Rodger A. Payne's Blog

2026 Oscars

2026-03-15T11:00:00.010-04:00

Photo taken by RAP in LA, August 15, 2025

As I do annually, this post reviews Academy Award nominees in major categories and provides my rankings within them. I am not predicting winners and only rank the films I have seen. Again this year, I have not seen very many of the movies, so I will be updating this post extensively in the future and noting the edits with yellow highlights.

You can find my post about last year's Oscars here and work backwards if you want.

Best Picture

“The Secret Agent”

“One Battle After Another”

“Train Dreams”

“Sinners”

“Hamnet”

“Frankenstein”

“Bugonia”

I suspect that a couple of the films I have not seen will push towards the top of this list, but I can only rank what I have watched to-date. Were most of these films better than Eddington? Or Black Bag?

** Update: The Secret Agent is exceptional filmmaking.

“F1”

“Marty Supreme”

“Sentimental Value”

Directing

Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”

Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”

Chloé Zhao, “Hamnet”

Every year I struggle with ranking in this category -- I usually just put them in the same order as I do the films unless there is a good reason not to do so.

Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”

Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value”

Actor in a Leading Role

Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”

Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”

Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”

Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”

I don't think DiCaprio is going to win a second Oscar this year and Jordan did play two characters.

Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”

Actress in a Leading Role

Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”

Emma Stone, “Bugonia”

Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”

I do not think Stone will win a third Oscar and doubt that she deserves it for this role. I saw a lot of Jessie Buckley last month as we watched the entire run of Fargo, the series. She's talented.

Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”

Actor in a Supporting Role

Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”

Benicio Del Toro, “One Battle After Another”

Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”

Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”

There's apparently a lot of buzz about the one performance I have not yet seen (Skarsgard), but Sean Penn could absolutely win for this role. He was great. I would be very surprised if the other 3 won.

Stellan Skarsgard, “Sentimental Value”

Actress in a Supporting Role

Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”

Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”

I would not be surprised if Taylor won, but obviously I still have to see several other performances.

Elle Fanning, “Sentimental Value”

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, “Sentimental Value”

Amy Madigan, “Weapons”

Animated Feature Film

This is one of those years that I did not see any of these films.

“Arco”

“Elio”

“KPop Demon Hunters”

“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”

“Zootopia 2”

Documentary Feature Film

I have neglected this category often in recent years. It happened again.

“The Alabama Solution”

“Come See Me in the Good Light”

“Cutting Through Rocks”

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”

“The Perfect Neighbor”

International Feature Film

Honestly, I probably would have watched "The Secret Agent" in a nearby theater while traveling in the UK if it was shorter (it runs 160 minutes). The problem with "Sentimental Value" and "Sirat" is that they were not showing at a non-chain theater near me. I'll view several of these soon, most likely.

“The Secret Agent,” Brazil

The Secret Agent would have been a completely defensible Oscar winner.

“It Was Just an Accident,” France

“Sentimental Value,” Norway

“Sirat,” Spain

“The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Tunisia

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Best Films of 2025

2026-02-20T16:56:00.005-05:00

The graphic below identifies the top 25+ films from 2025 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing the list from the same website as I used last year. I'm fairly certain that the methodology for compilation is the same. Here's the detail I posted last year:

Films are sorted by the percentage of lists they are included on.* This is typically the same as sorting by number of lists included, but can vary when films make lists across multiple years. For example, if one film makes 10 lists in a year with 100 lists available, it’s ranking will be higher than a film that makes 15 lists when 200 lists are available. The times a film appears at the top of a list is used as a tie-breaker.

*punctuation errors corrected

Basically, this is an annual best films comment that I'm posting for 2025. This is the post about the best films of 2024. Below this graphic, you'll find my rankings of these films (by tiers) with a lengthy list of the ones I still need to see. As I watch them over time, I'll edit the post but note the changes with yellow highlighting.

This "best of" comment is distinct from both the annual post on "films of 2025," which is my end-of-year musing about all the films I saw in a calendar year, and my annual Oscar post, which concerns that year's Academy Award nominees. I have seen some 2025 films in early 2026 and will post about the Oscars soon.

This is my reranking of the top 25:

Top-Tier Films (Oscar-bait)

The Secret Agent

One Battle After Another

Black Bag

I watched The Secret Agent on a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit. It is excellent and may be my favorite film of the year.

Second-tier films (very good, with minor flaws)

Sorry, Baby

Train Dreams

Eddington

Sinners

Hamnet

Blue Moon

Third-tier films (watchable, but more flawed)

Frankenstein

Bugonia

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Fourth-tier films (some serious flaws)

Films yet to see:

28 Years Later

Afternoons of Solitude

Caught by the Tides

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

It Was Just an Accident

Marty Supreme

Misericordia

No Other Choice

Sentimental Value

Sirat

The Mastermind

The Shrouds

Weapons

Glancing through the rest of the top 100, I've seen the following films already and rank them roughly in this order:

Souleymane's Story (76)

A House of Dynamite (52)

The Ballad of Wallis Island (61)

The Phoenician Scheme (33)

Eephus (26)

Roofman (73)

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (38)

Jay Kelly (39)

Companion (84)

One of Them Days (72)

Materialists (54)

Highest 2 Lowest (50)

Friendship (48)

Superman (27)

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (74)

Nearly all of these films would be in my second or third tier above.

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Honorary Kansan?

2026-01-31T16:47:00.005-05:00

Today my spouse and I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This is one of the artists most famous paintings (Sunflowers):

In case you don't know, the sunflower is the state flower of Kansas.

This is his painting of a wheat field.

Kansas calls itself the "breadbasket of the world" because of the volume of wheat it produces.

Maybe you are familiar with this self-portrait:

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Books of 2025

2025-12-31T22:49:00.008-05:00

Annually, I write a post listing almost all of the books I read during the calendar year. It seems kind of hard to believe, but I have produced such a post every year since 2005. This is a link to the 2024 list if blog readers want to work backwards. You will find that the books are loosely ranked within categories.

Nonfiction:

John Owen, Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order (Grawemeyer winner for 2025)

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Jonathan Caverley, Democratic Militarism

Ronald Kramer, Apocalyptic Crimes; Why Nuclear Weapons are Illegal...

Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Michael Lewis, The Premonition

These were all good books, though the Lewis work is not as tight as the ones he often produces. I've previously disclosed a writing project that explains several of these choices and I was solicited to review Kramer for a journal.

I read several other books for this category that I am not listing here. This is because I do not include works that I did not read cover-to-cover even if I read huge chunks of them.

Also, I do not include any works that I reviewed unless those reviews were published. In practice, this means that this post will not include the books I reviewed for the Grawemeyer Awards in Ideas Improving World Order. I generally won't disclose reading a book in that process unless it happens to win. Even then, I mostly read those winning books after they have advanced in the process, it is very rare that a book I was asked to read advances to win. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 examples over a period of decades.

Baseball/Sports Non-Fiction:

Joe Posnanski, The Soul of Baseball; A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America

Jane Leavy, The Last Boy; Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood

Ted Williams with John Underwood, My Turn at Bat

Bob Gibson with Lonnie Wheeler, Stranger to the Game

Dan Gutman, The Way Baseball Works

Philip Lowry, Green Cathedrals

John Dewan, The Fielding Bible

KC Star, George Brett: A Royal Legend

Jeff Montgomery with Matt Fulks, If These Walls Could Talk: KC Royals Stories...

Anthony Castrovince, Fan's Guide to Baseball Analytics

Chuck Woodling, Against All Odds: Kansas Won the 1988 NCAA Championship

Steve Cameron, George Brett: Last of a Breed

I continued my trend of reading lots of baseball non-fiction. Most of these books I own and I'm trying to decide what might be worth keeping.

Posnanski's book is well worth your time and I really enjoyed the books about Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Bob Gibson. Your experience may vary. For more information I recommend you read my reviews at Goodreads.

Several of the books on this list I read a few pages at a time over breakfast or lunch. These include the works on George Brett, the 1988 Kansas basketball champs, Lowry's Green Cathedrals (about stadiums), and Dewan's Fielding Bible.

Literature and Genre Fiction:

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys

John Updike, The Coup

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Depending upon who is reading them, two or three of these works might be considered genre fiction. However, the authors and/or subjects are often considered literary. The books by Towles and Whitehead are highly recommended. One is about half the length of the other and it does not lose much in its efficiency.

I was disappointed in this Updike work, but really disappointed in Lethem's book. And Orbital was too unconventional for my tastes.

Genre Fiction:

Donald Westlake (as Richard Stark), Butcher's Moon (Parker #16)

Chris Pavone, The Expats

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (Jackson Brodie #4)

Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame (Bernie Gunther #5)

Eric Ambler, Passage of Arms

Lawrence Block, Hit List (Keller #2)

Stephen King, Colorado Kid

Helen MacInnes, Assignment in Brittany

Ruth Rendell, Wolf to the Slaughter (Inspector Wexford #3)

Mick Herron, Slow Horses

Michael Dibdin, Cabal (Aurelio Zen #3)

Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge (Matthew Scudder #7)

Ian Fleming, Man with the Golden Gun (James Bond #13)

Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot #24)

Walter Mosley, Six Easy Pieces (Easy Rawlins #8)

Everything above this paragraph is superior to the fiction that follows. I actually gave Butcher's Moon 5 stars on Goodreads but it is for long-time Parker fans -- don't start there if you are unfamiliar with the series.

Beyond crime novels, this list includes quite a number of spy stories. The Slow Horses TV show is so loyal to the book that it is hard to recommend the book if you already watched the series. I doubt I'll read more of them as a friend said the series was generally loyal and he's read all or most of the books.

I'd recommend these listed books by Pavone, Ambler, MacInnes, and Fleming. Apparently there are more Kate Moore stories by Pavone, but this is the first, so you don't need to read any of these others after reading something else. That goes for James Bond because I assume you are familiar with the character.

