Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
July 28, 2023: The Week in Review
Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
Making Wider Waves of Turmoil
|
|
The cartoon to the left puts a spotlight on the ironic flip-flop on current matters of war and peace in the upper ranks of U.S. politics.
The underlying contradictions came to the surface with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, a blunder that is changing the global terrain. As a Zelinsky-led Ukraine thwarted Russia's initial tank thrust on Kyiv, the U.S. and NATO decided to back him up with arms and other measures. For Ukraine, their war for their sovereignty has shifted from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. Russian forces have retreated to four eastern provinces, where they have dug in and declared the territory annexed to Russia. (The 'annexation' has been largely ignored worldwide).
The stalemate presents a problem across the board. Should the U.S. continue the flow of arms? Under Trump, the policy was to back Putin and sow disunity in NATO, a view still held by a large bloc of GOP Trumpers in Congress and elsewhere. Thus the GOP fighter bomber in the cartoon aiming its fire on the White House.
This is topsy-turvy. Since WW2 and the Korean War ended, the GOP and most Democrats were fully united behind U.S. foreign policy. The voices against war and armaments came from a progressive Democrat minority aligned with a peace movement.
Now some Democrats and others on the left want to curb or end arms being sent to Ukraine in order to pressure Zelinsky. The road to peace, in their subtext, is for Ukraine to accept, in one form or another, Russia's occupation of the four eastern provinces.
But they face a quandary. To press on, they have to make common cause with the pro-Putin far right. They fear going there, so they, too, are currently stalemated.
Meanwhile, Putin is facing turmoil in his own camp. First, his Wagner mercenaries marched toward Moscow, demanding changes. They were stalled but not dissolved. Prigozhin, now based in Belarus, still has the loyalty of many of his mercenaries. Putin is trying to bring them under his control but finds difficulties. A sizable number of the Wagner group is based in the Central African Republic, where they back the current regime in exchange for plundering the country's gold, diamonds, and other resources.
The trench warfare in Ukraine and the division of Africa can recall images of WW1. But we face a very new world order full of new contradictions--cyberwar, weapons of mass destruction, satellite snapshots of battlefields, and other space-based communications.
Given all that, we still see the principle contradiction as that between Russian aggression and Ukraine's fight for self-determination. Thus solidarity with Ukraine is our core responsibility, however nuanced we might be on secondary matters. We will still be fighting the White House on many matters, but we will oppose the attacks on it from the far right.
|
|
|
|
 |
WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
|
We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
Started in August 2022, then going forward every week.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' LeftLinks or add a new topic. We can invite guests or carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, [email protected]
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT.
The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
Let's see what happens!
|
The Forgotten History of the March for Jobs and Freedom
Wednesday, August 2
@ 1 PM ET
Sixty years ago this summer, hundreds of thousands of Americans convened in Washington, DC to advocate for civil and economic rights for all. While best known for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s iconic “I Have a Dream Speech,” the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom originally positioned securing employment for all as a central rallying point.
While much has changed for Black families in America in the intervening years, employment disparities remain a persistent problem. On August 2, join some of the nation’s leading experts in a lively historical discussion of the labor and economic roots of the march… and its lessons for today.
This is the first in a four-part series of virtual panel discussions for CEPR’s Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom throughout the month of August.
William P. Jones is a Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches and researches the history of race and class in the United States.
Tanya Wallace-Gobern, Executive Director of the National Black Worker Center. She moved to the deep south in 1991 to launch an organizing career empowering women and people of color.
Rev. Nelson B. Rivers, III, Vice President of Religious Affairs and External Relations of the National Action Network and Pastor of Charity Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, South Carolina.
|
|
|
|
Greetings. The release of Christopher Nolan's film, Oppenheimer, and the ongoing war in Ukraine make discussions about nuclear weapons, and peacebuilding, even more relevant this summer.
Please join us on Zoom, at 7:00pm (Eastern Time) Saturday August 5th to converse with Ronni Alexander (Kobe University, Japan), the Popoki Peace Project, and colleagues in Japan and Guam. Zoom registration link below, and more information on the flyer above.
Zoom Link, please pre-register here:
|
Criminal case initiated against Boris Kagarlitsky.
July 27, 2023 - A few hours ago it became known that the FSB had opened a criminal case against well-known left-wing political scientist and sociologist, editor of the Rabkor online magazine Boris Kagarlitsky.
The formal reason for initiating the case was the alleged “justification of terrorism,” but we are absolutely sure that the persecution of Kagarlitsky is a political reprisal for his views.
Recently, Boris has been actively commenting on the current political situation, openly criticizing both the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian authorities.
The regime repeatedly tried to silence the political scientist – in 2018, the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (ISMO), headed by Kagarlitsky, was recognized as a foreign agent, and in April last year, the status of a foreign agent was assigned to himself.
Having started his activity back in the Soviet Union, Kagarlitsky was first imprisoned during the rule of Yuri Andropov. Under Yeltsin, during the events of October 1993, he opposed the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, for which he was detained and severely beaten. In 2021, for calls to participate in protests after the elections to the State Duma, he served 10 days of administrative arrest. Now Kagarlitsky can go to jail for up to 5 years.
The criminal case against Boris Kagarlitsky is an attack on the entire left movement. You can disagree as much as you like with individual statements and conclusions made by him in different periods of public activity, but we will resolve all our contradictions in the course of an open and honest discussion, when Boris is free.
We call on all socialist and communist organizations to organize a broad solidarity campaign and demand the immediate release of Boris Kagarlitsky and all political prisoners.
In his latest articles and speeches, Kagarlitsky remained invariably optimistic about the prospects for the current Russian government, or rather, their absence. Objective reality shows that this optimism is fully justified – starting a total cleansing of the remnants of civil society, the authorities are trying to plug a leak the size of a core with a bottle cap. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
|
|
News of the Week, Plus More
|
|
Photo: Inspecting a machine gun in Zaporizhzhia Region, Ukraine, March 2023 Stringer / Reuters
The War That Defied Expectations
What Ukraine Revealed About Military Power
By Phillips O’Brien
Foreign Affairs
July 27, 2023 - The Russian military was fast. So fast, analysts said, that the Ukrainian military stood little chance of resisting it in a conventional war. Moscow, after all, had spent billions of dollars upgrading the armed forces’ weapons and systems, reorganizing their structure, and developing new attack plans. The Russian military had then proved its worth by winning battles in small states, including during its invasion of Georgia and its air campaign in Syria.
Experts believed that if Ukraine was attacked by Russia, Russia would quickly overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses and launch a sweeping ground campaign that would rapidly envelop Kyiv. They thought that Russia would shatter Ukraine’s supply lines and isolate most of the country’s forces. Ukraine’s inability to resist this onslaught appeared so obvious that some analysts suggested Kyiv might not be worth arming for a standard interstate war. As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the British Parliament in early February 2022, Ukraine could not hold off Russia even if it were given “very capable” Western weapons. “If they get into a conventional fight with the Russian military,” Lee argued, “they are not going to win.”
Wildly off the mark
Eighteen months later, it is clear that these expectations were wildly off the mark. Ukraine fought back with determination and smarts against Russia, halting Moscow’s advances and then driving Russian troops back from roughly half of the territory they seized in the last year and a half. As a result, Ukraine’s military looks far more powerful and Russia’s looks far weaker than virtually everyone expected.
In fact, the entire shape of the war is very different from what experts imagined. Rather than the fast-moving conflict led by phalanxes of armored vehicles, supported by Russia’s advanced piloted aircraft, that the analytical community imagined, the invasion was chaotic and slow. There has never been a quick armored breakthrough by the Russians and only one by the Ukrainians—last September’s surprise advance in the province of Kharkiv. Instead, almost all of the war’s gains have come gradually and at great expense. The conflict has been defined not by fighter jets and tanks but by artillery, drones, and even World War I–style trenches.
Ukraine’s successes and Russia’s losses have prompted experts to intensely reevaluate both countries’ military prowess. But given the unexpected shape of the conflict, military analysts must also reconsider how they analyze warfare in general. Defense experts tend to think of conflicts in terms of weapons and plans, yet the invasion of Ukraine suggests that armed power is as much about a military’s structure, morale, and industrial base as it is about armaments and blueprints. Russia, for instance, fell down not because it lacked sophisticated weapons but because it could not properly operate its systems. The country faltered because its military logistics—the process by which an armed force equips itself with the materiel needed to conduct attacks—were poor, and because its forces have low levels of motivation.
Implications for China, Taiwan and elsewhere
These lessons are important for thinking about the future of the Russian-Ukrainian war. But they are also critical for thinking about other conflicts, including the one that might erupt between China and the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Many military analysts have tried to game out such a war by looking at the weapons and strategies that China, Taiwan, and the United States deploy. But if Ukraine is any guide, a battle over the region would have as much to do with logistics and people as with guns and plans. And these factors suggest that a U.S.-Chinese war would be neither decisive nor quick. It would, more likely, be a global catastrophe even greater than what is happening in Ukraine.
Systems and shocks
One of the main reasons experts believed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would be fast is that they focused mostly on what would happen when the Russian and Ukrainian armies exchanged fire on the battlefield. In doing so, they put a huge emphasis on the weapons that each side had at its disposal—an area where Russia had a clear advantage. Moscow’s firepower exceeded Kyiv’s in quantity and, before the conflict began, in quality.
The Russian military had world-leading electronic warfare capabilities, modern aircraft, and advanced armored vehicles: all weapons considered much more capable than most anything the Ukrainians possessed. As the military analysts Michael Kofman and Jeffrey Edmonds wrote in Foreign Affairs, just days before the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia would attack Ukraine with hundreds of bombers, masses of missiles, and other systems that would provide Russian forces with “overwhelming firepower.” Russia, they said, “would have the advantage along every axis of attack.”
Indeed, some analysts indicated that Russia’s military was a near-peer to that of the United States. Particularly after Russia’s success in Syria and in Ukraine’s east in the years after it annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian troops were thought capable of undertaking operations that were similar to the ones American forces had carried out. The U.S. government itself repeatedly described Russia’s military as a near-peer and close competitor to its armed forces.
But rosy assessments assumed that Moscow was honest about the quality of its weapons and that Russia would operate its systems efficiently. Neither premise proved true. Rather than being in top shape, many of Russia’s weapons systems were poorly maintained or stripped down by corruption. According to Ukrainian observers, for example, Russia may have sold off the reactive armor that is vital to protecting many military vehicles, making it far easier for Ukrainians to destroy its enemy’s tanks. The country also did not do enough to train its troops in proper tank warfare.
A U.S.-Chinese war would be neither decisive nor quick.
Russia has made mistakes in almost every military domain. But it might have been in its inability to operate advanced systems where it failed most. For instance, Moscow has done a particularly bad job of using airpower. Russia’s aircraft perform decently as individual pieces of equipment, and in theory they should have been capable of establishing air superiority and helping Russian ground troops advance. Its commanders could have done what the U.S. Air Force does and begun their campaign by targeting its adversary’s antiaircraft systems. As the U.S. Air Force would have, Russia could then have gone about enforcing control over the area of battle by flying missions that destroyed, disrupted, or otherwise harassed enemy units.
The Russian air force has struggled to do any of this. It could not operate its planes as part of a complex system by using various military capabilities to quickly locate, prioritize, and then attack Ukrainian antiaircraft systems. As a result, it did not eliminate Ukraine’s defenses. In fact, the Russians have done such a bad job of protecting their aircraft or operating mutually supportive systems that most of the time their planes fly far back from the frontline in order to stay far away from Ukrainian defense rockets. As a result, with a few rare exceptions, Ukrainian forces behind the frontlines have been able to move freely on open roads in broad daylight.
It makes sense that analysts failed to predict Russia’s aerial shortcomings, as well as many of the country’s other military failures; it is hard to say how forces will perform until they are put to use. But defense scholars could have done a much better job. Military analysts like to say that amateurs discuss tactics whereas experts discuss logistics, but compared to the amount of time spent chronicling the quantities of Russian airpower and armor, there was little talk among experts about whether Russia could properly supply, maintain, and regenerate these forces in war. In fact, some detailed reports that explored how a Russian invasion of Ukraine might progress almost entirely neglected to consider logistics. Instead of discussing how far and to what extent Russian supplies could be transported and maintained in the face of Ukrainian fire, experts seemed content to study what Russian systems could do in battle.
Ukraine’s talents have defied expert predictions.
Analysts also spent little time considering how each side would regenerate lost resources. It has proved to be a critical question, particularly when it comes to ammunition. Both Russia and Ukraine have used far more ammunition than reports predicted, and so both have been left trying to source bullets, shells, and rockets from outside states.
Russia, for instance, has turned to Iran and North Korea for supplies. Ukraine, meanwhile, has become reliant on NATO countries. As of April 2023, the United States alone had shipped 1.5 million 155-millimeter shells to Ukraine, prompting Washington to begin increasing its own military production. The European Union has also drawn down its stockpiles, and on July 7, it announced plans to invest over $500 million in ammunition manufacturing. But for now, no outside party can sate Kyiv’s or Moscow’s appetites.
Ammunition constraints are not unique to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In virtually every large interstate war, the demand for bullets, rockets, and shells vastly outstrips prewar estimates, and countries run low after, at most, a few months. During World War I, for example, all the combatants found themselves facing an acute shell crisis by the end of 1914 as artillery systems consumed much more ammunition than prewar analysts expected and as soldiers struggled to hit targets inside trenches. Yet despite this history, analysts did not account for stockpiles and production when making predictions about Russia’s invasion. Moscow, they assumed, would win so quickly that ammunition levels would not matter.
Military analysts also neglected to account for the broader industrial, technological, and economic strength of the warring parties. They didn’t, for instance, take note of the fact that Ukraine has traditionally been one of Europe’s biggest weapons producers, or that—despite its size—Russia’s economic and technological base is not one of a major power. (Russia’s economy is smaller than Canada’s.) Conventional interstate wars have never just been tests of militaries; they also always involve entire economies. Experts, then, could have at least acknowledged that Russia was not economically powerful and better worked that fact into their calculations.
The human factor
The invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that states need good logistics and strong economies if they want to defeat large adversaries. But to win a major war, those two factors are not enough. States also need their militaries to be staffed by highly motivated and well-trained soldiers. And Ukrainian troops have repeatedly proved that they are far more determined and skilled than their Russian opponents.
