Author: RJ

Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.

Read Eighty Books a Year: A Reader’s Arithmetic:

Stephen King reads sixty or more books a year. I’m lucky if I reach twenty—and the disparity bothers me more than I care to admit. Not because I value quantity over quality, but because there are simply too many books I want to live with, too many voices I want time to answer back to.

Time flows from us like a running faucet. Time is our common currency granted daily. How do we spend it? It comes down to our priorities.

King has been candid about how he does it. He treats reading as a necessity, not a luxury, reading every day for two or three hours, sometimes more. As he puts it in On Writing: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

That rings true for me. When I write, it’s almost always in response to what I’ve read—to extend an argument, disagree with it, enthuse about it, or share it with others.

King refuses to slog through books that fail to engage him. He abandons them without guilt. Interest propels reading; boredom kills it. And he always has a book with him—reading while waiting, traveling, between tasks, or before bed. Those fragments accumulate.

The numbers themselves are demystifying. Suppose your goal is eighty books a year with an average length of 300 pages. That’s 24,000 pages annually. Divide by 365, and you arrive at roughly 66 pages a day. At a moderate pace of about 40 pages per hour, that comes to around an hour and forty minutes of daily reading.

That’s doable.

My final tip is one that has helped me most: read in clusters. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and commit to five or six books in that area.

Reading a single book from a wildly eclectic list can feel shallow; focused reading builds momentum, deepens understanding, and increases motivation.

This year, for example, I’ve chosen to immerse myself in Kentucky sage Wendell Berry—two biographies and three of Berry’s own books. Depth, it turns out, can be the best catalyst for volume.

—rj

Small Changes, Big Results: Lessons from Atomic Habits

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the celebrated bestseller that has sold over 25 million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages.

I rarely read self-improvement books—not because I’ve arrived at perfection (far from it), but because I gravitate toward literary and intellectual works, and leisure time is finite. Still, Atomic Habits begins with such clarity and momentum that I can already tell it will be a quick read for me—simply because I can’t put it down.

The title itself hints at the premise: small, almost imperceptible changes that compound over time. Baby steps, if you will, that quietly evolve into daily discipline and, eventually, a better self. I’ve long believed that we can’t really make friends with the outer world until we make friends with ourselves, and Clear’s approach aligns with that idea.

Go to bed a little earlier, away from blue screens. Make your bed when you rise. Keep your bathroom tidy. Simple acts, but ones that generate momentum and a sense of self-respect. Want to read more? Start with a single page. Avoiding exercise? Take a five-minute walk. Clear gives modern life to an ancient axiom: “The longest journey begins with a single step.”

This is one of those books I’m reading with a journal nearby, interacting with the text—even if only a paragraph at a time. That, too, is a habit I know would enrich my life, but one I’ve too often postponed.

The irony is that when we fail to act on habits we know would improve our lives, the result isn’t neutrality—it’s to sour on ourselves.

Being up in years, my gray matter has shifted. Memory doesn’t cooperate the way it once did. There was a time I could glance at a list of twenty French or German words and walk away minutes later with them securely lodged in mind. No longer.

That frustration nearly convinced me to abandon my desire to read in Italian. But Atomic Habits reframed the problem: it isn’t the goal that matters so much as the process—where I am today versus where I was yesterday. Incremental steps still count. And so I persist with Italian, imperfectly, patiently.

It’s time for breakfast now—but not before I make my bed.

—rj

When Elections Are Not Enough: Removing Trump From Office

It is now 2026, with the midterm elections approaching in November. My New Year’s wish is straightforward: the impeachment of Donald Trump—assuming Democrats regain a decisive House majority—followed by a Senate trial resulting in his removal from office.

The Framers of the Constitution were not naïve about power. They were steeped in history’s lessons about its corrupting tendencies and had lived, in their own time, under the despotism of a foreign monarch. Their revolution was not merely against a man, but against unchecked executive authority.

