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It’s “War”?? Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” — Day One

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The opening: “You Think You’ve Seen ‘Shock & Awe’”??

(Trump posted this AI fantasy on Truth Social early Saturday)

“The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” [AP]

(The Reality Update – Saturday afternoon):

Indianapolis Times:

Indiana National Guard troops will mobilize to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement with transportation and logistics across the state beginning mid-September, a spokesperson for Gov. Mike Braun confirmed.

Around 50 Hoosier guardsmen will help ICE officials with tasks such as answering phones, biometric collection, tracking expenses, entering data and maintaining vehicles. They will not engage in law enforcement functions or make arrests, the spokesperson said.

Meantime, outside:

Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker posted a defiant retort on X: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.

This is not a joke. This is not normal.

Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”


To be continued . . .

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Who?? Happy Birthday to One of the Most Important Quaker Writers Most of Us Never Heard of

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Milton Mayer was born on August 24, 1908. He was a journalist, scholar,  moral philosopher, terrific writer — and a Quaker.

A Jewish Quaker.

A southerner Jewish Quaker.

He wrote some of the most potent, challenging, memorable Quaker essays and books of the past century. He was also funny.

He and his work deserve to be remembered and re-examined now, 39 years after his death in 1986. Not only because of the excellent writing, but because his over-arching subject, which was facing/surviving authoritarian/totalitarian government — is now our over-arching crisis.

He predicted this rise, warned of it, analyzed its coming and impact in his lifetime. And he tracked how ordinary people reacted, resisted, or reinforced tyranny.

Mayer’s story was told in a probing summary essay by a top Quaker historian, H. Larry Ingle, in the journal, Quaker Theology. Here is  Ingle’s incisive sketch:

Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog

A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle

Reprinted from Quaker Theology #8, 2003

Oxford-educated political scientist Isaiah Berlin, in his minor classic “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953), divided people into two groups, those who understood one big thing like the hedgehog and those, like the fox, who knew many things.

Milton Mayer

The subject of this essay was a hedgehog who throughout his life concerned himself with one common theme, the threat of state authority over the individual; this threat emerged, he insisted, because individuals permitted it by not resisting the state’s encroachments.

During the current period, a time of mounting concern about civil liberties and individual rights, especially in the face of mounting governmental authority, it is wise to consider one of the best known Friends of the twentieth century. I write of Milton Mayer (1908-86), now mostly forgotten but well worth recalling because he illustrated a significant, continuing, and newly-timely strain in Quaker thinking.

A newspaperman and magazine columnist, Mayer wrote and edited numerous books and turned out reams of personal essays for the Progressive, a journal that carried his byline for nearly forty years. His best known and most important book was his study of ten average Germans from 1933 to 1945, They Thought They Were Free, a work he published a decade after the war when he lived in Germany and interviewed residents of that defeated nation.

No one has done a biographical study of Mayer, although he left numerous references to his personal experiences in his essays and books, so it is only a matter of digging out the factual details to put his life into context.

Born in Chicago of a German Jewish father and an English-born mother, Mayer was educated in the public schools of the city where he reminded readers constantly, he received a classical education with a heavy emphasis on Latin and languages; he graduated from Englewood High School. His Reform Jewish family was well enough off that young Milton visited Germany probably after World War I.

His self-composed entry in Who’s Who in America for 1984 refers only to his being a student at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928, without mentioning that he did not earn a degree. Mayer apparently left the University the year before the thirty-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins became president in 1929. He told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942 that he was “placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window, ‘failing, however, to hit the dean.’” (“Keeping Posted, March 28, 1942) Their lives would be intertwined until Hutchins’s death in 1977, and Mayer’s widow would oversee the publication of a biography her husband had penned of his friend. This unorthodox study, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir, published in 1993 by the University of California Press, offers insights into the genesis of Mayer’s development that are absent from his other writings.

After leaving the University, Mayer worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post for nine years and married his first wife Bertha Tepper; the couple had two daughters. They were divorced in 1945, and two years later he married Jane Scully, who would become well-known as “Baby” or, after protests from feminists, “Ms. Baby,” to readers of his magazine columns. These details come from the Who’s Who entry, but the Hutchins biography reveals that Mayer had gone to work for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American sometime during the early 1930s, covering the University of Chicago from which position he met Hutchins.

