Parents send their children into danger because home is more dangerous

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports on a COVID milestone. One of the ways to measure the deadly effects of the virus is to estimate the number of deaths if the virus hadn’t been around and compare that to the actual number of deaths. This difference is the excess deaths attributed to the virus. That can also be shown as a percent. And in the US for the first half of this year that has been 0%. In terms of deaths, the pandemic is over. Yes, that means people are getting sick, sometimes quite sick, from COVID, but they’re doing a lot less dying. There are a couple factors at work. One is that the circulating variants are quite similar to Omicron. So between people having caught it already, having been vaccinated, or having already died about 96% of Americans are protected. The other is medical workers know a lot more about how to treat the virus, reducing the rate of death. Variants of the virus are out there. It can still mutate. The next big wave may never come or may come next week. For now, let’s celebrate the milestone. Sumner had been convince living with the virus would be impossible. He thought we had to eradicate it and were doing a terrible job of it. This news is much better than expected. Kos of Kos asks an important question: Would you prefer to live next to the person complaining about what immigrants are doing to the country, or would you rather live next to the immigrant? At the top of this post is a photo of the words:

No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

Those against immigration dehumanize them as criminals or opportunists, those hoping to take advantage of hospitality. Yet, data are clear that immigration supports our economy. Florida is now struggling to get enough farm workers. There seems to be a big disconnect in those who can’t get enough farm workers yet still think the nasty guy is the best president ever.

People don’t leave their homes on a lark. They don’t say goodbye to everything they know, the people they love, and the communities they belong to for funsies. They don’t get on rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean, like the one that recently sank and killed over 600 Pakistani, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian migrants, simply because they want a higher-paying gig. It is always an act of desperation. ... The people making these trips are just as desperate as the Latin American immigrants who brave the gauntlet of thieves and rapists, a dangerous river, and a blistering hot desert on the American side full of even more bandits, plus right-wing militia nutbags. Parents will send their children into danger because gang and drug violence at home is even more dangerous. So let’s ask that question again: Who would you rather live next to? The people who risk everything to come work, to find a better life and send money to their families back home, or those who would steal water left for migrants in the desert, point guns at them, and vilify them for their desperation?

A ProPublica article written by Paul Kiel and posted on Kos discussed some of the tax avoidance tricks used by billionaires. The example in this case is Harlan Crow, revealed a few months ago as the sugar daddy for Justice Clarence Thomas. The article focuses on the way Crow uses his yacht, which frequently hosted Thomas, to reduce taxes. The big way to do this is have a wholly owned corporation own the yacht, then write off its cost through depreciation and business expenses. To actually claim the yacht as part of a business it must be chartered. No problem – the company charters it to Crow. He pays for its use, though well under what the company shells out. The company loses money. And Crow gets a tax writeoff. As a billionaire he paid a 15% rate, lower than many middle-income workers. ProPublica got a trove of IRS data with tax info on thousands of wealthy people. I read parts of the original ProPublica article. It’s a long one. They say the data was provided to them after they published a series of articles scrutinizing the IRS. Beyond that they are not disclosing how they got the data. The stash includes returns from Crow. What Crow did is likely illegal. There is no evidence the yacht was chartered to anyone else, which means the charter service isn’t a real business. The article discusses a second way of getting around the law. Above a certain threshold gifts are subject to a gift tax. What Crow gave Thomas is likely way above that. But Crow claims he doesn’t need to report or pay it because his company still owns the yacht – which ignores the value of such things as the services of the yacht’s staff. Since the rich rarely report these sorts of gifts the only way the IRS learns about them is through an audit. That’s a big reason why Republicans were so intent on keeping the IRS budget so low that it didn’t have the manpower to audit the rich.

“A lot of these tax rules were developed in an era where there were a few millionaires and the tiniest number of billionaires,” [Pace Law School professor Bridget] Crawford said, “and now there are many. This is becoming a more visible problem.”