As with the rest of the war, Ukraine’s talents have defied expert predictions. Even though Ukraine was the country being invaded, many analysts believed that the Ukrainian people would be divided and that Ukrainian resistance would be compromised from the start. Plenty of Ukrainians, experts argued, were pro-Russian, because they were educated in the Russian language, came from ethnically Russian families, had many personal contacts in Russia, or some combination thereof. Some experts even thought that these connections meant that Ukrainians would struggle to mount an insurgency against Moscow. (It is easier to conduct an insurgency than to win an interstate war.) In a February 2022 article for The Week, for example, Lyle Goldstein, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argued that because “the Russian and Ukrainian cultures are rather similar,” any Ukrainian rebellion would struggle to succeed. Observers seemed especially skeptical that Ukrainians in the country’s east would fight hard—particularly once Russia’s military had shocked them into submission. By contrast, few analysts argued that Russia’s military lacked the morale needed to carry out a full-scale invasion. In fact, they rarely probed the motivation of the average Russian soldier.
It is difficult to say exactly how much Ukrainian skill and high morale—and Russian disenchantment—has shaped the battlefield. But these factors have clearly made a difference. Motivated Ukrainians quickly learned how to use a vast array of newer, NATO-standard equipment and then integrated it into their militaries, despite the fact that they had little or no previous experience with such weapons. Ukrainian determination has also allowed the country’s military to trust and frequently empower its forces. Moscow, by contrast, has been stuck with a rigid, dictatorial method of military control, making its units far less flexible. Its troops also tend to lack initiative and keep their heads down.
High morale is not enough to win the war for Ukraine, and low morale will not lose it for Russia; weapons do matter. When determined Ukrainians attempted to break through Russian defenses in mid-June, their tanks and other vehicles proved vulnerable to a range of Russian systems—including mines, handheld air-defense systems, artillery, and unmanned aerial vehicles. As a result, after weeks of trying, the Ukrainians stopped these direct vehicle-led assaults.
But the country’s superior talent and dedication is allowing it to degrade Russia’s fighting strength. The Ukrainian armed forces, for instance, have figured out how to integrate drones, artillery, and rocket systems so they can strike Russian military installations. To identify a target, Ukraine sends out scouting drones or conducts an infantry assault that triggers Russian artillery systems and therefore expose their positions. Ukrainian analysts then determine whether the Russian installation is worth hitting, and if so, what system they should use to attack it. This process would be difficult under the best of circumstances, and Ukrainians must execute it while under heavy fire. But despite the complexities and obstacles, they have destroyed countless Russian artillery launchers, ammunition depots, and command posts—damage that could enable Ukraine to advance later in the summer. Clearly, Ukrainians’ training, dedication, and talent is one of the reasons Kyiv retains the advantage.
Reality check
The war in Ukraine has been a learning experience for the Ukrainian military, which has had to study how to operate new weapons systems in rapid order. It has, to a lesser extent, also been a learning experience for Russia, which is figuring out how best to fortify its positions.
But it should be a learning experience for defense analysts as well. The conflict shows that many variables determine whether complex military systems function properly, and that the odds of failure are very high. The invasion, in other words, indicates that states need more than good weapons for their operations to have a chance of succeeding. Experts must therefore think twice before predicting that a war will be fast, or that one state will have an overwhelming advantage.
This lesson applies to almost any conflict. But it is especially important as analysts ponder a war between China and the United States over Taiwan—easily the most concerning potential global conflict. A war in the Pacific involving the two powers might seem like it would end relatively quickly, with either a successful Chinese seizure of Taiwan or a devastating rebuff. But when looking at how complex the operations would be and accounting for human variables, it become clear that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would likely be protracted.
For the Chinese, attacking Taiwan would mean attempting, with no experience whatsoever, a major air-sea campaign and even a historically large amphibious assault—arguably war’s most difficult operation. They would do so in the face of some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world and against a population that, as with the Ukrainians, would be galvanized by a desire to save its country. It would be so difficult, in fact, that the Chinese might very well opt for an extended air-sea blockade around the island.
Whether it went for a blockade or an outright invasion, the fighting then would likely extend over large amounts of the Pacific Ocean, and the logistical challenges would be immense on all sides. The war would be as difficult for Washington as it would be for Beijing. The United States would have some of the longest supply lines in the world, stretching across the entire Pacific Ocean, making them difficult to protect. American forces would have to operate relatively closely to China’s mainland, making U.S. troops vulnerable to attack. And the United States would be battling against an enemy that could not be conquered and that has the industrial and technological resources to keep up a fight for years and years.
A U.S.-Chinese war, then, would not be fast or straightforward. It would not be decided by a battle here or a battle there, or by which country has the fanciest weapons. Instead, it would be decided by the ability of each side to operate complex military systems and staff its forces with well-trained and motivated personnel—potentially for a very long time. Any state contemplating military action in the region should realize these facts, and then think twice before launching a conflict. ...Read More
|
|
Why ‘Oppenheimer’ Matters
More than a film review. The father of the atomic bomb still speaks to the danger of complacency.
By Jonathan Stevenson
The American Prospect
July 28, 2023 - J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist, piloted the Manhattan Project to its completion of the first atom bomb. In the cinematically stunning and passionately observed film Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, writer and director Christopher Nolan captures women and men realizing human destructive capability at its most terrible for the first time. Along the way, he tells the story of Oppenheimer’s journey from anointment as a heroic member of America’s elite to consignment to history’s doghouse. The film, though cluttered and in places reflecting customary creative license, is not the hagiography it might have been. It is admirably complicated.
With virtuosic nuance, Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as a set of paradoxes—dutiful and self-indulgent, humble and arrogant, self-loathing and conceited, measured and impulsive, savvy and naïve, even brilliant and dumb—and thus a kind of stand-in for a mid-century United States unaccustomed to global power but embracing it as its destiny.
The immediate stakes were also high, as the genocidal Nazi regime was working on an atomic weapon under the leadership of Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s greatest physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. The drama is heightened by the fact that Oppenheimer revered Heisenberg as a graduate student in the interwar years and feared him as an adversary. Having leavened their task with the thought that they were simply inventing a “gadget” to end the war, he and his team confronted the horror of their work only after the bomb has been tested in July 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, when he famously remembered a line from Hindu scriptures: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
More than Japan, also first step in the Cold War
In the event, of course, the Allies ended the war in Europe without the bomb. Although there is little doubt that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs hastened Japan’s surrender, historian Gar Alperovitz has argued they also essentially constituted the first step in the Cold War, dropped mainly to increase the United States’ leverage over the Soviet Union in shaping the postwar world order. That they certainly did do, which made it psychologically and politically difficult for the United States not to countenance nuclear weapons as legitimate tools of war, at least provisionally, and to develop ever deadlier ones.
At first, this meant contemplating Hiroshima and Nagasaki as harbingers of future armed conflict. With harrowing images of nuclear explosions and aftereffects tormenting its protagonist, the film imparts how difficult it must have been for a conscientious scientist with intimate knowledge of nuclear war to live with that view. Deployed nuclear weapons are durably frightening, like a rack of Chekhov’s guns waiting to be fired. Implicitly, the film asks why, over the course of nearly 80 years, nuclear dread hasn’t produced greater alarm and more potent and open critiques than it has.
The short answer is that nuclear deterrence has worked. Inchoate in the 1950s, the theory progressed from dangerously destabilizing “massive retaliation,” which left room for a pre-emptive first strike, through the counterintuitive concept of “limited nuclear war,” to “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, which hinged more sensibly on a devastating second-strike capability that would foreclose a first strike. Though tantamount to hostage-taking, and conducive to arms races and capability overkill, it worked. Combined with a numbingly technocratic approach to force planning, effective arms control, and détente, MAD squelched fundamental debate about the utility and morality of nuclear weapons. Even near misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis were ultimately reassuring: Cooler heads had prevailed and would in the future.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan disrupted this sense of calm, proclaiming the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Yet at heart he was a nuclear abolitionist. His fanciful Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” whereby missile defense would supposedly render America invulnerable to nuclear attack, was at bottom protective rather than aggressive. He proposed mutual nuclear disarmament at his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, but the meeting adjourned with no agreement. An acute sense of peril persisted due to Reagan’s dogged anti-communism. Abolitionist protests and the nuclear freeze movement gained traction.
The world looked poised for a reinvigorated debate about nuclear weapons. In late 1987, however, moving forward from Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This was one of the great arms control accomplishments of the Cold War, eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. A reassuring vibe of nuclear self-control returned. Then, unexpectedly and fortuitously, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended without a single nuclear bomb having been dropped in anger.
The moment of maximum danger seemed to have passed. The fact that the Cold War stayed cold suggested that nuclear deterrence had become a refined and precise craft that had foreclosed actual use. Nuclear abolition yielded to the nuclear powers’ evolved assumption that knowledge and know-how could not be spirited back into the bottle and nuclear capabilities had best be left intact. Arms control agreements, an end to active targeting, and the United States’ unprecedented military and economic superiority seemed sufficient to lift the dread of self-annihilation. Some even came around to the view that it was all a charade anyhow—that nuclear war was so awful that, for all their high-tech posturing, military decision-makers were simply self-deterred.
While Oppenheimer might have questioned the feasibility of deterrence, he believed in pursuing it. Oppenheimer stresses his undeniable mistreatment by those who had once exalted him and the terror of his guilt. Its more submerged revelation is that Oppenheimer was no nuclear abolitionist. He sought to use his prestige as the “father of the atomic bomb” to limit the potential destructiveness of war in more calibrated ways. First, he argued for international authority over nuclear power to regulate proliferation and arms races. Second, he opposed the development of the exponentially more powerful hydrogen bomb, known as “the Super.” Some of his fellow physicists, notably Edward Teller, strongly advocated the pursuit of the H-bomb, but Oppenheimer characterized it as a militarily useless “weapon of genocide.” Third, he believed the United States should instead invest in lower-yield fission weapons of the kind tested in Alamogordo and used on Japan for tactical use, especially to offset the Soviets’ conventional military advantage in Europe.
Despite the sophistication of Oppenheimer’s overall position, his stance against the H-bomb and the broader worry that he might inconveniently bring his reputational clout to bear on other areas of U.S. strategy led to his downfall. Several officials in the military-security bureaucracy, stoked by McCarthyist paranoia as well as personal resentment, brought him before a closed Atomic Energy Commission proceeding, which resulted in the revocation of his top secret code word security clearance. Ostracized by much of the defense intellectual elite he once bestrode, Oppenheimer died hollow and despondent at age 62 in 1967. Although credible evidence has emerged that he had secretly been a member of the Communist Party, the Department of Energy vacated the AEC’s action in 2022, having reviewed the records and judged Oppenheimer loyal.
The success of deterrence notwithstanding, the present state of international security would make Oppenheimer nervous about its stability. Arms control is moribund: China has shown little interest, Russia has suspended its participation with the United States in the New START treaty on mutual nuclear force reductions, and Russia and the U.S. have invalidated the INF Treaty. Further, the United States has ended strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, indicating that it would defend the island against a Chinese attack in a conflict that could escalate to the nuclear level. All three superpowers are upgrading their nuclear arsenals.
The Russia-Ukraine war has raised the nuclear specter more dramatically. Now that it is the West that has the conventional military advantage, the Russians have ostensibly embraced an “escalate to de-escalate” concept, publicly endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whereby they could use battlefield nuclear weapons to reverse tactical losses. Oppenheimer himself might have credited the military logic of this position. Yet Putin’s actions have reflected more restraint than his incendiary rhetoric suggests. Deterrence has worked as expected in Ukraine, confining the conflict to conventional means and geographically containing it. Nuclear peace, albeit a more fragile one, goes on.
From this perspective, Nolan’s film is not a wistful lament about a better world that might have been. A planet without the hydrogen bomb would have been safer, but probably wasn’t achievable. Be that as it may in retrospect, Oppenheimer—ultimately recognizing that it takes time for humans’ ethics to catch up with their technical achievements—bravely deviated from the standard line and paid a price. Oppenheimer explores the difficulty of challenging cherished orthodoxies in trying circumstances, especially if undertaken by qualified scientists. Nuclear deterrence is one such orthodoxy, while skepticism about climate change and perhaps sanguinity about artificial intelligence are newer ones. With its spectacular images of nuclear destruction, a crucial question the film stimulates is whether MAD, stripped of arms control and regular diplomacy and under the pressure of a major war involving nuclear powers, can still work.
In the end, Oppenheimer is about the danger of complacency. How widely it will resonate remains to be seen. While 1960s movies like Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, and Fail Safe ended with a nuclear strike as an existential coup de grâce, their successors of the early 1980s such as The Day After and Threads, spurred by Jonathan Schell’s ominous 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, upped the ante by looking as well at the grisly aftermath. Robust arms control followed by the Cold War’s abrupt end and America’s extended unipolar moment soon made them seem moot. But Oppenheimer rivetingly revisits the terrible origin story of nuclear weapons when their salience is rising, assaults on conscientious scientists are continuing, and America’s relative power is diminishing. At the very least, Nolan’s timing is perfect. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: A Black woman in sunglasses smiles at the camera. She is holding a yellow and brown picket sign that says "UPS Teamsters, Just Practicing for a Just Contract." She is surrounded by matching signs, presumably held by other people who are mostly not visible in the shot.
UPS workers held a practice picket in Philadelphia July 13. Pickets around the country showed UPS how serious the strike threat was. Photo: Joe Piette, CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
UPS Teamsters to Vote on Contract that
Ends Driver Tiers, Lifts Part-Timer Pay
By Alexandra Bradbury
Labor Notes
July 27, 2023 - With just a week to go before the strike deadline, UPS and the Teamsters announced a tentative agreement July 25. There will be no strike on August 1.
It’s clear their strike threat paid off in a big way—to the tune of $30 billion, the union’s calculation of how much more UPS is spending on this contract than the last one.
“This contract is going to show the Amazons and the Walmarts and the Targets that the Teamsters are here, there’s a shift, and they should be careful and start driving up their wages,” said New York City Local 804 President Vinnie Perrone, an international trustee who served on the bargaining team.
You can read the full language of the tentative agreement here. UPSers will vote online August 3-22 on whether to ratify it.