Donald Hamilton, The Wrecking Crew (Matt Helm #2)

James Burke, Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux #7)

Joel Goldman, The Last Witness (Lou Mason #2)

Garrett Epps, The Floating Island

William Forstchen, One Second After

John Grisham, Calico Joe

Ross Macdonald, The Ferguson Affair

Robert Parker, Crimson Joy (Spencer #15)

PD James, Unnatural Causes (Adam Dalgliesh #3)

Joseph Heywood, Ice Hunter

Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint

Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw (Kinsey Millhone #15)

James Michener, Legacy

James Crumley, The Right Madness (CW Sughrue #4)

Most of the rest of the books on my list received 3 stars on Goodreads, though the last few here were unimpressive and disappointing. Grafton's books have appeared near the bottom the last two years but I'll probably plug along anyway. A couple of the books are the first in a series and I'm not sure I'll be reading more of them (Forstchen and Heywood). Many of these authors have written books that I enjoyed more than the ones I read in 2025.

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Films of 2025

2025-12-30T23:30:00.002-05:00

Attribution: Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As usual, there are numerous well-reviewed 2025 films that I did not yet see during the calendar year. Many have been released in recent days and weeks and I won't see them until 2026 -- or later. Still, this year I saw many very good to excellent films from 2025.

Long-time readers may recall that it used to take great effort to figure out which movies were released this year and which movies I saw. I used to consult various lists, box office numbers, etc. However, now that I'm using Letterboxd, I have a really good feel for the exact movies I saw this year -- and a fairly good idea of which of them were released in 2025. A few of these titles are listed with 2024 production dates, but I'm fairly confident that if they are here, they were not widely distributed in the US until 2025. This includes some that my spouse and I saw at film festivals.

FWIW, I saw a large number of 2024 films this year too and if I was writing it now, would significantly revise last year's post on the Films of 2024. Indeed, I logged 92 films this year on Letterboxd so the list below is obviously only a sliver of my viewing.

I write an annual version of this post so anyone interested an use that link to work backwards -- or simply click on the film labels below the post to see a list.

We attended festivals in Collingwood, Ontario (Blue Mountain viewings are noted with ***) and Indianapolis, Indiana (Heartland is ****) and saw five films in total at those events. We also saw a couple of other films in theaters while traveling -- on a really hot day in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and on a festival day in Indy when we could not get good seats for a different movie (** below). Mostly, these movies were streamed on our television, though a few involved library DVDs.

The first few films I discuss are excellent, but really the top 15 are all worth seeing.

Both of the top 2 films deal with immigration, which confirms that this is a globally important political issue since one is from the US and the other is from France and the immigrants are from Latin America in one and Africa in the other. Paul Thomas Anderson has made a Tarantino-style movie with previous Oscar winners in key roles and Souleymane's Story is a relatively small film with a novice actor.

Black Bag is a fun spy film that is exceptionally well done with a great cast.

One Battle After Another

Souleymane's Story ***

Black Bag

It's hard to separate the dozen films in the next group and they cover a diverse array of topics. An interesting spin on a crime story set in Ireland, a modern take on the continuing problem of nuclear armament, and a film about recovery from sexual assault top the list, but the remainder of the films offer something for everyone -- interpersonal drama, the COVID pandemic and its politics/conspiracies, a small town baseball film, a human interest story based on a true story, a UFO movie, etc. Several are subtitled foreign films.

Sinners has been getting substantial attention so you probably already know about it. I liked the film, but it was not among the very best movies I saw this year.

Aontas ***

House of Dynamite

Sorry, Baby

Ballad of Wallis Island

Holy Cow ***

Eddington **

Sinners

The Phoenician Scheme

Eephus ***

Roofman **

Bugonia

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Hello Out There ****

This final group includes films that could be worth watching, but I found them to be flawed in meaningful ways. At the top is an AI story, but there's also comedy, social commentary, fun sequels, attempted satire of billionaires, a retelling of a classic superhero story, and the final Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie. The latter was overly long and predictable, sadly, and far from the best in the franchise. Bridget Jones was a better sequel.

I was probably most disappointed in Mountainhead because it sounded like a sharp critique of economic inequality and the "billionaire boys [tech] club." Unfortunately, the writing was just so-so and I did not find it that engaging.

Companion

One of Them Days

Materialists

Friendship

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Mountainhead

Superman

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning

I will update this if I watch any new films before midnight on the 31st. I'm scheduled to be on a long flight and it is hard to predict what might be available and worth viewing.

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Life Updates

2025-11-22T11:22:00.006-05:00

This blog has not been the site of much posting for many years -- but this year I have said even less than usual. These days, I am far more likely to post about global politics on BlueSky. I post short film reviews on Letterboxd and Book reviews on Goodreads. Fellow beer drinkers that I know in some way can also connect at Untappd where I have been checking in beers since 2013!

As readers may know, I am in the midst of a full-year sabbatical. I read and reviewed Ronald Kramer's Apocalyptic Crimes: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished. You can find that review here (that's a link to the journal Peace & Change). Soon I expect to post a link to an article that is "in press" on "Evaluating the Resilience of US and Canadian Climate Policy" for American Review of Canadian Studies. I submitted page proof corrections October 30 but the journal has not updated online articles since early October. My contribution was meant to be part of a special issue on Canada-U.S. Environmental Relations and focuses on the Electric Vehicle policies that Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau pursued a few years ago.

What else?

In October, my wife and I took a short road trip to Indianapolis to see a film at the Heartland International Film Festival which was recently named a top 25 film festival in the world. I imagine we'll find our way back up there again in the future though we only managed to see one movie this year: Hello Out There! We intended to go another evening but the remaining tickets at the venues of interest were less than ideal (front row in small theaters). Next year we'll plan better. HIFF does not really have daytime screenings Monday-Friday. We saw Roofman at a mall while we awaited our film the next night. Coincidentally, both of these films featured actors from the TV series Ted Lasso.

For unfortunate health reasons, a planned October-November sabbatical visit to the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in The Netherlands had to be postponed until 2026. I'm looking forward to it and my spouse is gradually recovering from an unexpected procedure. I'll post more about the project in the future.

Meanwhile, I've been revising a conference paper on climate change politics from the Midwest Political Science conference from 2024 and working with Kurt Mills on version 2.0 of our 2020 article on America First and the Human Rights Regime.

Now anyone who follows me on BlueSky probably has a better understanding of what I've been focusing on these past few months -- lots of climate change and Trump foreign policy -- and actions that seem to threaten American democratic norms and traditions.

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No Kings

2025-10-19T18:22:00.006-04:00

My spouse and I, a neighbor, and friends from different parts of town attended the No Kings rally in Louisville in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. Basically, peaceful protesters lined Frankfort Avenue for several blocks between 3 and 4 pm -- and numerous drivers tooted their car horns in support as they drove by. There were a few Trump supporters in vehicles that went by as well, but no one provoked violence on either side as far as I know.

Based on the signs, people obviously had very different reasons for protesting. Many signs focused on Donald Trump's immigration policy, reflecting anti-ICE sentiment and support for due process for all. There were a lot of signs about the Epstein files.

I didn't carry a sign but I'm quite disturbed by the masked immigration raids and deportations (again, without due process) of individuals to places like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In Chicago recently, masked and heavily armed ICE agents allegedly broke down the doors in an apartment building while residents were sleeping and took everyone into the streets at gunpoint (including children). Dozens of citizens were zip-tied together, separated by race and ethnicity, and then interrogated. Eventually, people were bused away to determine if they were criminals. In the words of one resident, "They didn’t treat people like they were American.”

Local politicians have reacted with outrage:

“This raid wasn’t about public safety,” [Chicago] Mayor Brandon Johnson said several days later. “It was certainly not about immigration. This was about a show of authoritarianism, a forceful display of tyranny.”

I am even more concerned about the President's extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean (talk about lack of due process). This undermines the rule of law with the President effectively acting as judge, jury, and executioner. We don't even know if those killed have committed capital crimes. The President has labeled them as drug runners and thus narco-terrorists. The most recent attack has apparently killed an innocent fisherman. That's murder and the Department of Justice is not doing anything to address this. The Supreme Court may have made the President immune from crimes he commits as part of his official acts (as commander in chief, for example), but those firing the weapons are likely guilty of war crimes. The former President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is in the Hague awaiting his trial for "crimes against humanity" for similarly ordering summary executions of alleged drug criminals.

Trump is also usurping congressional power of the purse, arguably the most potent power of Congress in the American system of checks and balances. He's ended programs that were authorized (funded) explicitly by Congress (such as solar energy grants) and has lately started spending revenues that Congress has not authorized (he did this in his first term with regards to the border wall). America's founding fathers wanted Congress to be the most important branch of government. If congressional Republicans want to end these programs, they could do it legally in the budget. The House is accountable every 2 years in elections, with one-third of the Senate also vulnerable every 2 years.

Trump's tariffs are also a blatant misuse of presidential power as the so-called Commerce Clause of the US constitution explicitly grants Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." Congress did pass some laws during the Cold War granting the chief executive power to enact so-called "national security" tariffs (or embargoes), but Trump has been using tariffs to generate revenues, punish states for non-security policy reasons, and as leverage in various negotiations. That's all illegal. If the Republican Congress wants tariffs, pass a law implementing them.

I took some photos, including several of the inflatable costumed critters and one of the main corner of the protest at Bauer. There were more people surrounding the Walgreens across the street from me than there were on my side.

There was a much larger and better-attended event in downtown Louisville Saturday -- it was scheduled for 3 hours and there were speakers (as there were at other events around the US). My group of friends opted for the neighborhood choice.

President Trump responded to these protests with a despicable AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and bombing protesters (see below). CNN reports that 7 million people attended over 2700 events across the US on Saturday. Every state had a rally and many were in smaller towns -- not just cities. Kentucky is a red state of course and there were plenty of rallies in other states Trump won.

CNN notes police reports of zero arrests in either Portland or NYC.

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Resistance Strategy When the Government is Itching for Violence

2025-10-07T18:35:00.011-04:00

Last week, President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth spoke to a group of U.S. generals and admirals they had assembled from deployments all over the world. Trump gave a rambling speech, but the most troubling part repeated something he said during his 2024 campaign. The U.S. military should be in the business of fighting what he called the "enemy from within" because it is a bigger threat to America. He noted that this threat was going to be a "big thing" for those assembled. He had recently signed "an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances."