Preparing an article for that paper, he read Hutchins’s 1935 commencement address to the graduates at the University, and his life was changed. In words that Mayer would echo and re-echo, again and again, Hutchins told his auditors that they faced a life that would corrupt them, tempting them to become safe, sound, agreeable, and inoffensive, giving them habits of timidity. “Believe me,” Hutchins pointedly warned, “you are closer to the truth now than you will ever be again.” (Mayer: 1993, 3-5) . . . .

Read the full article at this link — no paywall or registration:

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Resistance Vacation Reading #5: I Hate Dill Pickles: But There’s More to the Story

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I Hate Dill Pickles:
But There’s More to the Story

A Nearby City, Spring 2007

            Sara Rahman was my best friend that year. And some of the best times we had were while walking home from school. We joked and laughed about everything   stuff in school, books she was reading, her dorky big brother Ahmed, even some of the sillier songs from “American Idol.”

            Maybe we were having too much fun. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone running up to the ice cream truck that came jangling by and pulled over to the curb. But it was a warm spring Thursday, and Sara had five dollars in her pocket, a pre-birthday present from her aunt, and she loved ice cream. “Especially butter pecan,” she said. “That’s my very favorite.”

            So we did stop at the ice cream truck. No butter pecan, but they did have big cones of cookies and cream, so Sara got one of those, with raspberry, and bought me an Eskimo pie.

Continue reading Resistance Vacation Reading #5: I Hate Dill Pickles: But There’s More to the Story →

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More Resistance Vacation Reading: Comfort Food – A Story

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Comfort Food

Eastern North Carolina – 2007

​The large sign in the lawn in front of the old red brick building read:

“U.S. MARINE CORPS, CAMP ELIZABETH BRIG.

NO PHOTOGRAPHS ALLOWED.”

​I stopped the car right in front of it, rolled down the window, slipped the digital camera from my pocket and took a couple of quick pictures.

I hoped they’d also show the razor wire coiled along the edges of the tall fence around one end of the building. A few of the blades flashed in the late winter sunlight, the only bright color in the scene. Continue reading More Resistance Vacation Reading: Comfort Food – A Story →

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A Durham Double-Take & Berlin Wants You! (Who — Me?? No — YOU!)

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So yesterday I’m scrolling through the New York Times, and then up pops this big ad:

If I was writing copy for that ad, the statue would be pointing at the reader and the bold bright headline would thunder “BERLIN WANTS YOU!”

But that message still got through, especially if one clicked a link to more pages, vividly extolling  not only Brain City’s intellectual heft and (pardon my foul language) “diversity”, but also all the ways the German government was prepared to smooth the way to residency, work permits and cultural adjustments for brainy persons at loose ends or seeking a “career reboot,” especially after some hiccup or mishap in their previous company or, um, previous country.

Berlin, eh?? I scrolled through the stirring pages . . . .

Hmm. If I was younger, I mused… or if I was a scientist  . . . After all I have some German ancestry, though I know no details . . . And there have been some bothersome upheavals hereabouts of late — I believe the Germans even have a term for it — kulturkampf — which can fairly be translated as culture wars.

So I was intrigued; at least I was until I looked past the ad and asked other questions about the city.   Hmmm: a high percentage of women scholars and researchers? Good. But especially given my age, what about its weather?

Hmmm. winters, colder than here in central Carolina. Not so good. And summers, recently getting noticeably hotter — yeah, welcome to the club. But a caveat, with points to them for full disclosure: A/C, it seems, is not yet really a thing for the sturdy Berliners.

Well, different strokes, and all that; but I’m pretty well settled in the they’ll-get-my-HVAC-when-they-pry-it-from-my-cool-dead-fingers faction.

And so much for Berlin, though it was a refreshing armchair daydream.

