Category: War

New York Times on the crisis in Israel

by philg

The New York Times has been predicting doom for Israel for months.

July 2023, “In Israel, High Stakes for High Court: Democracy’s Fate”:

From Hungary to India to Brazil, how judges responded to attacks on their independence helped decide whether would-be autocrats prevailed in constraining the courts.

Over the last few decades, attempts to weaken the courts around the world have become recurring signals that a democracy is in trouble. Attacks on judicial independence were early steps toward one-party dominance in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, for example.

But a move to limit the authority of the courts — like the new law adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition barring judges from using the longstanding legal principle of “reasonableness” to overrule government decisions — does not make democratic collapse inevitable. It’s more like a flashing red light, and how the judiciary responds can begin to decide how much damage is done.

From climate change alarmist Thomas Friedman, July 2023, “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun”:

Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?

The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values…

They just find it hard to believe that Bibi would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben-Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.

But it is what it is — and it’s ugly. Tens of thousands of Israeli democracy protectors blocked roads and highways and besieged the Tel Aviv airport on Tuesday to make clear to Netanyahu that if he thinks he can snuff out Israel’s democracy just like that, he’s badly mistaken.

If the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders, who have taken to the streets every Saturday for over half a year, can’t stop the Netanyahu juggernaut from slamming this bill through, it will, as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote the other day in Haaretz, “degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society, isolate the country” and end “the democratic chapter” of Israel’s history.

Friedman says that he’s unhappy about Hamas’s recent military success in the war that the Arabs started 75 years ago (see my Israel background article from 2003; no need for an update because nothing substantive has changed):

Any prolonged Israel-Hamas war could divert more U.S. military equipment needed by Kyiv to Tel Aviv

(i.e., Ukraine is the real ally)

Separately, let’s keep in mind that a country’s resources are finite. The Arabs in Gaza are among those who have vowed to destroy Israel (as U.S. Congressional Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). Instead of spending the summer keeping track of what practical steps these Arabs were taking toward Rashida Tlaib’s goal, Israeli progressives were out protesting. They perceived Netanyahu as their biggest enemy and didn’t consider the possibility that the pen wasn’t mightier than the sword. The protests against cutting back the power of Israel’s courts were negligible, however, compared to the time, money, and energy that Israel spent fighting SARS-CoV-2. This fight apparently yielded no benefits because the country ended up with a higher rate of “excess deaths” than do-almost-nothing Sweden. Instead of cowering at home, Israelis under 65 could have been in military refresher training, manufacturing weapons;, etc.

One strange aspect of media coverage of this fight is that it is characterized as being against “terrorists” or “militants” and not soldiers of a legitimate government. Hamas enjoys more support among Palestinians than Joe Biden does among Americans. Why aren’t the people carrying guns on behalf of Hamas, which represents the interests of a majority of Palestinian Arabs, then referred to as “soldiers”?

From 2021, “Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas” (AP):

A new poll released Tuesday finds a dramatic surge in Palestinian support for Hamas following last month’s Gaza war, with around three quarters viewing the Islamic militants as victors in a battle against Israel to defend Jerusalem and its holy sites.

The scientific poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research also found plummeting support for President Mahmoud Abbas, who was sidelined by the war but is seen internationally as a partner for reviving the long-defunct peace process.

The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.

Related:

  • “Gaza struggles to accommodate the living and the dead as population grows” (Reuters, 2022): “Its population is set to more than double within the next 30 years to 4.8 million and already land is running out.”
  • from the United Nations, which guarantees health care, education, food, etc. to every baby born in Gaza: “The population growth rate stands high at 2.8% and it is expected to remain stable due to decline in mortality rates while fertility rate remains one of the highest in the Arab region standing at 4.06, with high disparity between Gaza and West Bank, 4.5 and 3.6 respectively. … The increase of youth population in Palestine for the past 20 years reflects the highest increase in the Arab countries”
  • “UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog” (The Times of Israel, 2022): Among the content [taught in the United Nations-run schools] that IMPACT-se flagged was a grammar exercise teaching that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” the statement said. Other exercises include sentences about “Jihad warriors” against “the occupier,” commitment to “liberate” Palestine, and “resisting the enemy courageously,” according to the report. A poem teaches students that to die as a martyr by killing Israelis is a “hobby.” Islamic education material depicts Jews as “inherently treacherous, and hostile to Islam and Muslims,” including another grammar exercise implying that Jews are impure and defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “Israel is described as having been implanted by an imperialist, European, colonial, anti-Arab conspiracy with the goal of dividing the Arab world,” IMPACT-se said. Israel is erased from the UNRWA material and the entire area of the Jewish state is labeled as modern-day Palestine. Students are given exercises of naming Israeli cities as Palestinian, it added. …. Sheff said the majority of the $338 million that the US funds for UNRWA goes to education. [i.e., American taxpayers fund all of the above]

From Ilhan Omar:

Harvard perspective:

Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.

Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.

The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.

Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.

  • African American Resistance Organization
  • Amnesty International at Harvard
  • Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College
  • Harvard Act on a Dream
  • Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association
  • Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association
  • Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine
  • Harvard College Pakistan Student Association
  • Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association
  • Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association
  • Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society
  • Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine
  • Harvard Islamic Society
  • Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine
  • Harvard Divinity School Students for Justice in Palestine
  • Harvard Jews for Liberation
  • Harvard Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus
  • Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Caucus
  • Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Women’s Caucus
  • Harvard Kennedy School Palestine Caucus
  • Harvard Kennedy School South Asia Caucus Leadership
  • Harvard Muslim Law School Association
  • Harvard Pakistan Forum
  • Harvard Prison Divest Coalition
  • Harvard South Asian Law Students Association
  • Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research
  • Harvard TPS Coalition
  • Harvard Undergraduate Arab Women’s Collective
  • Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo
  • Harvard Undergraduate Muslim Women’s Medical Alliance
  • Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Students Association
  • Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee
  • Middle East and North African Graduate School of Design Student Society
  • Neighbor Program Cambridge
  • Sikhs and Companions of Harvard Undergraduates
  • Society of Arab Students
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The Spanish Civil War started as a medium-size resource allocation dispute

by philg

“How the Spanish Civil War Became Europe’s Battlefield” is an interesting lecture series by Pamela Radcliff, a professor at UCSD.

According to the teacher, the political fight that started the war was about how much low-skill workers should be paid. The progressive Republicans wanted workers to be richer without them having to learn more (e.g., to read) or work harder. The conservative Monarchists, who became the Nationalists, did not want the government intervening in the labor market or allocating farmland, especially out of concern for small business owners.

The conservatives called the progressives “Communists” and the progressives called the conservatives “Fascists.” These monikers were inaccurate at first, but eventually each side lived up to the other’s worst caricatures. The progressives seized the means of production and had the workers take over from the capitalists. Farms were collectivized. The conservatives joined up with fascists in Germany and Italy. Both sides killed anyone who disagreed with them. (About 500,000 people were killed, including thousands of Catholic priests killed by the progressives.)

In other words, the political situation in mid-1930s Spain wasn’t that different from what we have here in the U.S. today! The Spanish, of course, did not enjoy the abundant natural resources that we stole from the Native Americans. And Spain did not have a big flood of low-skill immigrants like the one that is purportedly continuously enriching the United States (or at least the elites).

It would have been interesting if the Republicans had won the civil war. This would have been a tough challenge because, though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to assist his fellow progressive economic reformers, anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S. Congress prevented him from sending weapons and U.S. tax dollars. The Soviet Union did send weapons and personnel, but they were no match for what the Germans and Italians were providing to the Nationalists and the progressives did a lot of fighting and purging amongst themselves (anyone who didn’t follow the Communist line was labeled a Trotskyite). But if the Republicans had won, it would have been interesting to see their collective farms spread all across Spain, their central planning, their workers’ paradise in the heart of 1950s Europe.

Separately, Spain today is acting against its own economic interests, if our politicians are to be believed, by trying to reduce the number of economy-boosting low-skill immigrants:

Note that this lecture series is also available on Audible.

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How’s Afghanistan doing?

by philg

It’s the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 jihad to which we responded by invading Afghanistan. How’s the country doing?

“How the Taliban Suppressed Opium in Afghanistan—and Why There’s Little to Celebrate” (TIME, July 17, 2023):

The Taliban has been remarkably effective in maintaining brisk trade and crucial minerals exports, stabilizing the Afghan economy, significantly reducing corruption in taxes and customs, and generating some $2 billion in yearly revenues—the same as what the Afghan Republic did under far more generous international circumstances. … As the economist Bill Byrd puts it, the Taliban’s economic stabilization is one of a “famine equilibrium.” With 90% of the population stuck in poverty, what has kept Afghans from starving is humanitarian aid. Yet that aid has been rapidly declining this year—by at least $1 billion out of the $3 billion provided in 2022. … If the ban is maintained and in another year or so Europe starts experiencing a heroin drought not yet felt, a fentanyl epidemic will likely surge… it’s clear that cutting off supply doesn’t end use. It just forces those with substance use disorder and without treatment to switch to more dangerous drugs or new suppliers. For these reasons, the Taliban should not be praised for or encouraged to persist in its drug ban.

