Category Archives: Politics

Mass Groveling of the GOP Brain Trust

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The news today from Faux News is that picayune Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., wants to rename the Exclusive Economic Zone after Donald J. Trump. All 4,383,000 square miles of it. He proposes to call it the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” The EEZ extends out 200 miles offshore around the entirety of the US and possessions.

According to Mirriam Webster-

picayune • \pik-ee-YOON\ • adjective. : of little value : paltry; also : petty, small-minded.

This is after the earlier attempt to rename Washington-Dulles Airport after the orange felon. The brainwave behind this was Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., the House GOP’s chief deputy whip. This was supported by Reps. Michael Waltz, R-Fla.; Andy Ogles, R-Tenn.; Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Barry Moore, R-Ala.; and Troy Nehls, R-Texas.

Do we actually have to say it? How can this be any more than open groveling for favor by orthodox MAGA-mites at the top of the pyramid holding up an offering to the Orange Sun God. Could it actually be more pathetic?

Congressional Republican Mandarins pleading before the Orange Sun God for a bountiful election.

Shell CEO Tips his Hat to the Biden Administration

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Here is a link to an article reporting on comments made by Wael Sawan, CEO of oil major Shell plc. He stated that Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act “seem to be working in terms of attracting a significant amount of capital in different states, whether it’s a red or blue state,” at a meeting of the centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It wasn’t all sweetness and light. He was critical of the Biden administration for its decision to pause new LNG export permits pending a thorough review of climate impacts. Sawan explained his view-

“I think sometimes the disagreement stems from the fact that it is a fossil fuel, therefore it cannot be clean. There is an almost absolutist perspective on this that some have” in parts of Washington and some European capitals, he said. “While I respect that view, the reality is it is an energy transition. And we need to be able to transition to lower-carbon solutions.”

I have to agree with his comment. Given the colossal size of the global oil & gas (O&G) industry and the extensive reach of our reliance on petroleum fuels and chemical products like plastics, there must be a transition shallow enough to evolve into renewables without crashing the global economy and the political upset that will come from that. The path to renewables has to start sometime, but maybe there should be some negotiation on the LNG export permits, if there already hasn’t been any. Sawan’s comments on this were valuable.

The matter of climate change is pressing and the motivation to change rapidly is irresistible to many. But it took many decades to get into this mess and it looks like it will take some time to ameliorate it. In the meantime, we the public can alter our consumption and driving habits en masse and make real change faster than government policy.

De-platforming Trump and Misinformers From Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The Effect on Disinformation.

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The top-tier scientific journal Nature published on June 5, 2024, a research paper on the effects of Twitter de-platforming 70,000 accounts providing fake news. Unfortunately for many (most?) of us, online access to Nature is behind a paywall.

I won’t waste time on an analysis of someone else’s brief analysis of the hidden Nature article “Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter.” Am I too miserly for not paying for a Nature article or a subscription? Yes, I am. I will include a link here to a brief online review article at TechPolicy.press for the readers consideration.

“The report makes clear that the authors could not reliably identify the magnitude of the observed effects due to the complexity of the events surrounding the insurrection and the volume of the news reporting on it, and that the results may not be generalizable to other platforms or events. But while Twitter normally “benefitted enormously from Trump’s volatile tweets” by keeping the platform “at the center of public discourse,” they say, the events at the US Capitol marked a moment of crisis for the company. “January 6th is a moment that highlights the relationship between real-world violence and misinformation, as well as the attempt at purposeful control over political speech on Twitter by its leadership,” the paper reads. In th [sic] moment of crisis, perhaps the bluntest of content moderation tools appears to have had the intended effect.” Source: TechPolicy.Press [Emphasis mine]

Instead of relying on words and handwaving, the authors of the Nature paper above used actual Twitter data from 500,000 users over June 2020 to February 2021 to extract trends about the very complex behavior surrounding the Jan 6th, 2021, event. Again, from the TechPolicy.press article …

“To answer these questions, the researchers used data acquired during the two most recent US election cycles to compare the misinformation sharing rates on Twitter. The 2020 election share rate among all Twitter users was five times higher than in the 2016 elections, and about twice as high among misinformation sharers. Following the November 2020 elections, and up until January 6th, the rates of misinformation remained “relatively high,” which is in direct contrast with the 2016 elections, where misinformation “declined immediately following Trump’s victory.” These results suggest “a marked change in the misinformation ecosystem on Twitter over time,” according to the paper.” Source: TechPolicy.Press [Emphasis mine]

It is interesting how the “misinformation declined immediately following Trump’s victory.” Golly, why would that be?