Accordingly, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 chose to create a president, not a king. Crucially, they did not rely solely on periodic elections as a safeguard. Recognizing that elections alone might prove insufficient in moments of grave danger, they embedded in the Constitution a remedy for removing a corrupt or dangerous chief executive.

Those impeachment provisions are found in Articles I and II. Article I grants the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment by majority vote and assigns the Senate the sole power to try impeachments, requiring a two-thirds vote of members present for conviction. Article II, Section 4 defines the standard:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Impeachment, it bears emphasis, is an accusation; removal requires conviction.

Presidential impeachment trials are exceedingly rare. In more than two centuries of constitutional government, only four have occurred:

Andrew Johnson (1868)
Bill Clinton (1999)
Donald Trump (2019 and 2021)

All four trials ended in acquittal. Richard Nixon almost certainly would have been removed, but he resigned before the House could vote on impeachment—the first presidential resignation in American history.

The rarity of impeachment trials reflects not restraint alone, but the gravity of the remedy. As Alexander Hamilton explained, impeachable offenses are those that violate the public trust—abuses of power that strike at the constitutional order itself.

Measured against that standard, there should be little ambiguity regarding Donald Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” They include conduct that betrays the nation’s best interests and undermines the rule of law: defiance of judicial orders; the use of the Department of Justice to shield allies and punish perceived enemies; and the deployment of violent rhetoric that incites threats against judges and congressional critics, including calls for the execution of former public servants from the military and intelligence communities.

To these may be added the consistent placation of authoritarian foreign leaders and the initiation of military actions—such as attacks on Venezuela and vessels at sea—without clear congressional authorization.

Conviction in the Senate requires 67 votes. Given political realities, Republicans alone are unlikely to supply them. That leaves responsibility where it has always rested in a constitutional democracy: with the electorate.

If the Constitution is to function as intended—if law is to prevail over personal power—then it falls to citizens to vote in numbers sufficient to make accountability possible. The midterms present such a moment.

Whether the nation seizes it will determine not merely the fate of one presidency, but the durability of the constitutional order itself.

–RJ

Reading Recommendations For 2026


Welcome to my 8th Annual Annotated Book Recommendations.

As always, I try to select the very best reads, drawn from authoritative sources, books generally regarded as canonical, as well as works endorsed by critics of the first rank. I also aim for balance through stimulating titles across a range of interests.

Since this list begins as my own, it includes books I should have read long ago.

The hardest part is limiting worthy candidates in order to arrive at a manageable list of ten to twelve works of fiction and nonfiction. Ultimately, this list is yours—to read from, to browse, or simply to keep in mind.

Happy New Year!

Fiction:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (Achebe’s landmark novel that explores British colonial and missionary intrusion, destabilizing a rich and complex Igbo society.)

Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. (A novel challenging the mythology of the American West and the reliability of historical truth.)

Broch, Hermann. The Death of Virgil. (One of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th Century dramatizing the poet Virgil’s final hours, debating burning the Aeneid manuscript, fearing art’s complicity in fostering illusion rather than truth.)

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. (An African-American writer of eleven science fiction novels, Butler may have written the most relevant dystopian novel of our time. Published in 1993, the setting is thirty years later. Christian nationalism has usurped the government, the US is corporately run, states and cities restrict immigrants, the gap grows between rich and poor. Southern California is on fire. The fallout of not heeding climate change is horrific. Change is life’s constant. We adapt, or we perish.)

Colette. Claudine at School. (Colette’s first novel, partly autobiographical, depicting adolescent rebellion and the interplay between transgression and innocence.)

Dazai, Obamu. No Longer Human. (An exploration of social estrangement in a rapidly changing post-war society.)

Keegan, Claire. Small Things Like These. (Shortlisted for a Booker, an Irish novella of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and moral resistance. Several critics call it “a perfect book.”)

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. (While some have dubbed Kipling’s renowned novel as imperialist, it deserves reading for its multi-layered narrative, vivid in its vignettes of India, suspenseful as a story of espionage, and morally significant as a tale of spiritual quest.)

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (McCarthy may be our greatest novelist since Faulkner, writing a mesmerizing prose. This novel tells of Texas teen cowboy John Grady Cole’s quest to continue a vanishing way of life in Mexico, only to encounter danger, betrayal, loss, and a quest for justice. Winner of National Book Award for Fiction 1992, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 1992.)

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (An American classic, based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved Kentucky woman escaping slavery who, recaptured, kills her child rather than have her live in slavery. Morrison delivers in rendering slavery’s horror.)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. (Featuring a widowed father raising a neurodivergent son with a passion for animals in a next generation world devastated by climate change and species loss, Powers’ intense lyrical narrative probes the infinity of the universe juxtaposed by human limitation).

Pullman, Philip. The Book of Dust. (Pullman’s new fantasy work is a sequel trilogy to that of His Dark Materials, expanding on Lyra’s world, her separated daemon companion, and a corrupt Magisterium that governs religious and political thought. A masterpiece you won’t want to finish.)

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. (Through interior monologue, Rhys’s novel captures the yearnings of a middle-aged woman in a patriarchal world that enforces women’s dependency on men, but esteems youth and beauty foremost.)

Simenon, Georges. Pietyr the Latvian. (A good place to begin reading Belgian mystery writer Simenon, whose inspector Jules Maigret probes the arrival in Paris of a notorious criminal. Filled with twists and psychological depth, you’ll want to read more Simenon, who wrote 75 Maigret novels.)

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. (A terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art kills 13-year old Theo Decker’s mother. In the confused aftermath, he steals a 17th c. painting, “The Goldfinch.” A story of survival, the painting symbolizes resilience, the ability of art to sustain a traumatized life. Pulitzer Prize winner, 2014).

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. (A landmark science fiction read, mirroring the anxieties of the Victorian era: a stark meditation on entropy—biological, social, and moral—and on the uneasy faith in progress that defined the late nineteenth century).

Non Fiction:

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. (A critique of Freud’s limitations and profound meditation on mortality’s central role in shaping civilization.)

Cassidy, John. Capitalism and Its Critics. (Rather than a polemic, denouncing capitalism, Cassidy features a myriad of proponents as well as critics, resulting in an informed primer for understanding current debates about markets, globalization, and the future of work.)

Damrosch, Leo. Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. (In his short life of 44 years, the often invalid Stevenson, nonetheless, produced novels, poems and novellas that continue to excite the popular imagination. Damrosch avoids hagiography in this fully rounded portraiture of the great storyteller.)

Frank, Edwin. Stranger Than Fiction. (Frank, the editor of the New York Review of Books Classics Series, discusses forgotten or overlooked books that may be more culturally informative than celebrated canonical works.)

Hoare, Philip. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A compendium of visionary poet and engraver Blake’s influence on other artists and thinkers, from Derek Jarman to Iris Murdoch to James Joyce to the pre-Raphaelites. )

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction. ( A timely, thoughtful analysis of drivers of past species extinction and those of the present in which evolution is now principally influenced by humans.)

Kowalski, Gary. The Souls of Animals. (A Unitarian Universalist minister writes a grounded study in the emotional life of animals. If animals have souls, i.e., capacity for love, loyalty, grief and empathy, it follows humans must reassess their ethical relationship to its animal kindred.)

Nossack, Hans Erich. The End. (Nossack revisits Hamburg shortly after its 1943 allied fire-bombing. A discerning narrative in restrained prose, The End focuses on human trauma rather than physical destruction, measuring its limits in the aftermath of catastrophe.)

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts. (A tour of America’s cordoned places where the rich congregate, enjoying amenities unknown to the wider public, possessors of most of the nation’s wealth. How did they accumulate it? What do they want? What do they fear?)

Prideaux, Sue. Wild Thing. (The first biography of Gauguin to appear in thirty years, Prideaux attempts to separate the myth from the realty, loving his art, but not his misdeeds.)