Essentially none of the brass in the audience built their careers on fighting that alleged enemy from within -- especially considering that Trump seems to be talking about his domestic political opponents though he often conflated them with ordinary criminals (who rape, shoot or beat up people). He mentioned ambiguous threats from "insurrectionists" and said they were "paid by the radical left." Read the speech, it is not very clear.

In any event, it must be weird for career military official who have fought the Taliban, ISIS, or Iraqi insurgents to hear a president claim that domestic threats are worse these days. They have homes in the U.S. They can see that America is not like war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan. Why should they believe that these domestic threats are more worrisome than North Korean or Iranian nuclear weapons, or the rise of China as a great power? It's crazy talk, frankly.

Just to be clear, various sources of crime data find that violent and property crime is lower than it has been in decades. There was a 2020-21 blip from the pandemic, but that's it.

I know a lot of international relations scholars that worry that threats are often inflated via fearmongering, but even they would be unlikely to accept Trump's ridiculous claims comparing foreign to domestic threats.

It was not just this speech that brought the issue forward, obviously. On September 25 Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 which emphasized a (selective) handful of recent cases of political violence that led to a few deaths. He labels this domestic terrorism and basically blames "the left." He includes a set of anecdotes -- just like he has done when noting a few misleading cases over the last decade when discussing alleged immigrant crime. Yes, immigrants occasionally commit violent crimes, but the data have long shown that they do this less frequently than US citizens.

Anyway, this is from that NSPM-7:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.

There is no data to support these claims. A recent think tank study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies report noted a recent uptick in left-wing political violence, but there were only a small number of total deaths this century and their data revealed that the right had been responsible for far more political violence for several previous decades. The death tally for the last decade was 112 killed by the right, 13 by the left. See Figure 3 and Table 1 if you click that link. That's 125 people total, or around a dozen per year.

As I used to note on this blog, terrorism is a rare event and domestic terror is even rarer. More people die from peanut allergies, bathroom falls, dog bites, etc. The FBI and other organizations have catalogued domestic terror incidents for many years and the CSIS finding is not unique -- political violence has been far more common from the right than from the left. It's certainly not been a serious enough problem to justify reorientation of the military to fight an "enemy from within." That last linked article notes that the Trump administration removed a recent government report with conclusions that contradict Trump's baseless claims.

It seems like Trump, Stephen Miller, and perhaps Pete Hegseth are itching for combat in American cities. Trump himself has been telling outrageous lies about Portland burning in order to justify sending in the National Guard and/or U.S. military (as a "training ground" as he said in the speech last week). This is from his speech to the military leaders:

Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don't come in, we don't need you. I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.

I visited Portland for nearly a week in mid-August and the city is not burning. It has problems with traffic and unhoused people, but there are no riots -- or even large protests like there were in summer 2020 (possibly the source of Trump's claims about Portland). I saw a handful of protesters outside a Tesla dealership. Look on social media and residents have been posting all kinds of photos demonstrating the normalcy of Portland life.

There was a huge insurrection during the final days of Trump's presidency, but he praised that January 6 action and then pardoned all the convicted criminals this year -- even if they had committed violent acts against police officers. Such hypocrisy!

My fear is that Trump et al are sending troops and National Guard members to blue cities like Portland and Chicago (after LA and DC) in hopes of provoking the kinds of civil unrest witnessed in 2020 -- sufficient to allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act and occupy those cities. Those are Trump's words, not mine.

One obvious provocation involves ICE activities in blue cities and states. It is easy to find video footage of masked ICE agents using violence to break down doors, crash through windows, push people around. There do not seem to be many arrest warrants and the media reports plenty of cases when citizens are rounded up with other immigrants. Most immigrants now in ICE detention have never been convicted of a crime.

Most of the worst stuff from ICE seems to be happening in blue cities and states. In my blue city in a red state, Louisville, the mayor agreed to a 48 hour hold on inmate immigrants. In other words, if an immigrant is arrested, then the city allows the federal government 48 hours to make a decision about deportation. Louisville is thus not a sanctuary city. But, apparently as a result of this agreement, there have been almost no raids and arrests have not ticked up as they have in other cities and states. Anecdotally, I often see Latinos in construction and lawn care, seeming to work without concerns about ICE agents.

Trump voters in Kentucky (and other red states) might ignore or dismiss the news about heavy-handed ICE practices because they don't see anything like that happening in their cities and states. We residents of red states do know what that looks like. In summer 2020, BLM and Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville definitely triggered authoritarian responses from the police and people could see the streets brimming with protesters and police with occasional violence and some vandalism.

Should red state activists increase protests in calmer areas? I'm not calling for violence -- quite the contrary -- but perhaps some sizeable ICE protests in red states would reveal more clearly that the administration is implementing a political strategy and not a public policy. How would the administration address large protests in Louisville, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Dallas, etc.?

At the same time, I think activists in blue cities and states should be very clear that they are committed to non-violence. Especially if a regime is itching for violence, opposition violence is ineffective and counterproductive, as well as dangerous. The inspiration provided by Gandhi and MLK should guide contemporary protesters. Gene Sharp assembled a huge array of non-violent political tactics. Have a look at his toolkit.

More importantly, scholarly research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan demonstrates that non-violent movements are far more likely to achieve their policy goals. They wrote a terrific book that I highly recommend, but you can look at this academic article if you want to read something shorter.

I continue to worry about Trump's fascist instincts and he has been pushing the envelope throughout the year usurping legislative power (cutting spending authorized by Congress, declaring armed conflict on drug cartels, etc.). As Dan Nexon writes, the opposition needs to be planning -- and acting

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Michigan Travel and Beer Update

2025-09-24T15:41:00.002-04:00

White Flame Brewing, Hudsonville

This post is another update to my series of entries about Michigan beer. Basically, I'm listing places we visited on vacation this July and August (2025) along with prior visits to Michigan brewpubs. This is one instance where Google Timeline information is helpful.

The vacation was fun, though imperfect. It was really hot in the south in late July -- we went to a movie in a shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon to beat the heat. We saw Eddington, which I will mention in my December movie entry -- but you can read about it now on my letterboxd page. Later during the trip, once we went upstate to Traverse City, the entire area got hit by wildfire smoke from Canada. It was disappointing and limited our outdoor activites somewhat.

In any case, regarding the brewery listings, I'm not including stops where I didn't have at least one drink -- sometimes we decide a place is not for us, or I merely shop for beer. On the way home this summer I bought some beer at Brewery Vivant in Grand Rapids.

Given that Michigan has over 400 breweries, my personal list includes only about 6% of the total! I could move to Michigan and have a difficult time sampling all of them.

2025 (1 new; 25 total) (new ones in bold)

Big Lake Brewing, Holland

White Flame Brewing, Hudsonville

Loco Boys Brewing, Traverse City

Jolly Pumpkin Brewing, Traverse City

Rare Bird Brewpub, Traverse City

Founders Brewing, Grand Rapids

We dined at all these spots and had the best meals in Traverse City establishments and at Founders. I doubt we would return to White Flame.

Most of the other dining spots we hit were also beer friendly: Hops at 84 East in Holland, Hopcat Holland, 7 Monks TC, etc.

2024 (5 new; 24 total)

Latitude 42°, Kalamazoo (April trip)

Big Lake Brewing, Holland

Brass Ring Brewing, Grand Rapids

Two Guys Brewing, Grand Rapids

Short's Brewing, Elk Rapids location

Filling Station Brewing, Traverse City

Workshop Brewing, Traverse City

Infinity Brewing, Traverse City (September)

Jolly Pumpkin Brewing, Traverse City (September)

Loco Boys Brewing, Traverse City (September)

We dined at all of these except Short's, where I mainly wanted to try the new Payne Pils. Latitude 42 and Brass Ring had the best food though we liked our meals at Big Lake and Workshop. The wait and service at Filling Station had us questioning our choice.

Incidentally, we've now also visited beer friendly HopCat locations in Grand Rapids (2 different locations), Ann Arbor, Detroit, Holland, Kalamazoo, and Louisville (sadly now closed permanently).

October Update: The food was OK to good at both Infinity and Jolly Pumpkin, but Loco Boys was closer to very good/exceptional. They serve Mexican food!

2023 (1 new; 19 total)

Griffin Claw, Rochester Hills near Detroit

Brewery Vivant, Grand Rapids

Founders, Grand Rapids

Brewery Vivant may have the best brewpub food we've found in Michigan.

2022 (4 new; 18 total)

Odd Side Ales, Grand Haven

Unruly Brewing, Muskegon

Rare Bird Brewing, Traverse City

Cherry Republic Brewing Company & Public House, Glen Arbor

Founders, Grand Rapids

We dined at all of those places, though at Odd Side we had to order takeout from a nearby restaurant. They don't have food.

2021 (2 new; 14 total)

Big Lake Brewing, Holland

Guardian Brewing, Saugatuck (closed/moved to Indiana)

Brewery Vivant, Grand Rapids

We also dined at all of these.

2019 (2 new; 12 total)

New Holland Brewing, Holland

Big Lake Brewing, Holland

Clam Lake Beer Company, Cadillac (2)

Filling Station, Traverse City

Workshop Brewing, Traverse City

MiddleCoast Brewing, Traverse City (was called Monkey Fist at the time)

We did not dine at Big Lake or MiddleCoast, but both have food (I think).

2018 (2 new; 10 total)

Workshop Brewing, Traverse City

Clam Lake Beer Company, Cadillac

Filling Station, Traverse City

We dined at these.

2017

I was on antibiotics that trip and did not visit any brewpubs and avoided alcohol.

2016 (2 new; 8 total)

Saugatuck Brewing, Saugatuck

Filling Station, Traverse City

2015 (2 new ones, 6 total)

Short's Brewing, Bellaire

Rare Bird, Traverse City

We dined at these.

Older trips: (at least 4 visited, from memory)

New Holland Brewing, Holland

Mackinaw Brewing, Traverse City

North Peak, Traverse City

Jolly Pumpkin, Traverse City

We did not dine at Jolly Pumpkin, but they have food -- and various other locations across the state.