A doff of the hat to the authors.

An Eye for an Eye: The Right of Requital

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[Note: I’m about to make a mistake. I am commenting on the Israeli/Hamas conflict on the internets for the whole world to see.]

Basic to the Israel/Hamas conflict is the general matter of who has the right to reoccupy ancestral land. In the Levant, possession of the land has changed hands many, many times over history. Today, Russia is claiming that it has the right to “re-absorb” Ukraine back into what is now the greater Russian empire. The Chinese Communist Party claims that Taiwan belongs to the mainland Chinese. Conflicts over entitlement to territory is a persistent threat to global peace, especially now that nuclear-tipped missiles can cross great distances in a short time or can suddenly pop out from under coastal waters.

The bloody war between Hamas and Israel drags on. I think a few forget that the conflict between Palestinians and Israeli Zionists has been raging for many years. The current war is only the latest outburst and a particularly bloody one at that. The right of requital, or the principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is the guiding theory there.

Prior to this war I’ll admit that I was somewhat biased toward Israel because, even as a non-theist, I find their culture generally agreeable. But the bombing and mass extermination of civilians in Gaza as well as the embargo on food and medicine getting into Gaza is beyond any justification. Having been a victim does not give anyone the right to victimize other parties. An eye-for-an-eye is a specious argument.

Destroying whole buildings, neighborhoods, cities or territories with weapons where civilians may be present could be an indiscriminate attack. A quote from Indiscriminate Attack in Wikipedia-

“In international humanitarian law and international criminal law, an indiscriminate attack is a military attack that fails to distinguish between legitimate military targets and protected persons. Indiscriminate attacks strike both legitimate military and protected objects alike, thus violating the principle of distinction between combatants and protected civilians. They differ from direct (or deliberate) attacks against protected civilians and encompass cases in which the perpetrators are indifferent as to the nature of the target, cases in which the perpetrators use tactics or weapons that are inherently indiscriminate (e.g., cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines, nuclear weapons), and cases in which the attack is disproportionate, because it is likely to cause excessive protected civilian casualties and damages to protected objects.” Source: Wikipedia.

“Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited both by the Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol I (1977) and by customary international humanitarian law. They constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the perpetrators can be prosecuted and held responsible in international and domestic courts.” Source: Wikipedia.

“In 1977, Protocol I was adopted as an amendment to the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting the deliberate or indiscriminate attack of civilians and civilian objects in international armed conflicts; the attacking force must take precautions and steps to spare the lives of civilians and civilian objects as possible. Although ratified by 173 countries, the only countries that are currently not signatories to Protocol I are the United States, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Turkey.” Source: Wikipedia.

What about the Geneva Conventions relating to civilians? There have been 4 Geneva Conventions. The Fourth Geneva Convention covers humanitarian protections of protected civilians in a war zone.

Even if a nation is not a signatory or it hasn’t been ratified, from my western point of view the Geneva Conventions seem to outline the shape of decency, kindness and humanity.

Irrespective of the Geneva Conventions as at least an optional guide, neither combatants are concerned with the guidelines. Whether or not the Geneva Conventions could even include organizations like Hamas and others is unclear (to me).

I’ve noticed that social media is filling up with anti-Israel content. I’ve given up trying to understand who the more righteous party in this conflict is. I am unable to support either side. The attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was obviously a savage orgy of murder. Hamas had to have known that this act would provoke a retaliation that would affect Palestinian civilians.

I’ve long admired Israel because it has built a modern thriving civilization from the ground up. But, it has done so on homelands claimed and occupied by others. As an outside observer I’m sad for the Palestinians for their long suffering under Israeli control since 1948. The Israelis have built an apartheid zone and have confined a large number of Palestinians to the tiny Gaza strip and the West Bank. On the other side, however, numerous extremist groups have taken hold and shelter in Palestinian territories with the aim of killing all Israelis and have been doing so intermittently for years. These groups have received support from Iranian leaders and other players making the conflict a proxy war. Iran wishes for nothing less than demolition of the state of Israel and installing a far-reaching Islamic caliphate. They seem prepared for the long game. Just connect the dots.

Now, the US has bombed Yemen to prevent the Houthis from further attacking international shipping. A coalition of forces, principally the UK and US, has been intercepting drones and cruise missiles aimed at Israeli targets and ships intending to transit the Suez Canal. The Houthis, who have been engaged in a lengthy civil war in Yemen, have been building their military bona fides to further their ties with Iran, or so some say. The boldness of Iranian provocation continues to rise. Who knows what will happen after they test their first nuclear weapon?

