Coyote and roadrunner deported to Guantanamo
Bob Schwartz
Month: March, 2025
March 19, 2025
March 17, 2025
Orchid Blooming Part 2
In a recent post I wrote about the surprise blooming of an orchid plant.
Since then I have paid close attention to the unbloomed buds. Above is a picture of a opening bud yesterday and the full flower today. With three more ready to go.
So it goes.
March 17, 2025
Why try Buddhism?
I know quite a bit about three major religious traditions: Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity.
If asked to “identify” myself by tradition, I would say I am a Jew and a Buddhist, though the combination has its technical difficulties. I would say I am not a Christian, because of a core belief that I don’t subscribe to, though the words most attributable to Jesus are some of the wisest and most helpful uttered.
More and more, I see that Buddhism “makes sense”, or more precisely, makes things make sense.
Examine anything, from a rock to a painting to another person to yourself. You stand in one place. You move around. From one perspective you are not sure you get it. From another perspective, or another, it suddenly makes sense. Maybe some sense, maybe complete sense.
This is not the place to go into the strengths and value of any of these traditions or their sub-traditions. Also not the place to detail any particular elements of them. It is just to say that for me Buddhism is a perspective that constantly serves as a way of making sense and living a sensible life. Not every minute of every day of every week, etc. But frequently enough, and more frequently if/when I work at it.
March 17, 2025
Trump believes he is as great a president as George Washington. Here is what DSM-5 says about personality disorder and grandiose delusions.
Years ago, when Trump first became president, mental health experts—including his own niece—believed he exhibited clinical personality disorders.
I am not one of those experts, but I was able to consult DSM-5 (Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the diagnostic bible of psychiatry. At the time I posted about the description of narcissistic personality disorder.
Here in the second Trump term, a new pattern is emerging. He is comparing himself to George Washington as the greatest American president. Some may believe this, some may say it is a legitimate matter of opinion, some may believe that objectively this is not true. For those who think it manifestly untrue, this might be considered a delusion. A grand delusion.
Grandiose delusions are part of various personality disorders described in the DSM-5 . Here is a description of Paranoid Personality Disorder:
Associated Features of Paranoid Personality Disorder
Individuals with paranoid personality disorder are generally difficult to get along with and often have problems with close relationships. Their excessive suspiciousness and hostility may be expressed in overt argumentativeness, in recurrent complaining, or by hostile aloofness. They display a labile range of affect, with hostile, stubborn, and sarcastic expressions predominating. Their combative and suspicious nature may elicit a hostile response in others, which then serves to confirm their original expectations.
Because individuals with paranoid personality disorder lack trust in others, they need to have a high degree of control over those around them. They are often rigid, critical of others, and unable to collaborate, although they have great difficulty accepting criticism themselves. They may blame others for their own shortcomings. Because of their quickness to counterattack in response to the threats they perceive around them, they may be litigious and frequently become involved in legal disputes. Individuals with this disorder seek to confirm their preconceived negative notions regarding people or situations they encounter, attributing malevolent motivations to others that are projections of their own fears. They may exhibit thinly hidden, unrealistic grandiose fantasies, are often attuned to issues of power and rank, and tend to develop negative stereotypes of others, particularly those from population groups distinct from their own. Attracted by simplistic formulations of the world, they are often wary of ambiguous situations. They may be perceived as “fanatics” and form tightly knit “cults” or groups with others who share their paranoid belief systems. (emphasis added)
Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
March 15, 2025
When I wasn’t looking an orchid bloomed
There is an orchid plant in the corner of my office. When I bought it it was full of purple flowers. I cared for it without fuss, watered it when dry. As orchids will, it dropped the flowers a long time ago, while the plant continued growing. Being where it is I don’t pay close attention, even when watering. You might say mindlessly. This morning I looked more closely and saw not just a bunch of new buds but full orchid flowers. That is how it is.
March 7, 2025
Antisemitism in the Oval Office
The encounter in the White House was antisemitic….It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens’kyi’s bravery in remaining in Kyiv.
Timothy Snyder, Antisemitism in the Oval Office
https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-in-the-oval-office
Timothy Snyder is one of the great contemporary historians, especially of the Holocaust. His books include Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom, and more.
His post today, Antisemitism in the Oval Office, is about the inherent antisemitism of the recent confrontation between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office. It is Snyder’s view, and the view of other experts, that this was a clear example of public antisemitism. By the President of the United States.
Please read the post in its entirety. A brief excerpt below.
The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.
I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him….
To conclude that the scene in the White House was antisemitic, one does not need to know anything further. It’s all right there: the demand for deference, the obsession with money, the claims of corruption and dishonesty, the encirclement, the loud voices, the bizarre grievances, the underlying sense that a Jewish person does not fit and must be expelled. The context was evocative enough, and nothing more is really needed: those historical markers of antisemitism; Zelens’kyi’s Jewish origins; the particular way he was treated by non-Jews.
Timothy Snyder, Antisemitism in the Oval Office
March 1, 2025
If Democrats won’t lead us out of this political wilderness, who will?
American political parties have produced some great leaders and leadership. Also some less than great, terrible or even criminal leaders and leadership.
This is the most extreme political moment in American history. It may be an extreme that some Americans support and cheer, but for others of us, it is a lawful, constitutional and democratic disaster.
At the moment, of our two political parties, only the Democratic Party is not enabling that disaster. Yet up to the moment, the party has not stood up and stepped up, and is not offering much more than “help us retake Congress in 2026. Send money.”
Democrats retaking one or both houses of Congress in 2026 would provide some slowing of this downward slide. But it won’t stop it, because even if the Supreme Court reins in some of the executive actions, some of those actions will get through and stay in effect. Besides that, even if in 2026 and 2028 Democrats retake Congress and the White House, the mass of suffering will have happened, the mass of damage will have been done and will require—this may sound hyperbole but isn’t—rebuilding the republic.
All of which says that there must be action now to try to slow the devolution and degeneration. “Try” because even under the best circumstances, with Congress and the Supreme Court mostly on his side, overwhelming power resides in a twisted presidency.
So try we must. But try what? That’s where the Democratic Party has so far fallen short. Yes, electing not-Republicans is a necessary condition. Necessary but not sufficient. Electing Democrats in 2026 is not enough.
Americans need leadership that plans and organizes action that is not about the next election and not rhetorical. We will continue to wait for the Democrats to tell us what we should be doing—now, not next and not two years from now. So far, we haven’t seen or heard that.
If the Democrats won’t take that role, who will?
Bob Schwartz 