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Wildfire Season

2025-07-20T18:12:00.003-04:00

There's a long introduction explaining the origins of the song...by singer Jobi Riccio.

Of course one problem is that Wildfire Season is now 365 days in some places.

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Baseball Stadium additions

2025-07-12T17:35:00.009-04:00

Globe Life Field, Texas versus Seattle Friday July

I've seen professional baseball in dozens of ballparks -- many of them no longer open or even standing. My Dad and Mom took me to my first major league game in the early 1970s (I have not made an effort to pinpoint the game and my ticket stub collection is incomplete). It was in the old Municipal Stadium in KC so the game was probably in 1971 or 1972. Growing up in Kansas, this helped cement my lifelong fandom of the Kansas City Royals. In my youth, the team was terrific and George Brett was a huge star and eventual Hall of Famer. I attended his induction ceremony in Cooperstown. During college at Kansas, I occasionally made it to the park then known as Royals Stadium (now Kauffman, after the original owner).

From 1984-1987 I lived within easy driving distance of old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore and attended many games while in graduate school in College Park. With friends, I also road-tripped to Philly, Boston, and New York -- seeing the Mets at Shea. I attended Yankee Stadium during the Cooperstown weekend. Two buddies from grad school also went with me to spring training 1987 and we saw 8 baseball games in 7 days, but these were all exhibitions in minor league parks or training facilities.

While a doctoral fellow at Stanford I attended several A's games in the Colliseum and one Giants game in Candlestick. The next 3 years I lived in Chicago and went to numerous White Sox games at old Comiskey and a few Cubs games at Wrigley. I lived walking distance to the latter, but was an AL fan. From Chicago I road tripped to Milwaukee a couple of times to see the Brewers.

On my honeymoon, my wife and I attended a Mariners game in the Kingdome. Before you say that is not very romantic, keep in mind that this was during the second week of that trip. On our 10th wedding anniversary, we went to Montreal for an Expos game at the Big O.

Since moving to Louisville in 1991, I've seen the Reds in Cincy a number of times (2 different parks!) and have trekked to St. Louis to see the Cardinals (2 parks). During trips to visit friends and family, I've seen the Nationals in DC (2 parks). On vacations over the years, I've managed to attend games in Detroit (2 parks), Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland (2 parks). On conference travel, I saw the Braves in Atlanta. Travel has also taken me back to Seattle and Chicago so I've seen new parks in those cities too.

Earlier this month, I attended the SABR National Convention and added Texas's Globe Life Field to my list of parks (pictured above). Despite living in Waco for an academic year, and having a sister in Houston for many years, I never attended a Texas (or Houston) home game before. In any case, the conference was fun and I had a chance to catch up with some old friends both at the conference and in the DFW area. My favorite panels involved a mix of former players, baseball journalists, and a former union lawyer-executive (Don Fehr). The players on these panels included Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins, former Expos pitcher Steve Rogers, and old knuckleballer Dodger-Ranger Charlie Hough.

Adding Texas means that I've now seen 20 major league franchises in their home parks in 21 cities (Expos became Nationals). In August, I plan to make my first visit to Dodger Stadium to see LA versus San Diego.

I'm not even going to attempt to list all the minor league parks I've visited over the years, but I've often blogged about those experiences. This summer I added Rochester where I attended a game on Memorial Day. I've often organized minor league trips to see specific top-rated prospects who became future stars -- Bobby Witt was in Omaha when that team played Columbus in Ohio, I saw Vlad Guerrero Jr. (and Bo Bichette) in A ball in Lansing, Michigan, and Pete Crow-Armstrong in South Bend. The visiting team in Rochester this summer, Guardians affiliate the Columbus Clippers, featured Chase DeLauter. He homered. Remember that name even if he's not guaranteed to be a future all-star.

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Blue Mountain Film Festival 2025

2025-06-08T21:02:00.001-04:00

From May 29 to June 1, my spouse and I attended the Blue Mountain Film Festival near Collingwood, Ontario. We went in 2024 as well. If you are interested, this link navigates to a list of all of the films.

I post film reviews to Letterboxd, but not everyone is on that platform. Here are my brief (slighted edited) reviews of the four films we saw:

Thursday: Holy Cow (2024) (French)

This is a story about a young man known for his drinking and fighting who is forced to grow up when misfortune strikes his family. He begins a romance and learns an artisanal craft. It's worth a watch.

Friday: Aontas (2025) (Irish)

It's a crime thriller that provides commentary about the importance of community, especially given the contemporary political economy. The story is told almost exclusively backwards, beginning with a scene from nearly the end of the movie and working back bit by bit. It manages to provide plenty of suspense despite this method.

Saturday: Eephus (2024) (US)

I've seen a *lot* of baseball movies and this fun flick is in the upper third (approximately). There are some nods to prior films even as this movie focuses on a seemingly meaningless adult game featuring Dads, very pudgy catchers, old outfielders, and others with modest talent. They love the game and want to finish their late October matchup even though the sunshine disappears, the umpires leave (but baseball has no clock!), and the supply of balls runs short. Bill "Spaceman" Lee has a cameo inning pitching in the game. The conceit is that the field is being destroyed to make way for construction of a new school.

Sunday: Souleymane's Story (2024) (French)

This is an exceptional film. The novice lead is terrific playing a version of himself -- a recent immigrant from Guinea seeking asylum. His hard life in Paris reflected on the screen is sometimes tough to watch and it reminds the viewer of the horror of the nationalist anti-immigrant fervor infecting the US and other nations in the current political moment.

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A different kind of car song

2025-05-27T22:21:00.002-04:00

There are lots of songs about cars and driving, but most of them are not political. Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts have produced a cut called "Lets Roll Again" that is unlike other car songs. This is the Official Music Video. Enjoy!

It sounds a bit like "This Land is Your Land."

Trump Digs Coal

2025-04-10T11:14:00.005-04:00

Donald Trump campaigned as a coal-friendly presidential candidate and his administration is trying to make good on his promises. From Politico two days ago:

Trump signed four executive orders designed to eliminate what he sees as obstacles to ramping up coal energy production in the United States, including by opening up public lands for coal leasing. He is also pushing for the fuel to be used to power the artificial intelligence data centers that are expected to be a major contributor to skyrocketing electricity demand in the coming years.

One order would also instruct Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who chairs the president’s Energy Dominance Council, to designate coal as a “mineral,” which would help boost production under Trump’s previous executive order aimed at rapidly approving permits for domestic mineral production. It also directs Interior and other relevant agencies to lift barriers from mining the resource to boost production, according to a fact sheet.

I teach a course on the politics of climate change and all of my students can tell you that this is a very bad idea. Coal is by far the worst of the fossil fuels that cause climate change as it burns much less efficiently than natural gas and oil. As the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) keeps saying, climate change poses a " grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet." The IPCC has essentially issued a "code red for humanity."

Beyond its carbon intensity, coal is also "dirty" in the classic sense as it emits sulfur oxides and particulate pollution that is very bad for lungs. This estimate from a recent study by a team of scholars from George Mason University, the Harvard School of Public Health, and University of Texas at Austin is on the NIH website, but given the political climate could be vulnerable to a scrub:

The team estimated that between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths would not have occurred in the absence of emission from the coal power plants.

That's merely in the US. Another study from University College London and Harvard found that "more than 8 million people around the globe die each year as a result of breathing in air containing particles from burning fuels like coal, petrol and diesel."

Coal is also bad for miners and DOGE has set about killing programs and firing people that work on black lung and mine safety. Trump is also famously anti-union and anti-worker.

In any case, the only way coal can compete in many markets is via subsidy as inexpensive natural gas has long been replacing coal in electricity generation. There was even a big drop in coal's share while Trump was president 2017-2020, but that just continued a long-term trend:

My students can also tell you that both solar and wind power are both now cheaper than coal and other fossil fuels around the world. This chart is from Popular Science:

Trump obviously digs coal, but his policies seem to be designed to make Mister Peabody wealthier, damn the consequences for the coal miner's daughter, her family, and all the rest of us.

As the Weaver's asked decades ago, which side are you on?

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2025 Oscars

2025-03-02T18:45:00.077-05:00

As I do annually, this post reviews Academy Award nominees in major categories and provides my rankings within them. I am not predicting winners and only rank the films I have seen. This year, I have not seen very many of the movies, so much more than normal I will be updating this post and noting the edits with yellow highlights.

You can find my post about last year's Oscars here and work backward if you want.

Best Picture

Conclave

The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown

Anora

Emilia Pérez

Dune: Part Two

The Substance

I really liked Conclave even though I was not really expecting much. It features great acting performances and an intriguing storyline.

A Complete Unknown is an interesting and generally well-done biopic focusing on just a few years of Bob Dylan's life -- his period as a NY folk musician. There are a lot of great songs.

Anora is an interesting character study, but it felt like I was watching a preventable catastrophe. Emilia Pérez is a unique film. Did we need it?

Dune 2 has a complicated storyline and the acting is fine, but it is overly long and more of a technical achievement than anything else. Green Borders was a better film last year and I'm sure there were many other more deserving candidates for an Oscar nomination.

There were many non-Oscar nominated movies that I liked much better than The Substance. Indeed, in the same genre, I thought A Different Man was better.

Updates: The Brutalist is very good, but not especially entertaining. Conclave managed to be very good and entertaining. The nominations for Emilia Pérez , Dune 2, and The Substance suggest that this was a weak year for top films.

I’m Still Here

Nickel Boys

Wicked

Directing

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

James Mangold, A Complete Unknown

Sean Baker, Anora

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

~~I need to see more of the top films.~~ I never entirely know how to evaluate this category.

Actor in a Leading Role

Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

Ralph Fiennes, Conclave

Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown

Fiennes does a great job, though it is probably not the best performance of his career. That Nazi he played for Spielberg is difficult to shake all these years later.

I saw Chalamet in Dune 2 and Stan in A Different Man so I have a feel for their work. Both are quite talented but this year I'd go for Fiennes among the 3 of them. Update: Chalamet was great in A Complete Unknown. And Stan was excellent in The Apprentice. It's a tossup.

Update 2: Brody was really good too.

Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

Actress in a Leading Role

Mikey Madison, Anora

Demi Moore, The Substance

Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez

Madison committed to her role in Anora. She was very good, but it's an odd film.

Moore's performance was perhaps the best aspect of The Substance, but that was not enough to save the film for me. Gascón's performance was fine, but I'm not sure it was Oscar-nomination material even if she was the title character.

Cynthia Erivo, Wicked

Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here

Actor in a Supporting Role

Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Guy Pearce, The Brutalist

Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown

Yura Borisov, Anora

I watched A Real Pain instead of the Oscars. It was a very good performance, but grating. Norton was also excellent and could have won. Borisov was understated and also excellent.

In my view, Strong was robbed of the award, though he probably should have been nominated for Best Actor. He had a lot of screen time. Pearce was also excellent.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown

Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

Felicity Jones, The Brutalist

Saldaña gives an excellent performance and I can see how she won. She even sings and dances, of course.

Barbaro was good, but Elle Fanning might have been better. Her face said everything when she watched Dylan and Baez singing duets.

I don't believe Rossellini will win as this is a surprisingly small part. She is more seen than heard, perhaps predictably in a film about the selection of a new Pope.

Ariana Grande, Wicked

Animated Feature Film

Flow

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Wild Robot

This is unusual. In many years I don't see any of the animated features prior to the Oscars -- and may never see them. This year, I caught one because my wife wanted to see it (she usually has almost no interest in animation) and another because I teach climate change. A third was on a streaming service I'm accessing right now.

I really enjoyed Flow though I freely admit that the dog was my favorite character in a film mostly about the journey of a cat. The flooding and lack of people (and dialogue) makes this seem like a tale about climate change from the point of view of the natural world.

W&G was fine, but not spectacular. The Wild Robot was too much of a kid movie for my tastes.

Inside Out 2

Memoir of a Snail

Documentary Feature Film

Black Box Diaries

No Other Land

Porcelain War

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Sugarcane

International Feature Film

Flow

Emilia Pérez

Flow was a very good film, but I suspect there are stronger contenders for the award. It's amazing to me that Green Borders is not on this list -- apparently a decision marred by government pressure.

Maybe Emilia Pérez is a better movie, but I liked Flow -- but split Emilia Pérez into 2 nights because I really don't like musicals very much.

I’m Still Here

The Girl With the Needle

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

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Best Films of 2024

2025-02-04T18:28:00.042-05:00

The graphic below identifies the top 25 films from 2024 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing the list from the same website as I used last year. The methodology for compilation is ostensibly the same. Here's the detail from last year:

Films are sorted by the percentage of lists they are included on.* This is typically the same as sorting by number of lists included, but can vary when films make lists across multiple years. For example, if one film makes 10 lists in a year with 100 lists available, it’s ranking will be higher than a film that makes 15 lists when 200 lists are available. The times a film appears at the top of a list is used as a tie-breaker.

*punctuation errors corrected

Basically, this is an annual best films comment that I'm posting for 2024. This is the post about the best films of 2023. Below this graphic, you'll find my rankings of these films (by tiers) with a list of the ones I still need to see. As I watch them over time, I'll edit the post but note the changes with yellow highlighting.

This "best of" comment is distinct from both the annual post on "films of 2024," which is my end-of-year musing about all the films I saw in a calendar year, and my annual Oscar post, which concerns that year's Academy Award nominees.

Top-tier films. These are very serious Oscar contenders:

TBD.

Conclave

The Brutalist

Anora

I did not have particularly high expectations, but Conclave is excellent film-making. A thriller about selecting a new Pope!

Anora was very well made, but I didn't think it was an all-time great or anything.

Second-tier films. These are very good and could garner Oscar support:

A Different Man

A Real Pain

Challengers

Dune: Part Two

Janet Planet

Juror #2

Civil War

Third-tier films. These are entertaining but flawed films:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Love Lies Bleeding

The Wild Robot

I Saw the TV Glow

The Substance

Fourth-tier films. I found these to be disappointing and do not recommend (if necessary, could remain blank):

TBD

Films yet to see (20 of 25 as of today):

Nickel Boys

All We Imagine as Light

Wicked Part One

Sing Sing

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Hard Truths

The Beast

Nosferatu

Evil Does Not Exist

No Other Land

Glancing through the rest of the top 100, I've seen the following films already and rank them roughly in this order:

Best of the rest

Green Border (#45) (I'd put this in the first tier above)

A Complete Unknown (#27)

His Three Daughters (37) This could have been an Oscar contender in acting categories.

Between the Temples (42)

Thelma (61)

September 5 (40)

Rebel Ridge (50)

Kneecap (60)

I liked most of these films more than all of the third-tier above.

These were all about the same

Saturday Night (73)

Twisters (86)

Will & Harper (96)

Emilia Pérez (33)

Problemista (82)

Hit Man (31)

Flow (30)

My Old Ass (49)

Less enjoyable

Kinds of Kindness (63)

The Fall Guy (71)

Trap (44)

Nearly all of these films would be in my second or third tier above.

Note that the list numbers change slightly over time as more "best of" lists are added. That explains any discrepancy in ratings noted.

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Books of 2024

2024-12-31T16:59:00.003-05:00

James by Percival Everett

Underground Empire by Farrell & Newman

[Oops, an unfinished version of this post went online December 30 just before midnight.]

This is my annual post listing and briefly discussing books I read in the most recent year. It seems kind of hard to believe, but I have produced such a post every year since 2005. This is a link to the 2023 list if blog readers want to work backwards. You will find that the books are loosely ranked within categories.

Also, I posted short reviews of almost all of these books at Goodreads.

Non-Fiction

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire

Laura Neack, National, International, and Human Security

Michael Doyle, The Cold Peace

Most of the non-fiction I read this year was related to baseball (see below), but I did manage to complete a few other books. The Neack volume was the text in my spring 2024 Security Studies course and it worked very well. I would use it again, though I'm on sabbatical 2025-26 and don't teach Security in 2024-25. Doyle's book is interesting and offers some thoughtful comparison chapters thinking about autocracy today (especially in China and Russia) versus Mussolini's fascism and Japan's imperial period before World War II. As an international relations liberal, Doyle is concerned about how the domestic characteristics of states shapes their foreign policy behavior. He offers some insights about US competition with China and Russia and thinks about how to avoid disastrous outcomes that are plausible in a new Cold War.

The outstanding non-fiction book of the year for me was Farrell and Newman's Underground Empire. They make a convincing case that the US has exploited widely unknown economic and technical advantages for its own ends. Basically, they describe centralized chokepoints relating to the internet, banking, microchips, etc. The list of examples when the US exploited its leverage includes the nuclear deal with Iran and the Trump administration's sanctioning of an ICC prosecutor and another official. With Trump returning to power, I would urge everyone to think seriously about this almost hidden ("underground") but potent US power that seems quite vulnerable to abuse. The authors dream about using the tool to stop climate change or corruption, but I'm skeptical that those will be priority items on the US agenda 2025-2028.

Baseball non-fiction

Roger Angell, A Pitcher’s Story

Lucas Mann, Class A

Tyler Kepner, K: A History of the Game in Ten Pitchers

John Sickels, Bob Feller

Keith Law, The Inside Game

Barry Svrluga, The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season

Ron Backer, Baseball Goes to the Movies

Denny Matthews with Matt Fulks, Tales From the Royals

Yes, I read quite a number of baseball books this year and the list above does not even include the annual Baseball Prospectus that I consumed as well. Angell's book is about David Cone who struggled during the 2000 season even as his NY Yankees won another World Series. It's good and I'm not just saying that because Cone was drafted by the KC Royals as a local athlete who later returned to the team and excelled.

I much enjoyed the books by Mann, Kepner, and Sickels and would recommend all of them. Mann writes about professional baseball in small town Iowa and it speaks to many political issues too -- working conditions for labor, immigrant labor, globalization, the consequences of corn subsidies, etc.

Since I read Angell at the beginning of the year and the Sickels bio of Bob Feller at the end, I essentially bookended my reading year with 2 interesting stories about very talented pitchers. Feller pitched in the 1930s, when he was a teenage sensation and young star player, then lost multiple years to his voluntary service in WW II, and returned as one of the best pitchers in the game before his fastball lost its heat. He'd probably be very famous if his career had not been interrupted.

The Kepner book is about pitching too, focusing on 10 different kinds of pitches used by athletes in the highest level of the professional game.

I'm a big admirer of Keith Law's work but I did not learn that much from this book. Most likely, this is because I've previously already learned a great deal about the game from Law and other similar analysts.

The Backer book is OK though I disagreed with the author about the quality of many movies he discusses. The Matthews/Fulks book is really only for KC baseball fans and even then is not great. Too many stories are undeveloped or even untold.

Literature and Genre Fiction

Percival Everett, James

Matt Haig, The Humans

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

The best fiction I read this year is appearing on many "best of" lists -- James, by Percival Everett. I don't often read new books, but I'm glad I read this one as it is outstanding. You probably already know that is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway male slave that helps Huck. I really liked the satirical film American Fiction last year, which was based on another of Everett's novels.

Haig's book made me laugh out loud and Coetzee's novel provided valuable insights about colonialism. Both are fairly quick reads. The Portis book is also good and worth reading, though it is a bit dated in parts. If you look at the Goodreads page for Witches of Eastwick, you'll find many reviewers who consider this an offensive book by a misogynist. I honestly do not think it is that bad and feminist author Margaret Atwood wrote a glowing review in the NY Times decades ago. Would she still like it?

I was a bit disappointed in the Whitehead zombie book because I have had far better experiences with some of his other novels. Mailer was worth reading as history, but is obviously dated. There are other flaws too. It had been a few years since I read a book by DeLillo and this post-9/11 work is not one of his stronger novels, unfortunately.

Genre Fiction

I.S. Berry, The Peacock and the Sparrow

Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier

Philip Kerr, The One From the Other

Richard Dean Rosen, Saturday Night Dead

Donald E. Westlake, ,Plunder Squad (as Richard Stark)

David Goodis, The Burglar

Duane Swierczynski, Fun & Games

Donald E. Westlake, Don’t Ask

PD James, Cover Her Face

Lawrence Block, Hit Man

The above books are a cut above the ones listed below. The I.S. Berry spy novel is really good and I urge people to read it. I had read a favorable piece about the author in the Washington Post and am glad that I followed up. It won many awards, including an Edgar, and appeared on many "best of" lists in 2023.