TIER DELETED
Among the wins that will reverberate around the labor movement is the elimination of the lower-paid second tier of drivers, known as 22.4s after the article in the last contract that created the position.
Upon ratification, all second-tier drivers will be immediately reclassified into the first tier: Regular Package Car Drivers.
It’s a good precedent for the Auto Workers, another union newly led by reformers, which just kicked off bargaining with the Big 3 automakers. In the auto plants, eliminating tiers is a popular demand.
MAJOR RAISES
The sticking point in the final weeks of UPS bargaining was the low pay of part-timers, a majority of the workforce, who do the bulk of the loading, unloading, and sorting inside warehouses.
Currently their starting wage is $15.50 an hour, sweetened in some areas by a “market rate adjustment” to aid hiring, so part-timers receive a patchwork of rates. Their starting pay has only increased by $7.50 in the last 40 years.
Under the tentative agreement, the starting wage for newly hired part-timers (and the minimum for all part-timers) will be $21. By the end of the contract, the starting rate and the minimum will both rise to $23.
Current workers are getting an even bigger bump. Full- and part-timers alike will get a $7.50 raise over the five years, including an immediate raise of $2.75. (For part-timers, the immediate raise is $2.75 or to $21 an hour, whichever is more.) All current part-timers will be making at least $25.75 in five years, while those hired from now on will be making $23 by then.
About one-third of the part-time workforce has five or more years in. These long-timers will get an additional one-time longevity bump for those with at least five years (50 cents an hour), 10 years ($1), or 15 years ($1.50).
Market rate adjustments will remain at the company’s discretion, but members working under MRAs will receive the contractual raises, which wasn’t true before.
The union has mapped out some wage examples to show the raises that workers in different categories will get over the life of the contract, if it is approved.
Arguably this deal creates a new wage tier within the part-time workforce—since part-timers hired after August 1, 2023, will never catch up to those hired before that date. It’s an unusual tier, though. Usually two-tier involves a concession: existing workers hold onto something for themselves but give it up for new hires. In this case, new hires are getting a boost, while existing workers are getting a bigger boost.
The union also won a $1,000 increase in the monthly pension payout for the 60,000 Teamsters in the Central and Southern regions who are covered by the IBT-UPS Pension Plan (the workers who were formerly covered by the Central States Pension Fund, until the Teamsters under Hoffa allowed UPS to withdraw from it in 2007). All other pensions are maintained at the current level.
FULL-TIME JOBS
Part-timers are only guaranteed three and a half hours per shift; many would rather have a full-time job. This deal requires UPS to create 7,500 new full-time inside jobs by combining 15,000 part-time ones.
Previous contracts had loopholes that allowed union leaders to brag they had won more full-time jobs but allowed UPS not to create them. This is the first time since 2002 that the union has won new full-time inside jobs in any meaningful number.
WORKING CONDITIONS
On surveillance: There will be no driver-facing cameras, nor audio or video recording devices. Outward-facing cameras are allowed, but cannot be used for discipline.
“Driver-facing sensors,” similar to the kind in many new cars that beep if you’re straying over the lane line or tailgating, are allowed only for the purpose of triggering audible distracted-driving alerts. These alerts may be used for “identifying coaching/counseling opportunities” during a 30-day training period. After that, the sensor data will not be collected and cannot be used for discipline.
On extreme heat: All new trucks, which over the course of the five-year contract will include about one-third of the delivery fleet, will have air conditioning. When replacing old trucks with new ones, the hottest areas of the country are to be prioritized first.
Existing delivery trucks will get a single fan installed within 30 days and a second fan by next June. Within 18 months, they are also to be retrofitted with exhaust heat shields and air induction vents, both of which will come standard on the new vehicles.
A labor-management Package Car Heat Committee is created, and charged with figuring out how to add floor insulation and otherwise reduce the temperature in the trucks. ...Read More
|
|
Black Folks Who Were Touted by Florida as Benefiting From Slavery Weren’t Enslaved --The Daily Beast
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
kareem.substack.com
SUMMARY: A report by the Tampa Bay Times has exposed just how flawed Florida’s new education policy about teaching slavery—that it somehow may have benefited some Black people—really is, with nearly half of the examples provided by the state having never been enslaved at all. The Times reports that the state listed 16 names when pressed to provide proof of how slavery may have benefitted Black people, but the examples were shoddy at best. A museum dedicated to Lewis Latimer, a man touted by Florida education officials as an example, says he was born to free, self-liberated parents in 1848 before he went on to be an inventor that worked on the development of the telephone. The Museum of the American Revolution described James Forten, another example cited by the state, as a Black entrepreneur born to free parents. Henry Blair, Paul Cuffe and John Chavis were other examples provided by Florida, despite them being born free.
MY TAKE: The original story I wrote about last week was bad enough, but this new information that the examples used to prove their illogical and racist point reveals how contemptuous of education the Florida Board of Education is.
This seems like a good time to dissect just why the Republican national campaign chose to ignore and even rewrite history is detrimental to basic critical thinking skills in schools. Moms for Liberty and GOP politicians have justified changing curriculum and even firing teachers under the dubious argument that “Woke lessons make White students feel guilty.”
Any critical thinking teacher would point out that that sentence is not an argument but a statement of fact. Some children reportedly have said they feel guilty after learning about America’s racist past and the effects on current society. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
To turn that statement into an argument, they have to first define the vague words “woke lessons.” They actually mean to say, “Lessons about the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the horrors of slavery, the injustice of lynchings, murders of civil rights activists, voter suppression, and how those examples of systemic racism still survive to negatively affect Blacks today can make White students feel guilty.”
Now that we have defined “woke lessons” more specifically, to make it an argument, the arguer must not just state that “White students feel guilty” but tell us that doing so is a bad thing. They’d have to add something like “Lessons about the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the horrors of slavery, the injustice of lynchings, murders of civil rights activists, voter suppression, and how those examples of systemic racism still survive to negatively affect Blacks today can make White students feel guilty which has a devastating effect on their self-worth.”
That is an argument, which the Florida Board of Education would know if they actually understood how basic essay writing works. You need a clear thesis.
The next step, of course, would be to offer evidence that supports the argument. They’d have to prove (1) that a significant number of White students experienced guilt and (2) this guilt caused significant damage to those students. (I know “significant” is also vague, but this is an article, not a doctoral thesis.)
I couldn’t find any polls or studies that determined how many White students complained of guilt. There is only anecdotal evidence (the worst form of evidence) of parents saying their child felt guilt (or shame). That raises three problems: the number of students complaining so far is small, we can’t be sure they actually felt guilt (because we only have the parents’ word), and that the level of guilt they did feel, if any, caused any damage. For example, feeling guilty can develop empathy, which leads to less conflict and animosity among people. That’s demonstrably a good thing. Studies are available to prove this (“The Surprising Emotion That Can Make You A Better Person”). According to one expert, “Guilt is likely to steer us in a corrective direction if it's well placed.”
So, those pushing censorship and misinformation in the classroom offer no clear argument and no evidence of damage, yet continue to dismantle public education from kindergarten through college based on a faulty premise.
Here’s another disturbing fact that makes their behavior worse: 80% of parents in the U.S. are satisfied with their children’s education (“Politicians and pundits say parents are furious with schools. Polls say otherwise.”). This percentage that has held steady throughout the past several years, even through COVID. How is it, then, that a tiny minority is able to hijack so many other kids’ education?
Conservatives cite another number to make their point: This same Gallup poll revealed that only 42% of American adults are happy with the country’s public schools, a percentage that has decreased several points since 2019. But that figure includes all adults, not just parents, and it doesn’t indicate the reasons for discontent. Conservatives want to imply that the dissatisfaction is because of woke lessons. But it could be the opposite. I’m currently unhappy about children’s education in this country because of all the GOP laws dumbing-down lessons and the realization that the officials in charge (in Florida and Oklahoma, for example) are irrational parasites feeding off the school systems.
People make mistakes. The next step after a mistake has been revealed is to acknowledge and correct it, not stubbornly embrace it as truth. To not correct a mistake emphasizes that, to them, promoting the lie is more important than teaching the truth. This is why DeSantis has defended his school board’s mistakes while at the same time distancing himself from their actions (“Ron DeSantis Defends New Florida Curriculum to Teach Slavery’s ‘Benefit,’ Says ‘Scholars’ Are Behind It”).
When told about the errors, DeSantis said he had nothing to do with the policy (which is clearly a lie since the Florida Board of Education was obviously instituting policies he personally applied in other schools). Then he added that “scholars” put together the standards, which he said were “rooted in whatever is factual.” DeSantis was trying to wrap himself in the Cloak of Invisibility but instead slipped on the Hoodie of Absurdity. Calling them “scholars” doesn’t hold up when they’ve made such egregious factual errors that resulted in even worse conclusions. So, not really “scholars” and not rooted in the “factual.”
Another failing grade for DeSantis—and for all the parents fighting for their children to have a diluted education that harms their futures. ...Read More
|
|
Image by Dorothe from Pixabay
Is Earth Close to 'The Great Dying'?
Are the Great Conveyor Belt and the 'Clathrate Gun Hypothesis' about to throw the planet into an existential crisis?
By Thom Hartmann
The Hartmann Report
July 27, 2023 - You may remember the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which large parts of Europe and the American East Coast suddenly freeze up?
The plot device is that the Great Conveyor Belt — also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — which brings heat from the South Pacific around the southern tip of Africa and up the east coast of the Americas (we call it the Gulf Stream) into the North Atlantic and Europe shuts down.
The AMOC and the heat it brings to the North Atlantic Ocean is the main reason why London (at the same latitude as Calgary) has a relatively temperate climate year-round, instead of being snowbound six months out of the year.
It’s why Europe can grow enough food to feed its 740+ million people; if the AMOC was to stop transporting all that heat to the North Atlantic, the continent could be plunged into famine in a matter of years or decades (the movie was heavily dramatized).
The IPCC has warned of this possibility but had placed the danger zone for the failure of the AMOC in the early 22nd century, well past the lifetimes of most people living today. That proclamation moved it off most of our immediate-attention screens.
Now, however, might be a good time to watch the movie again: a new study published in Nature Communications last week titled “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” reports that global warming forced by all the CO2 and methane in our atmosphere — if we don’t do something immediately — could shut down the AMOC as early as 2025 and almost certainly before 2095.
This adds to a growing body of alarming climate science, like the one published last year in the Journal of Climate titled “Sixfold Increase in Historical Northern Hemisphere Concurrent Large Heatwaves Driven by Warming and Changing Atmospheric Circulations,” which indicates we’re much farther down the path of dangerous climate change than even most scientists realized.
That study essentially predicted this year’s shocking Northern Hemisphere heat waves (with more and worse to come); the lead researcher’s first name is Cassandra, no doubt an unintentional choice in the paper’s authors’ pecking order, but still.
Perhaps most alarming was a paper published eleven months ago in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled “Evidence for Massive Methane Hydrate Destabilization During the Penultimate Interglacial Warming.”
It brings up the topic of the “Clathrate Gun Hypothesis,”which is the absolute worst case scenario for humanity’s future.
All across the planet there are an estimated 1.4 trillion tons of methane gas frozen into a snowcone-like slurry called clathrates or methane hydrates laying on the sea floor off the various continental shelfs.
When they suddenly melt, that’s the “firing of the gun.” An explosion (in the context of geologic time) of atmospheric gas that’s over 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. The Clathrate Gun.
The PNAS paper mentioned above concludes that 126,000 years ago there was an event that caused a small amount of these clathrates to warm enough to turn to gas and bubble up out of the seas. The resulting spike in greenhouse gas (methane) led to a major warming event worldwide:
- “Our results identify an exceptionally large warming of the equatorial Atlantic intermediate waters and strong evidence of methane release and oxidation almost certainly due to massive methane hydrate destabilization during the early part of the penultimate warm episode (126,000 to 125,000 y ago). This major warming was caused by … a brief episode of meltwater-induced weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and amplified by a warm mean climate.”
The researchers warn we may be looking at a similar event in our time:
“Our results highlight climatic feedback processes associated with the penultimate climate warming that can serve as a paleoanalog for modern ongoing warming.”
As glaciers melt and the oceans warm, they note:
- “[M]eltwater-induced AMOC weakening significantly amplifies the warming of intermediate waters and, in turn, destabilizes shallow subsurface methane hydrate deposits.”
In other words, the recent extreme warming of our oceans increases the chances the AMOC Great Conveyor Belt will shut down, throwing Europe into an existential crisis and wilding the rest of the world’s weather. And, most ominously, the AMOC shutting down will speed up the melting of more methane clathrates on the sea floors around the world.
The process is driven by warming of the oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of the addition global warming heat we’re forcing by burning fossil fuels. As the BBC noted, the past month and first weeks of July “were hotter than any in recorded history” and:
- “This week, sea surface temperatures along the coasts of Southern Spain and North Africa were 2-4C (3.6-7.2F) higher than they would normally be at this time of year, with some spots 5C (9F) above the long-term average.”
Ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida this week were in the range that Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs: 101 degrees. This has never happened before in human history.
The least likely but most dangerous outcome scenario is that the warming ocean might begin a massive melting of those methane hydrate slurries into gas, producing a “burp” of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, further adding to global warming, which would then melt even more of the clathrates.
It would be a deadly “positive feedback system,” with each phase of warming setting up the next and worse one. The Clathrate Gun.
At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, this runaway process is apparently what happened when a spike in methane led to such a violent warming of the planet that it killed over 90 percent of all life in the oceans and 70 percent of all life on land, paving the way for the rise of the dinosaurs, as cold-blooded lizards were among the few survivors.
That period is referred to as the Permian Mass Extinction, or, simply, “The Great Dying.” It was the most destructive mass extinction event in the history of our planet.
Eight years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio and I put together and co-narrated a 12-minute video about this exact scenario, interviewing some of the world’s top climate scientists.
The “clathrate gun hypothesis” is controversial, but there’s a large body of evidence for it having done the damage at the end of the Permian, as we note in that video.
While it’s the least likely but most dramatic outcome of today’s global warming, it’s worth heeding the warning: by pouring over thirty billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year we have stirred a beast that could — if we don’t take serious action soon — spell the doom of human civilization, if not humanity itself.