So the Taliban have accomplished more in a couple of years than the U.S. has in 50+ years (our War on Drugs), but they should not be praised for this accomplishment, which was not worth striving for in the first place (which is why we strove for it for 50+ years).

Humanity is going extinct, according to planetary physicist Professor Dr. Joe Biden, Ph.D. The Taliban will come to the rescue, says the Washington Post… “Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners”:

In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”

But now, in a great twist of modern Afghan history, it is the Taliban — which overthrew the U.S.-backed government two years ago — that is finally looking to exploit those vast lithium reserves, at a time when the soaring global popularity of electric vehicles is spurring an urgent need for the mineral, a vital ingredient in their batteries. By 2040, demand for lithium could rise 40-fold from 2020 levels, according to the International Energy Agency.

In other words, the Taliban in a couple of years have done more than the U.S. and its puppet government accomplished in 10+ years.

How about coronapanic, the standard by which Americans judge the success of any society. Afghanistan, a country of 40 million (double the population of 20 million when we invaded), has suffered about 8,000 COVID-tagged deaths. Compare to 1.12 million in the U.S., a country of 335 million. 1 in 300 Americans was killed by COVID, in other words, compared to just 1 in 5,000 Afghans. The Taliban, in other words, have done a far better job of “controlling the virus” than the U.S. federal and state governments have.

Speaking of muscular human control of the weak flabby virus, what are the Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention up to on this day of solemn remembrance?

In case the above gets memory-holed, a screen shot:

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World War I and the current war in Ukraine

by philg

It’s Friday the 13th, an unlucky day. Let’s talk about an unlucky human experience: war. For some potentially relevant background on the current war in Ukraine, I decided to read Keegan’s The First World War.

How can a 100-year-old war be relevant to anything that is happening today? The author says that World War I is highly relevant to World War II:

… no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First. On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain … No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance!”

(for those who aren’t familiar with Adolf Hitler, he was the Donald Trump of his day)

Just as the Ukraine war arrived in a Europe that was not mentally prepared for the idea, so did World War I:

In 1939 the apprehension of war was strong, so was its menace, so, too, was knowledge of its reality. In 1914, by contrast, war came, out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.

Just as folks who’ve started wars recently have been overly optimistic about the timeline and the results (the U.S. being a notable example going back to Vietnam), the Germans had a detailed plan in which the war would be won within about 40 days:

“It is the thirty-fifth day,” the Kaiser exulted to a delegation of ministers to his Luxembourg headquarters on 4 September, “we are besieging Rheims, we are thirty miles from Paris.”94 The thirty-fifth day had an acute significance to the German General Staff of 1914. It lay halfway between the thirty-first day since mobilisation, when a map drawn by Schlieffen himself showed the German armies poised on the Somme to begin their descent on Paris, and the fortieth, when his calculations determined that there would have been a decisive battle.95 That battle’s outcome was critical. Schlieffen, and his successors, had calculated that the deficiencies of the Russian railways would ensure that not until the fortieth day would the Tsar’s armies be assembled in sufficient strength to launch an offensive in the east. Between the thirty-fifth and the fortieth day, therefore, the outcome of the war was to be decided.

Russia got off to a bad start in World War I, but ramped up eventually:

Russia, despite the terrible fatalities of 1914–15 and the large loss of soldiers to captivity after Gorlice-Tarnow, had been able to fill the gaps with new conscripts, so that by the spring of 1916 it would have two million men in the field army. Almost all, moreover, would be properly equipped, thanks to a striking expansion of Russian industry. Engineering output increased fourfold between the last year of peace and 1916, chemical output, essential to shell-filling, doubled. As a result there was a 2,000 per cent increase in the production of shells, 1,000 per cent in that of artillery, 1,100 per cent in that of rifles. Output of the standard field-artillery shell had risen from 358,000 per month in January 1915 to 1,512,000 in November. The Russian armies would in future attack with a thousand rounds of shell available per gun, a stock equivalent to that current in the German and French armies, and its formations were acquiring plentiful quantities of all the other equipment—trucks, telephones and aircraft (as many as 222 per month)—essential to modern armies.

Then as now a respiratory virus was an important consideration:

The German inability to sustain pressure was also hampered by the first outbreak of the so-called “Spanish” influenza, in fact a worldwide epidemic originating in South Africa, which was to recur in the autumn with devastating effects in Europe but in June laid low nearly half a million German soldiers whose resistance, depressed by poor diet, was far lower than that of the well-fed Allied troops in the trenches opposite.

