History is complicated

This thoughtful young man, Mik Barnes, mulls over the discovery that his ancestors include white men who fought for the Confederate States to preserve Black slavery in the U.S. Civil War. 

The Cado "Parish" he refers to is Louisiana-speak for what most states would call Cado "County."

Video by way of  Civil War Memory.

Does anyone else think that is a Fred Hampton t-shirt that he's wearing?

On cornering that slippery eel ...

Jay Kuo is a lawyer, a besotted father, a playwright, and chair of the Human Rights Campaign. He's also an acute observer of these distressed disUnited States and of our rogue pseudo-king. 

And Kuo, correctly in my view, suggests we step back as we prepare to say NO KINGS on March 28 and notice the dents we are making in the regime.

The Shit Hits the Fan ...

There is a tendency to dismiss any forward progress against the Trump regime, with many on the left asserting (even before they’ve understood the facts fully) that nothing ever matters and that Trump and his allies will never face accountability.

That gut reaction is understandable given how often we have gotten close only to see Teflon Don skate free. He is a very slippery eel, to be certain. But it is factually inaccurate and counterproductive to our aims.

It’s sometimes helpful to zoom out and ask what it is we have been demanding and to compare that against what has been achieved so far. When we go through this exercise, we can more easily identify areas of laudable progress.

With the Department of Homeland Security, we have been demanding Kristi Noem’s firing, along with Greg Bovino’s. We have been insisting that Noem’s corruption and grift, her exploitative and racially charged ads, and her brutal overseeing of mass detention centers and the illegal, warrantless seizure of immigrants and U.S. citizens come to an end.

On each of these questions, we have scored significant gains. Federal judges have ruled on the illegality of the warrantless seizures, and Democrats have held firm on shutting down DHS entirely until their demands on ICE reforms are met. 

Bovino was sent packing after Minneapolis, and now Noem herself is also gone. Shady contract awards to Noem’s political cronies are now under intense congressional scrutiny, and Noem is on notice that she will face charges if the evidence shows she committed crimes.

On the bloody and illegal war against Iran, which is now several days old, there is a steep political cost that Trump, Hegseth and the GOP must now bear on top of the hundreds of lives lost and billions of dollars already spent. ... the America First wing of the Republican Party is now in open revolt against the war. This will only deepen the electoral woes of the GOP in November should the war drag on.

And while the press concededly has often disappointed us in its coverage of Trump, with respect to the Iran war there has already been stellar reporting, without which we wouldn’t know who is to blame for the killing of scores of Iranian schoolgirls.

The latest Epstein files are a story that won’t go away for Trump, despite his best efforts to distract us from them. The latest disclosures are less than a day old, but already they are ricocheting across the internet, including with the president’s QAnon base. The Justice Department apparently tried to hide these files from the public, which has led many people to ask why. Now we know, and it’s truly bad for Trump.

It’s one thing to focus on a host of anonymous tips from a national hotline. It’s entirely another for the FBI itself to have conducted four interviews of the same witness, as well as spoken to other witnesses about the claims. It found the allegations credible enough to feature them as the lead on an internal PowerPoint slide.

The story over the cover-up isn’t yet over. While the DOJ finally produced the Form 302s themselves, they still failed to produce the FBI’s notes taken in conjunction with those reports. This only adds to the suspicion that there is even more they are trying to hide.

It is no small matter that Congress voted nearly unanimously last year to release the Epstein files. Nor is it a small matter that five GOP members of the Oversight Committee crossed party lines this week to vote with the Democrats to subpoena the U.S. Attorney General. This is only happening because there are some in the GOP, such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) who decided to put principle over party.

As Trump’s approval ratings sink further and his power dwindles, look for more Republicans to suddenly find the courage to defy his wishes. We aren’t fully there yet, as the failed War Powers Resolution demonstrates, but there are now major cracks in the Trump wall. These cracks are growing bigger, not smaller.

That’s why it’s vital to keep encouraging, rather than dismissing, the tireless efforts of certain reporters and lawmakers to press forward. We should recognize and celebrate important progress when it happens, even while remembering that getting the goods on Trump and his cronies has never been easy.

Each of us has the power to decide whether we are part of that effort, or whether we’d rather fold up our tents and give up just as our long efforts are finally starting to pay off.

Boldface added for readability. 

I think Kuo is right. Hard as it seems with every atrocity, with every cruelty, with every unnecessary death at the hands of this murderous regime, more and more of us are throwing sand in their gears. Nothing else to do if we're to retain our self-respect and regain a country. 