At least it was until this morning’s scrolling, when I got to the local, shriveled but surviving daily rag, the News and Observer. There I was stopped by another startling bold headline:

EDUCATION Duke to start layoffs in August after
nearly 600 employees take voluntary buyouts

Nearly 600 employees at Duke University have accepted voluntary buyouts under a program initiated this spring amid significant threats to the university’s funding under the Trump administration, according to an email sent to faculty and staff on Friday. Now, per the email, the university will make involuntary layoffs across campus in August.

“We determined that an involuntary reduction in force is necessary only after careful consideration and extensive consultation with leadership across Duke,” read the message from Duke Executive Vice President Daniel Ennis, Provost Alec Gallimore and School of Medicine dean Mary Klotman. Ahead of the layoffs, all university units will be asked to identify further non-personnel budget cuts they can implement, which will “determine the scale of” the layoffs.

The message added that “fewer employees will be affected” by the layoffs given the “high number” of employees — 599, to be exact — who participated in the voluntary buyouts. More than 250 faculty are also considering offers for voluntary retirement incentives, per the message.

“We recognize and are sorry for the impact these changes will have on our colleagues,” Ennis, Gallimore and Klotman wrote. Employees who are laid off will be notified between Aug. 5-19, per their message.

Friday’s announcement comes as Duke faces threats to its finances as the Trump administration has made major cuts to research funding [NOTE: other reports put the Duke research cuts at more than $400 million.]

Duke faces threats to its finances as the Trump administration has made major cuts to research funding and implemented policies affecting other university operations, such as increasing the tax rate on the endowments of Duke and other colleges. . . . [In] late April, as the university told faculty it sought to cut as much as 10% of its budget, or roughly $350 million, the university announced it would offer buyouts to staff. Those efforts were furthered by another round of buyouts for faculty, announced last month. “While the challenges before us are difficult, we are confident we can navigate them as a community and maintain exceptional support for our students, our world-renowned research and our core values,” Friday’s message read.

One of the country’s top research universities with a major health system, Duke employs more than 48,000 people across the Durham university. It is the Triangle’s largest employer and the second-largest private employer in North Carolina, behind only Walmart.

[Wow. Second only to Walmart?]

Duke isn’t the only local university grappling with the impacts of funding threats, though its buyouts and upcoming layoffs appear to be the most drastic response of schools in the Triangle. Salaries, hiring and other spending in the UNC System, which includes major research universities like UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University, are currently restricted under a directive from system President Peter Hans enacted last month. [NOTE: other sources estimate cuts at non-Duke NC schools to be well over $100 million; more layoffs among them are expected.]

Now, for myself: I never attended or worked for Duke. But I live nearby, and am in frequent contact with—its medical system. Or should I  say, its (formerly) world-renowned and globally-recognized medical center, which has taken a big body blow in the current shearing. (And maybe that’s why my last visit to their ER was so long & lonely. And maybe that’s why they had the A/C down to frigid levels, to winnow out some of the homeless folks taking shelter there from the downpours of a rainy night. And maybe that’s why when I called last week to schedule a routine checkup, the first available date was  April 2026. Whuzzup??)

Wait a second: what was the URL of that Brain City ad??

On a second look, there was that forbidden diversity word again and again, and toward the end another incendiary, straight-out banned, getchew and your bad self in big trouble (& not the good kind) term: “welcoming . . .” Plus another very sketchy one . . . . “Cosmopolitanism”:

[Personal videos] provide insight into the diversity, excellence, interdisciplinarity and cosmopolitanism of the science metropolis Berlin. . . .

The basis for this top-class exchange is the high density of research institutions in the city – with four universities, seven universities of applied sciences, three art colleges, 25 State-recognised private universities, around 70 non-university research institutions, unique research alliances such as the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) or Berlin Research 50 (BR50) and numerous start-up centres. At a total of eleven Berlin locations of the future, cutting-edge research and industry are also working together to develop products and high-tech solutions for tomorrow.

More than 250,000 people from all over the world teach, research, work and study in the metropolis and are enthusiastic about Berlin. In the words of Brain City Ambassador Nishan Jaint: “The city is open, welcoming and very international. That makes Berlin something special.” (vdo)

Hmm. More to think about. And I bet I’m not the only one in Durham digging up this Brain City ad again.

No, not by a long shot.

Now, to the last big gotcha question:
Do the Berliners make decent barbecue?)