Many of these books are parts of series that I am reading. The Atkinson book is an entertaining entry in the Jackson Brodie series, though he's arguably not the most interesting character in the story. Kerr's Bernie Gunther has survived WW II and the Nazis, but still finds plenty of corruption and crime. Rosen's former major league baseball player-turned-detective Harvey Blissberg starts the story with a vague baseball connection, but this is really about a murder involving a TV show similar to Saturday Night Live. The title is thus a play on words.

Unsurprisingly, since I do virtually every year, I read the next books in sequence in the Parker and Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake (he wrote Parker books as Richard Stark) and these examples were entertaining. I'm having trouble finding the next Parker book but hope to read it soon.

I had never read the first PD James book featuring Adam Dalgliesh, but now I have. It was fine, but not outstanding. Obviously I am reading that series out of order, but I am trying to correct that error. I didn't mean to start a new series by Block since I have not finished his Matthew Scudder books, but the work was on my shelf and seemed interesting. It is though the chapters seem more like short stories. Some apparently were originally published that way in magazines.

The books by Ambler, Goodis, and Swierczynski are standalone books worth reading. You will find crime and/or intrigue. Or both.

Peter Schilling, The End of Baseball

Agatha Christie, ABC Murders

Jason Matthews, Kremlin’s Candidate

Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine

Robert Parker, Pale Kings & Princes

Chuck Palahnuik, Choke

Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

Ross Macdonald, Trouble Follows Me

Sue Grafton, N is for Noose

Derek Raymond, The Devil’s Home on Leave

I'm not going to say much about the remainder. Most I gave 3 stars on Goodreads, so they are not terrible, but they all lack something. The bottom 2 books here were especially disappointing as I have enjoyed a number of Grafton's earlier books in the Kinsey Milhone detective series and had been recommended Raymond's work.

As you can see, there are some mediocre efforts here in series involving Christie's Hercule Poirot, Paretsky's VI Warshawski, Parker's Spencer, and Fleming's James Bond.

I wanted to like the Schilling book, and enjoyed much of it, but in the end I felt it needed both tighter editing and fewer major characters.

The Red Sparrow series ended in a somewhat disappointing way as far as I'm concerned though I enjoyed the first book quite a bit more and probably liked Kremlin's Candidate more than book #2 Palace of Treason.

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Films of 2024

2024-12-30T18:50:00.022-05:00

Attribution: AlexiusHoratius, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There are a large number of 2024 movies I intend to watch and some of the very best ones will be appearing on screens in front of me in the coming weeks of the new year. I say screens because this year I actually saw more than a handful of films in the theater -- for the first time since December 2019 (or maybe early 2020, I don't recall precisely).

As for the films I saw, readers can find my brief reviews and ratings at Letterboxd. On that site, I have been religiously logging all the films I've seen, not merely those released in 2024. It appears I watched 97 films this year; thus, the list of new films below reflects only a small portion of my total movie viewing. It does include a few foreign films that were technically released in 2023 but were not widely distributed in the USA until this year.

As longtime readers know, this is an annual list and here is a link to last year's post if you want to work backwards through my viewing experiences.

Films from this first set of films will probably receive award nominations, or at least deserve strong consideration. Two of them received recognition last year.

Green Border **

Zone of Interest **

Thelma *

The Teacher's Lounge **

Kneecap

Lee *

If you are a film buff, you probably already know about the Oscar nominations for two of the foreign films from 2023 -- Zone of Interest won an Oscar and was nominated for another; The Teacher's Lounge was also nominated. They are powerful and important films with very different subjects (Nazi death camps and elementary school theft). Green Border is an exceptional foreign film about Syrian refugees that opened in Poland in 2023 but was not available until mid-year 2024 in the US. Though eligible last year, it was not nominated for an Oscar after facing domestic political backlash.

Thelma is quite a different film, a fairly lightweight comedy action movie. We saw it on a big screen at the State Theater in Traverse City, as part of the reimagined TC Film Festival. Now, through much of the year, Tuesdays are reserved for festival films. Our show featured a Zoom discussion with the director-filmmaker Josh Margolin after the screening, featuring Q&A by Michael Moore. That may have influenced my rating, but it is a very entertaining movie.

Kneecap is about Irish rappers...and British colonialism, so be sure to check it out too. Lee, starring Kate Winslet, is an excellent biopic about a pathbreaking female photo journalist. Its release was delayed by the Hollywood acting/writing strikes of 2023. We saw this at the State Theater in Traverse City (home of the revamped TC Film Festival mentioned above) during my fall break in late September.

Next, these films were quite good and might receive award consideration. More likely, they will be remembered as very solid movies:

Girls Will Be Girls *

Civil War
The Missile *

Between the Temples

Will & Harper

June

Rebel Ridge

The Teacher Who Promised the Sea * & **

Carry-On

The three films with asterisks are foreign films that my spouse and I saw at the Blue Mountain Film Festival in late spring in Canada. There are some terrific acting performances in these movies and all address important topics. Green Border from the above list was also at the festival but we didn't attend, partly because it is very long.

Readers may be more familiar with two movies I saw on Max and Netflix this summer, Civil War and Rebel Ridge. They are entertaining and definitely worth seeing. Both have been picking up some votes (#32 and #55 currently) on critics' "Best of 2024" lists. We watched Civil War in the same fall break weekend that we saw Lee and both feature female photojournalists during wartime.

Between the Temples (#40) is funny thanks to a strong cast with good material. Through no fault of his own, I'm sure, Jason Schwartzman sometimes rubs me the wrong way. He's watchable here.

Will & Harper (#97T) has received a lot of press and it is a thoughtful and entertaining film. June is a documentary about June Carter Cash. I like her music and appreciated the doc.

Carry-On is an action movie on Netflix with a Christmas setting. Will it be the Die Hard of the 2020s (and beyond)? There's a reasonable chance of that. The hero isn't as funny as Bruce Willis sometimes was in the earlier film (iirc).

Finally, these films in the last set were less interesting to me though generally watchable and entertaining in one way or another:

Hit Man

A Quiet Place Day One

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Problemista

Love Lies Bleeding

Trap

This list actually includes several films that are appearing on critic "best of" lists. Love Lies Bleeding is currently standing at #24 on that list, making it arguably the best film I saw this year. While I think I know what it was trying to say, too much of it didn't really click with me. Likewise, my spouse and I didn't find Hit Man or Trap (#32 and #46) to be all that great. They were too formulaic and predictable, even when they were going for novelty, if that makes any sense.

In contrast, we had very low expectations for the Beetlejuice sequel and we kind of liked it. We rewatched the old one in preparation too. Problemista (#88) was both quirky and fun (and was also delayed by the Hollywood labor strife). The Quiet Place prequel was OK but it didn't have that much to offer beyond what the prior films in the series did.

I'm obviously missing a large number of highly rated films from 2024 and plan to see them through 2025 (and beyond). I used to provide a list (and I still might) of top-rated films that I have not yet seen, but I didn't do it the last couple of years and no one complained.

NOTES:

* I saw these movies in theaters!

** Foreign releases from 2023 not really distributed in the US until 2024.

I will update this if I watched any new films before midnight on the 31st.

I also saw "Blood of Angels" in a theater, a film made by local artists that I know personally.

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Vote No on Trump

2024-11-01T15:15:00.012-04:00

Donald Trump notoriously refused to have a second debate against Kamala Harris -- perhaps because polls and critics overwhelmingly thought he lost the September debate. His verbal mistakes and ridiculous claims during that performance have given way to physical stumbles this week. The guy is 78 years old and his supporters spent months attacking the apparent decline of an aging opponent earlier this year. The electorate obviously absorbed that and Joe Biden was supplanted as the Democratic nominee as a result of the fear of a geriatric president. I don't think Trump wanted America to see another contest highlighting the stark contrast between him and the far more vigorous and quick 60 year old Harris.

However, anyone can watch video of Trump campaigning in 2016 and it is quite evident that he is a shadow of his former self. His messages are less coherent, he rambles, and he misspeaks with great regularity. Those are links to articles, but just search YouTube for old footage of him from 2015 until 2020.

Through 2020, America became increasingly unimpressed with Trump and his daily COVID TV show. Many analysts say that the 2020 election was a referendum on Trump's handling of the pandemic -- and he lost. Biden won by 7 million votes nationally.

In any case, despite the lack of a second debate to highlight the contrasts between the candidates, there is still time for the Harris campaign to emphasize the stark differences in their views of America. I intend to make another post highlighting why Harris is the far superior candidate -- not only in temperament, but also because of her pro-choice stance, climate change policy, the importance of Supreme Court nominations, her plans to restore higher and fairer tax rates on the richest Americans, the survival of the Affordable Care Act, etc. Trump is far worse on all those points.

In this post I'm going to pick some choice Trump remarks that highlight some horrific stances the former President has taken regarding his plans for those opposed to his ideas and policies.

Before I begin, however, I would note that this clip from the 2016 campaign would have been disqualifying for someone seeking to be a junior high school assistant principal let alone President of the United States. I'm not sure new young voters are familiar with it:

Indeed, I've seen credible claims that the youngest voters don't really know anything about Trump's notorious Access Hollywood video footage. This also seemed disqualifying at the time -- and many Republicans said so:

Those words, which Trump and his followers dismissed as "locker room talk," were seemingly very accurate as reflected in Trump's civil defamation trial where a jury found that the former playboy committed "sexual abuse" and even "rape" against a female journalist -- and then denied it.

I have not even mentioned the 34 felony convictions for business fraud that were again returned after a jury trial. Average Americans, not partisan competitors, heard the evidence presented by prosecutors in NY and decided he filed fraudulent documents concerning his under-the-table payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Basically, instead of using personal funds to buy her silence, which might have been legal, Trump used business funds and recorded that the payments were for legal services. All of this was in an attempt to hide the facts of his tryst from a voting public in 2016. In other circumstances we'd call that "hush money."