Busy today

A lot happening out there in the disintegrating USofA and beyond, but this catches a lot of it.

That is all.
 

A.I. in war and peace

"Last week, as New Scientist reported that leading A.I. models kept recommending nuclear strikes during war-game exercises, the Department of War tried to strong-arm Anthropic, its leading A.I. vendor, into backing down from its demand that its tools not be used for domestic surveillance or totally autonomous warfare. In general, I’m not an A.I. doomer who thinks existential risk or even thoroughgoing social disruption is right around the corner. But these developments didn’t seem great.

"Then the Pentagon proceeded to launch an attack on Iran, reportedly with the help of Claude, even though President Trump had banned its use just hours before. It’s possible that one of the first targets was an elementary school in which at least 175 people were killed. (Neither Israel nor the United States has claimed responsibility for the strike.) ...

"... The major A.I. companies quickly grew so large and so important to the near future of the American economy that they began to seem not only too big to fail but perhaps so big that the government was scared to interfere with them. And now, partly in response, a genuinely democratic backlash is brewing ...  The country is hugely anxious about what’s to come while at the same time seeming to lack real faith in anyone, or in any institution, to actually manage it. One common analogue for artificial intelligence is nuclear weapons...."

David Wallace-Wells [gift article] argues that a combination of opportunity, nimbyism, and local targeting has channeled vehement popular opposition to unregulated A.I. into preventing build-out of massive data centers. 

"... A.I. arrives in that landscape like an all-encompassing symbol of people’s powerlessness, which is already here but is bound to grow worse, heralding a vision of the future in which much of the ordering of society has been handed over to robots operating in black boxes controlled by a small number of immensely wealthy people.

"Increasingly, voters seem to be trying to take things into their own hands, rising up in opposition to the intrusion of A.I. infrastructure into their local communities.... Younger voters especially hated the building of data centers ... an interesting inversion of the conventional pattern in which younger people are both more tech-friendly and less opposed to change than their parents. ..."

People can be roused and organized in opposition; A.I. is politically potent because what we know and what we are told echoes our felt fears.

"... I don’t know how it will address fears that a small group of tech oligarchs are working feverishly to design a future in which many of the rest of us might be rendered functionally obsolete. “The cultural and economic impact of A.I. is going to be the biggest issue in politics over the next decade,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in December, expressing what has become an even more common refrain in the couple of months since. “I think we have not a clue,” said [Senator Bernie] Sanders in announcing his data center [regulation] bill. “We are totally unprepared for what is coming,” he added, predicting “massive job loss” and widespread “cognitive decline.” ...

"... In the past three [years], we’ve gone from casual users freaking out about their first encounters with ChatGPT to the Pentagon staging industrial-strategy-level fights over whether fully autonomous A.I.s can be deployed in war zones without any human oversight. In the next three? Those exponential curves may not bring us to a new godhead, but the genie doesn’t exactly look like it’s going back in the bottle, either. And those hoping to play a more active role in shaping the future that it’s conjuring will probably have to do more than stop ground from being broken for a few new data centers. 

Technological progress can't be stopped, but can it be regulated. Maybe. 

I grew up in the shadow of the atom bomb, raised with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's requirement that school children become practiced in ducking under their desks should the great mass incineration seem immanent. (Really! Since nuclear proliferation is pretty much sure to recur in the law-free world we have slipped into in 2025, that anxiety is likely to reinvigorate.) And then, with the end of the Cold War, awareness of the nuclear threat became a second order terror, superseded by global pandemics and, for some, the immanent arrival of aliens, extraterrestrial or not.

Can human beings survive ourselves? We always have, though often at terrible cost in lives and suffering. The Orange Toddler's perfect little war should force all this onto the agenda of a free people. But will it? Do explore David Wallace-Wells' musings. He's smart, measured, and thought provoking. 

The last rational man

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime being alternately denounced for choosing to be himself by converting from Catholicism to Islam while young -- and also being admired as one of the most exciting, skilled, and durable basketball greats ever. Meanwhile, he's gone about his business of trying to be a thoughtful and rational man in an irrational nation and world.

As he does about most doings of his country, he has opinions about Iran and the Orange Toddler's war:

... When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.

The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.

Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.

A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.

And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. 

Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?

Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well. ...

Kareem puts me in mind of The Last Rational Man, a poem by Margaret Atwood. 

Yet cry out against war we must. 

Pioneers remembered

Obituaries marking the passing of runner and entrepreneur Jeff Galloway reminded me again of how much I owe to the generation of accomplished athletes, who, in the 1970s, popularized road and trail running for the untalented masses. That includes me.

