2025

Whether Trump wins or is stopped this year will forever be considered a turning point in American history.

The Lady of Kalymnos

I didn't know about this magnificent Hellenistic statue until today.

If you want to see more, go to Greekreporter.com where there is much more information about this style.

The Decline and Fall of the Trump Regime? Already?

From Timothy Burke from 8 by 7: I

’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse.

So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo.

What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new.

Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished. That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions.

This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies.

A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely?

They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear weapons.

I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy.

Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so.

That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.) In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The News: Yes, It's True. Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe Timothy Burke Feb 19 READ IN APP I’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse.

So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo.

What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new.

Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished.

That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions. This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies.

A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely?

They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear wea

I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy. Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so.

That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.)

In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile.

That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now. That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now.

Apocalypse Now: Literally

Timothy Burke offers us a truly terrifying explanation of what Trumpism and related apocaliptic movements realy mean.

The gentle beginning:,

READ IN APP

I keep circling around the cluster of people involved in Trump Administration’s programmatic disassembly of constitutional government in the United States, pacing like a zoo animal in a cage. What are they thinking? How conscious are they of their motives? What do they represent?

I try to remember a point I’ve made many times before about governments and leaders, that almost no leader is himself or herself the pivot on which all decisions turn, that the visible leader in a political coalition like like the tip of an iceberg, representing some vaster structure hidden below the water.

Perhaps even, as the phrase goes, a deep state. Or a deep strata of society, a formation embedded across a whole geology, that suddenly erupts into the surface of the earth. American Presidents normally are just the titular heads of an assemblage of ambitious public servants and elected officials who frequently share some social connections and some loose ideological priors, somewhat like the C-suite of a corporation where the CEO speaks for a cluster of executives who’ve risen through the company and some recruited new executives whose experience elsewhere has been deemed useful or generative. (On which point, once again: the CEO is not a king except in a few rare cases of smaller privately-held companies that are led by the scion of a particular family. Maybe.)

Trump’s first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.

Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon’s “populists” and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic’s basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.

As I pace mentally and try to apprehend what this coalition really wants, how it really thinks, what its aims are, I keep coming back to a repeated theme. I’ve already argued that the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters. And perhaps some of them are something bleaker: nihilists who want to negate everything and have no hope of a new world to follow.

And it gets much worse...

The destruction of the United States

I have been thinking about Trump's attack on Canada. It's a dangerous stuation and requires clear thinking and determination on our part.

But there is something worse happening: the destruction of law enforcement in the United States, which threatens the destruction of the United States of America. I have been worried (to say the least) about this. Now two observers spell it out: David Kurtz of TPM and Timothy Snyder at Substack

A 19th century tragedy

I was looking at a geneology of the Taffes, an Irish family from which my mother was descended. It was probably compiled by my aunt, Marie Hyle, when she was in high school in Ohio in the late 30s.

It includes this story of Patrick Taffe, who came from County Clare, Ireland to Ohio in about 1881. Here's what the Hyles remembered of him.

He came to Dayton and was employed at the Brownell Boiler Works. While working, he cut his finger and infection set in. Three days later as he was lying on a couch, having his wound dressed, he died.

This would not happen today unless your country' infrastructure has been destroyed by bombs and missles, IMAGE: The Brownelle plant in Dayton (probably from a catalogue).

Do you know the Cairo Geniza? Let's have some positive content in this blog

I thought I knew about the Cairo Geniza but I have had my eyes opened to the richness of this amazing collection of medieval writings by the book The Illustrated Cairo Genizah > by Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee. https://www.academia.edu/124354176/The_Illustrated_Cairo_Genizah?

What is the Cairo Geniza? Why is it important?

The authors explain:

Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end of the 19th century, it held hundreds of thousands of paper and parchment fragments. Now known as the ‘Cairo Genizah’, it has become one of the most important sources of knowledge for the history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. This book offers the first illustrated introduction to the unique collections of Cairo Genizah manuscripts at Cambridge University Library. Join Genizah experts Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee as they take you on a journey of discovery through more than 125 years of research at the University of Cambridge, showcasing over 300 stunning, full-colour manuscript images across 12 thematic chapters. From ancient Bibles to medieval magic and Renaissance printing presses, 'The Illustrated Cairo Genizah' reveals the forgotten stories of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities at the centre of a millennium of world history.

They have posted a free sample at Academic.edu. > Have a look. You may be stunned, like I was.<p></b>

This project says a lot about the positive potential of the human spirit. Nice to have such a reminder. Such as:

This is one result of an amazing multi-generational scholarly project that's been going on since the 19th century. This should remind us that there are an uncountable number of similar projects out there, mostly the product of people who, given their expertise, are paid very little and receive the appropriate appreciation only in a limited circle -- if even there. If it weren't for Academia.edu and Medievalists.net you might not have heard of this one.

Academics are getting smarter. Lots of them now realize that "ordinary people" are a big audience for their work, if it's appropriately packaged and priced. The genius scholars and publishers have managed to price this book at $60 US. Compare this to other academic books with less demanding technical and personnell requirements published in PDF versions at $120.

We hear a lot about the evils of too few rich people trying to control the half of global wealth they don't already control. This is a very bad, even evil situation. But there have been good things accomplished by rich people, even people who might be considered evil in general and acting from dubious motives when they did something worthwhile. For instance Andrew Carnegie didn't make his name as a great philanthropist, but he built a lot of public libraries, which I and my neighbors have benefitted from for many years.