Charles Jay of the Kos community discussed the current situation of Yevgeny Progozhin, the head of the Wagner group that staged a mini coup in Russia. A photo of him has surfaced, the first since the coup, perhaps taken at a camp in Belarus. Of more importance is that for now Russian authorities have dropped insurgency charges. He has already been described as a traitor, so maybe Putin will threaten him with investigating his finances. But there’s still an arrest warrant for Prigozhin in the US. He was indicted for his role in running a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. He was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list and there is a reward for information on Russian interference in US elections. Progozhin has both denied he interfered in our elections and boasted that his interference was successful and that he founded and was financier of the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm. Hunter of Kos discussed the Turning Point Action conference that was held last weekend. One of the things that happened was a straw poll showing 95.8% of them voted against supporting, “U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.” The conference leadership is known to be brazen liars, so it is hard to tell if the they made up that poll result or if the attendees actually voted that way. Hunter says either is possible – the nasty guy was the keynote speaker. Support for Ukraine among voters is about two-thirds. Among Republicans it’s a bit over half. And here’s a bunch that’s 95% against Ukraine. So don’t say that candidates and politicians are supporting Russia because their voters tell them to. The only ones demanding the US leave Ukraine are the activists. But it means candidates have to placate this anti-Ukraine crowd or try to evade the questions. Since those activists were aggressively interventionist towards war in Afghanistan, a second war in Iraq, and wanting one in Iran, why do they now say Ukraine is none of our business? The best answer that Hunter has come up with seems to be the obvious one: Money. It seems to have started with Paul Manafort making serious cash boosting Russian interests in Europe. Then there was Rudy Giuliani, the nasty guy (who was impeached for his efforts), Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and many more activists trumpeting Russian disinformation. Sumner posted a Ukraine update yesterday about noon that has two important topics in it. The first is the Kerch Bridge, the one between Crimea and the Russian mainland, has been hit again. The first time was last October. This time a section of the vehicle bridge has dropped several feet. Perhaps a pillar underneath has been damaged. It is closed. There may be no damage to the adjacent rail bridge, but that is also closed while it is checked for damage. The strike was reportedly done by the Ukrainian navy using sea drones. Russia says it will be repaired in a month, though if that support pillar was damaged, repairs will take longer. The closed bridge will affect Russia’s ability to supply its forces on the southern front of the war. All travelers to Crimea will now have to take a ferry or add to the heavy traffic along the coastal highway in occupied Ukraine, a war zone. The other big topic is that Russia has ended the deal that allowed Ukrainian grain to be shipped to the rest of the world. While the deal was in place 33 million metric tons of grain was shipped. That reduced world grain prices by 20%. Some reports say Putin ended the deal not because of Ukraine, but because Turkish president Erdogan had annoyed him with a couple other actions. The question is what happens now? Will Russia attack the grain ships, causing a halt to getting grain to the rest of the world? Will Turkey escort the ships so that if Russia fires on them it brings all of NATO into the war? Will alternate methods of shipment be found? No clear answers yet.

Earthquakes don’t kill people, badly built buildings do

My friend and debate partner responded to yesterday’s post as part of our ongoing debate about whether music can change the world. In that debate I had included a quote from Maya Angelou:

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

I had also talked again about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra made up of Israelis and Arabs. My friend wrote:

I made a point of praising music's capability to convey emotion as one of its strengths, and I do value that. But notice that Angelou only claims that "people will never forget how you made them feel". There is no claim that said emotion(s) lead those feeling people to change their behavior. If music is to change the world to the degree we are discussing, it must change behavior in large numbers of people. I don't credit music with that, although I do seek music out and care about it. To return briefly to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, I do not doubt that it has a great effect on those who participate in it and I'm happy it exists. But I doubt that it changes even its participants -- instead, I think appreciation for this politically charged music-making is a prerequisite for becoming a participant. These are people who are being the change they wish to create -- essential in creating change. But changing the world was our subject. Everything I know about Israel / Palestine says that the world around these musicians is not listening very much and, sadly, not changing. Instead, the Us vs Them cultures on both sides grow steadily more bitter. The Middle East is riven with "honor" cultures where people never forget and are committed to revenge. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is not to blame for that, but it is also not an effective agent of change.

All excellent points. I confirm that my friend is an avid music lover, though of tastes different from mine, so we don’t attend events together. I’ll go back to one of the responses in my post from last Saturday that started this debate. Can music change the world? Hasn’t yet. And I’ll set this debate aside. Hunter of Daily Kos discussed a report by Asawin Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis of Rolling Stone saying the nasty guy has been talking in campaign meetings about expanding the federal death penalty to apply to less serious crimes and then turning the executions into flashy televised shows featuring the firing squad, hanging, and maybe even the guillotine. The nasty guy had wanted to do this during his firs term but was dissuaded by staff. No doubt they knew most Americans would be horrified. Most. But those in his base who shrug at an attempted coup would love to see such spectacles. On the one hand this is a reminder that the nasty guy is a stupid, malignant boor. On the other, he appears to be completely serious about it. Hunter concluded:

Trump's admiration for murderous authoritarian regimes remains quite real. His base's enthusiasm for maximum cruelty, whether it is aimed at refugees or schoolchildren, protestors or criminals, has only grown. A very large chunk of Donald Trump's base consists of Americans who like the idea of watching other Americans be executed on television. These are people who frothed for the capture of lawmakers during an attempted coup; there is no depth to which they will not willingly sink, so long as they have a leader willing to point the way. Trump is a sociopathic and seditionist would-be dictator, but the Republican base loves him for it. This malignant, poisonous presence could very well decide to turn "flashier state murders" into a major campaign theme so that he can bellow that all the other Republican contenders are too "soft."