Galloway promoted a run-a-little, walk-a-little system for enabling us to complete races and distances we never might have imagined. I never took to his system, preferring to develop a long, slow, distance habit of running that enhanced my fitness. But people like Galloway and Dr. Joan Ullyot made it acceptable for we, the slow pokes, to stumble out there in a way that had been unimaginable before. Movement was no longer confined to "real" athletes; it was encouraged for everyone.

I observe the trend they started is still with us, because I see it outside my San Francisco front window. Before the pandemic, I was the very rare older person who ventured for a trot on the local Mission city streets, usually at dawn. Reduced traffic during the shutdown months brought out a new generation of runners; many are still continuing an urban running practice today.

For the last few years, infirmities have reduced me to long, slow walking using trekking poles, but I still keep up the regularity I long ago learned from the first running boom. Twenty to twenty-five miles a week, however slow and whether I like it or sometimes not. 

I remain grateful to the generation pioneering mass athletic participation of whom Galloway was an important leader!

Our Mad King ignites Iran and beyond

The key to understanding the Orange Toddler's excellent Persian adventure is to gaze at events from the appropriate distance. That distance is very far away for the noise and carnage. Don't be distracted by minutia -- minutia like a dead ayatollah, an obliterated girls school, a few crashing US planes. Looking closely and accurately doesn't inform; it merely confuses.

All there is to see here is death and destruction triggered by a stupid man trying to assuage his inadequacies and line his pockets.

Military and international relations scholar Phillips P. OBrien tells it as he sees it:

... Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US governments intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory.

He has made the national interest entirely personal.

... I cannot think of any other decision to start the use military force that comes close to the lack of support for these strikes. It might explain his desperation. Trump started this to have a win for him, but starting it as he has, he has made getting that win very difficult. It could lead him to get desperate.

... This is a president using the awesome power of the US military entirely for selfish reasons, killing Iranians and Americans to feed his own needs.

It is unlikely to end well.

We all, those still around, should be so lucky as to see it "end well," whatever that means. We live in the land of the Mad King who is also a whining Toddler.

It was pointed out a long time ago ...

 

There is no moral excuse for "a preventive war." The leaders of the Episcopal Church apparently understood that in 1952. This was the height of the Cold War during the national shock at learning that the US monopoly on nuclear weapons had not lasted forever, that the apparent  post-WWII US global hegemony faced a real competitor from the battle-hardened Russian Soviet Union. No excuse for preventive war in 1952. (This informative snippet flew by me by way of the Bishop of LA. John H. Taylor.)

 

No excuse now either, however awful the Mullahs have been for Iranians. Christian religious leaders today, mainline Protestant and Catholic, remind us of that. 

 

Trump has offered no plausible purpose or imaginable outcome for his war on Iran. The Washington Post reports that a combination of Saudi Arabia and Israel talked our gullible toddler into his Iran strikes. They point out: 

Now Trump will bear the risk of the bet he has placed: that a major military operation conducted from the air can achieve political goals on the ground. 

Retired General Mark Hertling knows a thing or two about wars. 

... The first night of a war is always the easiest night to make look clean.  ...  Degrading a regime’s capabilities is a military task; but replacing a regime, or trying to reshape its behavior through punishment from above, or compelling its people to rise up—those are strategic gambles that seem to rest on hope more than on a clearly articulated plan.

It is true that air campaigns can destroy things. What they cannot do, by themselves, is build political outcomes.

Pity the Iranians. Pity us all dragged into combat by foolish, greedy, vainglorious leaders. 

Once again a tin-pot quasi-dictator makes war

Pity the unhappy people of Iran, involuntary extras in evil men's fantasy theatrics. Or maybe I should say who are the target of an unconstrained little boy who likes blowing things up. 

Diana Butler Bass has re-upped a sermon from that uppity Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan from the beginning of George W. Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq. We know how that turned out ...

Our country is at war. One of the beatitudes, “Blessed are the makers of peace,” touches closely on our situation, which hovers between predicament and holy opportunity.

What indeed can it mean in such days as we endure, to be ‘peacemakers’? Not ‘just war’ theorists, not ‘pacifists,’ not, surely not war makers. But ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘the makers of peace.’

The term in the original Greek, is disturbingly concrete, physical. One makes peace in somewhat the way one makes a table or a building, a school or a hospital, something useful or beautiful or both. We make peace in somewhat the way two people make a child. Makers of peace. The task is untidy, unfinished, laborious, always to be started anew....

There are always more idiots who think they can blow things up without consequence -- and without regard for dead children. And the task of a decent people is always the same: to make peace, not wars.