As the scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted:
- “The key findings of our study add to a growing body of observational findings strongly supporting the ‘clathrate gun hypothesis.’ … Importantly, the interval we have studied is marked by a mean climate state comparable to future projections of transient global climate warming of 1.3 °C to 3.0 °C.” [emphasis mine]
We just this year passed 1.3 degrees Celsius of planetary warming: we are now in the territory of the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis if these researchers are right (although the risks are still small).
This is the first study I’ve seen to make such a claim, and it’s not from crackpots or alarmists; these are solid, credible scientists with a lifetime of learning and work behind them.
And, they argue, if the AMOC weakens or shuts down, all bets are off:
- “Simulation studies have suggested warming of intermediate waters has been limited to ~1.5 °C to 3 °C, and that such warmings were insufficient to significantly affect the stability of shallow subsurface methane hydrates. However, the magnitude of intermediate water warming can be significantly amplified by meltwater-induced weakening of atmospheric and ocean circulation, an amplification not considered in the simulations that examined potential gas hydrate destabilization.”
CO2 levels for the past 800,000 years from NOAA - the human race appeared about 300,000 years ago. In other words, if the AMOC fails, the clathrate gun hypothesis becomes significantly more viable.
For much of the past four decades, climate activists have been warning us that we’re approaching tipping points and thresholds that will alter how Americans live, cost us a fortune, and kill millions of humans every year.
Now we’re there. Our “normal” climate is dead; the weather has gone insane, and it is annually killing thousands of Americans and millions of people all around the globe. And the numbers are increasing almost exponentially, year to year.
This is how quickly it has hit us: when I published the first edition of my book warning of climate change, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, in 1996 (it’s been updated twice since then) there was still a vigorous debate here in the United States — funded in large part by the fossil fuel industry and its allies in rightwing media — over whether climate change was even a real thing.
They knew that their product was poisoning our atmosphere, but they were making hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. Nothing was more important to these morbidly rich people than that money.
They and their bought-off politicians began to believe their own lies, or at least some did, and thought this wouldn’t happen until they were all dead anyway, even if it was true.
But then it happened. The climate emergency we were worried about arrived. It is here, now.
Looking at statistical information about major heatwaves — particularly ones that hit multiple continents at the same time — the authors of the Journal of Climate paper referenced above found:
“Such simultaneous heatwaves are 7 times more likely now than 40 years ago. They are also hotter and affect a larger area.”
In the 1980s the Northern Hemisphere averaged around 73 heatwaves during the summer months from May to September. By the 2010s that number had grown to 152 heatwaves per summer.
And those heat waves are also almost 20 percent hotter than they were the year Reagan won the presidency (and denied climate change throughout his 8 fossil-fuel-funded years in office).
One of the most startling understandings of what’s happening has only become apparent in the past decade or so: that the atmospheric Polar Jet Stream is acting weird and thus making our weather extremes more severe.
Over the course of multiple conversations with a few of the world’s top climate scientists I’ve learned that the Polar Jet Stream — the fast-moving river of high-altitude (30,000+ feet) air that circulates around the North Pole — has slowed down, weakened, and is beginning to “drool” down over parts of North America, going as far south as Texas.
This was, in fact, what caused the severe winter weather that shut down Texas’ privatized power grid a few years back, along with causing the “bomb cyclone” freezing storms hitting the Midwest and Northeast every winter, and the extended periods of 100+ degree weather all across America, Europe, Russia, and China this summer.
Historically, the Polar Jet Stream was held in place — mostly in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere — by the temperature differential between the Arctic and the middle latitudes, where most Americans (outside of northern Alaska) live.
The cold arctic air defined the northernmost margin of the Polar Jet Stream while the warmer middle latitude air defined its southernmost margin. While it pushed weather patterns across North America for much of my life, it rarely dipped below the Mason-Dixon line and, even when it did, generally just brought the hot/cold, or wet/drought weather behind it for only a day or two.
But the Arctic has been warming at least three times faster than the middle latitudes where most of us live, which means the difference in temperature between the Arctic air to the north of the Jet Stream and our air to its south has diminished.
The North Pole/Arctic, once a solid cap of ice where Santa Claus was supposed to live, is now an open sea every summer.
As that temperature differential has declined, so has the strength and velocity of the Jet Stream. Now, instead of whipping across the Northern Hemisphere, it often spills down as far south as Mexico and then stays in place for days at a time.
What would have been a one-day cold-snap or heat wave becomes multiple days, long enough to wreak billions in damage to a state’s residential and energy infrastructure.
What would have been a rainstorm lasting a few hours becomes an unrelenting downpour lasting for days, creating massive flooding.
These changes in the Jet Stream, combined with the warming of our oceans (whose temperatures also drive weather), have also caused what were once routine weather patterns to change.
Regions that were only dry during the summer are now experiencing drought year-round; parts of the country where flooding was occasional but rare are now regularly experiencing massive, days-long storms that tear up houses and flood entire regions.
Flights are bumpier and being cancelled with increasing frequency because of weather, as we’re just now sliding into this unknowable new era of severe weather weirding.
This is our new normal, and it’s costing us lives and billions of dollars every year, all to preserve the profits of a fossil fuel industry that knew in the 1960s that their product was poisoning the world and would lead to this outcome.
But don’t think that just because this is the new normal that this “normal” will last. The last time our planet saw CO2 levels at their current 422 parts-per-million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and trees were growing in Antarctica.
In other words, we’re on a path, not at a destination. The planet will catch up with all that CO2, and as it does our weather will continue to become more and more severe until we figure out a way to get CO2 levels back down to the 1950s count of just over 300 ppm.
Meanwhile, we’re pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere right now than at any time in human history, despite efforts among the world’s developed nations to reduce their carbon footprints. ...Read More
|
|
Florida Ocean Records ‘Unprecedented’ Temperatures Similar To A Hot Tub
The 90-100F readings add to previous warnings over warming water putting marine life and ecosystems in peril
By Dani Anguiano
The Guardian
July 25, 2023 - The surface ocean temperature around the Florida Keys soared to 101.19F (38.43C) this week, in what could be a global record as ocean heat around the state reaches unprecedented extremes.
Florida serves as a staging point for large quantities of drugs making their way into the US from South America. Experts say ‘cocaine sharks’ may be feasting on drugs dumped off Florida
Normal water temperatures for the area this time of year should be between 73F and 88F (23C and 31C), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The level of heat recorded this week is about the same as a hot tub.
Records for ocean surface temperature are not kept, but a 2020 study suggested that the highest temperature observed was 99.7F (37.61C) in the Persian Gulf.
The extreme readings add to previous warnings over Florida’s warming waters in the south-eastern United States as prolonged heat continued to bake other parts of the country. The south Florida coast has been grappling with an extreme heatwave that threatens marine life and ocean ecosystems.
“We didn’t expect this heating to happen so early in the year and to be so extreme,” Derek Manzello, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, told CNN last week. “This appears to be unprecedented in our records.”
Heatwaves are increasingly affecting the world’s oceans, destroying kelp, seagrass and corals and killing swathes of sea-life like “wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”. Research in 2019 found that the number of ocean heatwave days had tripled in recent years.
A 2021 heat dome probably killed more than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific, experts have said.
The growing frequency and intensity of severe weather – both on land and in oceans – is a symptom of the global, human-driven climate crisis that is fueling extremes, experts warn, with current heatwaves expected to persist through August.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported earlier this month that global sea temperatures have reached monthly record highs since May, also driven in part by an El Niño event. Sea surface temperatures worldwide have broken monthly records for heat in April, May and June, according to Noaa.
The temperatures in Florida also pose a threat to human food supplies and livelihoods for those whose work is tied to the water.
As he worked his knife to filet fish hauled into Key Largo on Tuesday, fishing boat captain Dustin Hansel said the catch had been getting “slower and slower” for the past five summers. He had also been seeing more dead fish in waters around Key Largo.
“As far as all of our bay waters, any near-shore waters, everything is super, super hot,” Hansel said.
Noaa warned earlier this month that the warmer water around Florida could supercharge tropical storms and hurricanes, which build more energy over warmer waters. Rising temperatures are also severely stressing coral reefs, the agency said.
The high temperatures around the Florida Keys are putting coral reefs at risk – scientists have observed bleaching and even death in some of the Keys’ most resilient corals, said Ian Enochs, lead of the coral program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
“This is more, earlier than we have ever seen,” Enochs said. “I’m nervous by how early this is occurring.” ...Read More
|
|
Photo: A young Fidej under arrest.
Moncada: On July 26, the First Blow of the Cuban Revolution
A great and heroic act, seventy years ago today. We can marvel at the intellect depth of Fidel's speech at the time
By Charles Mckelvey
https://substack.com/@charlesmckelvey
July 26, 2023 - In a manifesto released on July 23, 1953, Fidel Castro, at the time a Havana lawyer known for defending the poor, called upon the people to “continue the unfinished revolution that Céspedes initiated in 1868, Martí continued in 1895, and Guiteras and Chibás made current in the republican epoch.” The revolution, he maintained, was the revolution of Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Martí, Mella, Guiteras, and Chibás. This single revolution, having evolved through different stages, now was entering a “new period of war.”
The initiation of the new stage was proclaimed dramatically three days later, on July 26, when Fidel led an attack on the Moncada military garrison in Santiago de Cuba. The intention of the assault was to seize weapons for the launching of a guerrilla struggle in the mountains. The assault failed, and 70 of the 126 assailants were killed, 95% of them murdered after capture by Batista’s soldiers in a four-day period following the assault.
Although the Cuban intellectual class during the period 1934 to 1953 had kept alive an ethical attitude in the face of the cynicism and fatalism generated by the neocolonial republic, there had emerged among the people by 1953 the sentiment that an ethical attitude is not enough; one must act. In this context, the Moncada attack threw itself on the political scene as a great act, which broke the barriers that were confining the movement to the verbal expression of an attitude, and which opened the possibility for a new stage in the Cuban Revolution.
Moncada, moreover, was a heroic act, which by its example called into being a new stage of struggle that would advance through personal courage and sacrifice. In his address at his trial for the attack, Fidel expressed the significance of the emergence of a young generation of Cubans prepared to sacrifice in defense of the nation.
It seemed that Martí would die during the centennial year of his birth, that his memory would be extinguished forever. . . . But he lives; he has not died; his people are rebellious; his people are dignified; his people are faithful to his memory. There are Cubans that have died defending his doctrines. There are youth who in magnificent selflessness have come to die beside his tomb, to give their blood and their lives in order that he would continue living in the soul of the country.
The Moncada assault, therefore, brought to the political foreground the Cuban tradition of personal and collective sacrifice in defense of national dignity. Moncada responded to the needs of the people and the revolution in that historic moment, providing an example of heroic struggle that the people were able to understand and were ready to support. Moncada was an “enormous, ripping and creative new force that would project itself over the future of Cuba in an irresistible form,” as was expressed by the Cuban essayist Cintio Vitier. And it lifted Fidel to the position of the charismatic leader of the new stage of the revolutionary struggle, a role assumed in earlier historical moments by Martí, Mella, Martínez Villena, and Guiteras.
Following the failed assault, Fidel was arrested and placed in solitary confinement, and he was brought to trial in a procedure separate from his comrades, which was not open to the public. He was permitted to address the court, and his address of October 16, 1953, was delivered from memory. A written version of the address was smuggled out of his prison cell, and it subsequently was distributed clandestinely. Fidel concluded the address by saying, “History Will Absolve Me,” and the underground document became known by that phrase.
In his October 16, 1953, address to the tribunal, Fidel described the organization and the carrying out of the assault, its intentions, the reasons for its failure, and his capture. He condemned the soldiers who had tortured and murdered captured revolutionaries, maintaining that they had degraded the uniform of the army. He harshly criticized the career of Batista and his deceitful message to the people on July 27. He praised the courage and heroism of the young insurrectionists who had carried out the attack.
In addition, Fidel argued that the assault of the Moncada garrison was legal. He maintained that in early 1952, although the people were not satisfied with government officials, they had the power to elect new officials, and they were in the process of doing so. They were engaged actively and enthusiastically in public debates in anticipation of elections. The Batista coup of March 10, 1952, ended this process. Fidel referred to a writ that he had submitted to the Court on March 12, two days following the coup d’état, which argued that the coup was a criminal act that violated several laws of the Social Defense Code, and which asked that Batista and his seventeen accomplices be sentenced to 108 years of imprisonment, in accordance with the Social Defense Code. But, he noted, the Court took no action, and instead, the criminal strides up and down the country like a great lord. The assault on the Moncada garrison, he maintained, was an attempt “to overthrow an illegal regime and to restore the legitimate Constitution.”
In the October 16 address, Fidel noted that Batista established the so-called “Constitutional Statutes” to function as a replacement to the 1940 Constitution, and in this Batista was supported by the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights, which was established by the 1940 Constitution. But, Fidel argued, said Court violated the Constitutional article that established it, and thus its ruling is not valid or constitutional. Fidel maintained that the 1940 Constitution remains in force, including Article 40, which affirms the right of insurrection against tyranny. And the Batista regime, he maintained, is tyrannical. It has eliminated civil liberties and suffrage, and it has uprooted democratic institutions. In “using tanks and soldiers to take over the Presidential Palace, the national treasury, and other governmental offices, and aiming guns at the heart of the people,” Batista has established “Might makes right” as the supreme law of the land. As soon as it took power, the regime engaged in repression against popular organizations, cultural institutions, and journalists, including arbitrary arrests, beatings, torture, and murder. Furthermore, the regime placed in top positions the most corrupt members of the traditional political parties. The previous regime was guilty of plunder of the public treasury and disrespect for human life, but the Batista regime increased pillage tenfold, and disrespect for human life a hundredfold. It served the great financial interests, and it redistributed loot to the Batista clique.
Fidel proceeded to remind the tribunal that the right of the people to revolt against tyranny was recognized by the theocratic monarchies of Ancient China, the city-states of Greece, and Republican Rome, and it was affirmed by the philosophers of Ancient India. In the Middle Ages, the right of the people to violently overthrow a tyrant was confirmed by John Salisbury, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. In the early modern era, it was sustained by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Mariana, the Scottish reformers John Knox and John Poynet, and the German jurist John Althus. The right of the people to overthrow despotic kings was the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775, and the French Revolution of 1789, and it was affirmed by John Milton, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, the US Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Fidel provided succinct summaries or quotations from these mentioned sources, with the most extensive quotation being from the US Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776.