As I've blogged previously, some of my greatest concerns about Donald Trump center on the fact that the former President regularly makes the kinds of claims and threats that people associate with dictators and tyrants -- he fantasizes about not relinquishing power (and sought to remain in power after losing an election), describes his political opponents as "vermin" or enemies of the people, and threatens to turn the powerful US military against those enemies.

Just this week, Trump discussed having Republican Liz Cheney, who co-chaired the January 6 investigation in Congress, face a firing squad for her political opinions.

This is on top of Trump expressing open admiration for non-democratic rule in March 2018 -- and the press reported that the Republican donors in attendance applauded!

Chinese President Xi Jinping recently consolidated power. Trump told the gathering: “He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great.” Trump added, “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.”

I know that the Trump campaign has been trying to play up Joe Biden's recent slip of the tongue inadvertently calling Trump supporters "garbage," but Biden is not the candidate, he clarified his remark to make clear he was talking about specific speakers at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, AND Trump himself makes similar comments all the time. For example, on Veterans Day in November 2023, Trump called his political opponents "vermin" and an "enemy within" that his administration would persecute:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

It is clear from the speech context that Trump was not talking about some small slice of people who actually identify as communists or Marxists (though a new round of McCarthyism would be horrible). He imagined that this collective group is more dangerous than China or Russia. It's a lot of people.

Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”

Trump has called Kamala Harris supporters garbage and scum. Just about a week ago, he called the US the "garbage can for the world."

While words matter and these words are especially concerning, all voters should be frightened about how a new Trump presidency would address the so-called vermin/scum/garbage enemy within. Trump himself claims his response would involve setting the National Guard and military on these foes. Consider his words from an interview on Fox in mid-October 2024:

"I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said. He added: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

Now circle back to that quote about Cheney above -- and the many documented times Trump has encouraged political violence. Former top national security and political aids who worked for Trump have warned that he is a dangerous wannabe fascist who should not be anywhere near the presidency again. I believe them.

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The F Word

2024-10-24T16:53:00.047-04:00

Nope, not that one. I mean fascism. Not all readers may know what that term means or implies, historically. Most have a vague idea that the term is associated with Hitler (and maybe Mussolini), but don't realize that the word isn't merely a label for a type of politics that may seem obscure to them. It's a label for a particularly dangerous type of authoritarian politics that ends democracy.

Political scientists often point to numerous examples where fascists and fascist-adjacent authoritarians came to power VIA ELECTIONS and then do everything in their power to assure that their political opponents (along with academics, journalist, artists, and other voices of dissent) are silenced, thrown in prison, and even killed. They do not relinquish power and subsequent elections are effectively "rigged" by the fact that opposition has been illegally crushed.

It's been shocking to me for some time that the European Union, a democratic institution, has not done something dramatic about Victor Orban's Hungary. His rise to power -- and many years in office -- exactly reflect this danger. Many Americans on the right are openly infatuated with this pathway and celebrate Orban as if he were someone to emulate.

In any case, it is important to realize that the road to fascism is the road to the end of democracy, even if a democratic election lies along the pathway. The presence of a prominent (and successful) fascist in American politics poses great potential dangers.

For those wanting more detail, the Council on Foreign Relations provides a helpful definition of fascism:

Many experts agree that fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of the nation over the individual. This model of government stands in contrast to liberal democracies that support individual rights, competitive elections, and political dissent.

In many ways, fascist regimes are revolutionary in nature. They advocate for the overthrow of existing systems of government and the persecution of political enemies. However, such regimes are also highly conservative in their championing of traditional values.

And although fascist leaders typically claim to support the everyman, in reality, their regimes often align with powerful business interests.

Why would John F. Kelly, Donald Trump's longest-serving Chief of Staff, a former four star general in the US Marines, call Trump a fascist?

Shall we go through the definition?

First, does Trump lead "a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of the nation over the individual"?

Trump is a self-described nationalist and ran as a populist, claiming to support the little guy who elites had trampled in the past. He claims to lead a very popular mass political movement. Trump lied and said he won the 2016 election in a "landslide" and repeated the lie after the election of 2020.

The movement's slogan is literally "Make America Great Again" (MAGA), which is not the same as the liberal democratic objective to prioritize individual rights and dissent. I refer to liberal democracy here as a form of limited government -- the type America has attempted to create since its founding, open to free flowing information, equal protection under the law, minority rights despite majority rule, the rule of law, and a market economy. Americans aspire for a more perfect union, but this can require struggle. America's orginal voters were property-owning white men. Only gradually were other men, women, people of color, adults aged 18 to 21, etc. allowed to partake in this democratic experiment.

Numerous Trump policies and/or proposals put his view of national goals over individual liberty -- the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, recision of Title IX protections for transgender students, and many more. If none of that seems bothersome to the reader, don't forget the famous classic poem "First They Came" by Pastor Martin Niemöller.

What about militarism? Trump's efforts to MAGA included (in his first term) an effort to "make our military stronger than ever" as his then-Secretary of Defense said at the time. Trump perhaps wanted to be viewed as the "peace candidate" in 2016, but he repeatedly made (or makes) outlandish military threats against other states -- including North Korea, Iran, and now "the enemy from within." That's militaristic. Trump talks openly about deploying the US military against alleged internal threats -- despite laws designed to prevent that exact scenario.

Incidentally, that Defense Secretary statement about military strength was from former four-star Marine General Jim Mattis, who reportedly agrees with Kelly and called Trump “the most dangerous person ever.” Notoriously, Trump appointed numerous generals to fill top slots in government, including to positions that are typically reserved for civilians, worrying some scholars of civil-military relations and democratic governance.

Beyond Kelly and Mattis, others from that group have offered similar warnings about Trump as a fascist threat to democracy:

Mark Milley, who was appointed by Trump to be the nation's highest ranking military officer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him "fascist to the core" and "the most dangerous person to this country" in comments to journalist Bob Woodward.

Some of the non-military former staffers have also agreed with Kelly and signed an open letter.

Second does Trump "advocate for the overthrow of existing systems of government and the persecution of political enemies"? Was his regime "also highly conservative in...championing of traditional values"?

After January 6, the answer to the first question seems obvious. Trump has been offering the "big lie" since losing to Joe Biden in 2020 and still does not accept the results of the election even though he lost dozens of court cases and all of the "evidence" for a stolen election has been convincingly and thoroughly debunked. Even when Trump sympathizers attempted to recount ballots in Arizona, they arrived at a result that favored Biden by even more votes than the original count. Trump knew that he lost -- according to his Attorney General and his political advisors. His own daughter (Ivanka, who served in the administration) admits that he lost.

Some people might consider all this and merely think Trump is a "sore loser." But there's much, much more. He gathered protesters and extremists to Washington in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 election, he worked with political figures in various states to manufacture fake Electoral College electors and ballots, he is charged with inciting protesters to criminal and violent behavior, and he both privately and publicly urged Mike Pence to take actions that are not in the power of the Vice Presidency.

Since losing, Trump has repeatedly said he will seek revenge on his political enemies -- it's a growing list that includes lots of Republicans that have spoken out against his lies. I do not have time or energy to document each case as an "NPR investigation has found that Trump has made more than a hundred threats to investigate, prosecute, jail or otherwise punish his perceived opponents, including private citizens." By name he has mentioned Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, etc. Trump openly says he wants retribution.

The championing of conservative values is part of Trump's message so I won't belabor it. He appointed judges who eliminated the right to abortion and calls now for a "states-right" approach, which is what segregationists wanted for civil rights. He supports tax cuts and gun rights and makes anti-immigration and massive deportation a central argument for his election. These are now all conservative causes -- to say nothing of his recent use of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Third, despite Trump claiming "to support the everyman," did he, "in reality...often align with powerful business interests"? Trump's main legislative victory as president was a huge tax cut that primarily aided wealthy people and business interests. He appointed a large number of billionaires to his Cabinet -- and very few women or people of color. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has been advising Trump and openly campaigning for him in person and on his social media site.

That's the CFR list, but I could easily add more points. Trump has said he would be a dictator on day one. He has stoked violence in American politics -- a critique I have been making for many years. Trump repeatedly praised authoritarians and dictators while he was president -- and after. The list includes Russia's Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Hungary's Victor Orban, and Chinese President Xi Jinpin. Behind the scenes he apparently admired Adolph Hitler. He has "joked" about serving as president beyond two terms (contrary to the US constitution) and reportedly made all kinds of policy suggestions that would not be legal. Some of the generals and other former Trump officials speaking out against him say he has no understanding of the rule of law.

I haven't even mentioned his almost unfathomable propensity to lie -- notably even claiming falsely that his January 6 speech encouraged merely peaceful protest, that no one was killed that day, or that no one was armed. All readily disproved. Oh, and by the way, this lying is buttressed by his constant criticism of the media, which he has called "the enemy of the people," and threats to jail reporters and strip away broadcast licenses.

Anyone thinking of voting for this man should take into account the views of the numerous inner circle Republicans -- including former Vice President Dick Cheney -- who are courageously speaking out against Trump and urging his defeat in November's election.

NOTE: I may update this piece with links and ideas that I overlooked.

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Immigration and Crime

2024-10-17T16:19:00.012-04:00

I participated in a panel in my department today on Foreign Policy and the 2024 election. I talked about NATO and climate change -- with these questions in mind: Will these policy issues influence the outcome of the election (maybe climate change); and how will the election results influence policy going forward?

Colleagues talked about Russia/Ukraine, Gaza/Lebanon, China, and immigration.

The last issue was the most controversial as the panelists (and student audience members) had the deepest disagreement on this issue during the Q&A.

I feel compelled to fact-check some of the statements that were flying around the room.

Contra to alarming claims, the Biden administration has not had an "open borders" policy. This claim is basically a Republican talking point in recent presidential campaigms, not some settled matter of public policy. The libertarian Cato Institute, which used to be reliably Republican, agrees. On the left, advocates of open borders certainly do not view the US border as open.

Next, immigrants do not commit "most crime" or even a disproportionate share of them. A number from New York City referenced in today's discussion was essentially made up by "police sources" and reported in the tabloid New York Post. Meanwhile, a more thorough dive by the NY Times this past February revealed quite different official data from the NYPD:

But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy.

