Kent State

I'm avoiding politics as much as I can, but the Kent State shootings were an important event in my life (though I wasn't there). p> If you are interested, see this post at TPM.

Moonbows

Back when this blog was new, indeed when blogging was new, I used to post pictures of astronomical wonders. I got out of the habit. But today Space.com posted a picture by Aaron Watson of a double moonbow.

Did you know South Korea has put two orbiters around the moon? I didn't!

Here's to the Jews

A remarkable essay by Rusty Reid.

The decline and fall of the American Empire -- and what I'm doing now

I have not been posting recently because I don't feel I have much to offer about current events. When I switched my emphasis to current events, it was because the situation was so dire and few people besides Umar Haque were aware of reality, so I posted links to the few worthwhile analyses I ran across. Well, Umar is still writing good stuff, but he's not alone. Have a look at this post by Matthew Hoh. An excerpt:

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions, an attempt by the world's nations to restrain and prohibit the horrors and terrors of modern warfare. The victors of World War II were the authors. Somehow and in some way, after the destruction and death of WWII, humanity had to progress. The Geneva Conventions were the world's attempt to do so. As this anniversary is marked, the United States is seemingly doing everything possible to demean, diminish and demolish the world's work 75 years ago. The US political and diplomatic protection of Israel, the mass supply of money and munitions by the US to a well-understood genocide, and a willingness and ease to lie by US civilian, military and diplomatic officials out of loyalty to what is politically expedient and advantageous rather than a duty to law and treaty commitments, makes it clear to the world the profound degree of cynicism and dishonor that characterize the American state. Direct and indirect violations of international law by the US are not confined to its current support of Israel but span the actions of successive US administrations across the globe. A view of the US as an outlaw or rogue state, in light of its flagrant disregard for international law, is held by many throughout the world, and such a charge cannot be dismissed for lack of evidence. The war crimes the US is openly supporting and subsidizing do not just carry a moral penalty but a practical consequence, contributing to a rush by the nations of the world to escape US hegemony. The decline and dismantling of the American Empire is hastened by the US' own deliberate decisions and actions. To do justice in telling our imperial tragedy, we need the likes of an Aeschylus, a Gibbon or a Vidal.

My interest in Hoh's post is increased by the last line of the excerpt:To do justice in telling our imperial tragedy, we need the likes of an Aeschylus, a Gibbon or a Vidal. The reference to Gibbon, a towering figure in the historiography of the Middle Ages as much as the Roman Empire, strikes me because I have been thinking about the Middle Ages -- and writing up my interpretations. I will be sharing some of my thoughts here, to give any of my readers who have come here looking for medieval stuff, some of that medieval stuff.

Umar Haque has something to feel good about

Umar Haque has been for years one of the most perceptive commentators I know. That means that so many of his contributions have been downers. Reality is a downer, he sees it and he calls it out. Well, the developments in American politics in the last week or so have given him reason to be a little bit -- a little bit -- optomistic. See (Why) You Should Feel This Proud of a Democracy Every Single Day, or, What a Democracy Really Is

The following passage really struck me: I went to Canada to go to grad school, motivated by the excellent program and the cheap tuition which applied, then, even to foreigners. I had no grand expectations of life in Canada. My situation was different from Umar Haque's. I wasn't a "desperate, depressed 'brown' kid in America, I was a blond white invisible immigrant with a barely detectable American accent. But I think I know why his experience speaks to me. Eventually I came to feel that Canada represented a superior idea of civilization. You may call me an idiot but I actually said that to a student, and I meant it.

Life in America feels bad most of the time. Depressing, stressful, hostile. That is because America has been ceasing to be a democracy for many years now, and I don’t mean that in the sense of voting, but in the truer one, a place where the values of peace, justice, equality, and truth are paramount, enacted, expressed, embodied, in even the humblest everyday interactions. Contrast that ugly feeling with the euphoria of that moment. This, my friends, is what a normal society feels like. Let me quickly tell you a little story. At 16, I went to Canada, for university. I’d never been before, and I didn’t know what to expect. And the feeling of being in Canada was so different to America, I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t understand it. I was a desperate, depressed “brown” kid in America, bullied, beaten, abused, hated just for existing. Life was torture. I didn’t know much else, apart from the other collapsed societies I’d grown up in. But in Canada, I felt these new emotions. And I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t put words to them. I could just…exist…here? And nobody would…attack me? Beat me? Insult me? Hate me? I could…walk down the street? Have friends? I could date girls and just sit at the cafe or the bar…and everyone beside me would be chatting and smiling and laughing? Not angry, upset, or looking at me with hostility, that would soon explode? It took me a long time to understand it all. But this was happiness. The happiness of a kind of existential level. Just existing, in a happy way. In peace. As an equal. With justice. In the truth of the fragility and mortality of each of us. This is what a normal society feels like.