From within the Hamas frame of reference, perhaps a big provocation followed by a big retaliation might rally Islamic nations against Israel and its sponsors?? As I understand it, what isn’t helping their cause is the bad taste Palestinians left in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon in the past. There is a sense that to accept Palestinian immigration is to accept a population carrying militancy with it.

Israel’s response to the attack was to retaliate with shock and awe in Gaza in an effort to exterminate Hamas once and for all. From within the Israeli frame of reference, there is a certain cold military logic to their strategy in greater Gaza. However, whatever support Israel may have had from the 10/7/23 attack has withered. Israel cannot shake the historical facts of its founding- that it was established by displacing Palestinians from their home territory. Palestinians are still furious about Zionist colonization. Palestinians were simply removed from their homes and driven out. The same thing is happening in slow motion in the West Bank. While the world’s attention was elsewhere, Gaza was cemented into an open-air prison camp far short of liberties that we in the US take for granted.

Unfortunately for Israel, Hamas represents a political belief system strongly coupling homeland with Islam. Extinguishing a belief amounts to long term Wack-A-Mole. Palestinians are in desperate straits and have no place to call their own. In their abysmal location in Gaza, why should they stop the struggle?

Unfortunately for Hamas, the State of Israel in its present location is a long-held dream come true for Zionists. Israelis have nowhere to go even if they did give up the land. Israelis will fight to the death rather than handing over what they believe is their ancestral homeland. Israel is a nuclear state and will likely use their nuclear weapons if state collapse is threatened. Isn’t that what every nuclear state threatens to do?

What we see is a never-ending cycle of retribution. One side is brutalized and eventually strikes back.  Many take the view that past Israeli or Palestinian victimhood does not justify continued victimization. The killing of non-combatants is simply unjustifiable and must stop. The Palestinian death toll is over 33,000, most of whom are reportedly women and children. The Islamic world will not soon forget this assault on Gaza and the role of the US.

The role of the US in this conflict is troubling. We’ve always been supporters of Israel. Israel and Turkey are claimed to be the only countries in the Levant resembling a democracy. There is strong political support from Jewish and Christian Zionist communities in the US. The magnitude of this translates into hard support for Israel in terms of funding and weapons. Israel’s soft power is US backing in international matters including military support.

For the US to support the Palestinians would be taken as an affront to the Israelis and would be political suicide for any US administration taking such a position. Israel enjoys considerable support in the US and such a stance would not survive. Obviously.

I am a supporter of the Biden administration and the direction he has taken the country generally. I agree there is a logic to long term support of democracies around the world. However, Biden’s public and unwavering support of Netanyahu’s Israel has been, I believe, a strategic mistake during this conflict. There are indications in the news that there is a quiet effort behind the curtains to convince Netanyahu that the mass killing of Gazans is the wrong choice. Recently Biden and Netanyahu have spoken and signs that the severity on Gazans lightening is apparent.

I’m an American and I agree with and support our democratic values emphasizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So, to militarily and politically support a nation that is exterminating civilians, democracy or not, is immoral.

US policy toward both the state of Israel and Palestine/Gaza/West Bank must undergo major recalibration to a more balanced approach in the region. The Palestinian demand for the return of their homeland did not suddenly fall from the sky. It has been there from the beginning. The State of Israel is the result of documented actions taken by the United Nations following the expiration of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. US President Harry Truman was the first head of state to formally recognize Israel as the legitimate Jewish state in 1948. Truman did express misgivings, however.

America’s credibility in backing a righteous path has been damaged by our own expeditionary zeal in post WWII. The big skeleton in the American closet is that in our history is full of examples of appropriating territory from the Native Americans and our appalling treatment of them. Plainly, they were here first. Settlers pushed them off their land, encouraged by the government, and confined them in ever diminishing remote spaces. The point is that the US can hardly lecture Israel on the way their state was formed. Israel is a technologically advanced nation with many accomplishments to their credit. But, in the political choices made before and after 1948 leading to nationhood, they have set themselves up for this conflict.

In history there are endless examples of conquest and defeat. Lands are taken by invading armies, people die and the social order tipped over. Over time, conquerors are eventually conquered themselves, people die and yield to new military and political forces. Borders and power shift, people die and settle for a time, but eventually a new order arrives, people die and things shift again. This has been seen in history all over the world and it will continue to happen. The Palestinians have lost their homeland and might just have to live with it as so many others have done in the last 10,000 years. Perhaps one day what is left of the Native Americans population will reclaim North America after some kind of large-scale apocalypse wipes out the colonist population.