Mark Sumner of Kos, in discussing the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, noted that the city of Erzin had no major damage and no deaths. Osmaniye and Iskenderun on either side of Erzin were heavily damaged and many died. The mayor of Erzin explained:

Earthquakes don’t kill people, badly built buildings do. Not a single building collapsed in Erzin, Hatay, perhaps because the Mayor never signed off on unsafe or “kaçak” buildings. Residents were angry at him, he says. But he was saving their lives.

Erzin has a history of mayors that insisted on adhering to the earthquake resistant building codes. In other cities most of the buildings that collapsed were because of corruption. The builders did not build them according to earthquake codes. And that corruption goes all the way to Turkish President Erdogan. Sumner quoted NPR, which said Erdogan bragged about his zoning amnesty. He allowed contracts to ignore building codes that would make houses and offices more resistant to earthquakes. Then he gave amnesty to the unscrupulous builders. Sumner added:

As anger over both the response and the unsafe building increases, it’s very much worth noting that the area most affected by this quake is also the area that gave the heaviest support to Erdogan in the last election. Erdogan won that election with 52.6% of the national vote, but he carried those same areas around Osmaniye and Iskenderun and Erzin with over 70% of the local vote. Anger toward his government isn’t just growing, it’s growing in the area of Turkey he needs most to win reelection. That election is coming soon. A “snap” presidential election is scheduled for June 23. That election was already considered to be competitive. Now it will be taking place against the background of fallen cities and videos of Erdogan bragging about how he allowed contractors to skimp on safety.

Also, American Republicans want to get rid of government oversight. In a Ukraine update from last weekend Sumner reported the hottest area of fighting right now isn’t Bakhmut, the city that Russia has been trying to take for months (it is still in Ukrainian hands). The hottest area is Vuhledar. Unlike Bakhmut, Vuhledar actually has some strategic value – taking it would protect fragile Russian supply lines. The assault on Vuhledar and Bakhmut and other areas is not going in Russia’s favor. Sumner wrote:

Four days ago, it was big news when Ukraine reported 1,030 Russian soldiers killed in a day, with most of those losses taking place near Vuhledar or Bakhmut. That marked Tuesday as the biggest day for Russian losses since the invasion began. Then Russia lost over 900 more on Wednesday, and 900 more on Thursday as another catastrophic advance at Vuhledar was followed by that failure at Kreminna. The Friday number was something of a decline, with “only” 750 Russian troops eliminated — a rate that, if it continued, would still see more than 270,000 losses in a year. But then the astoundingly foolish assault on Avdiivka combined with more bad decisions at all of the above, and the end result is that on Saturday the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported that Russia had lost an absolutely staggering 1,140 men in one day. There are estimates that Russia now has 320,000 troops in Ukraine. If they keep falling at the rate they were lost this week, all of them will be dead before the end of the year. It’s worth noting that those Russian losses haven’t come in the form we’ve become familiar with after watching months of activity near Bakhmut — small companies of men sent across fields or along streets between ruined buildings with little to no armor support. All week long the losses have come in the form of entire armored units blasted to smithereens along roadways. In part this has come because Russia has done what Ukraine refused to do: attempt to assault fortified positions in conditions that meant armor was restricted to traveling along a few narrow roadways. In part it’s because Russia seems to be replicating with its armored forces the tactics that it had “mastered” with infantry — if at first everyone gets killed, just send more. The result of this is that each of these days has come not just with astounding losses of men, but almost equally staggering losses of equipment. Since Tuesday, Ukrainian forces have destroyed 36 Russian tanks. Twenty five tanks were lost in two days. These are unsustainable levels of loss.