Raffles, Hugh. The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. (A profound, geological distillation across epochs of violence, loss, and extinction that become metaphor of human rupture inflicted by dispossession, environmental change, and the long reach of capitalism.)

Sanbonmatsu, John. The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves. (A leftist cultural critic, Sanbonmatsu argues on ethical grounds for abandoning a meat economy, which he links with other forms of social injustice; but then how do we feed billions of people without meat? Sanbonmatsu makes a cogent argument meriting thoughtful appraisal.)

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (An essential read in the making of Modernism in the arts, Stein poses as her life long partner, reminiscing Stein’s influence on avant-garde figures such as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Pound.)

Thurman, Judith. Colette: Secrets of the Flesh. (Thurman’s definitive biography of French novelist Colette, exploring not only her life events, but the social and psychological dynamics that continually shaped her identity.)

Books I Read in 2025

Byatt, A.S. Possession.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.

Grant, Richard. Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta.

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 

Knaussgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 1.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 2.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 3

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Book 4.

Kristof, Nicholas. Chasing Hope.

Landon, Brooks. Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses.

Mitford, Jessica. Hons and Rebs.

Rufo, Christopher F. The Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

Salina, Carl. Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. 

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others.

Sumption, Jonathan. The Challenges.

Woolf, Virginia. Diary, 1918-41.

Brigitte Bardot: Beauty, Activism, Controversy

Brigitte Bardot : ses photos quand elle était jeune.

French movie star Brigitte Bardot died on Sunday at age 91. Sometimes referred to as France’s Marilyn Monroe, her startling beauty and engaging singing voice won her instant international fame with her initial film, “And God Created Woman.”

Like Marilyn, she was an intelligent, sensitive woman. But also controversial, given her right wing political views and support for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.

She inspired young Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCarthy, who insisted their girlfriends dye their hair blonde.

Intellectuals admired her as well. In 1959, ardent feminist Simone de Beauvoir penned her landmark essay, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” lauding her as France’s most liberated woman.

A non-conformist, she withdrew early from making films to support animal welfare, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, and engaging in activist politics: “I gave my youth and beauty to men. I give my wisdom and experience to animals.”

I do not subscribe to her political views—she detested Muslims and gays. But as a passionate lover of animals and a vegetarian, I have admired her devoted witness on their behalf, protesting dolphin hunts in the Faroe Islands, religious sacrificial rituals, cat slaughter in Australia among other international cruelties.

This was her truest blooming.

In his tribute, French president French president, Emmanuel Macron wrote, “Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory … her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. A French existence, a universal radiance. She moved us. We mourn a legend of the century.”

Repozez en paix!

—rj

After the Stars Go Dark: Thermodynamics for Mortals

Our universe is mind-boggling in its vastness and mystery. Astronomers estimate it contains on the order of a septillion stars—roughly a 1 followed by twenty-four zeroes—though such figures apply only to the observable universe, bounded by the reach of our most powerful telescopes.

Though stars appear to us as ageless fixtures of deep time, they too—like all things—have beginnings and endings.

Our universe itself burst into being some 13.8 billion years ago. It continues to expand as galaxies rush away from one another, yet it will not expand forever in any form recognizable to us. Ultimately, it will be unable to sustain the structures that make matter—and life—possible.

How it ends remains a matter of fierce conjecture. The leading scenario suggests that as galaxies drift ever farther apart, they will fade beyond visibility; their stars will exhaust their fuel, leaving space cold, dark, and diffuse—a state known as thermodynamic equilibrium, or maximum entropy.

Sleep well, however. Such an ending lies far beyond the human temporal imagination.

Our sun, a middle-aged star at roughly 4.6 billion years old, has another four or five billion years ahead of it. Before its quiet extinction, it will grow hotter and brighter, boiling away Earth’s oceans and transforming the planet into a scorched desert—an irreversible greenhouse effect.

