IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:
Objective reality only exists because other people do: We experience only one small slice of the ruliad. What’s the ruliad? Stephen Wolfram explains. (Stephen Wolfram, The Big Think)
ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:
Trump’s New Fed Chair Deserts Trump (Robert Kuttner, July 29, 2026, American Prospect)
As expected, the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates today, but neither did it lower them from its current target range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent for short-term rates. And the vote was 9-to-3, with three regional bank presidents—Beth Hammack of Cleveland, Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, and Lorie Logan of Dallas—voting to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point. It was the first time since 2016 that three officials dissented in the same direction.
GENTLEMAN SNAKE:
Tangled Up in Indigo: Since first encountering an indigo snake as a boy, the author has been haunted by this all-but-extinct vestige of the Southern wild, once as much a part of the landscape as the longleaf pine. For fifty years he has walked the woods in search of an indigo, with an eye to the ground and, at long last, a little help from perhaps the only group in the world trying to save them (Padgett Powell, April/May 2015, Garden & Gun)
James Gregory’s father, we were told, was stabbed twenty-seven times in a shell parking lot outside a liquor store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, possibly, he worked. We never talked to James Gregory about it. We did not know James Gregory well. We put on a school play in which we surgically removed a tumor from a patient using backlit projection on a bedsheet to better show the ghastly tumor lifted from the patient. The tumor was a live six-foot snake that in the projection must have looked fifteen feet long. We got the gasp from the audience that we wanted. I like to think that the patient was James Gregory, and that yada yada we were exorcising a demon from him, but in fact I do not recall who played the patient and doubt that it was James Gregory. We did not know him well, and I do not even often think of James Gregory in this or any other context. I do remember that after the show the snake was enjoying his stardom until too many children touched and grabbed at him and it became a kind of rock star–fandom event that needed security and there was no security and the snake having had enough decided he was his own security and he bit Mike Wilkerson on the thumb, and Mike Wilkerson shook him off his thumb and in that jostle we dropped the snake, who crawled under a long leaning stack of metal chairs for surcease from his admirers.
And let us pause. We have a large snake under a long stack of leaning, heavy chairs. I am an agile twelve-year-old boy with a good sense of physics, which is what confers agility. The snake is under my charge. The snake has been put in my charge by my fifth-grade teacher, Shirley Brown. She has him because she has friends at the Jacksonville Zoo reptile house, whence he comes to her on loan. The snake will not be declared federally protected until 1978, but already in 1964 it is a rare animal. I have been allowed access to him to put him in the play. I am in charge and the snake has survived a fan event without security and is now under a ton of metal that can, with less jostling than dropped him to the floor, slide, shear, crash, and in my agile twelve-year-old brain cut him to pieces or merely crush him to one multiply bolused piece. The prudent thing would have been to put my foot on the rubber foot of the leading leaning chair to secure the stack and ask Mike Wilkerson to get the snake, or, if Mike Wilkerson had had enough of the snake, to have him replace my foot with his and get the snake myself.
Maybe prudence had been abdicated when we decided to pull a snake tumor out of a person onstage. I got down and into the chairs and maybe Mike did too, and we got the snake out without incident; he did not, that is to say, bite us in the face, which we were presenting to him perfectly had he wanted to. I already knew that the character of this snake was special, having handled him some before his stage debut (I posed with him outside the Jax Zoo reptile house), but I suspect his agreeable demeanor at this juncture may have spoken to me in my condition of emotional delicacy, a phrase I borrow from William Trevor and will explain. The snake had no more quarrel with Mike Wilkerson’s thumb. We got him into a secure cage and I had a nervous breakdown. Maybe that overstates it. The expression “burst into tears” understates it. Let’s say I was wracked by a sobbing that made it hard for me to breathe, or see much, but the little I could see included my teacher’s collapsing faith in me as her protégé. (She had called me this when introducing me to a man at a drugstore who was not her husband, whom I knew and liked, and my adult-behavior alarm had gone off.) In my sniff-heaving I could not begin to explain to anyone the vision of those chairs, the hair trigger those old beige rubber feet were, what one rung of chair could do to a snake let alone five hundred…and I watched Shirley Brown dismiss me, and thought something like, Well, this is of course regrettable, but she has no idea, hail-fellow-well-met with her drugstore dandies.
For fifty years I have thought only occasionally about James Gregory, sturdy Mike Wilkerson, or Shirley Brown. I have had no outsize breakdowns, just the steady march unto desuetude. But more than occasionally I thought about that giant purple friendly snake, and I have walked the woods looking for one. At first everywhere, anywhere, because they were alleged to be everywhere, and later in rarefied, special terrain, because they were supposed to be there, I walked the woods looking for an indigo, the gentleman snake.
WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN FAKE OUT THE RUBES ANYMORE
Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua plans to scrap elections – what that says about today’s autocrats (Felix Wiebrecht, July 27, 2026, The Conversation)
Nicaragua’s elections have long been rigged and repressive. But this marks a new scale of authoritarian rule. The elimination of elections is a rare and extreme case, even in today’s landscape of authoritarian regimes. So this reflects a worrying trend of brazenness on the part of Nicaragua’s president.
Most modern autocrats are what researchers call “spin dictators”. They invest in a democratic disguise and the careful curation of a public image fostered by propaganda and misinformation. Elections play a central role in this playbook.