(The book was written at the end of the 1990s. Science then said that the flu originated in South Africa. Wikipedia today says that Science has narrowed things down to just three possibilities for the origin of the influenza that was so much more lethal than SARS-CoV-2: the U.S., Europe, and China.)

The author, writing in the 1990s, might have been a little too optimistic about Europe!

The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology’s intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the elevation of commissars, gauleiters and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind. Of that, at the end of the century, little thankfully is left. Europe is once again, as it was in 1900, prosperous, peaceful and a power for good in the world.

The author hatefully says that diversity is not anyone’s strength and, in fact, is a huge threat to political stability.

The liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe from the imperial rule of German-speaking dynasties, Hohenzollern or Habsburg, brought equally little tranquillity to the successor states they founded. None of them—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes or, as it became known in 1929, Yugoslavia—emerged into independence with sufficient homogeneity to undertake a settled political life.

According to one of the foremost historians of the past 100 years, a country with a mixture of ethnicities and religions will eventually become too weak to defend itself:

Czechoslovakia’s inheritance from the Habsburgs of another German minority in the Sudetenland equally robbed the new state of ethnic equilibrium, with fatal consequences for its integrity in 1938. Yugoslavia’s unequal racial composition might have been brought into balance with good will; as events turned out, the determination of the Orthodox Christian Serbs to dominate, particularly over the Catholic Croats, undermined its coherence from an early date. Internal antipathies were to rob it of the power to resist Italian and German attack in 1941.

Even one of the world’s best historians can’t figure out the “War, what is it good for?” question:

But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?

Do I recommend the book? Not as a way of understanding the action of the World War I. There are so many battles that I think that story of the war needs to be presented as a video animation with voiceover to explain which armies are moving and why. Nobody has sufficient memory plus spatial thinking skills to follow a text narrative of the entire war. Here’s how the grand 40-day plan to beat France is presented in the Windows Kindle app:

Clear as mud! Still, the book has a lot of interesting and surprising facts. Mostly, the reader is left amazed that so many people sacrificed their lives for nothing. See, for example, “Britain entering first world war was ‘biggest error in modern history” (The Guardian):

Ferguson is unequivocal: “We should not think of this as some great victory or dreadful crime, but more as the biggest error in modern history.”

He continued: “The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain’s military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.

More: Read Keegan’s The First World War.

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National WASP WWII Museum

by philg

As we remember Pearl Harbor today, I will share some photos from a recent visit to the National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. I learned that just over 1,800 women who’d already earned at least Private certificates were invited to train as Women Airforce Service Pilots (closer to 1,000 completed the program). The museum does a good job of walking visitors through the progression of training to fly military aircraft.

I knew that WASPs had ferried new aircraft from the factory to military bases, but I didn’t realize that they’d also towed targets for live fire practice (video interview). Remarkably, none of the women were killed during this activity.

Some details on the admissions and training processes:

Note that an interview with Florida-native superstar pilot Jacqueline Cochran was required.

The museum preserves some of the trainer aircraft (airworthy, apparently; note the oil drip pans) and shows off the skeleton of a “Bamboo Bomber”:

There are some poignant stories and memorials regarding each of the 38 WASPs who died during the two years that the program existed. No WASP was ever in combat, but there was plenty of potential for a mechanical problem in an airplane made without CNC machine tools. There was no moving map, no GPS, no NEXRAD for weather, etc.

WASPs were civilians, though Jimmy Carter retroactively made them military personnel (on the one hand, their job was nowhere near as dangerous as being a combat pilot and they never had to deploy overseas; on the other hand, their job entailed far more danger than that faced by millions of military men, e.g., those who worked stateside at desks). The museum highlights later female-identifying military pilots. The sign below makes it sound like an F-14 crash was the plane’s fault (after mismanaging an approach, Kara Hultgreen stomped on the rudder like a student pilot, which killed one engine, and then failed to manage the single-engine go-around).

The sign below about Colleen Cain caused me to search for more. She and two fellow crewmembers died going out at night into horrific weather to try to save seven sailors on a fishing boat. They had trouble with navigation, plainly, and ended up hitting terrain. They would all likely still be alive today given GPS and moving terrain maps. It is tough to understand how people can be brave enough to fly helicopters for the Coast Guard. A core part of their job is going out into weather bad enough to sink ships.