It is difficult to see how Israel and the Palestinians can come to some sort of armistice without Israel surrendering some land and the Palestinians committing to less than full repossession of the land.

Taking the cosmic viewpoint, the human inhabitants of Earth are wrecking the biosphere, raising the temperature of the atmosphere, altering the climate, and while all of this is happening, murdering each other over beliefs and notions. Normally I might have said “let ’em go at it”. But we’re all on the same small speck of dust in empty space. There is nowhere else to go.

A Bottomless Pit of Awful

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Note: I’m having a difficult time not posting on the many ways I’m sickened by you-know-who. This is one more but is blessedly short.

To my great chagrin, there are tens of millions of US citizens who can look at the photo below and not sicken at the patronizing spectacle of a former real estate mogul turned reality TV showman’s hamming it up with a clownish embrace of the flag and laying on a fully puckered kiss for good measure. The guy is a one-man traveling burlesque show. This picture is part of his brand.

#45 Smoochin’ Old Glory.

This is a pose cynically staged to appeal to the many citizens who cannot recognize a charlatan when he is standing in front of them. It is an exaggerated and garish display of idolatry posing as patriotism. Patriotism is many things but not this.

American Isolationism and the World

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The reverberations of Trump’s South Carolina comments on NATO continue. Being a thuggish racketeer himself, he sees something like freeloading or racketeering in the motives of the NATO states. With his disparaging rants about NATO and proposing that the US stands back while Putin pushes west, he emboldens the Kremlin to maintain their aggression in the hope of the US standing down. There should be no mistaking Putin’s motives- he wants to recover the territory once controlled by the Soviet Union. Some suspect that Belarus will be annexed next.

Isolationism has been a Republican reflex since before the formation of NATO. It seems to be a part of the libertarian worldview of the isolated and rugged individualist. Either they do not care about the global balance of power or are ignorant of it. We are seeing a wave of Russian aggression disguised as self-defense or the defense of “ethnic Russians” living across borders. Hitler used this trick to grease the skids for his takeover of the Sudetenland in neighboring Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was partly justified with the lie that Ukraine is infested with Nazis who are threatening Mother Russia. In 2014 Putin had slyly marched into southern Ukraine annexing the Crimean Oblast. Shielded from critics by his extensive blackout of international media, Putin dispatched troops for the “Special Military Operation”.

On September 30, 2022, Putin gave a speech declaring annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. In an angry, ranting speech Putin said “They don’t want us to be free, they want us to be a colony; they don’t want equal partnership, they want to steal from us,”

In Ukraine, Russia has inadvertently revealed itself to the world as a paper tiger. However, they are still in possession of a large stockpile of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons with its own triad of delivery systems. Russia’s policy has always been to use nuclear weapons in the event of the possible downfall of the state. By that they mean the downfall of Putin by outside forces. Russia is not burdened by having a policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons like the West.

So what about Putin’s comment that “They don’t want us to be free …”. This is the autocrat who has shut down all independent news reporting within Russia, disconnected internet access to much of the world, normalized defenestration and has criminalized even the smallest whiff of dissent. Like autocrats often do, he accuses others of what he does himself. His rationale is that harsh measures are necessary to resist outside threats. He also claims that the West wants to steal from Russia. When you are an isolated and naturally secretive country, accusations of thievery are a soft sell. Accusations like this are part of the feedback loop of paranoia, hardening resolve to resist by being more secretive and brutal.

Imagine the ridiculous folly of attempting to invade or colonize Russia or take resources from it for any reason. Really, who the hell wants to be in control of Russia other than some Russian? What would a foreign invader of Russia hope to accomplish by taking control of this giant, multiethnic country? Decades of bickering, insurgency and violence? The taiga? It is a stupid plan, yet Putin frightens the population with visions of American attack and along with its sexual perversion.

Putin’s lessons from history come from Soviet times when the KGB watched for spies behind every tree and surveillance of the citizenry was justified for “state security”, a catchall for close control of its citizens. Escape from the USSR was difficult and getting caught could mean long imprisonment in a gulag.

Putin’s protestations are little more than a trademark display of strongman fulminations meant to justify the slaughter of his own military in Ukraine. I’m surprised he doesn’t do it shirtless on horseback to display his lean and mean musculature.