What truly unsettles me is the possibility that other universes may have existed before our own. Classical Big Bang theory posited a singular origin—a point of infinite density from which space and time themselves emerged. More recent theories challenge this view, suggesting instead that our universe may be one episode in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction.

The mystery deepens further. Might other universes exist now, alongside our own? Many physicists think so. If space extends infinitely beyond the observable horizon—currently about 46 billion light-years in radius—there may be regions forever beyond our capacity to detect, perhaps governed by laws of physics unlike our own.

The takeaway is not randomness, but recurrence: a cosmos governed by patterned transformation—birth, death, and regeneration repeating across unimaginable scales.

The end of Earth, and even of our universe, would not mark finality, but transformation.

Our suffering arises from clinging to permanence. The Buddha may have intuited this truth 2,500 years ago: reality is not static but dynamic—endless flux, expansion and contraction. Modern physics echoes the insight in the laws of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed; and all systems tend toward entropy.

We live, then, not in a fragile accident, but in a universe shaped by the regularity of change itself.

–rj

Ken Burn’s The American Revolution

I’ve finished watching Ken Burns’ six part series, The American Revolution, and I think it brilliant, reproducing through letters, paintings, actual locale, staged reenactment, and historian insight a reasonable, balanced portraiture of the genesis of a new nation.

In watching it, I’ve found myself unlearning the version of American history I absorbed in school—one that portrayed the country as born purely of promise, while minimizing its foundations in slavery and the seizure of Indigenous lands.

I hadn’t realized, for instance, that the Revolution was in effect America’s first civil war: nearly 20 percent of the population sided with Britain as Loyalists. Atrocities occurred on both sides—burned homesteads, pillage, and widespread rape.

George Washington emerges as essential to the colonies’ improbable victory over seasoned British troops, often intuitive, and when necessary, boldly improvisational—especially in his surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton.

He also also fought with chronically scarce resources, including men and weapons. Smallpox devastated his ranks until ever practical Washington ordered mandatory inoculation for the entire Continental Army. For this, and much more, he merits the accolade, “the father of our country.”

The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence remains, for me, among the greatest ever written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s also, as historian Jill Lepore points out in These Truths, proved an instrument of exclusion, its author Thomas Jefferson—like Washington—owning hundreds of enslaved people and enjoying immense wealth.

The Declaration is a document of soaring ideals and deep compromises, and we live with those contradictions still—half of America’s wealth held by one percent of the population, and inequities woven through our social and economic life.

The American Revolution, then, is best understood as a work in progress. It inspires hope that we can do better—and in some respects, we have—though much remains unfinished.

While the Revolution’s principal architects—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin—were men of the Enlightenment who trusted reason to guide human flourishing, the war itself was largely fought by working-class coalitions, many lured by the promise of 100 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations.

Burns isn’t receptive to the argument advanced by the 1619 Project—that American history truly begins with the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, and that the Revolution was in part propelled by Southern fears that Britain would eventually abolish slavery.

We do see, however, that the Dunmore Proclamation (1775)—offering freedom to enslaved people who joined the British cause—galvanized Southern resistance. Yet Britain itself, as Burns points out, was hardly on the brink of abolition, its Caribbean wealth built on massive slave labor. Simply a political ploy, Dunmore owned many slaves, and slavery would endure in the Empire for another sixty years.

France entered the conflict in 1777, driven not by idealism but by a desire to avenge its humiliation at Britain’s hands and to reclaim lost influence. Without French military and financial support, the colonies almost certainly would have remained British dominions. By this point, the Revolution had become a global conflict, fought on many fronts.

Part V turns to Valley Forge, outside Philadelphia—the de facto capital of the newly united colonies. There the Revolution reached its nadir: troops half-starved, poorly clothed, ill-housed, and undersupplied as a brutal winter descended, the Congress unable for months to pay the troops. Many died. Many deserted.