Fidel expressed the patriotism of the young people who assaulted the Moncada garrison.
- "We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty, not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of liberty, justice, and human rights. We were taught from an early age to venerate the glorious example of our heroes and martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gomez and Martí were the first names engraved in our minds; we were taught that Maceo had said that one does not beg for liberty but takes it with the blade of a machete. . . . We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon our National Anthem, whose verses say that to live in chains is to live submerged in an affront and dishonor, and to die for the country is to live. All this we learned and will never forget."
Fidel maintained that if the assault had succeeded, the revolutionaries would have had the support of the people. He described the people in the following terms:
- "When we speak of the people, we do not mean the comfortable and conservative sectors of the nation, who welcome any regime of oppression, any dictatorship, any despotism, prostrating themselves before the master of the moment until they grind their foreheads into the ground. We understand by people, when we are speaking of struggle, to mean the vast unredeemed masses, to whom all make promises and who are deceived and betrayed by all; who yearn for a better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations of justice, having suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation; and who long for significant and sound transformations in all aspects of life, and who, to attain them, are ready to give even the very last breath of their lives, when they believe in something or in someone, and above all when they believe sufficiently in themselves."
Fidel described the sectors that comprise the people: 600,000 unemployed; 500,000 agricultural workers who work only four months of the year and who live in miserable shacks; 400,000 industrial workers without adequate salary, pension, or housing; 100,000 tenant farmers, working on land that is not theirs; 30,000 teachers and professors who are poorly paid; 20,000 small businessmen who are weighed down by debt and plagued by graft imposed by corrupt public officials; and ten thousand young professionals in health, education, engineering, law, and journalism, who find that their recently attained degrees do not enable them to find work.
Fidel maintained that if the Moncada garrison had been successfully taken, five revolutionary laws would have been immediately broadcast by radio. (1) The re-establishment of the Constitution of 1940, with the executive, legislative, and judicial functions assumed by the revolutionary government, in order that the government would be able to implement the popular will and true justice, until these governmental structures, presently distorted by dictatorship and corruption, can be restored legitimately. (2) The ceding of land to tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters who occupy parcels of land of less than five caballerías (67 hectares or 165 acres), with compensation for the former owners. (3) The granting of the right of workers and employees in commercial, industrial, and commercial enterprises to 30% of the profits. (4) The granting of the right of tenant farmers to 55% of the yield of sugar production, and a guarantee to small tenant farmers of their participation in the sugar commerce. (5) The confiscation of property that was fraudulently obtained as a result of government corruption, with the establishment of special tribunals with full powers to investigate and to solicit the extradition of persons from foreign governments. Fidel explained that these five revolutionary laws would have been followed by other laws, based on further study. These further laws would have included agrarian reform, the integral reform of education, the nationalization of (US-owned) electric and telephone companies, the return to the people of the excessive money that these companies have collected through high rates, and the payment to the government of taxes that have been evaded.
Fidel explained the structural roots of the social problems of Cuba. Cuba is an agricultural country, an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods; it has limited industrial capacity. More than half of the productive land is foreign-owned. Eighty-five percent of small farmers pay rent, and many peasant families do not have land to use for the production of food for their families. These economic conditions generate inadequate housing, low levels of education, and high levels of unemployment. The solution to these problems, Fidel maintained, cannot be based in strategies that protect the interests of the economic and financial elite. A revolutionary government would ignore such interests and would act decisively in defense of the needs of the people. It would mobilize capital to develop industry; distribute land to peasants; stimulate the development of agricultural cooperatives; establish limits to the amount of land that can be owned by an agricultural enterprise, expropriating the excess acreage; reduce rents; and expand and reform the educational system.
In formulating a program for the next stage of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro did not mention US imperialism, nor did he cite Marxist thinkers or mention Lenin or the Russian Revolution. ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
AOC Joins Hollywood Picket Line In New York: ‘Solidarity Is Stronger Than Greed’
Left progressive congress-woman criticizes the wealth of studio executives as new contract negotiations remain at loggerheads
By Michael Sainato
@msainat1
July 24, 2023 - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the picket line of film and television actors and writers represented by Sag-Aftra and WGA in front of Netflix’s New York City office on Monday.
The liberal congresswoman from New York criticized the wealth of studio executives as new contract negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents the studio bosses – and unions have been at loggerheads.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents about 11,500 film and television writers, began striking on 2 May. The US actors’ union Sag-Aftra, which has 160,000 members, called their strike on 13 July.
Both unions are pushing for residuals from streaming services and terms on how the industry uses technology such as artificial intelligence. The strikes have halted the majority of film and television production in the US.
“How many private jets does David Zaslav need? For real. How many private jets do the CEOs need?” Ocasio-Cortez said on the picket line, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, who received a $246.6m compensation package in 2021.
As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Ocasio-Cortez continued: “It is insatiable. It is unacceptable. I do not know how any person can say I need another $100m before another person can have healthcare.”
Liz Shuler, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the US, also attended the picket line.
The picket line on Monday included high-profile actors such as Tatiana Maslany, Sandra Bernhard and F Murray Abraham.
“We have workers all across the country either currently on strike or gearing up to be on strike because at the end of the day we are all facing the same challenge, which is the concentration of wealth and corporate greed in America,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
She also expressed encouragement to workers on strike and emphasized the effect their strike is having on the labor movement throughout the US.
“Direct action gets the goods, now and always,” she said. “The only way that we can do this is by showing them that we are stronger. That our solidarity is stronger than their greed, that our care for one another will overcome their endless desire for more.” ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Vaccine Denialism Kills
New research confirms the Republican-embraced war on vaccines has been a huge setback for science and public health
By Merrill Goozner
GoozNews
JUL 25, 2023 - There is no denying that among advanced industrial nations, the U.S. mounted the worst public health response to the 2020-23 COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly a third of our population caught COVID, and over 1.1 million people died from the disease. Our death rate of over 340 per 100,000 population was surpassed by only a handful of former Soviet bloc countries and a few in Latin America.
To analyze why the U.S., which spends more on health care than any other country, mounted such a poor response, one must begin by recalling the trajectory of the pandemic. In the first year, coastal states with the largest exposure to foreign travelers like New York, New Jersey and California were hardest hit. But it quickly spread to every state.
It was immediately apparent that certain sub-populations were particularly vulnerable to the new pathogen: seniors, people who are obese, and people with chronic medical conditions. Among the general population, workers in critical service occupations, who could not work remotely, and the poor, disproportionately minority, who could not or were not allowed to take time away from work, experienced the highest death rates.
It didn’t help that the pandemic landed on our shores while the second-most polarizing president in U.S. history (the grand prize still goes to Abraham Lincoln) was running for re-election. The administration’s first-year actions, which ranged from the bumbling to the irresponsible, made it inevitable that our fragmented public health system would fumble its initial response.
The scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and state public health agencies recommended masking, social distancing, and economic lockdowns. But the success of those measures depended on wartime-like social discipline, i.e., near total adherence. That might work in countries like Japan or Singapore, but it simply wasn’t going to happen in a Donald Trump-led America.
Vaccine mandates — an American tradition
The Trump administration did get one thing right, though. It pursued Operation Warp Speed, which developed an effective vaccine in record time. Its introduction in April 2021 offered a solution that was solidly within longstanding American law, and reflected a scientific tradition that supported mandatory vaccination campaigns. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
No-Tillers Maximize Yields & Improve Efficiency With Air-Assist Harvesting
Farms, where the soil cover is unbroken, draw carbon out of the air and into the ground
By Noah Newman
no-tillfarmer.com/
July 25, 2023 - The implementation of an air-assist harvest system with a S3 AWS Airbar has been a game changer for Tipp City, Ohio, no-tiller Steve Hodge, and Huron County, Ont., no-tiller Perry Lealess.
The no-tillers recently joined No-Till Farmer editor Noah Newman for a webinar to discuss how the S3 AWS Airbar is maximizing their yields while improving overall harvest efficiency.
“The AWS Airbar speeds up harvest in a couple ways,” Hodge says. “We can start an hour earlier in the morning and work an hour later in the evening. We’ve increased our ground speed by 1 mile per hour, which makes a huge difference by the end of the season for us. It’s also helped deal with variable soybean heights caused by different weather extremes.”
“Many growers in our region were getting tired of having to pull in dry beans,” Lealess says. “We don’t have a lot of full-time help, so we didn’t have the manpower to pull beans at night and harvest all day. But we didn’t want to give up on the dry beans because we like them in the rotation. We gave the AWS Airbar a try to see if we could clip the dry beans. It worked. It’s also a game changer with short soybeans.”
The S3 AWS Airbar is available for both draper and auger headers. It employs a single-channel, wraparound, closed-circuit air system. With the fan and chassis centrally located on the combine header and powered by the feeder house reverser gear, the airflow gravels around the back of, and across the front of the header from a single airflow channel.
Hodge says his yields have gone up 1.5-2 bushels per acre on average with air-assist harvesting. In a drought year, like 2023, the yield impact could be even higher.
“When you have short crops in a dry year, the Airbar helps even more,” Hodge says. “It’s a challenge to get crops in the combine, but with the Airbar we can just pick those soybeans up as they shatter mid-air and float up onto the belt.” ...Read More
|
|
New Journals and Books for Radical Education... |
|
From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
|
|
The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
|
|
VVAW: 50 Years
of Struggle
By Alynne Romo
While most books about VVAW focus on the 1960s and 1970s, this photo-with-text book provides a look at many of actions of VVAW over five decades. Some of VVAW’s events and its stands on issues are highlighted here in stories. Others show up in the running timelines which also include relevant events around the nation or the world. Examples of events are the riots in America’s urban centers, the murders of civil rights leaders or the largely failed missions in Vietnam.
Paul Tabone: This is a must read for anyone who was in the war, who had a loved one in the war, who is interested in history in general or probably more importantly for anyone who wants to see how we repeat history over and over again given the incredible idiot and his minions that currently occupy the White House. To my fellow Viet Nam veterans I say "Welcome Home Brothers". A must read for everyone who considers them self an American. Bravo.
|
|
Facing Widespread Precarity, Young US Voters
Are Becoming Even More Progressive
'This generation has never felt secure—personally, physically, financially,' said one pollster.
|
By Julia Conley
Common Dreams
July 26, 2023 - A pollster at Harvard University pointed to a persistent sense of precarity in the lives of young voters as a key reason behind new data that shows Americans aged 18-29 have significantly more progressive views than young people did even five years ago.
Data analyzed by the Harvard Youth Poll, which releases survey results focused on young voters every spring, found that a clear majority take a progressive outlook on what John Della Volpe, director of the poll, called the "big four" political issues that respondents are asked about: LGBTQ+ rights, economic inequality, climate action, and gun violence.
Sixty-two percent of voters between 18-29 (those born between 1994 and 2005) believe the federal government should provide residents with basic necessities. Just 52% believed the same in 2018, and only 44% did a decade ago.
Fifty-four percent say they reject the idea that same-sex relationships and marriage equality are morally wrong, and 63% support stronger restrictions on access to guns—having come of age in an era that saw gun violence overtake vehicle accidents as the leading killer of children in the U.S. and witnessed carnage in Newtown, Connecticut; Uvalde, Texas; Las Vegas; Parkland, Florida; and dozens of other places in recent years.
Half of respondents said they want the government to do more to address the climate crisis; while not a majority, that number represents a 21-point increase since 2013. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, who commissioned the data analysis by the Harvard Youth Poll, noted that 57% of young voters told the poll-takers in 2020 that the government should take stronger climate action "even at the expense of economic growth," and said the dip in recent years could "reflect preoccupation with economic doldrums unleashed by Covid-19."
"This generation has never felt secure—personally, physically, financially," Della Volpe told Sargent, who wrote that the "big four" issues "all speak to the sense of precarity that young voters feel about their physical safety, their economic future, their basic rights, and even the ecological stability of the planet."
With Republican leaders attacking LGBTQ+ rights across the country; continuing to deny that humans' extraction of fossil fuels is driving the climate crisis which scientists say has caused the extreme heat experienced by more than a third of Americans this summer, pushing to further cut taxes for the wealthy while blocking legislation to help working families, and refusing to support gun control legislation backed by clear majorities of Americans, Sargent wrote that young voters present "a serious long-term problem for the GOP."
The data from 2016 to the present "suggests that [former Republican President Donald] Trump's rise to the presidency might have accelerated their progressive evolution," wrote Sargent, as young voters' support for climate action and government provision of basic necessities rose sharply after Trump took office. "The former president continues looming over our politics and will likely be the GOP nominee."
"They're growing up in a 21st century America that's far more diverse, inclusive, and globally connected than the 1950s and 1960s America of the GOP base," demographer William Frey told the Post of the poll's respondents. "They're going to shun the Republican Party as they get older."
Some progressives, however, have raised alarm about Democratic President Joe Biden's approval rating among voters under age 35—which stands at just 51%, with only 9% of those voters saying they "strongly approve" of the president and more than a quarter saying they "strongly disapprove."
"We cannot just run on what we're against. We have to run on what we're for," Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D-52), who was reinstated to his seat after being expelled by Republican leaders earlier this year for participating in a gun control protest, toldNBC News earlier this month. "I've been hopeful to see the Biden campaign doing this. Running for an economy where young people are not saddled with hundreds of thousands in debt; running for a livable planet... Protect kids, not guns."
For Democrats to retain the support of the young people who helped vote Biden into office in 2020, Jones told NBC, "We must do things out of the ordinary." ...Read More
|
|
|
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project & Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
|
|
|
|
Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
|
|
|
|
Illustration of a muscular male torso statue. A feather pen in an inkwell and a hand weight sit in front. A figure sitting in front of a flickering computer screen sits in the middle. Animation by @eoinryanart for POLITICO
The Masculinity Issue
How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas into the GOP
A modern story of shitposting, self-publishing
and how an anonymous persona can help your
ideas take off — and take root at the highest levels.
By ROSIE GRAy
Politico
July 16, 2023 - In 2018, Costin Alamariu disappeared.
There was a flurry of activity in October, when Alamariu, a Romanian-American writer with a Ph.D. from Yale, published an article: “Jair Bolsonaro And The Populist Crisis in Brazil” in Palladium Magazine, an online journal that was associated with the anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian “neo-reaction” movement.