The Russian people deserve much better than a long history and an extended future of oppression. The region has seen immense suffering over the decades from invasion by Hitler, deadly oppression from Stalin and privation and imprisonment by its own leadership. Today, the strong arm of the Kremlin regime reaches deep into their lives, preventing a popular uprising or just expressions of discontent. What Russia lacks is an army of martyrs willing to die for freedom because that is what it would take. Putin keeps them comfortable enough to stay out of politics.

Gloom on the AM Band

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For a few months I have been avoiding my normal radio listening habits. I have been an NPR news listener from the late 1970’s until very recently. It isn’t NPR itself that I’m avoiding but the news. I still think NPR is a first-rate operation. Everywhere the news has become all-election all-Trump all-the-time and it turns my stomach.

This morning I grew tired of listening to the song of the open road so I switched away from FM and entered a place I never go- the AM radio band. I stopped on several talk radio and religious stations. There were a few gravel-throated guys yammering non-stop about sports minutiae or some anti-liberal diatribe. One station featured an author who was interviewed by the preacher-man host. The guest had written a book about -as always- the collapse of American values and the negative role of liberal progressivism from the evangelical Christian point of view. This is the doom and devilry so beloved by evangelicals. The idea that they are being oppressed for their faith gets their Christian soldier juices flowing and the preachers know it. The threat of the Jesus team hanging on by a thread unifies the flock and gives them the vigor to continue accelerating the second coming of Christ through Christian Zionism, book banning, prayer in school, reproductive issues and running the government by “biblical law”.

In particular the guest spoke of Marxism in America and how liberal/progressives are, among other things, forcing gay and transgender permissiveness down the throats of good citizens and school districts across the country. The emphasis, they claim, is not on teaching tolerance but on outright conversion of innocent children to a trans lifestyle.

A new day for an old scare tactic. Source.

In the mid 19th century in Germany, Marx and Engles contended that there was a practical materialistic conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and the workers (proletariat). According to Vladimir Lenin–

“the principal content of Marxism” was “Marx’s economic doctrine. “Marx demonstrated how the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that “the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are … one and the same.” He believed that they did this by purporting the concept that “the fastest possible growth of productive capital” was best for wealthy capitalists and workers because it provided them with employment. Source: Wikipedia.

The radio author’s Marxism angle included the demise of individualism which he claimed to be a goal of the alleged Marxist liberals. This was contrasted with the Declaration of Independence and its emphasis on the rights of the individual. Raising the specter of Marxism in America and misusing the meaning of it is useful rhetorical leverage for his argument to an audience slow to fact check.

While there is no definitive Marxist theory, conservative evangelicals like the author on the radio like to use the word Marxism as a dog whistle to frighten the masses of the poorly informed.

Marxism is the theoretical underpinning of communism and socialism. Some of it seems to make sense as a critique of capitalism. You know, capitalism is great if you have capital. But, the application of Marxism to revolution and government takeover is always performed by flawed human beings who usually resort to totalitarianism. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can be humanely to the application of governance.

Marxism was about fair treatment of workers. Lenin took it way beyond that to governance as well. We all know how that turned out.

Marxism is a social, economic and political philosophy that analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in the society. It stimulates the workers to protest the injustice. Source: The Economic Times.

Socialism is characterized by community ownership or regulation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Source: Google.

Communism is a subset of socialism that seeks to socialize both production and consumption for economic equality. It is both a form of government and an economic system. Private ownership is not allowed. Source: Google.

The American side of the cold war in the middle of the 20th century was based on dread fear of communism, Soviet socialism or Marxism-Leninism spreading around the world in domino fashion. The Soviets had their own fear-mongering propaganda on the evils of capitalism and American nuclear strike capability. Americans noticed with alarm the trend starting from the Bolshevik revolution to Stalin’s land grab after WWII, to the communist takeover of China, Cuba and North Korea.

A Chinese poster showing Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong. Source: The Diplomat.

The communists eventually prevailed in Viet Nam as we all know. The cold war motivated each side into an ever-increasing arms buildup and a few ill-advised military actions on foreign soil. It also gave birth to many successive generations of increasingly deadly weapons systems and advances in aerospace technology to bring the battle to the enemy.

It could be said that both the West and the USSR were guilty of pumping up irrational fear of the other side. Both sides took advantage of the strategic tensions by advancing their own technological prowess in weaponry, aerospace and nuclear weapons design. Both sides had (and have) a government-military-industrial complex that consumes vast amounts of funds.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then war is a mother.

