoyable experience only for those with huge amounts of money to spend, because that is where the profits are. It is a portrait of a nation with a disappearing middle class. It is a description of the dollar store economy at work.

As I’ve noted countless times before, Biden’s attempt to shatter the dollar store were defeated by inflation and a lack of votes in the Senate. Trump is attempting to break out of dollar store bondage with a very different program, featuring mass deportations and tariffs. It is unlikely that the tariff levels that he has selected and/or negotiated are sufficient to bring about a massive improvement in the lives of poorly educated workers, so their hopes will have to ride on labor shortages created by the deportations. Is that likely to work, or will we instead see vegetables rotting in the fields and small business closures due to a lack of suitable employees? My money is on the latter.

I start this with the caveat that my knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism is very limited. With that said, here goes:

I read somewhere that a court in India ruled that Hinduism was really a cultural phenomenon and a way of life, not a religion. On its face, it is polytheistic, which obviously conflicts with my definition. It is also tied way too closely with Indian history and culture to be universal. Relative to my definition, it is a flop.

Buddhism is a tougher call. There are so many variants of Buddhism, some of which are metaphysically similar to Christianity, that it is difficult to analyze. The core of Buddhism, however, is the association of human life with misery and the attempt to mitigate it by overcoming desire. This method is both unchanging and universal, which meets my definition. If all of humanity succeeded in meeting the challenge of overcoming desire, however, it would cease to exist. In addition, much of the best of our culture can be found at the intersection of Desire Street and Frustration Avenue. Would we really want to give that up?

Trump and Modi are both swaggering right-wing populists with limited tolerance for opposition. They should have no trouble getting along, right?

The problem is that Modi wants to be the unquestioned boss of India, but Trump sees himself as the boss of the entire world. The two aspirations are incompatible. Friction was the inevitable result.

Two observations are pertinent here. First, as I’ve noted many times before, the notion of an enduring international coalition of nationalists is logically ridiculous, because no nationalist leader is going to agree to subordinate his country’s interests to someone else. Second, history provides evidence for the point; the high-water mark for extreme nationalism was the 1930s, and you know how that turned out.