That prompted Sumner to chart out how quickly Russia is losing tanks compared to how quickly they can build new ones. At his computed rate they may have only 37% in working order at the end of the year. Sumner reminded us Ukraine cannot build its own tanks – an important manufacturing site was in Crimea and captured in 2014. So all of Ukraine’s tanks come from the West – and from Russia through battleground captures. Charles Johnson tweeted a page from “The KGB’s Magical War for ‘Peace’” by John Barron. It was written some time in the Soviet era. Johnson highlighted a paragraph that is a quote from Maj. Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko, who fled the KGB and came to America. The quote is about how the KGB distorted reality (something Putin, a former KGB person, still does). Here’s part of it:

Almost everybody wants peace and fears war. Therefore, by every conceivable means, the KGB plans and coordinates campaigns to persuade the public that whatever America does endangers peace and that whatever the Soviet Union proposes furthers peace. To be for America is to be for war; to be for the Soviets is to be for peace. That’s the art of Active Measures, a sort of made-in-Moscow black magic. It is tragic to see how well it works.

Charles Jay of the Kos community told the story of Vladimir Romanenko, age 24. He had been working for the Russian propaganda site Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP). He had become disillusioned with the war and its propaganda. So as the one year anniversary of the start of the war approaches, he posted a series of ten articles on KP. For example, one was titled “The Russian Federation committed crimes in Bucha, Izyum, and Hostomel.” Of course, the articles were removed within ten minutes. Romanenko is physically safe. When the mobilization was announced in September he left Russia, even though media workers wouldn’t be called up. He won’t say in which country he is living. He had been working remotely and is now, of course, out of a job. There was another mass shooting in Michigan, this one on the Michigan State University campus. It happened on Monday. In a report on Tuesday Aysha Qamar of Kos discussed what had been learned by then. Qamar reported that Jackie Matthews is a senior at MSU. She had been a student at Sandy Hook Elementary when fellow students were gunned down. She said “The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible.” There is also a student described as having “witnessed the shooting” who is wearing an Oxford Strong shirt. The shooting at Oxford was only 15 months ago. Qamar included a quote by Dan Hodges:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

That’s an important insight, but maybe it isn’t over. Since Tuesday Michigan Radio has reported on vigils on campus and rallies at the state Capitol, just a few miles from campus. There Democrats, now in control of the legislature and governor’s office, vow they will have bills to curb a bit of the violence. Rick Pluta reported:

House Democratic leaders said bills are still being finalized. But they said the legislation will almost certainly include universal background checks, red-flag rules that would allow guns to be taken from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others, and a requirement that guns be locked up when not in use. Governor Gretchen Whitmer says she is ready to sign the bills.

Those laws will help, but won’t be enough. David Horsley of the Seattle Times tweeted a cartoon of a family lying on the ground as bullets zip overhead. The mother says, “I don’t know what to call this, but it isn’t freedom!” To that Amy Mader replied:

Exactly! Those bullets have the freedom to pierce human flesh but I can't go to the movies, concerts, bars, school, college, church, grocery shopping, etc. Guns in Walmart, guns in target, guns in Starbucks. Can't piss off a driver, might have a gun.

Neda Ulaby of NPR reported that an art gallery in Washington DC is displaying the work of Stephanie Mercedes. The art is bells cast from bullet casings and parts of old guns that she has melted down. She makes bells with the metal because they carry spiritual significance across cultures and they are tolled for mourning. She is gay and Latina and the project was inspired by the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Many of these bells are not beautiful and some look like the weapons they used to be. Joan McCarter of Kos reported the White House has released a fact sheet on the federal budget and Republican hypocrisy. McCarter included this WH tweet that sums it up:

President Biden’s budget will cut the deficit by around $2 trillion over 10 years. Congressional Republicans are backing plans that will add more than $3 trillion to the debt over 10 years.

In a speech on Tuesday Biden said he told McCarthy they should meet to compare budgets, compare what gets spent where, what gets cuts, and who does and doesn’t get taxed. But McCarthy won’t raise taxes and just wants to cut. McCarter laid out why the budget will increase by $3 trillion under Republican plans.

It’s all true, and Biden proceeded to lay it all out in his speech, and the White House backed it up in that fact sheet: The $114 billion they would add to the debt in their bill to protect wealthy tax cheats (the first bill they passed this year); the $159 billion they’d add to the debt by repealing reforms that lower prescription drug costs from Medicare; trying to repeal corporate tax increases to the tune of $269 billion in debt increases; and their insistence that the Trump tax cuts continue, “a $2.7 trillion debt increase that would give the top 0.1% (with incomes over $4 million per year) a $175,000 annual tax cut, over 2.5 times a typical family’s annual income.”

McCarter titled the piece using the phrase “GOP deficit peacocks” which seems to be quite accurate. CameronProf of the Kos community echoed a story from Outsports that reported Jakub Jankto has come out as gay. He is the first active men’s player in international football (what we call soccer) to come out. His Czech team is fully supportive, as is UEFA, European football’s governing body.

It's not just Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or ballet

I finished the book Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers. This is the third novel by Powers I’ve read and enjoyed all three very much. The narrator is Theo, an astrobiologist trying to model how we might detect life on exoplanets, those outside our solar system. The other main character is his nine year old son Robin. One doctor says Robin is on the autistic spectrum, another says Robin is ADHD, and his school wants him medicated because of violent outbursts. Theo thinks it wrong to medicate a child so young. Robin’s mother Alyssa died two years before the story opens, though there are flashbacks so we can see who she was. Though marketed as general literature, this is science fiction. That comes through in a treatment of biofeedback offered to Robin that is beyond what can be done now and has side effects that unnerve Theo. The treatment allows Robin, always fascinated with nature, to become essentially Greta Thunberg’s more artistic little brother. Robin can’t fathom why humans are so destructive to nature. At times when Theo needs to calm Robin they take a mental journey to an exoplanet to explore what life might be like there. The description of one of them prompted me to think it was symbolic of the relationship between Theo and Robin, but the symbolism of other planets escaped me. This is the second novel in a row – the other being The End of Eddy – in which dialogue isn’t enclosed in quotes, instead it is italicized. Eddy used it for all characters. This one does it for Robin’s and Alyssa’s words while Theo’s words are put in quotes. In this case it might be appropriate, leading one to wonder whether Robin actually spoke out loud or Theo is imagining what his son is saying. This use of language is not one I would want to see catch on, though it is better than a few novels (the ones I can think of are Australian) where there is no separation of spoken text. There’s just things like this: It’s a cloudy day, he said. Robin is quite the intriguing character, frequently bewildering his dad. The language Powers uses is gentle and evocative. I recommend this one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data updated Tuesday. We seem to be in a plateau, thankfully a low one. The peaks in the number of new cases per day for the last few weeks are 984, 844, 778, and 764. The number of deaths per day remains at a low level. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Alan Elrod of Arc Digital discussing the word “groomer,” among others, by the anti-LGBTQ crowd:

What I want to note is the way this idea invites a view of being trans as an illness and, by emphasizing it as a social contagion that can rapidly overwhelm a young person, one that is highly communicable. As to the supposed spreaders of this illness? Well, Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik was unequivocal in her condemnation of LGBTQ advocates, calling them “groomers” and concluding “I think they’re evil.”

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that a bill to ban children and youth from drag shows has been introduced in the Nebraska legislature. It is backed by Sen. Dave Murman, who said, “I think the vast majority of Nebraskans would agree that sexualized dancing and enhanced genitals is not appropriate for children to view.” I agree with Einenkel – “enhanced genitals?” Where is this guy’s brain? Einenkel note this bill may prevent youth from seeing the show “Hairspray” and perhaps a few of Shakespeare’s plays (and in Shakespeare’s time that would be all of his plays because women were banned from acting and men played the female roles). Sen. Megan Hunt added an amendment to the bill, showing two people can play this game. The opening text, likely mimicking the original, says,

The Legislature finds that there is a well documented history of indoctrination and sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders and clergy people upon children. Abusers within churches and other religious institutions often use events like church or youth-group-sponsored camps and retreats to earn children's trust and gain unsupervised access to such children in order to commit such abuse.

So kids should be banned from church camps and also from rituals where ceremonial alcohol is present. For my non Christian friends – in the Sunday service, the Mass, in the Catholic Church and in some Protestant denominations the high point is the Eucharist or Communion, which includes a sip of wine. Other Protestant denominations have replaced the wine with grape juice. So, yeah, Hunt’s amendment would ban youth and children from Mass. Einenkel discussed a study released by the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center about 173 mass attacks that occurred between 2016 and 2020. Some of what the study showed: No community is immune from being a target. Guns were the cause of injury and death in three-quarters of the attacks. Less than a quarter of those gun attacks involved a gun acquired illegally. One-quarter of the attackers held a belief (that was important to the attack? Einenkel isn’t clear) that is conspiratorial, topic specific, or hate-focused. More findings:

96% of the attackers studied were male, 3% were female, and 2% were transgender. 57% of attackers were white. 34% of attackers were Black. 11% of attackers were Hispanic. 4% of attackers were Asian. 1% of attackers were American Indian. 72% of attackers experienced some kind of financial stressor sometime prior to the attack. Just under 20% of attackers had an “unstable housing” situation at the time of the attack. Bystanders intervened in about 10% of the attacks. When that happened, the attacker was killed by the intervening bystander only 2% of the time. (Think the mythic “good guy with a gun.”) While there was a large age range, the average age of an attacker was 34 years old. 41% of attackers had a history of “engaging in at least one incident of domestic violence.” And nearly a fifth of attackers exhibited “misogynistic behaviors.”

In a pundit roundup by Chitown Kev of Kos commenter Hugh Jim Bissell wrote:

We need a new metric: a number that describes how many are killed by gunfire in a given election district as a function of how much money the gun industry gives to public office holders and seekers in that district. Such a metric would help us know how much value each representative gives the lives of their constituents. If you take the amount of NRA funding received by each elected representative and divide it by the number of dead kids in their respective jurisdictions during their time in office, you’ll get exactly how much they earned for each killing.

That second paragraph is in an image and has a different font. I don’t know if it is original to Bissell or he pulled it from somewhere else. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread about US police traveling to Israel for training. Sometimes the Israeli trainers come to them. The Anti-Defamation League and American taxpayers fund these trips. This kind of training happened before the deaths of George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Tyre Nichols. Police are also getting surplus military equipment. This is important because:

Our tax dollars are being spent to send US police officials to Israel to be trained to respond to Americans as though we are all terrorists within our own country.

McElrath got significant pushback for her thread.

If you question the activities of Israel, its government, or its security forces, you will be attacked as “antisemitic” or as engaging in “blood libel.” First time I’ve been called a “Nazi” though. FTR, I question the actions of *every* state, government, and security force.

The trolling got so bad she had to lock down her Twitter account for awhile, permitting no one outside of trusted friends to see it. I was one of those who tried to see her tweets during that time and was denied. Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO. Turkey, already a NATO member, has been holding up Sweden’s approval over what Turkey says are anti-Islamic incidents. Recently there was a new incident of someone burning a copy of the Quran, upsetting Turkey again. Anders Åslund, who has written a book about Russia, tweeted a quote from a TV news report.

"Swedish journalist Chang Frick, affiliated with Russian propagandist channel RT, paid for Danish far-right activist Rasmus Paludan to publicly burn the Quran near the Turkish embassy in Sweden." To block Sweden from NATO...

Also, Alexander Stubb, former Prime Minister of Finland and now a professor at the School for Transnational Governance and a member of an organization promoting conflict resolution, tweeted:

This should come as no surprise. Russia seems to be behind the burning of the Quran in Sweden. This is what hybrid warfare of a rogue state looks like. In today's world everything can be weaponised.

Andrew Michta, dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the Marshall Center, tweeted a thread:

A word of advice for all those "realists" among Western elites who oppose support for #Ukraine: Finally, once and for all bury the Yalta mindset. Understand the Russia is no more entitled to a sphere of influence than a gangster is entitled to keep the spoils of a robbery. Time to set aside our double standard whereby when it comes to #Russia, we don't enforce the rules, but instead hope for a good tsar (Gorbachev, Yeltsin) with whom we can (to quote Lady Thatcher) "do business." We should also set aside the nonsense about Russian high culture. Russian culture must be seen in its totality -- it's not just Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or ballet; it's first and foremost the Gulag, prisons, firing squads, rape and torture. It's the culture of violence and theft as a mode of governance. It's an empire awash in blood.

In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Kos included a video that appears to be put out by the Wagner Group, the mercenary group beating against Bakhmut for the last six months or so but not yet taking it (though they might now be close). The video appears to be recruiting Americans to join Russia’s fight, claiming only Russia is fighting against evil. Sumner wrote:

The video may or may not be an actual production of the Wagner Group. To quote pro-Russian bloggers when they’re pretending that Ukraine hasn’t just liberated Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Kherson … time will tell. But whoever put together this “true patriot” video did an admirable job of touching Americans right in the Q-center. From the footage of Jan. 6 “patriots” to the final scenes that crib part of the atomic blast from Terminator 2, it’s a love letter to anyone who ever thought it would be great to scream “Wolverines!” only while working for the Russians. Will this video actually send some Americans looking for the nearest Wagner recruiting station? Unknown. But it’s tempting to wish them success in this venture. Sending Americans to Ukraine who believe in Wagner’s idea of “the patriot” might be the best thing for both nations.

Jon Hawkes tweeted an image of a Full Width Mine Plough – a big device with a tarantula vibe that can plow up mines from fields and wherever else they might be. If I’m decoding the abbreviations right Germany facilitated getting a large quantity of them from a manufacturer in England into Ukraine by the end of the year. How the thing keeps from getting blown up from each mine it encounters is not explained. I’ve collected several cartoons and tweets that all have to do with racism. There is a famous 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell of a black girl being escorted by federal officers to a school in New Orleans to force integration. Two recent cartoons play on that painting. Mike Luckovich tweeted an image of a white girl being escorted by men with “GOP” armbands. She says, “But I don’t wanna be protected from black history.” Andy Marlette tweeted an image of a black girl carrying a Black History book. But instead of being escorted, she is stopped by a man with a “DeSantis” button. Ruben Bolling of Kos showed the covers of several popular children’s books reworked to meet the standards of DeathSantis. The titles include “Harry the White Dog and His Black Friend Who’s Never Experienced Any Racism” and “The Free Market Tree” by Shel Silverstein. Luckovich again, with a child walking through a detector that starts beeping. The cop say, “Halt, is that a book in your backpack?” Incognito Finito tweeted with a photo to prove it:

I bought a bag of M&M's and they don't have M's anymore. They all have W's... for woke.

Professor Bigfoot tweeted in response to Stewardship asking, “Why is the white man so deathly afraid of the black man and our culture?”

A desperate fear of being “ruled over” by their lessers. This cartoon is from the 1870s near the end of Reconstruction, a time when Black men were being elected to Congress. The pathological need to dominate and control stems from fear.

The cartoon shows a white man with a smoking gun with a small black child at his feet, “Ef I hadn’t-er killed you, you would have growed up to rule me.” Someone fearful of being ruled over by their lessers is someone highly invested in the social hierarchy and glad there is someone below him. I think the fear comes from the need to dominate, not the other way around. Their fear is of losing their position in the hierarchy to someone they feel should be below them.

Learn about it safely by, you know, reading

I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. The reason for going is an exhibit that ends in ten days. It is By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800. The website says there are 17 women featured. It didn’t seem to be that many, but I didn’t count. Gentileschi is the featured artist, though I hadn’t heard of her or any of the others. A big part of their creative work involved how to be noticed in a male dominated world. One made several self portraits in a variety of settings, saying see I am good enough paint you and your family. One did miniatures. Another painted on ivory. Gentileschi was able to do religious themes – such as large altar pieces for churches. One was a nun who sold paintings to support the convent and taught her fellow sisters to paint. Beyond the paintings patrons commissioned many of these women painted scenes featuring strong women. Judith and her maidservant cutting off the head of Holofernes was depicted several times. Madonna and child was also a frequent subject – I was amused by one where there was a ring of flowers instead of a halo and one can’t tell whether the child is bestowing the ring or playfully snatching it away. I finished the book Managing Martians by Donna Shirley. It is her autobiography, mostly of her time at the Jet Propulsion Lab managing the team that developed Sojourner, the first rover on Mars, the one that got there in 1997. The first part of the story is of her growing up in rural Oklahoma where she definitely didn’t fit in. She wanted to go to space, and Mars in particular (science fiction stories set on Mars fueled that dream). She wasn’t accepted as an astronaut, so going there virtually on a rover would have to do. There was the usual problems of being a woman at JPL in the 1960s and not doing a traditional woman’s job. And then the problems of being a woman manager. And the ever present we can’t give you the job of developing something that flies in space if you’ve never developed something that flies in space. Turns out she was a good manager. Her style was different from other managers who determined their worth by the number of people they controlled. She wanted none of that hierarchy stuff. She recognized that her team would talk about concepts that made no sense to her and that was fine. There were other colleagues who could verify the ideas. Her management style helped JPL reduce costs. After Sojourner successfully worked on the moon Shirley wrote a book on how to manage creative people. She said it is different than a lot of books on management styles in that they seemed classroom exercises and she figured it out by doing it. I enjoyed the book. I also enjoyed the technical discussions about this problem appeared and this is how we fixed it. None of this was deeply technical, but might be a turnoff for people who are definitely not technical. There was also a lot of discussion of how JPL projects were funded by NASA. And that was followed by how to balance cost with all the other requirements. I learned there was always a lot of balancing – we could do this, but it weighs too much. Or this, but it would have to be a less expensive version. If you are interested in how spacecraft get developed you will enjoy this book. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The peak in new cases per day for last week was lowered, but the peak this week is higher. The peaks in the last three weeks are 3250, 3993, and 4807. Counties in the Detroit metropolitan area and in a few other places in the state have now said masks in public are recommended. As for deaths per day, for the last six weeks they have been at 15 and below and in the last ten days they have been at 8 and below (though these are likely to change as more data comes in). Remember towards the start of the pandemic the meat packers were saying there is a meat shortage and the nasty guy responded with an executive order keeping the plants open in spite of the unsafe conditions that killed hundreds of workers? Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported it was all a lie.