Both sides had political movements that they benefitted and suffered from in their respective arms buildups and political polarization. But that is not to say that they were equivalent in their morality status.

People have struggled to immigrate to the US and Europe for a long time. In the USSR, people struggled to get out. People made their choice and the USSR wasn’t the place to go.

In America, many began to imagine that the Soviets were ten feet tall and made of steel based on their rapid development of both fission and fusion weapons, the massive size of the Warsaw Pact forces as well as their notable firsts in space exploration. But in the end, it wasn’t sustainable. The USSR trotted out for all to see the one thing they were good at and that was its military forces. In the end, the USSR governmental apparatus was rotten to the core and collapsed in on itself. The USSR cracked open spilling out solitary states, including Russia which struggled in a whirlpool of giddiness followed quickly by discontent over 10 years. A few Russians became fabulously wealthy oligarchs. But a market economy was not to be and general dismay with Yeltsin and government support gave a player like Putin the chance to bubble up from the KGB and eventually succeed Yeltsin.

It could be that I’m just ignorant. But I am unaware of a burgeoning Marxist/communist/socialist movement in the US that the GOP refers to. Where are these Marxists and their ideological children the socialists and the communists? Like everywhere else, the US is comprised of a statistical distribution of individuals in its population representing a roughly bell-shaped spectrum of beliefs. I’ve no doubt that there are a few actual Marxists and communists scampering about in America, but seriously, is it a movement?

Trump and others have seized upon the epithets “Marxism, communism and socialism” in their rhetoric along with “immigrants who murder, rob, rape and terrorize” the good citizens of the US. This dark variety of persuasion has been used with success probably as far back as humans have had language. Fear of uncertainty and of “others” is a fundamental human weakness and will live on.

Marxism-Leninism collapsed with the USSR on 26 December, 1991. Communist China remains a unitary communist state, but they have morphed into a controlled capitalistic economy. Viet Nam is a one-party socialist republic that is a popular with tourists. North Korea remains a backwards and closed totalitarian state. Cuba, according to Wikipedia, is a Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party, semi-presidential socialist republic.

What kind of fool would propose to convert to a state based on Marxism today? Where is the successful example from history that you could point to? Or communism or just socialism. All of these “-isms” have any number of variants.

The US has long operated state-run organizations like fire departments, police departments, street maintenance, postal service, social security, the military, the US mint, water and sewer utilities, and more very successfully. It seems to work pretty well, overall.

Despite what you may hear, a great many things in the USA do work very well or well enough. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. I don’t see anything so bad that it is worth dumping democracy for the totalitarian pipe dream of the Neo-Republicans or some despicable clown like Trump.

Navalny and Trump: Brothers in Sacrifice. Seriously??

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Recently Trump has compared his troubles to that of Alexei Navalny, the recently deceased political opponent of Putin. Fox News aired a Trump interview with Laura Ingram where she asked how he is going to pay his enormous legal costs. He described his troubles as “a form of Navalny” and quickly pivoted to his large-scale legal woes. He stated that “We are turning into a communist country in many ways.”

First, 4 grand juries of fellow citizens in 4 jurisdictions indicted him on 91 felony counts. He has been given due process. For, Navalny, not so much. He was poisoned with nerve agent in 2020 (a particularly Russian trick) but managed to survive. Following treatment abroad, he returned to Russia where he was quickly apprehended, convicted and sentenced to 19 years in a maximum security prison for recidivists and those with life sentences for violence.

Source: Google Maps. The Fku-Ik3 facility in Kharp, Russia, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

He was sent to penal colony number 3, a distant arctic prison in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. According to Hugh Williamson of Human Rights Watch, “The Russian authorities have abandoned any pretense of justice in dealing with dissenters, and with Navalny they have thrown a litany of charges against him, each more brazenly absurd than the next.

Source: Google maps. Navalny’s Polar Wolf penal colony was in the town of Kharp in north central Russia, as indicated on the map. The town was built by Gulag prisoners in the Stalin era.

The Soviet Union had a large number of Gulags prior to its collapse. The map below shows the locations of the camps. During Operation Barbarossa in WWII, Hitlers army and Himmler’s SS were under orders to kill all Jews encountered and they did. Many non-Jewish Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians were murdered during Hitler’s advance to Moscow and subsequent retreat. Poland in particular suffered greatly during this time. Some fraction of Jews were sent to various concentration camps but a great many were collected into groups and shot en masse just outside of their villages. As the Red Army moved into Poland killing and pushing the Germans west, Stalin gave orders to take over control of the country and establish a communist government. The participants of the weak non-communist provisional government of Poland were captured and killed by the Soviets and the Polish government was taken over under communist control. Many, many Poles were captured and sent into forced labor in the Gulag system. Poland was savaged by both the Soviets and Germans.