A final point inspired by this book, though I've had it before. Egypt is an important and creative country which should be known for more than their early expertise in piling stone blocks --though they were awfully good at that. When the Crusaders showed up in Egypt in the 13th century, they were hicks from the sticks (even though the Europeans had gotten pretty good at handling stone blocks by then). And in general, imagine what we might know if other cultures had a custom like the Genizah.

Go, have a look. You'll thank me.

The Small Megallanic Cloud sends New Years' greetings

Live Science.

Stupid commentary on Canada as "the 51st state"-- the sad state of journalism

I am disgusted with the stupid commentary on Trump's malicious teasing on Canada as the 51st state.

I am almost willing -- ALMOST WILLING -- to cut the American commentators a break. After all, Canada is a big country with lots of regional variations. But really, guys and gals, how can you not know that CANADA IS A BIG COUNTRY WITH LOTS OF REGIONAL VARIATION? It's right next door! You don't have to go to Addis Ababa to figure out what's going on. (On the other hand, if you go to Toronto you might meet some interesting and intelligent Ethiopians who can give you a clue).

But the Canadian commentators are equally lame. They should be pointing out to their audiences some basic facts that make this 51st state nonsense ridiculous on the face of it--if anyone bothered to look at said face. For instance:

Canada is made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories. Somebody is going to bundle these into one state?

Canadian provinces have important constitutional powers. Do you think any of them would be willing to give them up?

Quebec -- Quebeckers can barely tolerate being one of ten provinces,the French-speaking one, the rest being basically English-speaking. Francophone Quebeckers can barely tolerate being outnumbered as is. It doesn't take much to imagine how unpopular this idea would be.

Regional cultural differences--say Alberta v Ontario. HA HA HA HA HA.

It's sad, sad, sad, sad that such basic issues hardly come up.

Charlie Angus should be Prime Minister of Canada--see why I say this

I have been steering away from commentary on the march of fascism around the world because there is plenty of reportage on specific events and policy arguments. I don't comment unless I think something is really important but not getting the appropriate attention.

Well, here is something that people interested in US-Canadian relations, Trump's tariff threats and Canadian reactions, and the perfidy of the Conservative Party, federally and provincially. If think you are not directly affected by any of these issues, you may be wrong.

The best and smartest account of these issues is a speech by Charlie Angus, the New Democratic Party MP for Timmins-James Bay. This is a huge electoral district with hardly any people. If you look at a map you can see how it might be an atypical district. Put in the fact that mining is important and that indigenous people are a big factor. It's a place where a serious, intelligent odd-ball (compared to usual politicians) can be elected. The speech can be seen here the Meidas Touch channel on YouTube; you can see an interview with Charlie here/a>.

Astounding fact -- or rather projection -- imagine Ethiopia with twice the population of Russia

At Foreign Policy Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that Putin's concern with Russia's projected depopulation is an import factor in his motivation for his invasion of Ukraine. In making their argument they site this astounding "fact" (which admittedly is a projection):

Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”/

I'm used to thinking of Nigeria as a big deal because of its population, but the idea that a future Ethiopia may be twice the population of Russia astounds me (but not my wife who says "they [the Russians] all live in St. Petersburg [and the rest of Russia is empty]."

I will definitly have to pay more attention to Ethiopia.

Image: a crowd in Ethiopia

Norwegian Butter Spoons -- link fixed

Back on December 1 I urged you to read this essay, then did not include a link to it. Well, it should have a link at the>December 1 post, and here. I cannot express what a unique piece of writing this is.

The dangers of too much scholarship

Bjorn Weiler reports on Matthew Paris's view of the dangers of approaching schoarship in the wrong spirit:

, scholarly curiosity pursued as an end in itself, unrestrained and unguided by a desire to be useful, posed a grave danger to the writer’s chances of redemption and salvation. This, at least, is the thrust of two episodes recorded in the Gesta abbatum and the Chronica respectively. The Gesta’s account of the abbacy of William of Trumpington (1214–35) includes the monitory example of Alexander de Langley, keeper of the abbot’s seal. Alexander had obtained his position by his skill in rhetoric (he had once written a most elegant letter to the pope). However, Alexander began to study in an almost manic fashion, became arrogant, and went insane. He was eventually whipped for his transgressions and transferred to a remote dependency of St Albans, where he died a miserable and lonely death. 45

Matthew Paris was a thirteenth-century monk, historian, and illustrator.

Matthew Paris shows Louis I of France crossing to England to support the English barons.

Angela Merkel's memoir Freedom

I found this review by Timothy Garton Ash fascinating, probably because of my ignorance of this important figure. I recommend it.

Extelligence: Norwegian butter spoons, cold sled rides in Minnesota, and love

I decided to pass this around because I undoubtedly have friends interested in butter spoons. Then I found out thatthe essay has so much more. It's written by Some Guy and forwarded from Catheiuine.

80 Million!

On the CBC's program "The House" a government official high up in border enforcement said that he expects that 80 million people will come to Canada in the upcoming year (most of them normal visitors). But 80 million!

That's twice the official population of the country! Doesn't that give you a different view of what "population" means?

And if there are really that many visitors, what are the chances that every other person you pass walking down the street is one?

Of course, if a Windsorite crosses the border to buy cheaper gas or attend a concert, how does this person count?

Image:Detroit and Windsor in one pic. Yes, it's busy but it's not exactly swarming ...

David Kurtz of TPM reacts to the Trump victory

TPM is one of the best sources for American politics. If you have to read something about the Trump victory, read this.

My summary would be, that America is not perhaps what you thought it was.

Happy Halloween: LDN 43

From NASA: