Care for each other

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data yesterday. The spreadsheet had not been updated when I looked a week ago. It has now been updated to Friday. In the last four weeks the new cases per day peaked at 1325, 1558, 1733, and 1976. Cases are rising and are now above the peak in April of 2020. It was the rise to that first peak that prompted states, including Michigan, to issue lockdown orders. Now that the case rate is higher than a year ago Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says new government mandates are not in the plans. I take that to mean she has been thoroughly cowed by the Republican led legislature. Yeah, the legislature and state Supreme Court took away the law that allowed her to declare emergency measures. But there are other laws she could invoke. And she hasn’t. The leadership in both Wayne and Oakland Counties, the two most populous counties in Michigan, have issued mask mandates for schools. I’m glad someone is stepping up. Thankfully, deaths per day is not following what happened in March and April 2020. After several weeks with deaths per day mostly in the single digits, in the last three weeks deaths per day peaked at 15, 23, and 14. That compares to 170 deaths in each of two days in April 2020. Even if one doesn’t die from COVID it can be a nasty experience with symptoms lasting for months and perhaps for the rest of one’s life. Getting vaccinated is much easier, safer, and cheaper than trying to ease the symptoms of the virus. Back in January 2020 I wrote about the introduction to the book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, published in 1999. I wrote about a couple of the early chapters in April 2020. As I read through the book I intended to write about each chapter of the 600 page book. Yeah, that didn’t happen. This was my “car” book, one that I left in the car to read while waiting, such as before a movie or concert or in a doctor’s office. There weren’t movies or concerts in theaters to wait for, and I got tired of lugging a heavy book around, so I didn’t finish the 600 pages until a week ago. I also stopped carrying around a pencil to mark pages and passages of interest. That means I won’t have another eight posts to discuss each chapter. Instead I will touch on those chapters and then delve into the final chapter’s summary. Which will be similar to the first chapter and my first post in which Faludi laid out her basic ideas. In my second post I talked about Faludi’s chapter on work. That contrasted a shipyard that did great work with a space contractor where the men were lost in the corporate cubicle farm with no real understanding of how they fit into creating the final product. My third post was about the contrast between the Citadel, an all male school, and its first female student. The men didn’t want attention from the outside because they feared the world would not understand how comfortable they were taking care of each other and would assume they were all gay. That contrasted with the Spur Posse, whose members were after fame. Additional chapters were about: A group of Cleveland Browns fans trying to keep the team from skipping town and the betrayal they felt in the process. Corporate sports became interested in only money. The Promise Keepers organization, a national religious movement for men. There were both regional rallies held in stadiums and in-home groups of men supporting each other. Faludi sat in on one of these groups. The men talked about what they didn’t get from their fathers and how they tried to see Jesus as a father figure that met their needs. They found the second and third rallies in their area were the same as the first – the message didn’t build. The national organization fell apart. The local groups lost interest. Veterans of the Vietnam war talked about going to war to earn their manhood and how thoroughly the war failed to provide that. Faludi provides a strong indictment of that war and how disastrously it was waged. The men talked about having to deal with that disaster. I probably read that chapter more than a year ago so can’t fill in the details without spending more time than I’d like. That chapter was followed by one discussing how men were portrayed in movies. That also included a discussion of President Ronald Reagan, who many times acted as though he was still a character in one of his movies. Also in the discussion were the Rocky and Rambo movies and others like them. They were about a lone soldier out to save the world while trying to get confirmation from a superior officer. Both actor Sylvester Stallone and the scriptwriter had father issues they were trying to work through. Stallone tried to aim his acting in a different direction, but Hollywood and his fans didn’t let him. At the end of the book he is planning Rocky VI. The Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas is the next topic. More accurately, it is about the men who assemble at the site every year on the anniversary of the firestorm and why they feel the need to be there. The siege and fire were during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet the men were upset with Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno for emasculating men. They declared white men were the most discriminated against group in the country. The men tended to be troubled by two ideas that went wrong in this case. First is the idea that a man’s purpose is to protect women and children (even if the women don’t need that protection). Second is the idea that men, while not supposed to dominate (which some do quite well), they’re also not supposed to be dominated, which they saw Hillary and Reno doing. The next chapter was about males caught in a display culture. First up was Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11 that landed on the moon. The problem was after the trip where NASA put them on display and paraded them around the world. All three of them became so sick of constantly being on display they quit NASA and never went into space again. Then there are three brothers trying to prefect their gangsta image. Yeah, there was some brutality associated with it, but that got you in front of the cameras. Which was the important thing. But that life either soured or didn’t pan out. The third aspect of display culture was men’s magazines shifting from how to be a man to how to display being a man. Interesting that this discussion included the early years of gay rights and magazines that supported gay men. Alas, they soon shifted to style magazines, a chance for corporations to market to gay men. The last chapter before the close was sixty pages about men in the porn industry. The industry wants one thing from their male stars and any hint of performance anxiety makes that one thing not happen. Along the way porn films are reduced from storylines that require actual acting to just the one act. Female stars rule the industry, so men who don’t do well in the industry blame women. In the closing chapter Faludi discussed her major themes. There was (and maybe still is, I haven’t asked a Millennial) a belief that if a man is loyal to the corporation the corporation will be loyal to the man. Corporate downsizing showed that not to be true. But behind that were men with abandonment issues with their fathers. The father was supposed to demonstrate to the son how to be a man. But the father was caught up at work and couldn’t show that to his son. How to be a man included things such as providing for a family and standing up for what is right and important. Yeah, there have always been fathers missing in action. A failing economy can prompt that. But the decades after WWII had unprecedented prosperity. Fathers had so much to pass on, and didn’t. That left the sons wondering why Dad was so silent. The culture had changed so that men were judged by ornamental terms of how sexy they were, whether they were known in the wider culture, or whether they were a winner. As for that last one, America has always been about winning – we “won the West.” Dominance and being first have always been prized and a times seemed to be all that mattered. Yeah, women are also defined by ornamentation, by glamour. But that has also seen a shift. It used to be something women did for fun and enjoyment. But the glamour industry stole the pleasure and made it a commodity. Mass media molded people into passive roles and emphasized consuming. In seeking a way out, a way to revolt, women had an advantage – the could identify an enemy, which was men, or at least patriarchy. Why aren’t men rising up against this betrayal? Part of the answer is men are taught to confront a problem – identify the enemy and defeat it. But in this case who is the enemy? Themselves? So maybe solving problems through confrontation is not the answer. What is then? Gay men might provide an example. When the AIDS pandemic hit gay men mobilized to take care of gay men. Quite quickly they built a network of clinics, drug buyer’s clubs, legal and psychological services, political action networks, transportation systems, home care, buddy visits, meal deliveries, and hospices. They had a job to do and did it. Yeah, gays teaching men how to be men. A way out of the mess is to forget about masculinity and focus on humanity. Don’t worry about being a man. Ignore the masculinity scorecard society has given men. Do the work of a man – which happens to be the same as the work of a woman. Thank you, feminism! And that work is social responsibility. That can be summed up easily: care for each other. Some men are becoming rebels through figuring out how to do just that.

I think we already broke

Aysha Qamar of Daily Kos reported that Hillary Clinton has been chartering flights to try to get at-risk women out of Afghanistan. There are various other organizations accepting donations to do similar work. In the title of this piece Qamar mentioned another person trying to get people out. This person is Erik Prince, the brother of Cruella DeVos, who, as head of Blackwater, has profited handsomely from the ongoing wars. Prince’s efforts are different from Clinton’s – Prince is charging $6,500 a seat. Yesterday I wrote about the Supreme Court and its use of the shadow docket. Mark Joseph Stern tweeted a thread reviewing the case and summarized:

When the Supreme Court issues major shadow docket decisions like this it is not acting like a court. The shadow docket is for rare, true emergencies. SCOTUS abuses it to issue unsigned opinions in blockbuster cases at 10 pm. It's rule by raw judicial power, not reasoned judgment. ... The point—the problem—is that the court's own rules do not allow it to govern the nation through emergency decrees *even if* one party has the stronger claim. ... It doesn't much matter if you agree with the majority or the dissent on the merits of the eviction moratorium. The deeper problem is that the Supreme Court had no license to intervene with a definitive judgment at this stage. We need shadow docket reform.

M.S. Bellows added:

Most folks don't realize that the Supreme Court is NOT a court of appeals: it almost never is required to accept a case, and its purpose isn't to do justice or right wrongs but to set judicial policy + resolve conflicts between the circuits. The shadow docket upends this.

The other side of the decision by the Supremes to gut the eviction moratorium is that very little of the money to pay back rent is getting to tenants or landlords. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that the billions of dollars was given to states and cities, who came up with their own methods and requirements for applications. The money hasn’t gone out because of layers of bureaucracy. The solution, wrote McCarter, would be for the federal government to take the money back and be the single point of contact for renters and landlords (yeah, I know the time needed to do that means a lot of people would be evicted). One wonders if state and local governments purposefully designed their system to be hard to use because they’re cruel people. Sheesh, they’re telling poor people, who may not have internet access or scanners, that documents must be uploaded. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that seven Capitol Police filed a lawsuit against the nasty guy and others involved in or responsible for the Capitol attack. Named in the suit are the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and nasty guy allies Roger Stone and many others. The suit says the defendants “violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 that prohibits the use of conspiracies to block Congress from performing its constitutional duties.” In the suit the seven officers, five of whom are black, recounted the verbal and physical violence they endured on Jan. 6. This suit joins several others. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that House Committee investigating the Capitol attack is still there and has issued a sweeping demand for documents. I’ll let you read through the description of the requested documents. Sumner wrote:

The new requests show that this is not going to be over quickly, because the volume of information to be considered is just too great. Republicans who feared that the investigation was going to still be going on when the 2022 elections rolled around are very, very likely to see those fears confirmed.

David Neiwert of Kos reported that last Sunday the Proud Boys, in what was billed as a “Summer of Love” event, held a rally in Portland, Oregon. Afterward they set about attacking their perceived enemies through street brawls, overturning vehicles, and assaulting people in their cars. Police didn’t intervene until there were gunshots. Neiwert wrote:

Before the event, Portland Police published a statement announcing that they intended to stay out of the protest. “You should not expect to see police officers standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart,” Chief Chuck Lovell said. “People should keep themselves apart and avoid physical confrontation.”

But that ignores the goal of the Proud Boys to engage in physical confrontation. Their method of operation seems to be to announce a big rally to draw Proud Boys from across the country into a liberal city to create scenes of street violence. Which is the chief attraction of their members. Sunny Singh tweeted:

“Nice people made the best Nazis...They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” I keep remembering this @NaomiShulman quote. Have been, through the absurdities of the past weeks.

In an article about the pandemic McCarter wrote:

Antivax Republicans are calling for an economic boycott—"MASS NON-COMPLIANCE" to "end this tyranny"—of vaccine mandates. That includes leaving their jobs, boycotting stores and restaurants, etc. They need to add to that list that they refuse medical care if they get sick, the logical conclusion of COVID-19 denial. Of course, that's not happening, and of course, hospitals can't refuse them when they show up at the door.

McCarter quoted a tweet from Nick Sawyer, MD:

This is how I know COVID is going to get worse. There are adults - and parents of children - who not only refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine but also REFUSE TO GET TESTED IN ER or let THEIR CHILDREN GET TESTED IN THE ER. They don’t care if they have it or are spreading it.

Qamar wrote that many hospital staff feels like they’re in an unwinnable war:

As hospitals nationwide struggle again due to a rise in hospitalizations due to the delta variant, reports of staff shortages increase. As unvaccinated individuals continue to fill hospitals and fight with health care professionals, exhaustion and lack of support have left health care workers struggling with their own problems. In Mississippi, as the state battles some of the highest numbers of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents in the nation, nurses are resigning due to extreme burnout. At least 2,000 Mississippi nurses have resigned since the beginning of the year, according to the Mississippi Hospital Association's Center for Quality & Workforce. "It looks heroic," Nichole Atherton, a nurse who resigned from Singing River Ocean Springs Hospital, told CNN. "But that's not what it is. It's sweaty and hard and chaotic and bloody. And it's hard to live in this every day and then go home and live a normal life." When asked by CNN if the health care system is reaching a breaking point, another resigned nurse said: "I think we already broke."

Some hospital systems in the state are urging the state to use COVID relief funds for retention bonuses. Nurses respond it’s not about the money. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported James Akers took a 90-second opportunity to speak before the Dripping Springs Independent School District. Higgins wrote:

Akers identified himself as a father of four, including one currently in high school in the district, located outside Austin, Texas. He said he doesn’t like anyone, including the government, to tell him what to do, but sometimes “I’ve got to push the envelope a little bit.” Then he said he’s not going to talk about it but “walk the walk.” Akers expressed how much he disliked the jacket, shirt, and tie he has to wear to work and then removed all three items. He then sarcastically described driving recklessly by blowing past stop signs and through red lights before parking in a spot reserved for disabled folks. "I almost killed somebody out there,” he said. “But by God, it's my road, too, so I have every right to drive as fast as I want to.” By the time he stripped down to his swimsuit, he had added that people follow certain rules for a “very good reason” and said it’s just a “simple protocol.” People in the audience laughed, cheered, and gasped. Barbara Stroud, president of the board, asked him to put his pants back on for comments, which he did. He was still shirtless when he walked back to his seat.

With no transparency, no visible process

Last week Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote about what the conservatives on the Supreme Court have been doing lately. The Supremes have always had a “shadow docket,” a term coined by Will Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. McCarter explained:

The shadow docket has always been there, where the court issues rulings (without scheduling hearings) that are often unsigned and often consist of just one or two sentences. But the current iteration of the conservative court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has been picking up the pace of those shadow docket cases.

The shadow docket has been used for such things as reversing a lower court stay or imposing a stay while an appeal is working through the court system. Usual beneficiaries have been the nasty guy, states seeking the death penalty, and religious organizations. The problem is that it is being used to “issue significant rulings that change the rights and responsibilities of millions of Americans” without disclosing court reasoning and which justice voted which way. If this was a liberal court Republicans would accuse it of being “activist.” McCarter reviewed a recent offense. The order was an injunction against the New York state law banning evictions during the pandemic. The Supremes sided with the landlords. At least in this case liberal Justice Stephen Breyer added a dissent joined by the other two liberals. McCarter concluded:

The court's legitimacy is most definitely at issue here. The regular process decisions they issued this term were radical and dangerous. The cases they agreed to hear next session are perhaps even more so. Now we also have to worry about the cases that don't wend their way through the trial process through the district and appeals courts. The court can take an emergency order on the shadow docket and with no transparency, no visible process, reshape our lives. That can't stand. The court has to be reformed to keep this radical majority on the court from doing further damage. Expansion is the most expedient way to do so.

In a post dated yesterday Gabe Ortiz of Kos wrote about an even worse offense committed by the conservative Supremes. The nasty guy implemented Migrant Protection Protocols, otherwise known as the Remain in Mexico policy. Those seeking asylum in the US had the live in Mexico while waiting for their court date. While in Mexico they lived in squalid camps and could be victims of kidnapping and murder. Legal scholars routinely declared it to be unlawful and a humanitarian disaster. Biden, naturally, reversed the policy. Republican governors on the Mexico border sued. A lower court judge (appointed by the nasty guy) demanded the policy be reinstated while getting dozens of facts wrong and wildly misstating the law. And the Supremes (nominally between terms) agreed with the lower court judge, saying Biden was required to reimplement an unlawful policy. That now means that lower court judge now has the power to hold the Biden administration in contempt if he decides they haven’t acted in good faith. I didn’t follow the entire explanation, so I’ll leave that to you and your interest. Ian Millhiser of Slate wrote:

The decision upends the balance of power between the elected branches and the judiciary. It gives a right-wing judge extraordinary power to supervise sensitive diplomatic negotiations. With this order, Republican-appointed judges are claiming the power to direct U.S. foreign policy—and don’t even feel obligated to explain themselves.

Ortiz then discussed how Biden might work around this order. He’ll need to do so carefully, but he must. A few hours after Ortiz posted his report, McCarter added commentary. She wrote that the order from the Supremes is way too vague. It doesn’t identify the violation Biden is supposed to fix, leaving that to the lower judge. McCarter wrote:

The radical and unlawful Supreme Court decision handed down Tuesday on immigration makes reforming that court all the more urgent, before they can do more damage to an increasingly fragile system of government. ... All of that is bad, and it is very much an outgrowth of the Court's use of the shadow docket: No one has to sign their name to the order and they don't have to provide legal justifications and weight of precedent that they must address in decisions resulting from regular process. They increasingly are choosing to take these hot-button political cases—religious exemptions to COVID restrictions, the pandemic eviction moratorium, this immigration case—on an "emergency" basis that allows them to circumvent full proceedings. This is a really radical decision from an activist court that is acting in an entirely political way.

Congress must and can fix this, though that requires getting rid of the filibuster. Turning to the pandemic. McCarter wrote about how the unvaccinated are breaking everything. They’re breaking health care workers. The workers are feeling worn down even more during this surge because the disease is preventable. That prompted 75 doctors in South Florida to walk out in protest. In many other hospitals walkouts have been permanent. They’re breaking the health care system. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Fund found unvaccinated people cost the health care system $2 billion in just June and July. They are killing other people by so overloading hospitals that those with other kinds of severe medical issues, such as cancer, can’t get treated. In the early days of writing this blog I learned when someone shouts about freedom it is important to ask: Freedom for whom? Kerry Eleveld of Kos wrote about Govs Abbot and Costello (um, DeathSentence) and their sick ruse of declaring personal freedom and pretending it means freedom for everyone. That prompted me to think about that question again. Freedom to not wear a mask and to not get vaccinated robs children and immunocompromised of their freedom, their health, and sometimes even their life. When someone rants about demanding to preserve personal freedom, such as freedom of religion, they are really demanding to preserve the freedom to discriminate and oppress. I’m not the only one who has come to this conclusion. Michael Harriot, writing in The Root, agrees. Even though the word “freedom” appears only once in the Constitution white people will insert the word into a sentence to sound more patriotic and to justify such things as pro-gun legislation and police brutality. Harriot provided a few examples of anti-mask rallies proclaiming freedom.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with asserting one’s rights. These people absolutely have the right to not wear masks or refuse vaccines. That’s not what they’re arguing. They’re arguing that they have the right to ignore science at the peril of others. Their kids’ right to go to facemask-free schools can’t infringe upon the rights of parents who don’t want their children to die coughing up coronavirus phlegm. They are insisting that their personal liberty is not just worth their health, it’s more important than your right to choose to be healthy. It’s the ultimate act of privilege because what they are essentially saying is: “Give me liberty or give you death.” ... For white people, living in America is like having skin that can’t burn. If you didn’t have to worry about being consumed by flames, you might think fire codes are overregulated. Why should your hard-earned money be spent on a fire extinguisher if you’re fireproof? ... They are impervious to fire, so we can’t force them to care about the people who aren’t. But we also can’t forget the fact that the role of government is not just to protect our individual rights; it also must protect our collective rights. ... The reason every individual has the right to vote is that a true democracy represents the collective, not just individuals. You don’t pay school taxes so that your kid can get an education; you pay them so you can live in an educated community. You don’t pay the cops to keep you safe. You pay police departments to keep your community safe.

Harriot likes freedoms. “When I get some, I’ll let you know.”

An explicit policy to ignore corruption

It’s been a few days since I’ve written about Afghanistan. Since two people quoted Sarah Chayes I thought I had better go to the source. Chayes wrote in her personal blog (like I’m doing). She covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001 for NPR. She then stayed in Afghanistan for a decade and ran two non-profits. Then she worked for two commanders of the international troops, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Out of that came two books. From her blog post from 9 days ago:

Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face. I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did. For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable. Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line. I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for. And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules. Is that American democracy? Well…?

Chayes then discussed the extent to which Pakistan has nurtured and backed the Taliban, even doing market surveys to determine that “Taliban” had the best messaging to appear as a group of young religious students who were gentle and their only interest in government was to stop the extortion. Yet we insist Pakistan is an American ally. Then on to Hamid Karzai. The US chose him to lead Afghanistan after ousting the Taliban in 2001. A strange choice since he negotiated the Taliban’s entry into Afghanistan in 1994. And now he is a major member of the team negotiating for peace today. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo:

Certainly the way it’s played out has been messy, chaotic, mortifying. Many armchair quarterbacks have the idea that the US could have evacuated everyone who had worked with us in advance of withdrawal. But as I and many other have argued that’s a basic misunderstanding of the situation. If you evacuate everyone who might be endangered by the fall of the government in advance, you are basically signing the regime’s death warrant. You are saying you don’t expect the regime to last and that the fall will come fast. That message is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, Marshall wrote, the Americans could have processed exit paperwork more quickly, but this type of exit was baked in to the US mission in Afghanistan. Steve Inskeep of NPR spoke to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in office under GW Bush when 9/11 happened, about when America could have exited Afghanistan. We could have left in 2002 when it seemed clear Osama Bin Laden was no longer in the country. Another chance came in 2005, but attention was diverted to Iraq. Obama tried the surge to end things, but the Afghan government was too corrupt and the local troops didn’t think it was worth the sacrifice. Armitage said the decision to get out is correct, but the execution has been a mess. He said:

Let me give you an example. The whole world had witnessed a conga line of grifters in the previous administration that paraded as Cabinet officers. Nobody knew better than our foreign friends what these folks were about. So that raised questions, first of all, about where the direction of the United States was. ... My preference would have been to just to take the end of the year, make an announcement - we're going to get out - and use all that time to process special immigration visas and other things. But the fact that even now, as I understand it, we're still to some extent trying to enforce some sort of bureaucracy on those leaving Afghanistan who are not American, it strikes me as insane. We ought to get them out and then sort them out after.

MimiStardust of the Kos community quoted a guy, name not given, who was featured in the Kansas City Star. Twice he served in Afghanistan as a Marine. He summarized the situation quite quickly:

“One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan.” “Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.” “...when people ask me if we made the right call getting out of Afghanistan in 2021, I answer truthfully: Absolutely not. The right call was getting out in 2002. 2003.” “Elitist hacks are even blaming the American people for what happened this week. The same American people that they spent years lying to about Afghanistan. Are you kidding me?”

David Rothkopf tweeted about our messy exit from Afghanistan:

For those who say that what has happened in the last week will permanently damage America's standing in the world, a short list of reasons why, bad as it was, it won't even make the top 30 things that have really harmed our standing. 1. A coup against our government led by our president 2. Support for the coup from the entire Republican Party 3. A major political party (see above) dedicated to dismantling democracy in the United States 4. A president impeached for encouraging the coup 5. A president impeached for trying to blackmail a US ally 6. A president who bullied & insulted our allies for 4 years 7. A president and party who have actively promoted racism and ethno-nationalism ... 11. US having the highest COVID death total in the world 12. A president cozying up to dictators worldwide 13. A president corruptly profiting from the presidency 14. A president who was a serial sex offender 15. A president who is a serial tax cheat 16. A president who serially obstructed justice 17. A president who was, at least, the pawn of a foreign enemy who he catered to at the expense of US national security and that of our allies 18. A president surrounded by a long list of corrupt, indicted, convicted cronies ... 27. A president who violated int't law via rendition programs and the opening of the prison in Guantanamo 28. A president who illegally invaded Iraq without justification causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents ... We mismanaged an event in pursuit of doing the right thing. That is much better by any measure than doing the wrong thing efficiently. ... What is more, the admin responded quickly.

Stacy Mitchell, the co-director for the Institute for Local Self Reliance, tweeted about the bad deal cities and towns have been getting out of big box stores. These big companies promised huge tax revenues that enticed local governments. But underneath were two big costs: 1. They require expensive public services, mainly roads and police. 2. They cause the value and tax revenue of the town’s downtown to drop. A few years later the city’s finances would break even or perhaps be worse. A few years after that with the loss of downtown and the area’s overall decline the big box chains would contest their property valuations, which slashed the taxes they paid. The town would be even worse off. Vermont, which compelled towns to do the thorough analysis, has a lot of healthy small businesses.

For the deaf that hearing would also enjoy

Two movies in the week, though this one was at an actual theater. I went to see the movie CODA, Children of Deaf Adults. It is also a musical term meaning the ending. I was interested in it because Ruby, the young woman at the center of this movie, loves to sing though this is something her deaf parents and brother can’t understand. Since I compose and perform music and know its power to move people that situation is fascinating. My niece was interested in it because she has studied American Sign Language. We weren’t sure we would be able to see it together in a theater, then my schedule for today unexpectedly cleared. We met at the Maple Theater in Bloomfield Hills for the 2:30 show. I got there first and was startled that the inside was dark and no one was around, yet the doors were unlocked. Then I saw a sign by the door saying they were closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. But I had checked the website before I left home and Niece checked it on her phone while we stood outside – it indeed listed two showings for today. We needed to make a choice. We could wait nearby until another showing at 4:00 (according to the website) or try for Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. We chose Ann Arbor and drove the 45 minutes. We got there in plenty of time for the 4:15 showing. Even had time to do some walking around the area, though didn’t do much because of the heat. So, back to the movie. Niece explained this was a movie made for deaf people that hearing people would also enjoy. Everything said, both in English and ASL, was displayed in subtitles. When there wasn’t actual singing, there was very little background music. When the family discussed or argued all we heard were the sounds of the room, such as footsteps or things being set on the table. When Ruby, played by Emilia Jones, did her big concert the sound faded out so we could experience it like her family would. They looked around to see how the music affected others in the audience. The conflict of the movie centered around the father and brother, as fishermen, needing a hearing person and translator on the boat and Ruby had that unpaid job. But she might be good enough to go off to college to study music. Then what would the family do? The deaf people in the story were played by deaf actors – Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant. All of them, especially Kotsur. are fine actors. I’m sure Kotsur relished the salty language he got to sign – much to the embarrassment of Ruby, who toned down her translation. His scene where he reminded Ruby’s boyfriend to use a condom was hilarious (except to Ruby and the boyfriend) and no translation was needed. I highly recommend this one.

The sign on the hill

My Sunday evening movie this week was Up by Pixar. Yeah, it came out a dozen years ago, but I hadn’t seen it. I knew the basic premise that an old guy and a young scout flew away in a house held up by thousands of balloons, but nothing beyond that. So I was pleased by how sweet the first half of the movie is. I was also surprised at how much the second half was a simple swashbuckler, with an unrelenting evil nemesis, surprise attacks, derring do, and improbable escapes. It was fun. After watching I read through the trivia of the movie on IMDB. It said to lift a 1600 square foot house 20 thousand balloons wouldn’t be enough. It would take 12.5 million balloons, which would take 3.5 years to inflate if one didn’t stop to eat or sleep. I had considered watching the movie Summer of 85. The trailer showed two young men in a sweet gay love story. But then it showed the highly homophobic reaction of the adults. I’m so over that. Homophobic parents were accurate in 1985, not so much 36 years later in 2021. So I didn’t watch. When I checked the Michigan COVID data on Saturday I discovered it had not been updated in a week. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed a report written by Sydney Page in The Lily. Hamilton County, Tennessee announced a mask mandate that included an opt-out options parents could sign. “Wendy” of the East Hamilton school district wrote on Facebook (as excerpted by Dartagnan):

As the parent of a daughter at East Hamilton, I find the school’s dress code policy to be misogynistic and detrimental to the self-esteem of young women. … In light of the opt-out option related to the recently announced mask mandate, I can only assume that parents are now in a position to pick and choose the school policies to which their child to be subject. ... I therefore intend to ... send my daughter to school in spaghetti straps, leggings, cut offs, and anything else she feels comfortable wearing to school.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported on Republicans arguing to expose school children to the virus. He started with a few basic points: * Masks work in protecting us from a potentially deadly virus. * One can still get enough air and release enough CO2 while wearing a mask. * Various workers have worn masks for years during prolonged shifts and heavy labor. Some cultures, including some in Asia, routinely wear masks in public spaces. * It is only Republicans who are attempting to prevents schools and workplaces from using masks. Cynthia Silva of NBC News reported that Newberg Public Schools, located about 20 miles southwest of Portland Oregon, passed a measure 4-3 on Aug. 10 to ban “political” signs and clothing from its campuses. This included Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ signs. Supporters of the ban said the signs would cause “more division and more anger,” while those opposed said such signs made students feel seen and helped comfort those who had been bullied. A few days later farmer Jaybill McCarthy shared an idea on social media and got donations and supplies to build an 8x16 foot pride-transgender-black lives matter flag on painted plywood. They mounted it on a hilltop on his farm highly visible from the high school. It is a message that everyone belongs to the community. McCarthy tweeted a thread with pictures showing progress and finished sign. Tai Harden-Moore is an advisor to the school’s Black Student Union. Her son appreciated seeing Black Lives Matter signs in classrooms to know what teachers were safe to talk to. A one minute video of a guy beating his own drums in an unusual way.

Did not think America’s longest war was worth fighting

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported there are 49 school districts in Texas who have declared their defiance to Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates. Attorney General Ken Paxton sent these districts a letter that reviewed Abbott’s order and threatened legal action. Sumner wrote:

All those schools should definitely hang onto that letter and mount it proudly in a place where students and visiting parents can see. Because less than eight hours after those papers went out, they became paper tigers. Facing lawsuits from multiple districts—and without a single decent argument to make for why children should be subjected to an avoidable risk—the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced Thursday evening that Abbott’s ban on mask mandates would no longer be enforced.

In Florida, 60 districts are defying a similar ban on mask mandates. And Gov. Ron DeathSentence’s poll numbers are dropping. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that the State Election Board in Georgia, using the new election power grab law has appointed a panel to conduct a performance review of the elections in Fulton County. It’s the county with the highest population – and the most Democratic voters. That panel is “bipartisan” – 2 Republicans to 1 Democrat, so it is bipartisan in veneer only. As far as the GOP legislature is concerned the eventual goal of this effort is to replace the Fulton County election board with party hacks to make sure Democrats are never elected again. Kerry Eleveld of Kos suggested questions reporters could ask the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to not certify the 2020 election. Several of these Republicans are in swing districts and their voters would be interested in these answers. Start with Sen. Rick Scott, head of the Senate GOP campaign. He recently declared, based on the chaos at the airport in Kabul, that Biden was unfit for office. Eleveld wrote:

At the heart of the matter is whether Republicans who voted to overturn the will of the people with no proof to back their claims are fit to participate in governing a democracy. The natural offspring of that question is whether a party led by seditionists is fit to participate in democracy. A common question for reporters to ask someone like Scott—who has been working to portray the Senate GOP caucus as mainstream—is whether he regrets his vote to overturn the election. But I think there's a better way to ask that question: "Sen. Scott, recently you questioned President Biden's fitness for office. You voted to overturn the 2020 election based on no credible evidence. Since then, none has emerged. Do you question your own fitness for office?”

The followup question is, “Do you still support democracy?” If Scott defends his vote, then turn to the members in swing districts and ask: Your leadership doesn’t believe in democracy. Do you? Will you approve seditionists for leadership positions? Voters deserve to know. That leads to a question from me to the media: Why aren’t you asking these questions? There are nine Democratic House menbers who are demanding the House vote on the Senate infrastructure plan without waiting for the much bigger House Build Back Better plan. A reason for doing it this way would be to then thwart the bigger plan. McCarter reported that Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are supporting their House counterparts. McCarter then went through a lot of detail about a group called No Labels airing ads in support of the nine Democrats. McCarter concluded:

So why don't Manchin, Sinema, and the nine want that to happen? The same reason Manchin and Sinema are ultimately fighting their own bill—that's what ExxonMobil and all the dark money groups behind them and No Labels want.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted several people discussing the situation surrounding Afghanistan. First from Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. They ask, “Where are the anti-war voices?” We hear a lot of voices criticizing the withdrawal – often the people complicit in the two decades of failed policy there. But those who support what Biden is doing? They spoke to a communications professional, a person who works with news outlets to get voices on the air. But right now no one returns his calls. The supportive voices are purposely being shut out. The voices being heard are Bush administration officials criticizing the withdrawal. Dworkin then quoted an AP report on an AP-NORC poll:

Roughly two-thirds said they did not think America’s longest war was worth fighting, the poll shows. Meanwhile, 47% approve of Biden’s management of international affairs, while 52% approve of Biden on national security.

Finally, Dworkin quoted a tweet from Mark Hertling;

It’s interesting we’ve seen more public questioning of Afghanistan policy/strategy in the last three days than we’ve seen in the last several years.

Responsibility to protect

Aysha Qamar of Daily Kos reported that all across the country parents are showing up at school board meetings demanding districts not adopt mask mandates and otherwise displaying their worst selves. Qamar also reported that the school board in Paris, Texas amended its dress code to require masks. Qamar wrote:

The statement [by the district] noted that the governor’s order did not suspend any part of the Texas Education Code, which allows board members to amend dress codes. “The Texas Governor does not have the authority to usurp the Board of Trustees’ exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district,” the statement continued.

Also, disability rights groups have filed federal lawsuits against the mandate ban alleging such a ban puts students with disabilities at risk. In announcing his mask ban Gov. Greg Abbott wrote, “The path forward relies on personal responsibility—not government mandates.” Commenter moose65 to this post wrote, “That “personal responsibility” line is utter horse s---.” And TexasTom replied:

Of course it is — because Republicans who utter this bulls**t about “personal responsibility” are using it to appeal to people who are completely irresponsible.

Michaeleen Doucleff of NPR reported on the world condemning the US decision to offer booster doses of COVID vaccines. Some of their reasoning: * Booster shots in the US won’t slow down the pandemic. There isn’t much difference in protection between two doses and three. There is a great deal of difference between two doses and zero. * Diverting vaccine doses from unvaccinated people will help drive the emergence of more variants, which have a chance of being more dangerous and able to evade the vaccine. * America says they’ve donated 100 million doses and another 500 million are on the way. But the world needs 11 billion doses, and in many countries less than 5% of people are vaccinated. However, if you are offered a third shot booster, refusing it doesn’t mean it will go into an arm halfway around the world. At the end of July I included a quote from Leah McElrath:

Republicans across the nation are leveraging this pandemic to try to create chaos that they hope will ultimately undermine parental support for the public education system. Mark my words.

McElrath isn’t the only one noticing that. Several noticed years ago that was the main reason why Cruella DeVos was hired to be Secretary of Education under the nasty guy. Laura Clawson of Kos has noticed that Corey DeAngeles, the national director of research at the American Federation of Children, founded by DeVos, has been making the rounds at conservative think tanks and bringing his message to hard conservative platforms. Wrote Clawson:

And at any given time these days, DeAngelis’ Twitter feed is a mix of anti-masking and anti-teaching-about-racism, all with the singular goal of leveraging right-wing outrage over masks and the false picture of critical race theory to defund public schools and privatize public education dollars. To be clear, this isn’t about one guy. This is about the alliance between the institutional—Betsy DeVos-founded—school privatization movement and anything that allows them to undermine public education. They are willing to cozy up to conspiracy theorists and rape fantasizers and actively endanger kids’ health in the pursuit of that goal.

Why defund public schools? So those people don’t get an education and aren’t able to succeed in the world – and don’t learn their oppression is not the natural order of things. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted an editorial from the Hindustani Times.

After the end of the Soviet Union, during the unipolar moment — of United States (US) hegemony — the doctrine of humanitarian intervention picked up. This was based on the notion that sovereignty was not sacred, and that if a regime was involved in human rights violations, the international community was within its rights to intervene in a particular country. This principle was picked up by two different streams of thought. The first were the neo-conservatives who, during George W Bush’s era, argued that promoting democracy and enabling regime change was a legitimate extension of humanitarian intervention. The second were liberal internationalists who extended the principle to evolve a doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) — if a State failed to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, then other states could take timely, collective and decisive action.

Of course, Western nations didn’t apply this principle evenly. They intervened when and how it suited their strategic interests.

The fall of Afghanistan may well have eroded the entire architecture of Western interventions. If the US, as Joe Biden’s speech defending the withdrawal on Monday indicated yet again, is not willing to step up to protect minority, women and human rights, and can leave Afghans at the mercy of a brutal regime which has a record of rights violations, it will be hard for Washington to justify its intervention elsewhere in the future on these principles. The rise of China has already added a protective buffer to authoritarian regimes. ... But the abrupt end of an invasion meant to counter terror, create a democratic political order and protect human rights may have ended up eroding the political, moral and legal argument for such interventions itself. The possible dilution of global military interventions is positive. But if it emboldens despotic regimes, like the one taking over Kabul, the world is headed for more turbulent times.

Nuclear fission is when atoms of uranium or plutonium split apart. They make a big bang and leave radioactive debris all over the place. Nuclear fusion is when two atoms of hydrogen are forced together to make an atom of helium. This is the way the sun generates energy and it is much cleaner for the surroundings. One little problem – the equipment must get close to simulating the conditions in the sun for fusion to happen. Catherine Clifford of NBC News reported that the National Ignition Facility within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory briefly achieved fusion. This is such an important step that Omar Hurricane, a chief scientist at the lab, called it, “a Wright Brothers moment.” Hurricane stressed using fusion, a clean source, to generate energy to allow us to get rid of all those dirty sources, is still a long way off. The reason is simple – it takes a great deal more energy to produce those sun-like conditions than the resulting fusion produces. Back when I was an undergrad – a few decades ago – I remember taking a class led by a geology professor, though it wasn’t a class in geology. It was one of those classes held at 8 am, which college students don’t handle well. While I don’t remember the exact topic of the class I do remember I did a paper on the status of fusion. Back then the understanding was researchers were close to achieving fusion, though recognized the big problem of putting more energy in than getting out, with the hope achieving fusion in a few years. Decades later, they did. Some may be thinking, don’t we have hydrogen bombs based on fusion? Yes, they exist. I believe they use fission to create the conditions for fusion to happen. Hydrogen caught between two exploding chunks of plutonium could indeed experience the conditions of the sun. But that’s not feasible for a power plant on earth. Speaking of a Wright Brothers moment – today, August 19, marks 150 years since Orville Wright was born. Their Wikipedia page, though it contains much more information than I need, notes the extent of their formal education: Orville completed 3 years of high school, Wilbur completed 4. Hunter of Kos reported that the West has been so dry that next year state allocations for water from the Colorado River will be cut. That’s the first time a cut will be imposed. Arizona’s portion will be cut by 18%, Nevada’s by 7%, and California’s portion won’t be cut – yet – though California is already in a dire situation because of the low snowpack last year in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Hunter concluded:

The infrastructure costs associated with even keeping the taps in towns and cities in the region from running dry will be staggering, at this point. Given the speed with which the climate seems to be shifting, it's not a certainty that it can be done before some of those water systems collapse.

A few days ago someone said that 10-15 years ago a lot of climate reports, though I don’t know about official ones from the IPCC, said the temperature will likely rise by this amount by the end of the century and sea level might rise by that amount by the end of the century. Turns out that was a wrong way to frame the situation. It certainly implied we had plenty of time. Storms and fires in the last few years now show we didn’t. And don’t.

In pursuit of the votes of just one-third of Americans

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed some things that went on at the beginning of the Afghanistan war that would have saved the US from spending 20 years there.

If, in the wake of 9/11, what the United States had actually wanted was to see Osama bin Laden tried for his involvement and al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan disassembled, that could likely have happened without a single U.S. service member dying and perhaps without a bomb being dropped. However, a trial of bin Laden in Saudi Arabia or Qatar would not have even come close to quelling the anger following 9/11. So that didn’t happen. Two months into the conflict, if the United States had actually wanted Afghanistan to be brought to peace under terms that were likely to generate something like stability, it’s very likely that could have happened. But by then, it would not have satisfied a narrative that had equated any negotiation in Afghanistan with surrendering to terrorists. So that didn’t happen. That may have been the last chance to leave Afghanistan at a point that would not immediately result in a Taliban resurgence. Every action taken after the end of 2001 only made the Taliban stronger and made their return to power more certain. Now it’s happened.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on a poll by Axios-Ipsos that asked about mask mandates. Mask mandates for schools has 69% support, including 44% support by Republicans. Banning mask mandates has 66% opposed, which goes up to 77% opposed to governments defunding schools who have mask mandates. Eleveld concluded:

What the new data makes clear is that House Republicans and many GOP governors are explicitly putting the lives of their constituents at risk in pursuit of the votes of just one-third of Americans. It is just maniacally sick.

I think there is a second reasons many GOP governors are putting their constituents’ lives at risk. They really do want people to die. Sumner reported one reason why Florida Gov. Ron DeathSentence is taking the pro-virus positions that he has. And, as expected, it involves money. The biggest donor to DeSantis in 2020 was Ken Griffin. Griffin has a huge stake in Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. That company makes REGEN-COV. Which means the more people who get sick the more REGEN-COV is needed and the more money Regeneron makes. Of course, there’s a problem. REGEN-COV needs to be administered before patients are sick enough to be hospitalized. Testing is so bad that patients don’t know REGEN-COV could help them until it is too late. Even if they knew in time there isn’t enough REGEN-COV to treat all who might be helped. Then there is the moral problem of letting people get sick in a pandemic in hopes this drug can be administered in time to do any good. What would help is wearing a mask, effective over the last 17 months, and getting the vaccine, effective over the last 8 months. And Gov. DeathSentence is doing all he can to make sure they aren’t used. He’s earned his new name. This is the 224th time in the last 18 months I’ve tagged a post with “coronavirus.” This tag is now the 13th most used tag on this blog. Denise Oliver Velez of Kos reported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has been officially introduced in Congress. Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell did the formal introduction and did so in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. This is the bridge that was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were brutally beaten on March 7, 1965. One of those beaten marchers was John Lewis. I heard a report in the last few days about carbon offsets when one takes an airplane trip. The report was on NPR program Marketplace in a report by Amanda Preacher. The report said that the price one pays for a carbon offset varies by what organization you donate to and what you ask them to do with the donation. Planting a tree is one price, subsidizing a bit of renewable energy is another. There is also little connection between the passenger’s portion of the actual amount of carbon emitted on the flight and the carbon in the offset. In addition, planting trees doesn’t really solve the problem. The goal should be to eliminate carbon emissions, not in pretending offsets mean we don’t have to. Bodie Cabiyo, getting a PhD in trees and climate, tweeted about another problem with trees serving as a carbon offset:

Welp, one of the biggest carbon offset projects is burning. The Colville IFM project represents over 14M tons of carbon offsets, or ~6% of all credits in the CA compliance market.

IFM is Indian Forest Management, and the Colville IFM is managed by native tribes. Alex Steffen responded:

Our carbon offset forests burning in our climate chaos megafires is so very 2021.

Doing what’s necessary and popular shouldn’t be the hard part of governing

A poll by the Human Rights Campaign showed that 92% of LGBTQ people in the US have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Good job people! The poll was done through Community Marketing & Insights (CMI), who do an annual poll of LGBTQ people. This poll surveyed over 15,000 people. David Paisley CMI Senior Director of Research wrote:

There are many reasons why LGBTQ+ vaccination rates may be higher than the general population, including higher percentages of the LGBTQ+ community being liberal, living in blue states, and living in urban areas. While participants had strong education levels, those with no more than a high school diploma still had an 87% vaccination rate. We also see that COVID isolation significantly impacted LGBTQ+ people, which may have motivated quick vaccination to reenter the community.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that vaccine booster shots are likely coming. Sumner gets into the reasoning and the timing. It will take a massive effort, just like it did for the first time around. Pien Huang of NPR has a different take. Yes, boosters would help. However, what would help more is to get shots to the unvaccinated. Those vaccinated would be better protected if the virus can’t circulate at all. That includes the unvaccinated around the world where some countries haven’t started vaccinating yet, simply because they don’t have the vaccine or don’t have the resources for a nation-wide campaign. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has tested positive for COVID. Abbott has been vaccinated (he’s high risk, so appropriate). He currently doesn’t have symptoms. He gets tested daily. He is receiving treatment, even without symptoms. Leah McElrath, who lives in Houston, has a few things to say about the situation. Abbott’s daily testing and current treatment are out of the reach of most Texans. He was at a fundraiser the night before, full of older people, and not a mask in sight. Yeah, he’s the one banning mass mandates in the state, though 72% of voters favor mandates for schools. Texas is out of ICU beds, so good thing Abbott doesn’t need one. He minimized being vaccinated as a reason why he has no symptoms. Joan McCarter of Kos reported last week that Texas state Senator Carol Alvarado stood for 15 hours overnight to filibuster the special session Senate Bill 1, the voter suppression bill. Along the way she described the original Voting Rights Act and how this bill was a regressive step back. She had plenty of time to go through all the harms in this new bill. She also shamed national Democrats who are doing very little to to get modern voting rights bills passed. She couldn’t stop the Senate from passing the bill. It now goes to the Texas House where Democrats have been out of state to prevent a quorum. David Neiwert of Kos reported the Proud Boys are still at it. This group played a leading role in the Capitol attack. Even though some of their leaders are in jail because of that attack they are still carrying out their tactics. Which are: Attach themselves to a local conservative cause, such as a protest against Critical Race Theory, by volunteering to be the “security.” During the event start a brawl against counterprotesters and journalists. Blame it all on Antifa. Neiwert mentions it now because that’s what happened recently in downtown Los Angeles during an anti-vaccination protest. Annoyingly (for us), both the LAPD statement and the LA Times story did not mention the Proud Boys were there. Thankfully, there were lots of video taken by the counterprotesters of good enough quality that various Proud Boy members could be identified. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Alex Pareene of the New York Times, who was writing about a Pyrrhic victory in the Senate.

Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats set out to prove that their preferred way of doing business still works, and they did: The Senate can still function, not by just doing something but by taking a very long time to do half of something, on a bipartisan basis, with a dubious promise to finish the rest later. This bipartisan infrastructure bill is popular (and much of the spending is urgently needed throughout the country). Infrastructure spending, like bipartisanship, usually is. But having to spend so much time tortuously wringing support from the minority party to spend money on things people need and want is not actually a sign of a healthy system of government. Doing what’s necessary and popular shouldn’t be the hard part of governing, requiring painful compromise.

I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan has quite thoroughly botched. That is shown in numerous ways, especially the desperate crowds at the airport. McElrath tweeted another:

The US collected biometrics from our allies in Afghanistan. The Taliban reportedly has possession of the resulting database. They’re in a position to use it as a kill list, essentially. We SHOULD be using it to circumvent paperwork and admit refugees. ARE WE?

Chasten and Pete Buttigieg have become parents! They’re in the final stages of the adoption process. In memory of the death of “cowboy philosopher” Will Rogers back in 1935 Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a few of Rogers’ observations. Amazingly – and annoyingly – they’re still accurate almost a century later.

Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat. People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth. One thing about Republican presidents: They never went in much for plans. They only had one plan. It says, 'Boys, my head is turned. Just get it while you can.' Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. A man can make a million and he is on every page in the morning. But it never tells you who gave up that million he got.

A future where water and food will generate major conflicts

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos referenced reports from NASA’s Earth Observatory and NPR to note July 2021 was the hottest month in human history. Not just the hottest July, the hottest month. In all of human history. And sometime soon we may wish for its coolness. Sumner then discusses some of the horrible things that will likely affect the climate. He concluded with:

The assessment of the IPCC study is that the best outcome looking forward is a 3.1° F increase in temperature. That’s a change that will generate significant, lasting impact, including producing rising sea levels and lasting droughts that could make cities currently home to millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions around the world, unlivable. But at the other end of the scale, the possibility is a world that’s 7° warmer in just the next few decades. That’s a path to an Earth that’s genuinely unrecognizable—and to a future where water, food, and other resources won’t just generate refugees, but major conflicts. As has been said before, there’s no question that we can afford the cost of addressing the climate crisis, because we definitely can’t afford the cost if we don’t.

Leah McElrath tweeted a video from ABC News Prime about the wild fires in Siberia. We’ve heard a lot about the fires in the American West – the number and the size. Fires in Siberia are bigger than all the fires in the rest of the world combined. This report is from the province of Yakutia, which is along the Arctic Ocean and much of it north of the Arctic Circle. In winter Yakutia is the coldest inhabited place on earth. This year Yakutia has record heat and record drought, and 10 times more fires than usual. Smoke has reached Alaska and the North Pole. The fires aren’t being fought very well because they’re hard to get to, there aren’t enough firefighters, and there isn’t enough equipment. The region warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The fires are releasing large quantities of CO2, which makes the global warming problem worse. In another tweet McElrath wrote:

Too many people have shown themselves unwilling to do a bare minimum to protect themselves and others from a contagion. How are we going to tackle global warming with our current mindset? The survival of humanity depends on a shift in perspective at the level of the collective.

Greta Thunberg tweeted:

The “code red” IPCC report came out a week ago. Since then not one politician has been held accountable. Not one politician has been asked how they are going to act in line with this. ... As long as we continue to ignore the actual content and the root causes of the climate crisis we will not be able to avoid the worst consequences. And by doing so we are giving a death sentence to countless of people, especially in the most affected areas. But remember; as soon as we decide to treat the climate crisis like a crisis - everything can change overnight. We can still make the seemingly impossible possible.

I think since Friday practically everything on NPR shows Morning Edition (and their weekend equivalents) and All Things Considered has been about Afghanistan and the swift collapse of the government and takeover by the Taliban (they did make a little room to mention the earthquake in Haiti). With two hours in the morning and another two in the evening the catastrophe can be examined from a lot of different angles. There are a lot of other sources to get the latest on Afghanistan, such as doom scrolling (I now understand better what that means) through Leah McElrath’s Twitter feed as she shows and discusses the horrible situation at the Kabul airport and elsewhere in the country. I don’t want to say a lot about Afghanistan – other than What Were They Thinking? – because it all seems so obvious. However, there are a few things to say here and there. I heard one angle on NPR this morning that is worth sharing, though I can’t find it now. The guest talked about how the US government, which has been corrupted by rich donors, didn’t create a democracy in Afghanistan, they created a corrupt government. And why would a soldier in the field facing Taliban fighters want to give his life for a corrupt government? Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, had several quotes about our 20 year war. First is Jeff B on Twitter. He said the real author of this disaster isn’t Biden or the nasty guy. It’s George W. Bush.

Bush could have set a much more limited mission for American military power: get Bin Laden, exterminate al Qaeda. Instead it turned to nation-building with no real understanding of the geopolitics of the region. And then he turned to Iraq, compounding the historic error.

In response to a tweet blaming the problem on Biden and the nasty guy, Brian Rosenwald replied:

Again, this type of statement deliberately ignores something crucial: George W. Bush’s flailing in Iraq deprived this far more justified war of crucial public support. And has any politician in either party really explained to the public the need to stay there indefinitely?

Turning to the pandemic, Dworkin also quoted Helen Ubiñas of the Philadelphia Inquirer about anti-mask protesters. The quote ends with a question by Jason Arena.

“We will find you!” one of the especially deranged dads yelled as he and others screamed at the medical professionals, blocking their cars and berating them as they tried to drive away. Yo, tough guy, that would sound a lot more ominous if we didn’t already know where to find most doctors and nurses these days — at a hospital, probably near you, trying to save the lives of the unvaccinated. “If you don’t trust the medical field to prevent you from getting it, why do you trust them to cure you from it?”

Sumner of Kos reported that Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education, is going around Florida Gov. DeathSentence by sending $7 billion, the part in the American Rescue Plan Act designated for Florida’s schools, directly to the schools. Dr. Ashish Jha tweeted:

Today, the 5 most vaccinated states (14M people) had 580 people in hospital, 12 deaths In the 5 least vaccinated states (16M people)? 6,600 hospitalized, 104 deaths Per capita, least vaccinated states have 10X hospitalizations and 7X deaths So yeah, vaccines are working

Healing through dance

For a couple weekends there I watched Olympic ceremonies rather than an online movie. So today I got back to watching a movie. This one is a documentary, shown by the Detroit Film Theater. It is Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters. The movie is 94 minutes and can be seen through DFT through Saturday and probably other art theaters beyond that. Choreographer Bill T. Jones created the dance D-Man in the Waters. It won awards when it premiered 1989. It is still being performed. In 2010 the dance was licensed for general use. The credits listed 25 schools and dance companies who have performed it. There are a few parallel components to this documentary. First is the story of the creation of the original production in 1989. We see discussions by the original dancers reflecting on the experience. Second is a much more professional and higher quality video of the dance done a few years later. Third is a dance troupe of Loyola Marymount University recreating the dance just a few years ago under the direction of a woman who had danced it with Jones. Jones (black) and Arnie Zane (white) were a gay couple. Zane was a photographer and started photographing Bill’s dancing. Soon Arnie took up dance. Once they were performing as a duo they formed the Jones/Zane troupe. It was mixed race, gay and straight. A little community. Then AIDS struck. And Zane caught it. The company was around him when he died. The ambulance crew refused to carry the body out, afraid they might catch it. The dancers wondered whether Jones would want to continue the troupe. Instead of dropping out Jones and the troupe created this dance to help mourn and heal. A good part of the dance was created through improvisation. Jones asked the dancers to express themselves through movement, then they picked out the things they liked best. The final product was not really beautiful, instead it is highly athletic. Performing this dance was their therapy. There was a D-Man. He was Damian, a gay man in the troupe. He died of AIDS just three months after Zane. A dancer joined the group to take over from Damian. It didn’t take long for the new guy to realize he got the job because the previous guy was close to death. At the opening of the dance Jones and Damian improvised a brief moment for Damian, who was quite sick, to appear on stage. The students in the LMU troupe didn’t know much about AIDS. So there was lots of talk about what are your issues? What matters to you? How do you make the audience care? How do you take the original troupe’s message about AIDS, that by golly we’re going to keep living as much and as long as we can, and apply it to your own world? How can you bring that to the performance? Jones visited LMU to talk to the students about those kinds of things. There is a three minute excerpt of the dance by the Jones/Zane troupe on YouTube. Alas, I didn’t find a full performance there. I wish a full performance had been included in the movie.

Rethinking: Aliens invade and humanity pulls together to fight them

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data. The number of new cases per day peaked at 1388 this week. This has been a steady rise since the end of June, though a much slower rise compared to the outbreaks last October and March. The number of deaths per day has been 12 and under for eight weeks, since mid June. Deaths have not been rising following the rise in cases. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos, working on research by ProPublica, reported that the Republican tax cut for the wealthy in 2017 was a custom fit for particular billionaires – just 82 households saved over $1 billion. The bill started with a general outline. Then it went through hundreds of hands, blatantly and directly influenced by lobbyists, who inserted deals to help out particular rich people. Some of these deals were touted as benefiting mom-and-pop businesses, though most of the benefit went to the top 0.1%. Sumner wrote:

The Republican Party exists to service these people, and Trump’s tax bill gave them exactly what they wanted. At this point, Republicans exist only to defend that bill, and billionaires are willing to tolerate a little insurrection and a few hundred thousand deaths. It doesn’t just keep their taxes low, it keeps their taxes net-negative.

From my understanding the purpose of these tax cuts wasn’t so much to keep the money in the hands of super rich people, but to keep the money out of the hands of poor people, to make their lives more miserable. The tax cut also prevents (as Republicans keep telling us) the US government from having enough money to offer service to the poor to relieve their oppression. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that just a few days after the Senate voted on the bipartisan infrastructure package they voted on the outlines of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package that will bypass a Republican filibuster. The outline passed 50-49 because one GOP senator was not there. But bypassing the filibuster means that the amendment process cannot be shut down and Republicans threw all they could at it. The actual vote was at 4:00 am. McCarter wrote of one particular statement made after the outline passed:

That work done, Sen. Joe Manchin, promptly became the turd in the punchbowl of Biden's aspirations Wednesday morning, with a statement outlining his concerns. His "serious" concerns over the "grave consequences" for the future of spending that much money. Manchin apparently hasn't had time to read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report about the grave consequences we're already living with due to not spending trillions of dollars to avoid climate change. Manchin's deficit peacock shrieks are unwittingly and darkly ironic. He decries the "negative effects on our children and grandchildren" of adding to the national debt, ignoring the fact that our children and grandchildren are facing a world where basic existence is under threat. He says the economy, based on absolutely no concrete evidence, is "on the verge of overheating." How rich is that? No, inflation is not the "overheating" thing to worry about right now.

Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Laura Zhou of the South China Morning Post. China recalled its ambassador to Lithuania because that little country set up diplomatic offices in Taiwan. China insists Taiwan isn’t a separate country, but one of their own provinces. Zhou wrote:

Hours after Beijing‘s announcement, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that as a sovereign country, Lithuania would decide its foreign policy for itself and urged Beijing to change its decision. “Sino-Lithuanian relations should be based on the principle of mutual respect. Otherwise, the dialogue turns into one-sided ultimatums, which is unacceptable in international relations,” he told the Baltic News Service. “At the same time, as a sovereign state, Lithuania itself decides with which states or territories to develop economic and cultural relations, without violating its international obligations.”

Kerry Eleveld of Kos has another story about governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are making sure the children of their state cannot be protected from COVID. One new detail is DeSantis received $7 billion from the federal government to help the state’s schools reopen safely. He has spent none of it. The White House is looking to give money directly to school districts. Eleveld wrote:

The fact we are even forced to discuss the politics of putting kids' lives at risk is unfathomable. But that is exactly where the extremist ideology of today’s Republican Party has landed us. The message of DeSantis and Abbott is crystal clear: Sorry, kids, you're on your own. The GOP has turned into such a pro-plague death cult that both governors are more than happy to put children’s lives on the line to score a few political points with their base. ... DeSantis, Abbott, and other GOP governors are now the face of the delta surge, brought to you by an extremist anti-science, pro-pandemic Republican Party. If justice indeed exists in this universe, the GOP's willingness to sacrifice the lives of children in service of political gain will sink the party in 2022 just like it sank Donald Trump in 2020.

Lauren Floyd of Kos reported that dozens of parents from a half-dozen counties have sued DeSantis over his ban of mask mandates. The Florida constitution says that public officials must “ensure that Florida’s schools operate safely” according to the suit. A judge will hear the suit promptly. Sumner has his own post about Abbott and DeSantis (I’m old enough to think about Abbott and Costello and it seems I’m not that far off) and added Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. SD includes the town of Sturgis, where a huge motorcycle rally happening about now will definitely not be masked for the second year. It was a superspreader event last year, with attendees taking the virus back to their home states. This year the virus spreads faster and is deadlier. Sumner wrote:

Every author or filmmaker who ever created a book or a movie around the theme of “Aliens invade, and humanity pulls together to fight them” needs to do a major rethink. Because we just had that scenario. And one of America’s two major parties chose Team Alien.

A couple days after the earlier post Eleveld reported what has happened in Florida over those two days. One thing that happened, as Eleveld wrote:

Explaining that the delta variant is "airborne," DeSantis offered simply, "We just have to understand when that's happening, these waves are something you just have to deal with." Sorry folks, we’re sitting ducks here. That was the message from DeSantis, as if getting vaccinated and masking up—the two most highly effective preventative measures—weren't worth a mention.

That, and everything else, prompted Eleveld to give a new name to Florida’s top guy: Gov. DeathSentence.

Show your willingness to do actual harm to people’s lives

An update to my post yesterday about being kept in the dark: In today’s news I heard the winds for the 2:45 am storm hit 70 miles per hour. One of the electric companies said damage is likely when winds are over 40 mph. This was their 10th worst storm. While the strength was enough to rouse me from bed to check windows it didn’t affect my power because it was already out. A friend lost power about the same time I did. He emailed me to say the electric company estimated his power should be restored by the end of Saturday (which would be more than 72 hours without electricity). One of his friends was given an estimate of Monday, or 120 hours without power. Yeesh! I’m way behind in reading the news. So some of this is from a few days ago. In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbot is determined to tilt the election laws in the GOP favor (while making it harder for people to protect themselves from COVID), he renewed his call for a special legislative session to pass his voter suppression bills. House Democrats have fled to Washington, DC to prevent a quorum and to lobby Congress to pass national voting rights bills. Abbott ordered those missing Democrats could be arrested and compelled to attend state House sessions. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported the state Supreme Court has given that arrest order their blessing. In the meantime Texas House Republicans would have a hard time maintaining a quorum because so many of them need to quarantine because of COVID. So no quorum possible in this second special session. Hunter of Kos reported that Dade Phelan, Speaker of the Texas House, has signed arrest warrants. Any members still in Texas can now be hunted down and taken to the House chamber by force. The state in such a big surge of COVID that the hospital system is collapsing is not an emergency. But making sure the wrong people don’t vote … is. Wrote Hunter, “Incompetent fascism can survive a pandemic; it's a lot harder to survive an election.” Leah McElrath tweeted that there are zero pediatric ICU beds in the Dallas – Fort Worth area. That prompted Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins to order a mask mandate for the county. As part of his order Jenkins said:

We have zero ICU beds left for children…[If your child needs an ICU bed] your child will wait for another child to die.

Gov. Abbott is suing Judge Jenkins to end that mandate. Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press reported that classes in the Pearl Rivers school district began a week ago. The school board made masks optional in hopes of a more “normal” school year. After one week Central High School has quarantined 40% of the student body. The entire school district switched to virtual. After three days of watching the case rate soar the School Board called an emergency meeting. By a vote of 3-2 they adopted a mask mandate. Detailed census data has now been released, a few months later than usual. Redistricting efforts will begin. I heard Ohio has about three weeks to complete its new maps. Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed the Republican efforts to gerrymander.

To be perfectly honest, it's not pretty. As Mother Jones' Ari Berman reported, Republicans stand to gain anywhere from six to 13 seats in the House through their control of the redistricting process in just four states alone: Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. In other words, Republicans could literally gerrymander their way to a majority by redrawing the lines in four states—to say nothing of the other states they control.

Stephen Wolf of Kos Elections discussed gerrymandering in detail. And I do mean detail. For every state he lists who is in control of legislative maps, the likely partisan intent, and the likely outlook. He even reviews states with just one representative in the House because there are also state legislative maps to draw. I’ll let you peruse the list on your own. This list reminded me of something that was in my presentation when I spoke for the independent redistricting commission in Michigan while campaigning for it three years ago. Both Republicans and Democrats will gerrymander in their favor, given the chance. This really is a case where both sides do it. The only way around that is to put redistricting in the hands of a citizen commission. And the one in Michigan, now that they have census data, will be quite busy in the next couple months. Wolf wrote in his introduction to his list:

This marks the third straight cycle where the GOP will enjoy a huge advantage in carving out new maps, an edge almost as extreme as the one Republicans chalked up after the lopsided 2010 elections, when they won the power to craft just over half of all House districts and Democrats just one-tenth. That huge disparity helped Republicans win the House in 2012 despite the fact that Democratic candidates won more votes that year. The same story also played out in several legislatures in key swing states multiple times over the past 10 years. A repeat of GOP minority rule is now a strong risk for 2022 and beyond. And in an era where most House Republicans have shown their openness toward overturning Democratic victories in the Electoral College, a House where Republicans win a majority in 2024 due to gerrymandering could spark a constitutional crisis over the outcome of the next presidential election. Republican minority rule is a risk in the states as well, since control of legislative redistricting will also heavily favor Republicans.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Paul Waldman of Washington Post speaking of Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida:

Any politician can be an Internet troll concerned with nothing so much as Owning the Libs, and many in DeSantis’s party think that’s their most fruitful path to success. But to really capture the hearts of the party base, you have to show your willingness to do actual harm to people’s lives as you wage war against the other side. And that’s where DeSantis is excelling.

Yup, cruelty is the point, as I’ve quoted a few times before. An aspect of supremacy, of making oneself look better, is to make the other people look worse by making their lives be worse. And that includes the ability to inflict pain and hardship. I was caught by the phrase “harm to people’s lives as you wage war against the other side.” This accurately does not say “harming the lives of the people on the other side.” They are harming lives and don’t care whose lives are harmed. In much of Florida the lives being harmed are fellow conservatives, people who are refusing to be vaccinated. Dworkin also quoted Dana Milbank, also of WaPo. He disputed the adage that history is written by the victors. His first example is the South, the losers in the Civil War, who successfully reframed the war as the Lost Cause with gallant heroes trying to protect states rights rather than about slavery. His second example is the current telling of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. It is being portrayed as a similar Lost Cause. Julia Shiplett tweeted:

2020: omg we’re entering hell 2021: ok so how do we make hell cozy

A minute long video about how to love your child unconditionally. It includes this exchange: Mom, my name is Jesse. OK. Hi, Jesse. Mom, I’m a boy. OK. Hello, my son. Mom, I want blue hair. OK. Hello, blue hair. Thank you for trusting me with who you are.