Alamariu announced on Twitter he was restarting his account — though it’s unclear when or if he posted on the account previously, as no earlier posts are visible — and tagged far-right figures like Steve Sailer and Ann Coulter. “hi Steve I closed my account before but reopened to post some new articles. Hope you follow back! You might be interested in this one about Brazil,” he wrote to Sailer.
But on Oct. 30, he suddenly stopped tweeting. He hasn’t posted since then from that account. He hasn’t published any work since then, nor has he held a job with any public profile. As far as the general public is concerned, Alamariu no longer exists.
But as Alamariu was disappearing, another figure looking to make a name in conservative circles was on the rise. 2018 was also the year that Bronze Age Pervert, BAP for short, became a household name in far-right spaces.
That June, BAP, who had already built a small but loyal following online, tweeting from his account featuring a profile picture of a shirtless, well-built man photographed from behind, self-published his book Bronze Age Mindset, a curious mix of philosophical analysis, polemic and lifestyle advice all in the service of the argument that embracing one’s authentic masculine virtue is the only way to conquer “lower types of mankind” and root out the worst parts of democracy. (A sampling: “It goes without saying that you must lift weights”; women’s liberation infected society with a “terminal disease”; readers should prepare for impending — and in BAP’s view, desirable — military rule in Western countries.)
The book did surprisingly well for a self-published work and reached as high as No. 3 on the Ancient Greek History chart on Amazon. It was a word-of-mouth phenomenon, slowly gaining more and more fans, including, reportedly, a number of Donald Trump staffers. Their number is hard to gauge, though BAP today boasts more than 100,000 followers on Twitter.
BAP has become a key figure in the world of conservative masculinity influencers, which includes figures ranging from YouTube guru Jordan Peterson to TikTok personality and accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate. Over the past several years, this universe has gained followers and proven itself to be a reliable channel to conservative ideas and Republican politicians for young men in particular. It has also been a breeding ground for reactionary political ideas.
Of all such figures on the scene today, including clearly BAP-influenced anonymous accounts with names like Delicious Tacos, Raw Egg Nationalist and Zero HP Lovecraft, BAP stands out as one of the most influential — and the one associated with the most clearly articulated and far-reaching political and cultural vision. Further, that vision is an extreme one, built around a rejection of equality, democracy and other promises of modern liberalism — and it’s being taken seriously by prominent conservatives and Republicans.
BAP counts Michael Anton, former White House national security spokesperson, Darren Beattie, a former Trump White House aide who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and a number of young former Trump staffers among his readers. A review by Anton for the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute said the book speaks directly to a “youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day.” In the years since the book came out, BAP has only grown in popularity, even despite being banned from Twitter for a period until late last year. In a speech earlier this year, Peter Thiel said that while he found BAP’s solutions to modern problems “tempting,” he disagreed with his “distortions to the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance follows BAP on Twitter.
According to several outlets, the person behind the online persona is none other than Alamariu. Alamariu has never confirmed this. He hasn’t responded to messages and letters sent to his various physical and digital addresses — those of both BAP and Alamariu. But there is little doubt about the connection. Nor is there much doubt about the value that anonymity has given to his rise in the noisy and increasingly influential arena of masculine identity politics, allowing him freedom to express controversial ideas without having to answer for them. Because how can you hold a disembodied Twitter profile accountable?
“When you’re on the internet, a way of getting internet fame by having extreme views is doing so consistently, authentically and playing a role,” Danielle Lee Tomson, a writer and researcher who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on conservative influencers. She compared the way BAP operates to “performance art” and to kayfabe, the concept in professional wrestling of acting out stories and characters to heighten the drama of staged fights.
BAP, Tomson said, resembles folkloric “tricksters” who “are willing to push the boundaries of polite discourse by creating a mythic character of their own, [which] you can’t do as a normal human being.”
Alamariu’s transformation from a contrarian academic to transgressive internet sensation and idol of the new right is a story of the special allure that a provocative pseudonym holds, and how it can help launch a modern media celebrity — and spread extreme ideas further than they would otherwise go.
The Trump campaign and the early years of his administration triggered widespread condemnation of the president and his supporters by liberals and anti-Trump conservatives alike. Many conservatives, especially those who were extremely online, saw in this new atmosphere an overly censorious culture that too quickly canceled those who disagreed with the dominant liberal line; many of them felt an irresistible temptation to trigger shock, or, as they might call it, own the libs. “I literally just hate liberals. I don’t have any other politics,” went one viral 2020 post on 4chan, the freewheeling online forum that has played an important role in the spread of far-right ideology in recent years. BAP, a far-right, totally fringe, completely based “anon,” with a “shitposter” flair, met the moment perfectly.
Written in his signature slang (“wat means?” “ghey” instead of gay, “gril” for girl), Bronze Age Mindset was BAP’s salvo against contemporary society and liberal pieties. BAP joined a chorus of “trad” voices — short for traditional — gaining traction online who deplored modern society’s emptiness and the replacement of traditional values with progressive ones.
Where BAP differs from many trads is in his veneration of values that have nothing to do with Christian concepts of family or morality. In the book, BAP argues that modern society should take after Ancient Greece, when beauty, strength and courage were prized above all else. In particular, BAP prizes the classical conception of masculinity and wants modern men to emulate it. The key relationship that gave a society its strength in civilizations like Ancient Greece, BAP argues, was not that between men and women, or within families, but between young men who perform great deeds together. In BAP’s ideal world, these male friendships should be a young man’s focus. In his telling, modern society wants to weaken these masculine bonds because of their threat to the established order; “every great thing in the past was done through friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power,” he writes in Bronze Age Mindset.
For BAP, the elevation of this vision of masculinity in society comports with his ideal social order, where the strongest rule — and there are no curbs on their dominance, no efforts to protect those who have less power and certainly no attempt to equalize groups. BAP believes in natural differences between humans along racial, ethnic and gender lines, and compares non-Western societies to “yeast” mindlessly perpetuating themselves. BAP argues that equality itself, even democracy, is a dead end, and he believes in eugenic breeding to preserve what he views as superior stock.
“I believe in Fascism or ‘something worse’ and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience,” BAP wrote in a 2021 essay. “I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”
Anton received the book as a gift from the writer Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, an influential neo-monarchist blogger well-connected in “national conservative” and tech libertarian circles. Anton’s review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books, about a year after it was released, was mixed but respectful, and portrayed BAP as an important new alternative to mainstream conservatism, which had lost credibility with a younger generation. Around the time of the review, POLITICO reported that the book was getting passed around by young Trump staffers.
On the surface, Bronze Age Mindset doesn’t appear to have much to do with the project of mainstream conservatism. And BAP’s goals are pretty niche; most people wouldn’t want bands of pirates in charge, which is what he proposes as an ideal form of government.
But BAP’s critique of society aligns with an increasingly prevalent view on the right. Conservatives have become more and more preoccupied with liberals’ emphasis on diversity and equity. Big-name politicians campaign against “wokeness.” On the lowbrow side, this translates to Fox News culture war bait via sources like Libs of TikTok, a Twitter account that mocks liberal and LGBTQ social media users; on the highbrow end, intellectuals argue that society has become warped and decadent because it has been rebuilt around the desires, particularly of women and minorities, for equality.
And BAP’s ideas about masculinity, though expressed in an esoteric and eccentric way, reflect modern conservative handwringing about the role of men. Illustrating how BAP’s and other masculinity gurus’ ideas prefigured and seeped into flagship conservative thinking was Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary “The End of Men,” which argued American males have been physically and politically emasculated in a world that has become hostile to masculinity and need to recover their own inner strongmen.
Much of what BAP has to say is too rich for the blood of most conservatives who aspire to mainstream respectability. But BAP’s basic diagnosis of the problem isn’t so far off from what conservatives have been hearing for years from more mainstream sources, including powerful figures on the right like Thiel, who said in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
As influential as BAP is, there has long been an air of mystery about who he really is. The real person behind the persona has been identified as Alamariu — a fact that has long been known in far-right circles. He has also been identified multiple times in articles and podcasts and was the subject of a “dox” (outing) three years ago that caused a great deal of infighting in online right spaces. BAP has never denied being Alamariu, nor has he confirmed it, though he implicitly acknowledged the dox on Twitter by boasting about women who were calling him attractive based on a photo of Alamariu that was going around. It’s unclear where exactly Alamariu lives, or how he makes money, though he charges five dollars a month for subscriptions to his podcast “Caribbean Rhythms.” Alamariu didn’t respond to multiple requests for interviews.
But from the details that can be gleaned, it’s possible to understand more about how he was formed.
Alamariu was born in Romania in 1980. At age 10, according to a bio on one of his author pages, he immigrated to the United States with his family. His father was a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alamariu attended Newton South High School in the well-heeled Boston suburb of Newton. He was in the class of 1998, one year behind his classmates B.J. Novak and John Krasinski, future stars of “The Office.” UFC color commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan graduated from the same high school in 1985.
The 1998 Regulus, the school’s yearbook, lists Alamariu as the yearbook’s managing editor as well as class president. In his senior photo, he’s wearing a professorial jacket and tie and staring off-camera, hands clasped behind his back. Alamariu went to MIT for undergrad, where he majored in mathematics and won a prize in his junior year for a short story titled “On Tyranny.”
After graduating, he did a master’s in philosophy at Columbia. In the Columbia Daily Spectator, Alamariu weighed in on a controversy over Israel-Palestine that erupted on Columbia’s campus in 2005. The piece shows an early disillusionment with academic politics that presages today’s “anti-woke” talking points. Referring to the Middle Eastern studies department that was the focus of the controversy, Alamariu wrote, “This department, like nearly all others of its kind at other universities and like other departments within Columbia itself, has long replaced disinterested scholarship with political activism.” “Academic multiculturalism,” he wrote, “is not a scholarly school of exegesis; it is a political movement, founded with the intent of forwarding a narrative of Western and capitalist oppression and third-world victimization.”
By the following year, Alamariu had entered the political science department at Yale to work on a Ph.D. It didn’t take him long to write a letter to the editor to the Yale Daily News, excoriating the paper for left-leaning op-eds it published, including one about how Yale handled sexual assault cases on campus and another on the topic of women Yale graduates’ work-life balance. “I congratulate your paper on having advanced from incipient sexual Leninism to full-scale Maoism,” he wrote.
Alamariu was mentored closely by his thesis adviser, the scholar Steven Smith, who is known as an expert on the German-Jewish-American philosopher Leo Strauss, whose midcentury works on political philosophy have been an important influence on conservative intellectuals. Alamariu’s passion was for classical political theory. He had a good command of ancient Greek. “He was a very gifted student, although [it was] clear from the beginning, eccentric in some respects, and definitely sort of followed his own drummer,” Smith told me. Smith described Alamariu as an “international man of mystery,” who “knew people, but he was not close with anyone particularly. He was a contrarian, which I liked.”
“He enjoyed making a bit of a myth of himself,” said a Yale classmate of Alamariu’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of professional repercussions. “And he plays up his accent a little bit.” The former classmate described learning about Alamariu’s podcast as Bronze Age Pervert through another Yale connection and being surprised to hear that Alamariu was “exaggerating [his accent] considerably.” “And I just found it so ludicrous and over the top and just bizarre and surreal to listen to him basically doing a [Slavoj] Zizek impression that I just couldn’t keep up with it.” Another surprise was BAP’s evangelism for weightlifting, since the classmate remembered him as “skinny, pale. You know, at some point, … somebody mentioned him having an apartment, [and] I asked, if it was like an abandoned elevator shaft that he hung upside down in.”
Alamariu’s interest in aristocracy “was definitely there,” this person said. The classmate said that Alamariu already showed an interest in hierarchy and displayed sexism and a “strong Western cultural chauvinism” but not racism at the time. “I don’t know if this has persisted, but among the sort of national conservative set, he’s an unusual character because he was really pro-imperialism,” the person said.
Alamariu was friendly with his cohort of young political theorists. Smith had them all in a course on Machiavelli, which was “a lot of fun,” Smith said. But he held himself somewhat apart: “No one knew where he lived. For example, he would tell me occasionally that he was living in the back of his car,” Smith said. Alamariu’s former classmate said that he fit into the grad student social scene “episodically.”
“He’s a character, right? By design. You can kind of tell, he’s acting a character,” the former classmate said. “He’s the only person I’ve ever seen wear a swimsuit and a cravat at the same time.” This person said they didn’t recall knowing of any romantic relationships Alamariu had, with women or with men.
As much as he stood out at times, Alamariu was still following the path of a typical academic striver, working as a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes and writing his dissertation. He at first shared Smith’s interest in Strauss and may have been particularly influenced by Strauss’ 1952 work Persecution and the Art of Writing. “Strauss’ thesis about esoteric writing, that great writers kind of hide themselves behind different masks and different devices, they don’t reveal themselves plainly and clearly to their readers — I think he was intrigued by that idea,” Smith said.
Alamariu was keenly fascinated by the idea of a “warrior ethos,” Smith said, and enjoyed works of anthropology like The Golden Bough, the 19th-century study of comparative religion that posited that legends of glorious rebirth were central to mythologies across the world. He was fascinated by Yukio Mishima, the Japanese nationalist author who committed ritual seppuku in 1970 after leading a failed imperialist coup d’état, and gave Smith some of Mishima’s books. Above all, Alamariu was a Nietzschean, Smith said; “he always was drawn to Nietzsche’s ideas concerning hierarchy.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that modern culture would be run by “last men,” nihilistic people living small lives based around guarding their creature comforts; in BAP’s work, this is the role occupied by what he calls “bugmen.” Nietzsche thought the cure for the stagnation perpetuated by the last men would come in the form of the “ubermensch,” or superman, a figure far superior to the last men who would be strong enough to impose a new order.
Alamariu published his dissertation in 2015. It’s titled “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche.” “It was a very original take, which is, you know, can be both good and bad,” said Smith. “The dissertation was, in many ways, a brilliant sort of tour de force.”
Alamariu focused on one of Plato’s dialogues, the Gorgias, which includes a debate between Socrates and a philosopher named Callicles about the nature of tyranny. To make a long story short, Socrates is against; Callicles is in favor. Alamariu’s argument, of which Smith says “from what I can tell, it’s completely original to him, and with which I disagree,” was that Plato purposefully made Socrates’ anti-tyranny argument so weak that he must have intended that his audience side with Callicles’ defense of tyranny.