With Spring, the French presence is felt, dividing British resources. By 1781, the British suffer massive defeat at Yorktown through a combined force of American troops and the French fleet, blocking British escape. A peace treaty, however, would not ensue until 1783.

The war left the new nation weak and divided, its economy wracked with inflation, huge national debt, and resentful farmers who bore much of the burden, leading to the insurrection in western Massachusetts of 1000 farmers before it was put down by militia. The nation’s weakness would lead, however, to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 defining American governance with its checks and balances under The Constitution.

Women and slaves were, nonetheless, still omitted from the democratic franchise; indigenousness lands seized with violent alacrity.

Washington emerges the series hero, not only innovative on the battlefield with few resources, but committing to democratic rule in resigning his military commission at war’s end.

The series’ central insight is that while the Revolution promised a nation unlike any other, that promise survives only through continual reengagement.

It merits wide viewing: a masterpiece deserving of the highest praise.

—rj

A Legacy of Righteous Minds

Existence exerts a randomness in its distribution of fate. The wicked, as Job tells us, often live long, escaping their misdeeds with impunity; the just and talented, curtailed lives amid their greatest promise.

The list of those I deem the “righteous,” those who’ve especially influenced who I am, the values I embrace, and my hopes for a better human future taken from us early, their age at death indicated in parentheses, includes Princeton sage Walter Kaufman (59), biologist Stephen Jay Gould (62), astronomer Carl Sagan (62), science fiction writer Octavia Butler (58), essayist and novelist George Orwell (46), political sage and philosopher John Stewart Mill (66), and, not least, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (44).

I’m tempted to write a series of extended separate tributes to each of them in Brimmings, but will limit my commentary for now.

I was in my early twenties. a college student just out of the military, when I somehow came upon Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic (1961), which I’m re-reading now. He was the first to admonish me to accept only the empirical in the quest to discern the probable, to find courage to change course, and live daringly: “The question is not whether one has doubts, but whether one is honest about them.”

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould impressed me early with his clear cutting, scintillating prose endowed with grace, teaching me that science is not simply pursuing the factual, but a way of thinking that enlarges one’s humanity. Life is by-product of chance and contingency: “Human beings arose, rather, as a consequence of thousands of linked events, none of which foresaw the future.”

Astronomer Carl Sagan demanded the imprimatur of evidence for any accepted belief. Rationality demands we not cloister ourselves in cultural hand downs—that extraordinary beliefs merit skepticism: Compromising truth invites demagoguery and superstition’s advance: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”

African-American Octavia Butler has been a remarkable recent read, writing eleven science fiction novel standouts resonating urgency in confronting systemic collapse of ecosystems consequent with climate change. Her Parable of the Sower, a must read, has proven chillingly prescient. Change is life’s inevitability, morally indifferent, demanding adaptability to survive: “Human beings fear difference, and they fear it so deeply that they will not only oppress but destroy what they see as different.”

George Orwell, well known for his clairvoyant 1984, has always impressed me with the clarity of his writing, achieved through disciplined study; his wariness of manipulative despotism and its verbal deceit stratagems such as ’doublespeak,” timely and precise in their warnings of euphemism and abstraction: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

John Stewart Mill, “the saint of rationalism,” remains a seminal influence, ahead of his time, a champion of classical liberalism and its advocacy of the minority’s right to dissent. He taught me about nature’s indifference and logic’s necessity in a world absent of revelation. I return to him repeatedly for wisdom and inspiration: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has long been my most esteemed poet with his vibrant “sprung rhythm,” latent with emotion, a passion for nature and for those who suffer—so many—life’s inequities. His poetry sings, reenacting experience via the sensory, capturing the essence of all things. As a Jesuit priest, while not resolving the problem of suffering by resorting to a cozy theodicy or relying on sentimentality, he helps render its endurance: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”

I am forever grateful for their stalwart witness to life’s truths. Their lives argue by example rather than system—that meaning isn’t guaranteed by justice, nor extinguished by its absence. Fate distributes arbitrarily; conscience does not.