Now, the House select subcommittee investigating the pandemic response says that the meatpacking industry misled the public about the threat of a shortage and basically drafted Trump’s executive order keeping the plants open.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO – and there is opposition. Erdogan, the autocratic leader of Turkey is objecting, saying Sweden is harboring Kurdish terrorists. For those who don’t remember history of the last 35 years, the Kurds are a people who don’t have their own country. Their people are split between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. And Turkey considers them terrorists. When Russia invaded Syria a lot of people fled. And some of them are Kurdish and some of them went to Sweden. The real reason, wrote Sumner, is Turkey committed a NATO no-no. They bought military equipment from Russia (quite a while ago). In response the US canceled Turkey’s order of 100 fighter jets.

So Erdogan is holding up the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO until the U.S. agrees to give him his planes. But he can’t quite say it that way, so he’s making other excuses while waiting to see if he can get what he wants.

President Milanovic of Croatia saw an opening. He is also opposing Sweden and Finland. His complaint is about neighboring Bosnia, who he thinks are treating the Croats living there in some unkind way. Russia has invaded Ukraine, in which people are dying and which has dire consequences for the world. Sweden and Finland see a genuine threat to their neutrality and safety. And Erdogan and Milanovic are using the situation to try to address a pet peeve. Sumner has a good word for them – jackasses. Kos of Kos reported that Russia might be about to take a small city or three. Twitter now has hyperventilating accounts of how disastrous this will be for Ukraine. Other accounts are full of joy that Ukraine is about to be defeated. Kos said it is time for the big picture. Some of that is what I wrote about yesterday – Russia’s shrinking ambitions. Another part is why Ukraine stuck around so long in the cities that Russia has been bombarding.

Ukraine’s strategy is simple—bleed Russia while buying time, as hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s reserves train up and equip with the current influx of western arms. Over the last several days, several Ukrainian military and intelligence officials have referenced late summer as the inflection point at which Ukraine will start liberating territory. And not just post-invasion territory, but the entire Donbas and Crimea. All of it. It’s tough, ambitious talk, but the timeline speaks to Ukraine’s strategy— to hold out another four months as the nation mobilizes.

So don’t worry that Russia has taken a town or three. Kos warned that Azovstal factory in Mariupol is a toxic waste dump. If Russia isn’t careful the toxins could be released, which would kill life in the Sea of Azov and damage the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Alas, we know how careful Russia is. George Johnson, who uses they/them pronouns, wrote the book All Boys Aren’t Blue. They talked to Marissa Higgins of Kos. The books is about growing up black and queer in a family that was supportive but didn’t have the language. The book has earned serious accolades and Johnson has received letters and emails from readers who say the book changed their lives. Wrote Higgins quoting Johnson:

“When you're getting that type of messaging from so many people in the world, you know that you created something that is not just deeply impactful but is a change agent. The book is shifting culture. And how do we know that? Because we're watching them attack.” And attack they are.

This book is one of the top books that has been banned or targeted for banning. The usual reason is to say certain scenes are pornographic.

The book, in fact, is not pornography. It does include passages about sexual abuse ... a subject that teenagers and young adults can learn about safely by, you know, reading. And not just reading whatever random thing they find on the internet, but a book that’s been widely praised by editors, teachers, and librarians—you know, actual experts in what’s appropriate for the age group they work with.

Johnson said the real reason for the book bans and for many other things conservatives are doing these days is they are freaking out that the country is becoming more non-white. They want to maintain white supremacy. Leah McElrath tweeted:

By adhering to white supremacist ideology, some white people mistakenly believe they are raising themselves up or putting others down. What they are really doing is disconnecting themselves from their full spiritual capacity as sentient beings capable of connection. It’s sad.

The Federal Elections Commission bars politicians from repaying loans to their own campaigns by receiving donations over $250K after election day. It is important for new candidates to loan money to their campaigns to get started. It is also important to control how those loans are repaid. Allowing donors to give big donations after election day to pay off those loans means the money goes straight into the candidates pocket. And that is indistinguishable from a bribe. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported that of course, Sen. Ted Cruz loaned his campaign $260K so he would have a case to take to the Supremes. This week the Supremes sided with Cruz, essentially legalizing a method of bribery. The six justice majority says candidates need to be able to loan to their campaign, no matter the size of the loan. Kagan wrote the dissent noting this leads to government corruption.