Smith didn’t believe Alamariu’s argument was “interpretively correct,” and the two had many conversations about it, some contentious; but Alamariu stuck to his guns. After obtaining his Ph.D. at Yale in 2015, Alamariu went to Emory for a post-doctoral appointment for a year. That was the last time he worked in academia. It’s unclear exactly what happened, though doing a post-doc for a year before moving on somewhere else isn’t uncommon.
The academic job market is cutthroat at the best of times, and perhaps even more so for conservatives — especially in the febrile atmosphere of the Trump years. “Being a right-winger in political science during the Obama years was pretty easy because history had decided we were extraneous,” Alamariu’s former classmate said. But it was different under Trump, when many liberals began to view the right as not just wrong or an oddity but actively dangerous. “Costin was always kind of a fringy character anyway,” this person said. “But certainly once the ‘oh, this is an amusing curiosity’ quality went out, I can see it not going well.”
As Alamariu was building his short-lived career in academia, the Bronze Age Pervert persona was already taking shape online. An account with that name became a regular poster in 2010 — while Alamariu was in the middle of graduate studies at Yale — on anonymous Internet forums Salo and The Phora, which are now defunct. Early posts show that the ingredients for Bronze Age Pervert were already in place.
On April 16, 2011, BAP, whose profile photo was a muscular young man pulling his tank top to the side to expose a hairless, defined pectoral muscle, pitched a “radical new proposal” to other Phora users.
“From a eugenic point of view, we should accept and encourage the so-called ‘gay liberation’ movement,” BAP wrote. He believed, he wrote, that “it is very likely that the majority of human males are homosexual.” Furthermore, “it is better to encourage them to be so, in order that the few (2-3%) of men who are alpha by nature should impregnate most of the women. There will be social chaos and an era of destruction upon us, but human nature will benefit as the majority of men, who are homos, will no longer breed.” This proposal presages a key plank of modern BAPism: the denigration of family life and the valorization of the male “alpha.”
BAP’s posts on Salo, where his profile picture was a fully nude male figure shot in black and white from behind, sometimes amount to juvenile “shitposting.” “Oboma [sic] won because i masturbated,” he posted Nov. 7, 2012. His posts show an interest in the same themes that continue to animate his career today: which men are gay and how not-gay he is, bodybuilding, genetics, nationalism, beauty, etc.
They also reveal glimpses of a person who struggled with the expectation of partnership and marriage. In a post from 2015 on Salo, BAP indicates that he had left the U.S. He described seeing women from different countries in a cafe where he now lived and being taken with the beauty of the Brazilian women but disgusted by the American women, who to him were “animals” and “dog women.” “Probably the worst part of living in the US is this experience of never being carried away by desire for a woman in this way, because none of them are capable of inspiring it,” BAP wrote. He was 34 at the time he wrote the post. In 2016, BAP chimed in to a Salo discussion about marriage and the advantages of “mail order brides.” “No one is worth marrying,” BAP wrote. “Marrying is inherently a bad deal for men. This is why bachelorhood was illegal in early Rome. … Marriage is a social and political institution, that men had to be coaxed in by law and by being given tremendous legal privileges (ownership of the wife and family, including often power of life and death). But even with those privileges it’s hardly worthwhile. This is why I say I would only consider marriage to a very rich woman.”
That same year, Alamariu’s byline began popping up around the internet in right-leaning journals. In July 2016, he wrote a column in Taki’s Magazine, a publication known for publishing far-right and white nationalist writers like Richard Spencer and Gavin McInnes, defending Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin. “The same international vampires who raped Russia and who hate Putin for stopping their schemes are now shaking with fear that an American can stop them at home,” he wrote.
The next year, he wrote again for Taki’s about South American politics and race and wrote essays on his Medium page. In one article, Alamariu lambasted global elites’ supposed turn toward “matriarchy” and a system that favored incompetent bureaucratic functionaries comparable to historical “court eunuchs,” a class of servant in ancient history who had been castrated and, without any ability to establish their own dynasty, was thus seen as less threatening to those in power. Written shortly after Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March, the piece argued that the march happened because privileged women “didn’t get the matriarch they believed was their due” because of a sense of entitlement they had been afforded by a corrupt elite full of “weak-minded, and therefore easily-controlled, mental and spiritual cripples.”
Alamariu’s work shows a deep suspicion of democracy that ties into his views about male supremacy and hearkens back to his graduate work on tyranny. The modern meritocratic state, he argues, doesn’t work because of its focus on consensus-building and equality, which prevent real achievement and empower the weak; society functions better under the rule of leaders like Putin and Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro who govern like real men, without regard for public opinion or fairness.
Alamariu’s writing under his real name is sophisticated, but turgid. “The issue at hand has to do fundamentally with the fitness of the post-war liberal order — specifically the elites promoted through the educational and electoral system — to manage modern economies and modern states,” he wrote in the Bolsonaro article, echoing the argument in his 2017 Medium piece about the character of the ruling classes. In this article, Alamariu described himself as “an on-and-off resident of Rio for some years.”
But if Alamariu still had one foot in mainstream respectability and polish, Bronze Age Pervert didn’t — and he was taking off because of it. Anonymity, and the creation of a strange and compelling persona, turned out to be the key to getting people to listen. The book was spreading by word of mouth, and in influential circles.
Yarvin “literally held it up over his head with two hands like it was some kind of talisman,” Anton told me about when he was given the book. “He said, ‘Behold, Bronze Age Mindset.’” Anton read it also at the urging of Beattie, another former Trump White House aide. Beattie told him he needed to read it if he “really wanted to know what was going on among younger people.”
Edward Luttwak, the writer of books on military strategy and history, heard from Bronze Age Pervert through intermediaries several years ago. BAP had read a 2012 essay by Luttwak in the London Review of Books about a spate of recent translations of The Iliad and what it said about the epic’s lasting appeal. Luttwak wrote that The Iliad, with its valorization of men who were braver and nobler even than the gods, “offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history,” of “human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or kings.” Catnip for BAP.
“He has admirers, he has intense admirers who did everything to connect him to me,” Luttwak said. These, he said, were a “group of people involved in the Washington political scene” who share BAP’s Nietzschean worldview. BAP called Luttwak from Spain, Luttwak said.
“As a classicist, he’s very serious,” Luttwak said. BAP’s “ideology reflects a very deep interest and a sophisticated understanding of the Bronze Age.” Luttwak believes that European cultures are dying out because of the abandonment of a Bronze Age ideology that once made them great. “Once you don’t have young people, you don’t have young energies, and you just have cautious old people, society cannot be vigorous intellectually, culturally, or in any other way,” Luttwak said.
Modern people must cooperate, be sensitive, avoid conflict; modern men must treat women as equals. But “women love warriors,” Luttwak said. And the Bronze Age concept of individual freedom “was antithetical to anything social, was antithetical to society. It was truly individualistic. And the Greeks were happy with that. But the central fact about it is the affirmation of, of life as an individual, artistic act.”
I pointed out that most men nowadays won’t have the opportunity to die in glorious combat. Luttwak countered that he himself had volunteered for three different wars with the Israeli armed forces, “so I experienced it. And I felt totally exhilarated and totally empowered by it.”
“The Bronze Age Pervert is raising the fundamental question before European civilization and its American extension, which is, are you willing to admit and acknowledge this kind of life-affirming ideology, which is what this is,” Luttwak said.
BAP’s many critics have pointed out the LARPing (live-action role-playing) nature of much of this. Is it helpful for men to imagine themselves as Achilles, or just a form of escapism?
“This is just a retreat from reality, a very unmanly retreat from reality I would add, and just an embrace of fantasy and unreality that isn’t really going to help you become a better man, become a better person,” said Jack Butler, a conservative writer who wrote a critique of Bronze Age Mindset for National Review earlier this year. “It will further ratify you in this little niche that you’ve created for yourself and for your friends. With the exception, I guess, that if you take some of the lifting advice seriously, you’ll get some gains.”
Butler agrees with BAP’s assessment of modern society as “deprecating authentic masculinity.” But he doesn’t think the answer is “this nostalgic fantasy of what a man should be at a time when there were fewer people in the world and more cities to conquer.”
Butler highlighted BAP’s disdain for family life, which sets him apart from the other more mainstream masculinity-crisis preachers on the right, such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who see a recommitment to family life as the solution to what ails the modern man.
Anton now teaches at Hillsdale, the conservative college in Michigan that has become a key institution in the Trump/post-Trump right. Among the students he sees, Bronze Age Mindset is as popular as ever.
“It seems to be more popular with younger people on the right than any kind of conventional conservatism. … I can tell you that as a teacher,” Anton said. “In a number of programs, I come across a lot of people under 25, or, you know, in that area, and the majority of them, at least the males, and some of the women, … have read the book. Whether they agree with it, whether they ultimately accept it is another question. But there’s a sense that, if you’re under a certain age, and you’re in the conservative world, you need to read it.”
Anton thinks this is attributable more to the book’s outrageousness than its content. This is a book that calls developing countries the “Turd World,” full of “zombi [sic] hordes” living in filth and hardly better than animals; it’s a book that argues that “the true environmentalism is racism and has a racist foundation.” BAP uses the word “f----try” freely, calls everything gay and argues that women should have no role in political affairs. It’s the kind of material that would fit in on 4chan.
“We live in a particularly oversensitive age in which people just want to get offended about everything,” Anton said. “And I think that just heightens the natural enjoyment that younger people take in offensive content. And it’s acted as, to use national security jargon, a force multiplier on the book.”
If you’re a lonely young man on the Internet who hates “woke” stuff, it won’t take long to get to BAP. The question is what you do when you get there. Alamariu’s former classmate from Yale remembered finding BAP’s appeal mystifying, and polling younger men to explain it. “It was described to me as, the level of nihilism and dissociation among young men, especially young white men of the middle and lower middle classes, is extremely high,” this person said.
And in this environment, where young men could just as easily go down the path of full incel nihilism or overt Nick Fuentes-style white supremacy, BAP’s message of empowerment could actually offer a more salutary alternative. Indeed, Fuentes in particular seems to have recognized BAP as a threat, and has inveighed against him to his followers, known as “groypers,” accusing BAP of being a Jewish establishment plant. “And so you can kind of climb a ladder of BAP to [Jordan] Peterson, who really mystifies the world through like weird Jungian archetypes connected to waking up early and making your bed, into the Ben Shapiros of the world,” the former classmate said. “And all of a sudden you go from being a nihilistic, onanistic teenage boy with no hope in the world to just kind of a normie conservative Republican,” this person said.
But there are those for whom BAP’s message can form part of a destructive worldview. In 2021, a man named Lyndon McLeod shot five people to death in Denver. His accounts on Twitter and Instagram were full of photos of his muscled torso and other tough-guy imagery, like guns and whiskey. He shared passages from Bronze Age Mindset, posting photos of his heavily marked-up copy.
Like BAP, McLeod lamented a world that supposedly disadvantaged traditional men, though he put it more baldly. “Our entire society is made up of shitty little fucks who insult badasses & get away with it because law enforcement & social norms protect the WEAK from the STRONG,” he tweeted in April 2020. “I’m over it. The weak better buckle up ... shit is about to get real.”
McLeod wrote a series of self-published novels in which a protagonist with his name takes revenge on his enemies, which included real people whom McLeod later targeted in his spree. McLeod isn’t representative of BAP’s readers, who are far too numerous to be represented by any one person. But his story shows how the message that traditional masculinity is under threat from a feminized society dedicated to its destruction has the potential to lead some to dark courses of action.
Online, fittingly for a fan of Bronze Age Pervert, Lyndon McLeod wasn’t Lyndon McLeod at all. He went by the name Roman McClay. ...Read More
|
|
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
|
|
These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
Powerful stories, wonderful gifts.
As they stand up, slow down, form unions, leave an abusive relationship or just stir up good trouble, the characters in this multi-generation novel entertain and enlighten, make us laugh and rage, and encourage us to love deeply, that we may continue the fight for justice.
"So much fiction is about escape and fantasy, but these powerful Tales of Struggle will enrich our real and daily lives." ─ Gloria Steinem
“What a wonderful story of class, class struggle and regular people. The story is about struggle and change, but also about joy and humor. Great work! ─ Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided
Price: $15.00
|
|
Amazing Worldwide
Internet Radio:
Put your speakers on, rotate, zoom in, pick a station, anywhere in the world, any time, live, native languages and many English stations as well, thousands of them
Copy this link: http://radio.garden/visit/santa-cruz-da-graciosa/MDu6eLeE
|
|
History Lesson of the Week: Who were Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley?
By Linda Coutant
National Parks Conservation Association
Emmett Till was an African American teenager who grew up in Chicago and had relatives in the Mississippi Delta. At 14, he visited Mississippi on vacation in August 1955. He was kidnapped, tortured and killed by white men after being accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward a white woman.
His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, was an active member of the Chicago community with an especially close relationship with her son and who became a civil rights icon after his death. She quickly sought justice for her child, demanding his casket be transported home and unsealed, and then insisting his mangled corpse be shown to the world.
Till-Mobley devoted the rest of her life to seeking justice for her son, speaking publicly on issues of racism, educating children and comforting other grieving families. Her long journey was filled with setbacks, but her determination and resilience saw her through. She died in 2003.
Where is the monument located?
The National Park Service examined key civil rights sites in Mississippi for possible designation as part of a Till national monument. There also were proposed locations in Illinois, where Emmett Till was born, raised and buried.
Recognized as one of our country’s most infamous hate crimes, the widely publicized murder of Emmett Till and his mother’s calls for justice were major catalysts for the Civil Rights…
The White House proclamation identifies three key sites in two states. It also directs the National Park Service to develop a plan in consultation with local communities, organizations and the public to support the interpretation and preservation of other sites in Mississippi and Illinois that help tell the story of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley.
Anchor sites preserved by the monument are:
Graball Landing, Glendora, Mississippi
Graball Landing is where Emmett Till’s disfigured body is believed to have been found early in the morning of Aug. 31, 1955, by a Black teenager fishing. Located across from the confluence of the Tallahatchie River and the Black Bayou, the spot has become a recognized commemorative site.
