Sunday, September 20, 2026
1961 African-American student James Meredith was refused enrolment for the first time to the segregated University of Mississippi
1969 John Lennon privately announced to Paul and Ringo (George was not there) that he was leaving "The Beatles" at a London business meeting
2001 In an address to a joint session of Congress, George W. Bush declared a "war on terror"
2023 Homeland Security announced plans to grant special status on humanitarian grounds to 472,000 Venezuelans already in the US, allowing them to work; terminated by Trump, 2025
2023 Senate confirmed US Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a vote of 83-11; removed by Trump on 2/21/2025.
In bed at 9:15, up at 4:20; 0440.203.6. 119/73/66 117; 63/55/66/61; FLOOD WATCH, BEACH HAZARDS
Morning meds at 6:45 a.m. Entresto at 5:25 a.m. and p.m.
Geri returns today. I suspect she will be very happy to be at home after most of the week visiting cousin Sue. She didn't enjoy the weather in Charlotte where it's been in the mid-90s all week, but she won't be crazy about the weather here either, where it's about 30 degrees cooler, rainy, and damp. In any case, I'll be glad to have her home again. As I type this at 12:20, American Airlines shows the flights as delayed and as not having taken off yet. She arrived around 2:10 to a miserable, cold, rainy day.
I've started The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran. The first two chapters focus on Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, two very scary guys, each with serious connections to J. D. Vance. The third focuses on Balaji Srinivasan, whom Thiel tried to get Trump, in his first term, to appoint as head of the Food and Drug Administration. It is frightening how powerful, and how full of contempt for liberal democracy, these tech guys have long been. Even more frightening is how dominant the tech moguls have become in Trump's second term, starting with their front row center seats at Trump's second inauguration. Most scary, I suppose, is that half of the American electorate chose to put Trump back in power in 2020, knowing all that we all knew of him from his first term. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since the American electorate kept George W. Bush in power after the tragic fiasco of his invasion of Iraq. We were rewarded with the tragic fiasco of the collapse of the financial system in 2008. I was struck by this pre-publication praise for Duran's book on its back cover by Wajahat Ali, author of The Left Bank:
The Nerd Reich is a clarion warning about the rise of technofascist sociopaths who seek to profit from our collective misery. In clear, compellling, and meticulously researched detail, Gil Duran sounds th ealarm about this incestuous cabal of broligarchss.
The book reminds me of a simple truth that I've known for some time: not everybody is a fan of democracy. I am reminded of a notion forwarded by a political scientist or sociologist that democracy is most people's second choice; most (maybe all) of us would prefer a government that was always responsive to our own values, judgments, and policy choices. Since we can't get our own way all the time as a practical matter, we accept democracy where we can get something like our own way some of the time. Just as I thought of Donald Trump and his myrmidons throughout the American Scoundrel book, so too I keep thinking of him and his government as I read through this book. I thought of him often as I read Kurt Andersen's The Breakup, which is what the technofascists encourage, i.e., the breaking up of America's (and the Western World's) liberal democratic society into much smaller entities joined into a network by digital technology, to wit, them. Though Trump doesn't have anywhere near the smarts of Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Elon Musk, or March Andreeson, he surely considers himself a superman, with better genes than the rest of us little people and entitled to rule over us.
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