Source: Wikipedia, Gulag. According to Wikipedia, the Soviets had 423 labor camps as of March, 1940. It is said that 18 million people passed through the camps and 1.6 million died due to detention.

As an American, I have been exposed to the history of both the western European and Pacific theaters of WWII. However, the history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially from WWI through WWII has largely been absent in my experience. I just finished reading the 2010 Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a Yale historian and writes in detail on the period in the Central and Eastern European regions between the times of the Bolshevik revolution and the end of WWII.

The period of 1932 to 1933 (the Holodomor) in Ukraine is particularly interesting and sheds light on the fear and revulsion Ukrainians must feel at the prospect of once again coming under Russian rule. During this time the Soviets, on orders from the Kremlin in Moscow, blocked any exit from Ukrainian territory and starved the Ukrainians in an effort to speed collectivization. Their agricultural products were stolen leaving Ukrainians to starve. Many tens of thousands were killed or sent to the gulags. Being sent to the gulags entailed being packed into rail cars and shipped off without food or warmth. Sometimes when they arrived, they found that they would be forced to build the prison camp they would be imprisoned in.

Some critics complained that the book presents nothing new. It is after all heavily referenced to extensive existing literature. Nonetheless, it is a very compelling read for we non-scholars. For Americans in general, this bit of history is probably unheard of.

For Trump to compare his “treatment” by the American Justice system to that of Navalny betrays great ignorance of the history and contemporary politics of Russia. His lack of compassion for Ukraine is only a small slice of his overall absence of compassion.

Trump bitches that his troubles are of political origin. I agree, they are. Our democratic republic is in part a political system of government. Citizen voting and the legislative process are inherently political, but adherence to the law require is absolute. This political structure has a built-in justice system based on due process and the presumption of innocence with many checks and balances- perhaps to the point of generousness. Trump and his legal team routinely take advantage of our due process by filing for delays, dismissals, objections, nuances in civil trial procedure and lawsuits for the purpose of delaying judgement. He learned from his first attorney, Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Trump and his squad of attorneys are very good at it. Trump is a very ignorant and narcissistic man-child who attracts national news coverage because of his outrageous behavior. It’s cheaper than advertising, just like in the 2016 campaign. For him to compare his predicament to that of Alexei Navalny is preposterous. In Trump’s portfolio of legal trouble, where there is smoke, there is fire.

Handing over the presidency of the USA again to Trump would be a tragic mistake that might not be recoverable.

The Pale Blue Dot Revisited

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I would reproduce some memorable text from Carl Sagan’s book The Pale Blue Dot, but that would be a copyright violation. Instead, I’ll chime in and echo his intent. That would be for all of us to pause occasionally to reflect on our tiny spherical paradise amidst the barren expanses of the universe. Earth continues to harbor life because it can. The right distance from an average star for liquid water, the planetary magnetic field protecting the atmosphere from being stripped away, the right combination of chemical elements for the ignition and propagation of life, and the long-term climate that allowed life to survive.

Image of Earth captured by Voyager 1 on Feb. 14th, 1990, just before the camera was shut down to conserve energy as it sped from the solar system. The bands of dim light are artifacts of the camera lens due to the angular proximity of the sun.

In 1989 Carl Sagan requested that an image of Earth be taken from a great distance even though the scientific value was nil. After some internal haggling, the administrator of NASA, Richard Truly, interceded and the imaging was approved. In 1990, the decision was made to allot time to image the Earth just before the camera Vidicon tube was scheduled to be switched off to conserve energy. Just 60 images were taken and stored on an onboard tape recorder until they were later relayed to Earth between March and May, 1990. The signal was received by the Deep Space Network after 5 1/2 hours of transit time.

Image Credit: from Wikipedia. The vertical bars are represent 1 year intervals. Voyager was launched in 1977 and was 40.47 astronomical units (AU) from earth by Feb. 14, 1990, when the image was taken.

Just looking at the image without any concern given to what is happening there at present, the Pale Blue Dot appears unremarkable. On the cosmic scale, it is just a tiny ball of wet rock. Yet with the right elements, compounds and plenty of time this bit of rock spawned sentient beings allowing the universe to become self-aware.