Go, Umar!

Yes, it's this bad

From today's TPM Morning Memo: US President Donald Trump (R) greets US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts (L) as he arrives to deliver the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2020. (Photo by Olivier DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images) The organizing principle for TPM’s core coverage since Jan. 6, 2021, has been the conceit that we are a vigilant watchdog over the long, slow, unsteady process of holding Donald Trump to account under the law for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the early days of that effort, much of the focus was on expanding the public understanding of the election subversion scheme beyond the violent attack on the Capitol to encompass all of the wrongdoing that Trump and others conspired to engage in to retain an extraconstitutional grip on power. We traced the beginning of the conspiracy back to April 2020 when the new voting measures put in place during the COVID pandemic enraged Trump and many Republicans and began us on the road to the Big Lie. There were tendrils that extended as far back as 2016, but the core conspiracy sprouted in the spring of 2020 and didn’t just come into full bloom out of nowhere on Jan. 6, 2021. It was clear from the outset that Trump’s unlawful conduct was somehow beyond the imagination of the people most immediately responsible for protecting and preserving our constitutional framework and the legal system it undergirds. That was deeply alarming, but it also felt fixable, with the consistent application of a more dextrous imagination coupled with clear-headed thinking, the relentless gathering of evidence, a sober assessment of the consequences of an auto-coup attempt, and an emotional appeal to the underlying principles imperiled by Trump’s conduct and further imperiled by the failure to hold him to account under the law for that conduct. For a time, it was thrilling to watch the needle move as the public imagination broadened and deepened and officials of good faith began to come to grips with what had happened and what now needed to happen to preserve the rule of law. The work of the House Jan. 6 committee was pivotal in this regard. While the Justice Department moved quickly against the Jan. 6 rioters, it moved more slowly on other fronts; but it eventually brought to bear the full weight of its resources and professionalism to the enormous task of prosecuting a former president. As the needle started to move on the Jan. 6 front, an astonishing new development further reinforced the growing consensus in official Washington that Trump’s lawlessness could no longer be ignored let alone excused. The mind-boggling revelation that Trump had squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago classified documents he had pilfered upon leaving the White House and the FBI search of his home to retrieve them demonstrated the extent of his criminality, the risk he posed not just to he rule of law but to national security, and the consequences of not holding him to account under the law. Still, even with the needle moving during this period, it was becoming obvious that there was a fundamental failure at many levels of government to grapple with the political calendar and the fact that we were in a race against the clock. There is no justice in failing to hold to account in a timely fashion the man who illegally used the powers of the presidency to try to overturn the last election, especially when he is running again for the very same office, is the standard-bearer for his party, and remains a threat to democratic order and the peaceful transfer of future power. At this point in our national narrative, holding Trump to account shifted to the province of the courts. Speed is not their forte, and usually for good reason. Still, it felt like an important milestone. I’ve said here before, to the chagrin of many of you, that the goal wasn’t to land Trump in prison but to hold him to account in a court of law and let the chips fall where they may. Given how remote it seemed in the days immediately after Jan. 6 that such an accounting would ever happen, indictments in Washington, D.C., South Florida, Atlanta and to a lesser extent in New York City felt like a vindication of sorts for the rule of law and the ability of the justice system to rally to the historical moment. I needn’t tell you what happened next. The wheels came off. Sensing that we were losing the race against the clock, advocacy groups made a strategic decision to invoke the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause against Trump to keep him off the ballot in key states. If it didn’t apply to Jan. 6 insurrection, when would or could it ever apply? In so doing, we got our first taste of how the Supreme Court — with its six-justice “conservative” majority, half of them appointed by Trump — viewed Jan. 6. It couldn’t bring itself to confront the reality of Jan. 6 at all. With a dyspeptic hand-wave, it rendered the clear language of the Constitution a nullity and foreshadowed where things were headed next. Back in the real world, the work of holding Trump to account was proceeding unevenly. At one extreme, you had U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon corruptly mishandling the Mar-a-Lago trial after she had