Signs placed here by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission have been vandalized three times — the first one torn down and thrown in the river and two more signs shot up with bullets. The current sign, installed in 2019, is bulletproof and observed by security cameras.
Graball Landing served as a steamboat mooring until an 1894 tornado destroyed much of the area. Today, a dirt road leads to a clearing used by anglers.
Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi
The five-day murder trial of Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, the two men who kidnapped and killed Till, took place in this courthouse. Thousands of people came to Sumner to witness the event, including the deceased boy’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
With just over an hour of deliberation, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted the men of murdering Till. One juror told Time magazine, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.” The two admitted to the murder in a magazine article just a few months after the verdict. ...Read More
|
|
From an Activist Editor: Publishing for Solidarity
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the July 19, 2023 Bulletin
|
|
Sam Pizzigati has been co-editing the México Solidarity Bulletin since this weekly first appeared three years ago. But he’s been editing progressive publications for over 50 years, including over 20 spent managing the publications of the 3-million-member National Education Association. Currently an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, Sam is now stepping back from the weekly México Solidarity Bulletin to finish his fifth book on economic inequality. We’ve asked him to share his experience and lessons on communicating for effective advocacy.
What made you decide to spend so much of your time helping to build solidarity between people in the United States and people in México?
Like the vast majority of progressives in the United States, I entered the 21st century with only a vague sense of what was going on in México. We all knew — and know — much more about Central American political realities than about Mexican.
Some of that Central American sense I imbibed first-hand as part of the first U.S. trade union fact-finding delegation to El Salvador in 1983. We met with guerrilla leaders in the mountains and insurgents in the cities. We also met with Salvadoran generals, in mansions behind ten-foot-high walls topped by razor wire and broken glass, and with business leaders around their secure conference tables.
I still remember one of those expensively suited businessmen talking disdainfully about Salvadoran peasants. He clearly and simply saw them as “beasts of burden” and nothing more. So I had a vivid sense of the ongoing class struggle “south of the border,” but that sense didn’t include México.
That all changed when you became part of an extended Mexican family?
Yes, early in the 2000s, I found myself with a Mexican daughter-in-law and a wonderful new Mexican family that included progressive activists who would later become staunch supporters of AMLO and Morena. I learned a great deal from them all, and I began to see U.S. relations with-México through an entirely new prism.
I soon realized that progressives in the United States had more to learn about making social change from our Mexican counterparts than the other way around. Here in the United States, we’re constantly playing defense against the right. They’re playing offense — and winning.
So four years ago, the moment I met the U.S. activists involved in the new México Solidarity Project, I jumped at the chance to help spread the word about the amazing work Mexican progressives are doing.
And you brought some international solidarity experience to that work?
In the late 1970s, a bunch of us U.S.-based progressives interested in the struggle then unfolding in Italy organized a national group to work against U.S. interference in Italian politics. The traditional Italian left and the
young Italian “New Left” appeared, back then, on the verge of gaining enough power to reshape the corrupt U.S.-backed status quo.
We wanted to help give those Italian progressives the breathing space they needed to forge real change. But we didn’t succeed, partly because we had nothing close to the resources needed to spread the word — within the Italian-American community and beyond — about what was going on in Italy.
We did our best. We held events in New York, San Francisco, and Washington. We published and mailed out a regular newsletter.
But we couldn’t sustain the effort. In those pre-Internet days, communicating carried heavy costs. ...Read More
|
|
|
Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
|
There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
|
|
|
|
Video for Learning: Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Why Marx's Grundrisse is Relevant Today 40 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Sinead O Connor 'Nothing Compares To You' 5 min
|
|
Book Review Interview: Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Rural People Are So Angry They Want To Blow Up The System’
The first author to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice on how Charles Dickens – and rage about the opioid crisis – helped her write ‘the Great Appalachian Novel.’
By Lisa Allardice
The Guardian
June 16 2023 - ‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. “I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. It’s my upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.”
With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. Best-known for her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change. She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. And yet, she rarely leaves the farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing.
“When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this,” she says of her east coast accent. “Do you want to hear how I talk? ‘How y’all doing? Ahm’a so sorry-ee,’” she sings with a Dolly Parton twang. Not bad for someone who says, “they don’t make people more introverted than me.”
She is also surprisingly angry. “I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system,” she says. “That contempt of urban culture for half the country. I feel like I’m an ambassador between these worlds, trying to explain that if you want to have a conversation you don’t start it with the words, ‘You idiot.’”
Raised in Kentucky, Kingsolver describes herself as “Appalachian, through and through”. This DNA is stamped on every one of the 550 pages of her bravura retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, relocated to her native state and updated to the 1990s. Largely written during the pandemic, its subject is another epidemic: the opioid crisis, of which Appalachia was “ground zero”. With its deep-rooted evocation of place, epic scope and powerful moral purpose, Demon Copperhead is undoubtedly the defining novel of an already distinguished career.
“Now that it’s finished, I understand that my whole life I’ve been wanting to write the great Appalachian novel,” she says. For years she had been thinking of this big story she wanted to write “but that nobody wanted to hear”, not just about the prescription drugs crisis, but the generations of exploitation and institutional poverty, the plundering of the region for timber, coal and tobacco leading up to it. “Then Purdue Pharma targeting us saying, ‘OK, the last thing that we can make money off is the pain and the disability of the people who were injured in the previous industries’”, she says. But I had no idea how I could make this a story that people wanted to read. It was like a house that I was just walking around trying to find the doorway in.”
Ironically, for an author who describes herself as writing “very American novels”, she found the key in a B&B in Broadstairs, Kent. At the end of the UK book tour for her previous novel, Unsheltered, in 2018, and desperate for a break, she saw an ad for Bleak House B&B and thought it might be fun to check it out. “I had no idea how Dickensy it would be”, she laughs. “It was all very much set up as if he were still living there.”
And so she found herself, late one November night, sitting alone in Dickens’s study, at the very desk on which he wrote David Copperfield (his favourite and most autobiographical novel), staring out at the ocean, just as he had done nearly 175 years ago. “I just felt the presence of his outrage.” She’s not given to hearing voices, but she says: “I felt him saying, ‘What do you mean, nobody wants to hear this?’ He said: ‘Let the child tell the story.’ I thought, ‘well, I will. Thank you, Mr Dickens. I will let your child tell the story.’”
And so she sat up the rest of the night making notes and downloaded David Copperfield to reread on the flight back. “It was a masterclass,” she says. “Learning all the tricks that he used to get the gentle Victorians, who didn’t want to think about poverty and orphans, to look at those kids and wait for the next chapter.”
She finally had her way into writing about the “lost boys” of Appalachia, where 40% of children are raised by someone else, either because their parents are dead, in prison or too incapacitated by addiction. Her eldest daughter, Camille (both her daughters have returned to live nearby after university), works as a clinical mental health therapist with local schoolchildren, and gave Kingsolver some shocking insights into the social services. “We have this generation of traumatised kids who will be living with that for ever.”
As soon as she got home she set up a spreadsheet, with columns for each of the 64 chapters, and set herself the challenge of finding contemporary equivalents. A shoe-blacking factory became a makeshift meth lab, and Mr Creakle’s boarding school for boys is Creaky’s slave-labour tobacco farm. She “outsourced” her first draft to Dickens. Fans will enjoy all “the inside jokes” and character spotting – David’s shifty schoolfriend Steerforth becomes flashy Fast Forward, “Of course he would be the football hero quarterback. I know that guy!” she says. And Uriah Heep is transformed into creepy Soccer coach U-Haul. Anyone who remembers being disappointed in saintly Agnes will be happy to see her made over into tomboy Angus, with her “bad girl eyes”. “I wanted to make a tough cookie guardian angel, because that’s what Demon needed,” she says. “I think I maybe have a better understanding of women than Dickens,” she hoots. “I’ll claim that.”
The difference between pessimism and optimism is constructing a good ending.
But she’s insistent that you do not need to have read David Copperfield first. “In some ways it’s full of spoilers.” Taking on Dickens “was really fun and really hard. And I love both those things. As a writer I need to feel that I’m working at the very edge of my powers.”
Part of the block in writing her Appalachian novel, she realises, is that she had “internalised the shame” of her rural upbringing. Now she feels she has not “just the right but the duty” to represent her community. “The news, the movies, TV, it’s all manufactured in cities about city people. We’re nothing. We don’t see ourselves at all. And if we do show up, it’s as a joke, the hillbillies. We are the last demographic that progressive people still mock with impunity.”
In one memorable passage, Demon lists off all the insults thrown at them: “Hillbilly, rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.” The last alludes to a comment by Hillary Clinton, referring to Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables”. Now Kingsolver often spots bumper stickers proudly declaring “I’m a deplorable” in her neighbourhood. But her agent and editor, both based in New York, questioned whether she should include it. “I decided, yes, I’m leaving it in because I want this to make the reader uncomfortable.”
At the time of the last election, as non-Republicans in a red neighbourhood, Kingsolver and her husband did wonder if they should be fearful. “I love my neighbours, and I know they love me. But there’s still this feeling like somebody’s going to come down the road with the Trump flag and shoot you,” she says, in a way that isn’t clear if she’s serious. “It’s scary how detached some people have come from the possibility of compromise, the notion that ‘my people matter and I hate yours’ – that’s terrifying.”
There were days when it was really hard for Kingsolver to go to her desk and take Demon to the dark places his story had to go. “Writing means really going into another world and living there fully with your whole heart,” she says. Her husband would take her hand and make her go for a walk in the woods and remind her that their children were OK.
For her, the role of fiction is to give hope. “The difference between pessimism and optimism is constructing a good ending,” she says.
This article was amended on 21 June 2023. An earlier version referred to the David Copperfield character Mr. Creakle as “Mr. Crinkle.” ...Read More
|
|
Film Review: What ‘Chang An’ Gets Right — and Wrong — About China’s Greatest Dynasty
For decades, films set in the Tang dynasty were plagued by Shakespearean pretensions, geisha-inspired makeup, and anachronistic props. ‘Chang An’ dodges those pitfalls, while falling into a few new ones.
By Lu Shan
Sixth Tone
July 21, 2023 - It may not star a secret agent, renegade archaeologist, or one of the world’s most famous toys, but “Chang An,” the latest film from Light Chaser Animation Studios, does have one thing going for it: the power of poetry.
In keeping with the country’s ongoing craze for traditional culture- and mythology-themed animated features, “Chang An” tells the story of two of China’s best-known poets: Gao Shi and Li Bai. Although the film was marketed at parents looking for a fun but educational flick to watch with their kids, good word of mouth has made it one of the summer’s biggest hits, with over 800 million yuan ($111 million) earned at the box office in two weeks of release and a sterling 8.2 score on ratings platform Douban. (The film’s rating has actually risen in the weeks since its premiere, an almost unheard-of development on the platform.)
The hero of “Chang An” is ostensibly Gao, who, in addition to his career as a poet, was also a leading general and bureaucrat in the Tang dynasty (618-907). The highlight of the film, however, is Li. Discriminated against for coming from a merchant family, he must find alternative — and usually riskier — means of entering the upper classes.
The very different personalities of these two men help drive the film, just as their poems provide both its structure and its best moments. Yet, for all his misgivings, Gao clearly admires the upstart Li, who embodies the glory and ultimate dissolution of the High Tang period (713-755), when the city of Chang’an — modern-day Xi’an in northwest China — was one of the world’s economic and cultural centers.
Light Chaser’s choice to set the film during the High Tang was a smart one. The era produced some of China’s greatest literary works, including many poems that all Chinese learn in school. More recently, the dynasty’s cosmopolitanism and relatively more relaxed attitudes toward women — or at least noblewomen — have fueled interest in the Tang as being ahead of its time.
It’s odd, then, that so many of the films and dramas to come out of the current wave of Tang nostalgia have gotten the dynasty wrong. Admittedly, their creators did not always have access to the latest scholarship or historical documents, but as a writer who has studied Tang history and culture for more than 20 years, I’ve sat through more bad Shakespearean dialogue, royals dressed as geishas, and anachronistic props than I care to recall.
So it was a relief to see that the creative team behind “Chang An” had clearly done their homework. The city gates, buildings, and weaponry in the film were all based on murals preserved in the Silk Road gateway of Dunhuang. The characters’ attire is likewise patterned off Tang tomb murals and unearthed pottery figurines from the era. Even the dialogue and lifestyles shown in the film broadly correspond to the historical record.
Of course, that’s not to say it’s a flawless recreation. The biggest shortcoming of the film is its unwillingness to engage with the full arc of the Tang, from prosperity to decline. The An Lushan Rebellion, which tore the dynasty apart and set the stage for its eventual collapse, is portrayed as an accident of history, with the result that Gao’s motivations and emotions can feel unconvincing. In reality, under the then-emperor, Xuanzong, the Tang’s political system did not adapt to social realities, and the gaudy life of singing and dancing enjoyed by nobles teetered over a mass of corruption that oppressed much of society. The rebellion, led by one of Xuanzong’s most trusted generals, quickly shattered this bubble, and the Tang would never fully recover. A hundred years later, it was gone.
The true legacy of the High Tang lies not only in its cultural diversity, but also in the tension between its overwhelming wealth and sudden decline. The poems of Li and Gao, which have transcended their era and resonate even today, gained much from their authors’ reflections on the rapidly collapsing world around them. Presenting that decline as merely incidental to their story prevents “Chang An” from fully portraying the complexity of the two men and their era, to say nothing of their poetry.
Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to dwell on such heavy material, instead preferring to praise the dreamier and more poetic qualities of the High Tang. It’s a good thing, then, that poets like Li make it hard to hide from the truth. The film’s climax is Li’s recitation of his classic poem “Bring the Wine.” As he reaches the line “Heaven made me, I must have purpose” the animation springs into a dreamscape: The Yellow River and the Milky Way meet at the horizon as Li and his friends ride cranes into the clouds and drink with immortals.
But this flight of fantasy ends almost as quickly as it begins, with a white-haired Li reading out the final words of the poem: “a thousand ages of worry.”
It’s a glorious moment — and one that marks “Chang An” as a worthy heir to the classics of Chinese animation.
Lu Shan is the author of “A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Tang Dynasty.” ...Read More
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
Is the content of this email relevant to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