Two days ago, the historian Timothy Snyder offered his two most likely rationales for Trump's excellent little Persian war. He sees: 

... two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies....

At home, we know Trump's approval is cratering, so no wonder he needs a war. 

[From afar] ... who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. ...

The sheiks who pay the bribes to the Trump family are getting what they want. Most certainly, Bibi Netanyahu is getting what he wants from his dopey friends.

Let's hope this war stay "little." People far more knowledgeable than I doubt that "limited" war in the region is possible ... 

Speak its name!

That's right. A headline a former Buffalonian can love:

I don't miss winter. But this San Franciscan sure understands. 

Once upon a time in the midst of Iraq War II, citizens of this city tried to name our new brand new sewage treatment plant for George W. Bush. Cooler heads prevailed, alas ...

U.S. Olympians get to be real Americans

And our Orange Toddler of a president, doesn't like that.

Some days the only bit of day to day media coverage I can stomach are the offerings from the sports writers. The San Francisco Chronicle's Ann Killion brings smarts and empathy to reporting on the antics of our Winter Olympians. She argues "why none of us should 'stick to sports.'"

That was a rough couple of weeks for the “Stick to Sports” folks, who — at best — always sound a bit naive about how the sports world works, as though athletic endeavors happen in a remote silo off in the distance and are not a reflection of society at large.

The wildly popular Milan Cortina Winter Olympics — the highest rated in 12 years — were a perfect illustration of how sports always has and always will intersect with society and the issues of the times.

...As the [U.S.A. hockey team] men celebrated their stunning overtime win over Canada and FBI Director Kash Patel — already under fire for using an FBI plane for personal travels at taxpayer expense — chugged beer and acted like he had scored the winning goal, a congratulatory call came in from the president of the United States. Not unusual. 

What was unusual was that Donald Trump, after inviting the men to the State of the Union address and the White House, took the moment to be divisive and belittling to other American gold medalists: “And we have to — I must tell you — we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. If I don’t do that I probably would be impeached.”

Click to enlarge.

The women’s team also won gold, also beating Canada, on Thursday. For some reason, they did not receive a congratulatory phone call from the president of the United States. Citing scheduling — the players finished the Olympics last week and are back to the PWHL and college this week — they politely declined Trump’s half-baked invitation.

... The disdain for women’s sports, the lack of care over the hard work put in and the ongoing discrimination that females athletes face is real, and it was on full display in that phone call. 

Killion reminds that these are very young people, obviously committed to and engulfed by the demands of being the very best at their sports.

The U.S. men took a rash of grief for laughing at the president’s remark. I give them some grace because they were jacked up on adrenaline and beer and most Americans have been trained to smile at powerful men’s awkward, cringey attempts at humor. In truth you can hear one player clearly say “Absolutely” that the women should be invited and a few others call out “Two for two.” The two programs are close and generally supportive of one another.

... During the Games, American athletes were asked questions about things happening in their country and answered honestly and were attacked for those answers. Trump called one young American athlete, freestyle skier Hunter Hess, “a real loser.” Athletes from Minnesota and elsewhere felt strongly about what they were seeing on the streets of American cities and spoke their minds, and they were condemned for doing so.

... [Richmond, California's Alysa] Liu, whose father fled China in 1989 after participating in the student protests in Tiananmen Square, found herself being embraced by the conservative right in recent days, and the phrase “Be an Alysa Liu” caught fire on social media.

That’s a bit of a funny spot for the “alt” kid from the East Bay who defies convention and other people’s opinions. At the same time that “Be an Alysa Liu” was trending, also going viral was an interview with Liu, who said: “I think it is really important to notice the faults in our own government. Things are a little rough. There’s so many protests that are going on and I’ve attended. Coming from a family of immigrants, I think immigrants deserve rights.” ...

After all, these young folks are Americans. Since we are by and large untutored in their sports, the focus they attract redounds on us as well as on them. Our cheers for them are not only for their individual wizardry, but also because they demonstrate the country can produce skill and flair in arenas where most of us could never win entry. And that's good thing for them and for the country. 

... The athletes who wear the flag have grandparents or great-grandparents who fought fascism.They have parents who fled repressive regimes that allowed no freedom of speech or a right to protest. They know they have the right to speak their mind, to make their own choices, to stand up for what they believe is just, to demand respectful treatment, to insist on equality. 

If all this honesty and self-reflection makes the U.S. Olympic team “Team Woke,” a lot of us are here for it. And it’s just more proof that there’s no “sticking to sports.” Sports and social issues can’t be separated.