impermissibly intervened in the underlying investigation via a Hail Mary civil action by Trump. On the other hand, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had brought Cannon up short, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals were making quick work of Trump’s absurd claims of absolute presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case. Meanwhile, Trump would go to trial in the Manhattan hush money case and be convicted. But the clock kept ticking. The Supreme Court had taken notice of it in the Disqualification Clause case, where it quickly ruled in Trump’s favor, but it was mostly indifferent to it in the immunity case. By taking the case initially, the court used up valuable pre-election time. By putting it on less than the fastest track for argument and decision, it chewed up even more time. Oral arguments on immunity did not go great, but the range of possible outcomes on the immunity question still felt safely within the bounds of our constitutional structure and the rule of law. From the outside looking in, the greatest mischief the high court seemed to be engaged in was buying Trump enough time to push his Jan. 6 trial past the November election. It was egregious, unforgivable even, a sop to the man to whom they owed their majority. It was an abdication of the justices’ duty to the rule of law. But it was only a taste of the historically bad decision still to come. At this point in the narrative, it feels necessary to orient the reader to the narrator. I’m not by nature or temperament a hair-on-fire personality type. I counsel calmness under pressure. I value clear-eyed assessments of difficult situations. I can find pleasure in puzzling though solutions to hard problems. I’m more inclined to take the long view and try to prevail through perseverance. What I am about to say is uncomfortable, painful even. Yesterday’s immunity decision by the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the constitutional foundation of American democracy and eviscerated the rule of law. It will, in my view, go down in the annals of wretched Supreme Court decisions alongside Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu. It makes Bush v. Gore look like a piker. Three days ahead of the 248th anniversary of the American colonists formally shucking off monarchial rule in revolutionary style in Philadelphia, the Supreme Court gilded the U.S. presidency with monarchial powers the likes of which we’ve never had before, never sought, and thought we had rid ourselves of two and half centuries ago. The American presidency now exists outside of the law and beyond the reach of the criminal law. In the Supreme Court’s view, the President is the law. This is new, it’s unprecedented, and the consequences are almost beyond our ability to imagine or foretell. The rule of law, as the saying goes, must exist for everyone; otherwise, it exists for no one. By placing the president beyond the rule of law, the Supreme Court has deprived all of us of its protections. The constitutional structure we have relied on since 1789 — imperfect but resilient, a creation of man not of the divine, a work in progress never to be fully completed — was turned on its ear yesterday by an ahistorical decision grounded neither in the text of the Constitution nor our traditions and customs nor our best hopes for ourselves or our form of self governance. It is a shock to the system that is going to take a long time to come to grips with and decades or longer to remedy. In the first few hours since the decision came down, I’m not seeing it sinking in yet across broad swaths of the media, the legal system, the political system or society writ large. The high court has ruled it so. There is no immediate recourse against it or against the new and alien structure it has foisted upon us. Short of a new constitutional convention or a series of constitutional amendments, we are stuck with it. That is going to take time to settle into elite consciousness. The conceit that I began this monologue with — that vigilant watchdogs applying steady public pressure could rally those in authority to uphold the rule of law even in the extreme situation of a failed auto-coup — collapsed upon itself yesterday. What began as an effort to validate the rule of law ended up being the grim task of bearing witness to its demise. As a former lawyer, I can tell you we are outside of the legal realm now. This is no longer the work of lawyers or judges. They have been displaced in a bitter irony by the Supreme Court itself (how this is an aggrandizement not just of executive power but of Supreme Court power is an essay for another day). My friend Dahlia Lithwick, a relentless defender of the rule of law, recognized yesterday’s seismic shift. “As an official representative of the legal commentariat I want to suggest that tonight’s a good news cycle to talk to the fascism and authoritarianism experts. This is their inning now …” We have entered an uncertain new era. The door is now wide open to the kinds of fascism and authoritarianism we spent much of the 20th century and hundreds of thousands of American lives combatting overseas. Many of you will be skeptical of this. I will take no joy in being right about this. You can wait and see, but don’t wait too long. It may already be too late.