Hence, most authoritarian regimes nowadays hold somewhat competitive multiparty elections – and only a handful of regimes have resisted the turn towards elections that took off in the 1990s and 2000s. Among those are primarily hereditary monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei and the one-party state of Eritrea ruled by the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).
While there are differences in how non-democracies design their elections, they all share a playing field that is inherently tilted towards the incumbents. Widely used methods include restricting ballot access for genuine opposition candidates, manipulating electoral commissions and courts to favour the incumbent and controlling media coverage. Incumbents also have the power to deploy state resources for campaigning while harassing or co-opting opposition figures.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER:
Humphrey’s Executor Has Been Slaughtered: The Supreme Court has finally brought the administrative state back under elected control. (Ilya Shapiro, Jun 30 2026, City Journal)
[T]he Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC—like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on—today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire.
This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.
Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.” That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government.
THE MIRACLE OF REPUBLICANISM…:
Baseball as Covenant: Kendall’s Enduring Symbols of Ordered Self-Government (Clifford Bates Jr., 7/14/26, Voegelin View)
Kendall’s early writings on baseball reveal a deeply conservative anthropology: human endowment is uneven, yet rich in potential, demanding cultivation through practice, discipline, and reverence for the game’s structure. In his teenage pamphlet, Kendall emphasizes “native baseball ability,” quoting Yankees skipper Miller Huggins to underscore that talent cannot be manufactured by rules alone; it must be nurtured. Some players possess natural grace at the plate; others stumble, yet all are invited to participate within the game’s bounded structure. Here, the meritocratic ethos of baseball parallels Kendall’s conception of the American polity: individuals are born with differing capacities for virtue, judgment, and civic contribution, yet the republic offers a framework within which all can exercise these faculties for the common good.
…is that your superiors choose to be your equals.
THE ODYSSEY:
My Mysterious Search for J.D. Salinger: An obsessive (if strange) pilgrimage to the late author’s New Hampshire sanctuary, where, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of one man hiding. (Ron Rosenbaum, Jan 28, 2010, Esquire)
There’s a line in Mao II, Don DeLillo’s novel about a Salinger-like reclusive writer who wonders: Why are so many so obsessed with my invisibility, my hiddenness, my absence?
“When a writer doesn’t show his face,” he answers himself, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”
The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there’s something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.
And when a writer won’t break his silence, we think of ways to break into it. We think of knocking on his door or leaving messages in his mailbox.
S.’s two mailboxes beckoned to me as I stood at the bottom of his driveway.
TOUGH BEAT FOR IDENTITARIANS:
The creedal nation: A contentious birthright citizenship ruling has re-opened an old American question: is the United States defined by allegiance, or by blood and soil? (Sumantra Maitra, 7/15/26, Englesberg Ideas)
GK Chesterton wrote, ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’ Often forgotten is that the Declaration of Independence raged against the monarch of Great Britain for opposing migration and naturalisation: ‘He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’
The American creed is also clearly defined. ‘Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories,’ Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. James Madison argued that the US should never fall under the tyranny of majoritarianism: ‘Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’
The first major attempt at charting the story of the republic, by George Bancroft in his History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, had this sentence: ‘The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.’ Abraham Lincoln said that America is a nation defined by a proposition, that all men are created equal: in other words, a creed.
THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:
The DSA Platform Would Destroy American Democracy: The socialist group’s vision of a federal government without three equal branches providing checks and balances would facilitate the whims of a would-be authoritarian. Sound familiar? (Bill Scher, July 28, 2026, Washington Monthly)
To call the DSA platform antithetical to the U.S Constitution is not hyperbole, or an insult to the platform’s authors. The DSA preamble states plainly that the end goal is to “draft a new constitution” to “create a democratic socialist republic.” Such a new U.S. constitution, the DSA envisions, would “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which would be unicameral after abolishing the Senate.That last bit about the Senate may sound appealing. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait called it DSA’s “best idea” since the Senate’s structure gives disproportionate power to voters in less populated states in ratios likely unimagined by the Founders. But it can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader DSA program, which is an obliteration of the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances among three equal branches of government.
In the DSA view, the Constitution’s diffusion of power is “anti-democratic” and an inherent obstacle to a “democratic society of the working class.” America’s “political and economic system [is] built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” and DSA warns that “as capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism.”
But what DSA fails to recognize is that the Constitution’s diffusion of power is what has prevented Donald Trump and his MAGA minions from permanently installing right-wing authoritarianism.
Which is why the Trumpists hate the Constitution too.
RENEWABLES ARE INDEPENDENCE:
A great idea that everyone hates (Matthew Yglesias, Jul 28, 2026, Slow Boring)
The good news is that there is a very straightforward and well-understood idea that would have a meaningful short-term impact on prices without killing incentives for new investment.
The bad news is that nobody in their right mind even talks about this idea because it’s universally understood to be politically toxic and something everyone would hate.
I’m not here to dispute that diagnosis, just to say that failing to even talk about it is impoverishing the discourse — I keep encountering efforts to essentially recreate it with extra bells and whistles, and I don’t think that anyone coming up with these “new” ideas is taking seriously enough the question of why we don’t just do the straightforward thing.
So what’s the straightforward thing? It’s simple: We could charge household electricity users the spot price of electricity.
Tax externalities.