With all of the conflict and tension on Earth, someone has to stand up for the Earth’s biosphere. No matter what people do, nukes and all, planet Earth will remain in orbit spinning about its axis. It is civilization and the web of life -the carbon-based parts- that are serious risk. It is the birthright of each creature to share in the fruits of the earth. Politics and economics must adapt to a healthy and sustaining biosphere, not the other way around.

With the indecisive wars in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has been served many slices of humble pie. Yet, are we learning? Presently we are drawn deeper into the bottomless pit of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We have hitched our wagon to an Israel that pushed out the inhabitants of a piece of someone else’s land and colonized it. It is an undeniable historical fact. It should surprise no one that 2 million people now forcibly concentrated into a small patch of unproductive land and are militarily, politically and economically isolated are deeply resentful with their lot in life. As they have done many times in the past, the Palestinians have pushed back violently but this time with the help of others either directly or by proxy. The whole thing is further complicated by religious zeal on the part of both sides. Both claim to be doing God’s work, but to different ends. Magical thinking enforced by guns.

Elsewhere on the Pale Blue Dot, Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine has thus far brought Russia only death and humiliation, though outwardly Putin postures himself as unworried. He is in tight control of a nation that has been under tight control for most of its history. Putin’s conventional military has surprised many by its brittle collapse in the invasion of Ukraine. As with the Soviet regime before him, much of his power rests only on the sandy pedestal of propaganda and the large bureaucracy to monitor or punish everyone. Putin’s real strength is his nuclear arsenal and his expressed willingness to use it.

The last time the Russian populace rose up to successfully overthrow tyranny was the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown, murdered and replaced with a new type of totalitarian regime- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over time the USSR was able to modernize the state into a spacefaring, nuclear power but always retained and refined its authoritarian grip on its people.

Meanwhile in the west, a hornet’s nest of anger in the US has been awakened by a single charismatic and malignant narcissist who has attracted a dedicated following of the vocally disenfranchised. While his stunningly bad conduct should be obvious to anyone older than 12, no amount of pettiness, lies and over the top behavior seems to detract from his popularity. It has been said that he validates what his supporters believe. If that is true, then Trump is just the tip of a terrible iceberg.

Many 20th century dictatorships in history have been led by a charismatic idealist who understood the dark zeitgeist. Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler among others have risen to power and directed brutal attacks on whom they chose, sometimes driven by greed for power and other times by utopian fantasies. While Stalin didn’t author the Bolshevik revolution as Lenin did, he set the high-water mark for murder and cruelty in Russia. As bad as these actors were, all somehow avoided the assassin’s bullet during their heyday. One little piece of lead could have disrupted the timeline of terror each journeyed. Civilization does not have a provision that encourages this, though.

For crying out loud, people. Get a grip on how rare and special the Earth’s biosphere is. If there is another wonderous place like Earth, we are unaware of it and may never become aware. The earth is to be treasured.

Tough Sleddin’ for Bobo

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At a Republican district 4 congressional primary debate in Ft Lupton, CO, last Thursday, Colorado’s very own US Representative Lauren “Bobo” Boebert (R-CO) took fifth place out of 5 in a small straw poll, grabbing 12, or 10 % of the votes. The word “carpet bagger” was mentioned a few times. Given that her home district Democratic opponent has accumulated a large war chest, she decided the odds in the 2024 election were poor. So she loaded up the pickup truck, truck nuts and all, and crashed the party in district 4.

Boebert hails from Silt, CO, but was born in Florida. For today I’ll leave this nugget alone.

Let me back up. Boebert was elected twice in Colorado district 3 to the US House of Representatives, most recently in 2022 by a very slim margin. District 3 lies in the much less populous western third of the state. Most all of it is high, dry and approaching vertical in many places. A 65 % majority of the population is rural and mostly conservative.

The tragic comedy that is Boebert is available on Google so I won’t take time to repeat any of it. Suffice it to say that she is even unpopular among Republicans in District 4 as we saw Thursday.

It appears as though the depth of shame isn’t bottomless among district 4 Republicans. Who knows which straw it was that broke the camel’s back. I’m guessing it was the frisky hijinks at a certain musical that did it.

Here she is: Boebert.house.gov

Colorado is peaceful enough nearly everywhere that a sidearm is just dead weight that you carry around needlessly. Like everywhere else, the coppers need to carry a sidearm because the threshold for stupid behavior continues to drop. Otherwise, it is a form of peacock plumage displayed to make a statement. If the Taliban were hunkered down in Boulder or if I had to move in next to a strip joint in Denver, I suppose I’d carry one too.