A history of American intolerance -- from Talking Points Memo

My favorite news source, Talkingpointsmemo.com, suits me very well, because it takes history seriously as the background for current political and cultural developments. Much of this is due to the influence of Josh Marshall, the founder of TPM and a trained historian, but other talented members of his staff do their part. And TPM brings in outside talent, too. A day or two ago TPM reprinted an essay from Arthur Goldwag's book The Politics of Fear. It is long and it is good. Here's an excerpt that should tell you if you might be interested:

Some of the American dream is real, of course. As a second-generation Jew, I’m a beneficiary of it, as are the descendants of many of the other immigrant groups that came here voluntarily. Many Americans — including Black ones — really have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and for all of its many failures in practice, our system leans toward more rather than less liberty and opportunity. But America’s past, like most countries’, is not just marred by but defined by force and violence and fear and hate; worse still, as William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun (a novel whose plot turned on the legacies of race and rape), “it’s not even past.” Among the fiercest of America’s old hatreds, I would argue, is the hatred of Catholics. The first colonists brought it with them from England. A recent archaeological find sheds new light on this. In 2013, the remains of four men were discovered at the site of a chapel in Jamestown. One of them, Captain Gabriel Archer, had been buried with a silver box that a CT scan showed contained bone fragments and a lead ampulla. It was almost certainly a Catholic reliquary, and it was, in the words of The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, “a bombshell,” potential “proof of an underground community of Catholics.” They would have had to have been secret because Catholic worship had been banned in England since 1559, when Queen Elizabeth issued the Act of Uniformity. The English Protestants who colonized the New World feared hunger, illness, and childbirth, which killed one out of eight expectant mothers and a third of their children who were born alive by their fifth birthdays. They feared the raw wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants, who they knew were servants of the Devil, and the witches and other minions of Satan that dwelled among them, disguised as their wives, children, neighbors, servants, and enslaved people. They feared their own sinful natures and Antinomianism or “Free Grace” Protestantism, the radical doctrine that once they were saved, Christians were no longer bound by the moral law, a philosophy, they believed, that could not but lead to licentiousness and attacks on property and the political order. Most of all, they feared Catholicism, which they had been at war with since the time of Henry VIII. The Catholic French had forged alliances with native tribes in the north and west. The Catholic Spaniards controlled the south. The threat of internal subversion was real as well; the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had been executed less than a year before the Jamestown settlers departed England. Many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracy theorist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism.

Recommended.

George C. Marshall

If you don't know who George C. Marshall was, read up on him. He may have been the most important person of the second half of the 20th century. Here's what Heather Cox Richard says about him in her daily blog, Letters from an American:

The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t. Seventy-seven years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world. “The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%.

This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the U.S. and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of that decade. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that “[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.”

But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money.

The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.

“Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,” historian Charles Maier told Colleen Walsh of the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.” It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.

The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the U.S. to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The U.S. invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the U.S. influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well. Forcing the USSR either to join Europe or to divide the allies of World War II put Soviet leaders in a difficult position and at a psychological disadvantage.

With a clear ideological line dividing the USSR and Europe, Europeans, Americans, and their allies coalesced around a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy: the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the U.S. Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: “America’s gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic idea, democracy.”

In the years after the Marshall Plan, European countries expanded their cooperative organizations. The OEEC became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and still operates with 37 member countries that account for three fifths of world trade. And the U.S. abandoned its prewar isolationism to engage with the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan helped to create a liberal international order, based on the rule of law, that lasted for decades.

In his commencement speech on June 5, 1947, Marshall apologized that “I’ve been forced by the necessities of the case to enter into rather technical discussions.” But on the ten-year anniversary of the speech, the Norwegian foreign minister had a longer perspective, saying: “[T]his initiative taken by Marshall and by the American Government marked the beginning of a new epoch in western Europe, an epoch of wider, and above all more binding, cooperation between the countries than ever before.”

Not bad for an eleven-minute speech. —

Wab Kinew

The present premier of the Province of Manitoba is named Wab Kinew. Significance?