—rj

Not Without Consequences: Trump Rolls Back Biden’s Gasoline Mandate

One of Trump’s ugliest moments as President, and there have been far too many, occurred yesterday when, surrounded by applauding auto executives, he rolled back Biden’s 50 mpg gasoline mandate to 35 mpg by 2031, assuring along with suspension of tax credits, the death of electric vehicles in the U.S.

This can only mean more trucks, more SUVs. And—yes—more carbon discharge, escalating ocean temperatures already soaring, the disruption of marine life, and rising seas as the Alaskan Arctic and Antarctica glaciers continue to melt.

In the meantime, what a boon all of this is to China’s burgeoning EV sales in world markets that includes Europe as well as Africa, Asia and Oceania, some models selling in the $10,000 dollar range. China now is a majority stock holder in Volvo.

But Trump thinks climate change is just a hoax, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, declaring on signing the bill into law that climate change is “the greatest scam in American history, the Green New Scam a quest to end the gasoline powered car. This is what they wanted to do even though we have more gasoline than any other country by far.”

What Trump has just done will have its consequences, the best estimates of media and environmental groups informing us that under the earlier standards, gasoline consumption would have been reduced by 14 billion gallons by 2050: Long term, more drought, more forest fires and, ominously, the dissolution of ocean currents fundamental to mammal well-being, which includes ourselves.

Trump’s lackeys argue the president’s bill is a boon to consumers, reducing car prices by a projected $1000, as if that’s going to dent a stagnant auto market, the average vehicle price now $50,000 and faulting on auto loans at a record high.

Mind you, this is just empty rhetoric when it comes to curbing inflation, The truth is the president’s tariffs potentially increase builder costs from $7,500 to $10,000 per home, with every $1,000 increase in the median price of a new home pricing out roughly 106,000 potential buyers, according to the National Home Builders Association.

Along with rising home prices, this president’s hysteria when it comes to renewables is costing you monthly electric bills averaging 12% over those of 2024, all of which means less disposable income, and fated to impact low wage households the most.

But back to CO₂, pollutants from tailpipe emissions like nitrogen oxides (NO), volatile organic compounds (VOC), and particulate matter hasten poor air quality and generate respiratory health issues as well.

Trump gets none of this. He runs government as a business, reaping profits for himself and family members. A derelict president, he’s more absent than present in the Oval Office, this fiscal year thus far, spending $371 million dollars on flights at tax payer expense to play golf at his Florida haven, Mar-a-Lago.

Off message as usual, he used the occasion to assault Minnesota’s Somali community whom, the day before, he called “garbage.” Today, it was “they had “destroyed Minnesota” and “destroyed our country.” The “Somalians should be out of here.”

If I asked you what was the fastest warming area of the U.S. outside of Alaska, would it surprise you that it’s New England, where I was born and raised in my early years? The winters I knew as a child are filled with memories of frequent snow fall, frozen lakes, hockey, sledding, skiing, and maple syrup.

Weather experts report New England “has heated up by 2.5C (4.5F) on average from 1900 to 2024, far in excess of the global average, with the world warming by around 1.3C due to the release of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels” (The Guardian, 4 December 2025).

That’s a shocking increase and may prove a portent of what lies ahead. The UN and climate experts have set a maximum goal of 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming above pre-industrial levels as the threshold, above which we reach the tipping point of near impossible reversal.

Meanwhile, Trump ignores the coming apocalyptic fallout of unrestrained fossil fuel policy, eco systems destroyed, famine common, forest fires ubiquitous, unbearable heat, polluted air, whales and elephants reduced to children’s picture books.

In sum, the Trump administration’s assault on the environment in the context of exponential climate change exhibits all too well the earmarks of corporate denial in the pursuit of monetary gain, whose consequences none of us will escape.

A nation can survive incompetence; what it cannot survive is deliberate blindness to the world burning at its door.

–RJ