More than 170,000 migrants have arrived in the city since then, and it is difficult to know what crime statistics would show had they not come. But as the migrant numbers have increased, the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.

The story also quotes (by name) experts: "Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that there was no discernible migrant crime wave."

Beyond NYC, the paper also referenced academic studies:

"In 2023, researchers at Stanford University found that immigrants were imprisoned at lower rates than people born in the United States. In 2020, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study noted that undocumented immigrants in Texas tended to have fewer felony arrests than legal residents."

The Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice recently discussed a study it funded conducted using Texas data, which is perhaps the one referenced by the TImes (or a follow-up):

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

Reuters collected an array of academic studies in mid-summer debunking the myth of out-of-control immigrant crime. "A meta-analysis of more than fifty studies on the link between immigration and crime between 1994 and 2014 found there was no significant relationship between the two." .

The evidence seems overwhelming. The American Immigration Council looked at data from 1980 to 2022 and found "that as the immigrant share of the population grew, the crime rate declined." The Council also looked at recent data from the FBI and Census Bureau:

Using Uniform Crime Reporting data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and population data from the U. S. Census Bureau, the Council also explored the relationship between total crime rates and immigrant shares of the population between 2017 and 2022 at the state level. Using beta regression analyses and data from all 50 states, the result shows no statistically significant correlation between the immigrant share of the population and the total crime rate in any state. This means higher immigrant population shares are not associated with higher crime rates, which aligns with a wealth of prior research on this topic.

The Brennan Center for Justice links to numerous studies. The Center notes that the immigrant crime myth goes back to at least the 1930s and has been used to tarnish "Irish, Catholic, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and German people" who immigrated. One study by a Northwestern scholar referenced in the Reuters story I noted above uses data going back 150 years. The results showed that more recent immigrants are even less likely to commit crimes and become incarcerated than previous waves of immigrants.

Personally, I've referenced stats in my classes from the Anti-Defamation League that reveal much the same information -- immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens. By the way, links in this quote are in the original and not all of them currently work. The bolded parts are also in the original.

Study after study has shown that immigrants – regardless of where they are from, what immigration status they hold, and how much education they have completed – are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes or become incarcerated.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the overall percentage of immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. both increased between 1990 and 2016, the violent crime rate in the U.S. during that time plummeted 48 percent and the property crime rate dropped by 41 percent. More recent population and crime data from the Pew Research Center reveals the continuation of this trend. Studies have consistently found that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans and that there is a negative correlation between levels of immigration and crime rates.
Other studies have found that crime rates are lowest in states with the highest immigration growth rates, and that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares.

The ADL also debunks myths about terrorism, non-citizen voting, public health, etc. Customs and Border Protection also post annual stats. While those numbers undoubtedly reflect growing border encounters, they do not show a great number of criminals coming across the border as a percentage of the total. This is a link to the obviously non-alarming crime numbers from CBP.

When pressed for numbers, the Trump campaign responds with anecdotes about specific crimes. In a nation of 330 million people, this is a terrible and misleading way to document anything. Spend a few minutes on the internet and one can find misleading instances of all sorts of horrible crimes committed by all sorts of trusted people -- mothers, coaches, teachers, priests, etc. Those specific cases would not necessarily make any generalizable point.

Michael Light, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, said U.S. research overall does not indicate immigrants are more likely to commit crime.
"Of course, foreign-born individuals have committed crimes," Light said in an interview. "But do foreign-born individuals commit crime at a disproportionately higher rate than native-born individuals? The answer is pretty conclusively no."

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Firsts

2024-10-16T16:22:00.002-04:00

Here are 2 striking paragraphs from a (free access) column by Kate Cohen in the WaPo earlier this month:

When [Kamala] Harris was born, 60 years ago this month, women could not serve on a jury in all 50 states. They had to have a male relative sign a business loan. They had no legal recourse against sexual harassment or marital rape. There was no no-fault divorce. They could get the pill, but only if they were married. They could not get a legal abortion unless their lives were in danger, and they could be fired for getting pregnant. They could not be admitted to Harvard College or the U.S. Military Academy or join their local Rotary, Kiwanis or Lions Club. Among the Fortune 500 companies, there was not a single female CEO.

To get to the point where she might become the first female U.S. president, Harris first had to become the first female district attorney of San Francisco, the first female attorney general of California and the first female vice president of the United States.

Many of my students are about 20 years old and do not know about events from 10 or 12 years ago. My guess is that even middle-aged adults won't realize the history mentioned here.

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Republicans for Harris

2024-10-06T23:23:00.005-04:00

In late August more than 235 Republicans who describe themselves as "alumni" of the campaigns or presidencies of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney published a public letter explaining why they would not be voting for Donald Trump -- and would be voting for Kamala Harris.

Here's a key part of their message:

Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.

At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.

Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies.

Earlier in the message, they blast Trump for lying about the results of the 2020 election and inciting an insurrection. They describe the crowd as "a mob of sore losers and sycophants."

I have an old friend who was part of the HW Bush administration, but I do not see his name on the list of signatories. From a conversation we had in the last year or so, I'm pretty sure he won't be voting for Trump. It's another step to say you are voting for Harris -- and to do so publicly as these individuals have done.

Incidentally, the list does not include Liz or Dick Cheney, though their positions on this are well-known.

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Trump's Violent Fantasies

2024-10-04T13:24:00.001-04:00

Donald Trump is back to his habit of fantasizing about the government (under his leadership) using illegal violence against criminals, immigrants, and/or political opponents. I blogged about this in 2019 when he was in office. I also compiled references to his violent rhetoric dating to the start of his first campaign in 2015 through 2019.

A couple of days ago in Erie, PA, Trump said something that sounded like the plot for "The Purge." It imagined a whole new level of violence:

"You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day," he said, during a section of the speech about how left-wing politicians are allegedly preventing police from enforcing the law, "one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."

Trump defenders say that the former president was speaking "in jest," but it didn't seem like a joke (watch below) and is entirely consistent with comments he has made over the years. Plus, populists employing similar authoritarian rhetoric have actually empowered death squads in various countries around the world. In the Philippines, for example, 1000s of people were killed by the police during a war on drugs and crime authorized by a newly elected populist right-wing president. A similar pattern emerged in Brazil in 2019 where the police killed 17 people per day, on average.

In those deaths, the police act as judge, jury, and executioner. So much for constitutional protections like due process of law and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. How is it conservative to abandon the bill of rights?

If you want to skip straight to the quoted message in the video below, you cannot, because Trump starts with "one real rough, nasty day" around 2:15, gets off-track with a made-up anecdote about Kamala Harris (referencing a decriminalization law signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger years before Harris was elected to state or national office), and then around 3:25 into the video mentions "one rough hour, and I mean real rough." The first few minutes ramble through some complaints about debate moderators and some made-up stuff about crime. He criticizes statistics, though candidate Trump often references (made up or out-of-date) statistics to support his points.

That last linked article from the Washington Post notes that crime statistics have been in general decline since the 1990s, but did spike in 2020, Trump's final year of office (during the pandemic). Crime stats remained a bit high until 2022, but have declined substantially since then.

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Golden Championship Era

2024-09-08T14:56:00.055-04:00

With the KC Royals now likely to make the baseball playoffs and the defending champion KC Chiefs opening the 2024 football season with a victory, I've been thinking about the recent Golden Age for KC-area teams. In the most important competitions that I follow (major league baseball World Series, football Super Bowl, University of Kansas debate and Kansas basketball), these are key results from the last 17 years, 2008-2024:

2024 KC Chiefs win Super Bowl

2023 KC Chiefs win Super Bowl

2022 Kansas Jayhawks win NCAA basketball Tournament

2020 KC Chiefs win Super Bowl

2018 Kansas Jayhawks win National Debate Tournament (NDT)

2015 KC Royals win World Series

2009 Kansas Jayhawks win National Debate Tournament (NDT)

2008 Kansas Jayhawks win NCAA basketball Tournament

That's 8 championship teams!

The Super Bowl victories could be dated for the prior seasons since the overwhelming majority of games occur then, which would make those 2019, 2022, and 2023. That's how Wikipedia lists them. I have listed them by the date of the games, which is the same standard I applied for basketball and debate, which occur through an academic year.

The last 10 years have been particularly great, but those years could have been even better:

2025 KC Chiefs lose Super Bowl (2nd place)

2025 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NDT (2nd place)

2024 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NDT (2nd place)
2021 KC Chiefs lose Super Bowl (2nd place)

2018 Kansas Jayhawks lose in Final Four of NCAA basketball Tournament

2016 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NDT (2nd place)

2014 KC Royals lose World Series in 7 games (2nd place)

2012 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NCAA basketball Tournament (2nd place)

That's 6 more near-misses, creating good chances to win a championship 14 times in 18 years!

Additions and updates: I didn't note several Kansas Jayhawk debate appearances in the semi-finals (final four) (2019, 2021, and 2022) or a KC Chiefs AFC Championship loss (2018).

And I added 2025 successes. Make it 20 chances in 19 years!

It was a bit slower before then. This is from 1980 through 2007, a 28 year period:

2003 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NCAA basketball Tournament (2nd place)

2002 Kansas Jayhawks lose in Final Four of NCAA basketball Tournament

1993 Kansas Jayhawks lose in Final Four of NCAA basketball Tournament

1991 Kansas Jayhawks lose in finals of NCAA basketball Tournament (2nd place)

1988 Kansas Jayhawks win NCAA basketball Tournament

1986 Kansas Jayhawks lose in Final Four of NCAA basketball Tournament

1985 KC Royals win World Series

1983 Kansas Jayhawks win National Debate Tournament

1980 KC Royals lose World Series in 6 games (2nd place)

That's only 9 opportunities in 28 years, with just 3 championships.

Addition: I didn't note Kansas Jayhawk debate appearances in the semi-finals (final four) (1994 and 1999) or a KC Chiefs AFC Championship loss (1993). So make it 12 opportunities in 28 years, with just 3 championships. That's a smidge better but nothing like the run of recent success.

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