Globalization today

Economists are talking about a turning away from globalization as a policy. But there are other ways of defining globalization. Thomas de Waal has a long essay on the unstable situation in the Republic of Georgia. It's a very detailed analysis, but three passages struck me: his reference to "the tax-exempt status of the British Virgin Islands" as a factor in Georgian politics (no further explanation); the adoption by the increasingly authoritarian political party Georgian Dream, of the name of a rap song by the son of the authoritarian leader; de Waal's rather appropriate coinage: Georgian Dream has also signed up to the European chapter of what might be called ‘Illiberalism International’.

I was really alarmed by this -- Senator censured for stating a fact

 I won't try to summarize this.  I'll simply urge you to see for yourself.  (From David Kurtz at TPM.)

When The Truth Hurts

House Republicans lost their minds yesterday when Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) went on the floor and listed the trials Donald Trump is currently facing. They moved to strike McGovern’s comments from the record and admonished him for making them. McGovern was dumbstruck:

The result of the admonishment was that McGovern was barred from speaking on the House floor for the rest of the day.

Civic friendship as an essential element for democracy

 Brad deLong does his usual service -- drawing attention to important facts and ideas in a clear and convincing way -- by commenting on Brook Manville & Josiah Ober's The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691218609>.  I have for a long time been thinking about the role of what people often call norms; Manville and Ober seem to have come up with a better term and formulation.  Norms are bloodless; friendship is not.

 Here's the beginning of DeLong's post:

I  had wanted to spend this month's column writing a review praising Brook Manville & Josiah Ober with their very well-written and insightful book: The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691218609>. And indeed, the historical part is of enormous interest—is, indeed, a treasure for all time...But the what-do-we-do-now part? That part left me even more depressed than before, and with nothing constructive to say. For their big conclusion—with which I agree—is that democracies survive only where there is civic friendship, where, as Plutarch wrote of the Roman Republic before the year -150, points of contention "though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate."

But right now America has one political party—the Republicans—so constituted that it bankrupts itself if it ever acknowledges Democrats as civic friends rather than as mortal alien enemies. And so it cannot do it.

I date the beginnings of America's democratic decline to 1993. The Neoliberal Order established by the Reagan Revolution had, to put it bluntly, failed in policy terms. Newt Gingrich decided that since the Republican Party could not win by pointing to policy success it should try to win by arousing a combination of scorn and fear.

I was also struck by a comment on a different deLong post by Patrick Marren: 

       

And we no longer meet with people who disagree with us either; and the few times we do, we disagree on the basic facts, not just goals or means. To very roughly paraphrase Lincoln, "The realities of neither side could be completely true; those of one side must needs be false."

One hopes that other passages of that speech are not also echoed: "Neither party expected for the [conflict] the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of [any such fundamental] conflict might [not exist at all in reality]. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same [Constitution] and [honor the same Framers] and each invokes [their] aid against the other. It may seem strange that any [citizens] should dare to ask a just God's assistance in [dehumanizing their fellow citizens and targeting them with blood libels for short-term political gain], but let us judge not that we be not judged."

Yes, I hope, with Ebenezer Scrooge, that these are"shadows of the things that May be only, not shadows of the things that Will be."

Lincoln's second inaugural address is a treasure for all time.

As  is Lincoln himself. 

 

I, too, don't trust the New York Times

 I think many people think the New York Times is an organ of East Coast liberalism.  Me, I haven't trusted them since the Vietnam War.  When have they taken a leading role in opposing corrupt right-wing strategies?  I urge you to be skeptical -- to say the least-- of the Times' coverage.

But why should you take my word for it?  If you doubt me, have a look at Dan Froomkin's compilation of criticism of the Times by informed observers.  

The Banana Republic of America

 Is this the end of American democracy?  Pretty much, says David Kurtz,  an informed observer at the excellent Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshal, the founder of TPM, and the most penetrating observer of current American politics, concurs.

1,000,000,000 Voters

You read that right.  There are very close to ONE BILLION qualified voters taking part in the Indian election.  There is likely to be a high turnout because some issues important to Indians are effectively on the ballot.

You want another impressive number? How about  24,341,055,613.7 (earlier today)?

 That's the distance from Earth to Voyager 1 in kilometers.

From the Jet Propulsion Lab:

From the Daily Mail, sometime back.