T

The museum’s conference room featured incredibly comfortable “sled” chairs that allowed a slight recline and had sufficient cushioning. It looks like they are Office Master OM5 stacker chairs. I am tempted to order some for kitchen table use!

Admission is free, but donations are welcome.

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A visit to the Nobel Peace Center

by philg

Today is 9/11, the anniversary of the 2001 jihad, our reaction to which was to engage in years of war. I’m going to devote today to describing a visit to the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

The Peace Center is in a former train station, no longer needed because Oslo, unlike Boston, constructed a tunnel to unify all of its trains into one station. A view from the National Museum (mostly art):

The red brick towers behind the building are the City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is actually awarded.

The visitor experience begins with a history of Alfred Nobel, whose father was an impoverished entrepreneur and engineer. In addition to being a chemistry nerd, he loved to write fiction:

When he was young and poor, women refused to marry him. When he was old and rich, he didn’t want to get married.

This is what set him up to die without heirs and, therefore, endow the Nobel Prizes.

Treason is not just for Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrectionists. Alfred Nobel was also convicted of treason:

The visitor can use a touchscreen “peace personality” explorer. If you put in zero interest in helping anyone, the software says that your closest match among Peace Prize recipients is Barack Obama.

Moving upstairs, we find a room devoted to polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who later become a diplomat. Nansen seems to have been one of the originators of the idea that people in non-Malthusian situations are obligated to send money, food, and other aid to prevent the consequences of Malthusianism. His lecture in 1922:

“When one has stood face to face with famine, with death by starvation itself, then surely one should have had one’s eyes opened to the full extent of this misfortune. When one has beheld the great beseeching eyes in the starved faces of children staring hopelessly into the fading daylight, the eyes of agonized mothers while they press their dying children to their empty breasts in silent despair, and the ghostlike men lying exhausted on mats on cabin floors, with only the merciful release of death to wait for, then surely one must understand where all this is leading, understand a little of the true nature of the question. This is not the struggle for power, but a single and terrible accusation against those who still do not want to see, a single great prayer for a drop of mercy to give men a chance to live.”

In the spirit of Nansen, the UN World Food Programme won the prize in 2020 “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”

There is a room of tablets on sticks, a bit like some of the installations in Marfa, Texas (“Visitors are required to wear masks indoors”, said the site on September 4, 2022). Each prize winner gets a tablet:

Following Olympic viewing procedure, we will concern ourselves only with Americans. Barack Obama (2009) is featured for creating “a new climate in international politics”. Quite a few winners are featured for ending wars, but somehow the Big Guy didn’t win in 2021 for ending our war in Afghanistan? Al Gore won in 2007 and Jimmy Carter in 2002. Notorious racist Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for his role in founding the quixotic League of Nations. Norman Borlaug won for deferring our date with Malthus via the Green Revolution.

A notable non-American winner is the Dalai Lama, some decades before “Dalai Lama Says Europe is for Europeans, Refugees Should Go Home and Rebuild” (Newsweek 2018) and “Dalai Lama Says a Female Successor Must Be Attractive, or People Won’t Want to Look at Her Face” (Newsweek 2019).

The museum promotes “freedom of expression”, but the gift shop suggests that some perspectives are more welcome than others. A sampling:

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister from 1990-1996, liked to say “It’s typically Norwegian to be good at things.” (source) The Nobel Peace Center is certainly consistent with this point of view.

Readers: What are you thinking about today with respect to the events of 9/11/2001?

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Are there Ukrainian refugees in your neighborhood?

by philg

Our Florida neighborhood, which has no “immigrants welcome” signs, is now home to at least two groups of Ukrainian refugees (mother-child in both cases). That’s out of a sample of about 200 houses and apartments.

Our former neighborhood, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has more than 2,000 homes and perhaps 4,000 “migrants welcome” signs (squeezed in among the rainbow flags, BLM banners, In This House We Believe… laundry lists, and #StopAsianHate memes). The Ukrainian refugee count there? According to friends who still live in Lincoln… zero.

Readers: What’s the story in your own neighborhoods? Have you met any displaced Ukrainians or does the war remain an abstraction for you?

Related:

  • If you’re looking for a way to help Ukrainians and don’t want to copy me by giving money to displaced Ukrainians and/or their hosts (part of my overall offer to pay for food to anyone who says that he/she/ze/they support expanded immigration and are willing to host migrants in their own homes), you can look at The Bond of Sports Foundation (disclosure: I am actually a board member of this 501c3 corporation, the first of whose core values is “empathy” so you know that I am a huge contributor in non-monetary ways)
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Memorial Day reading: The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by philg

For Memorial Day, let me recommend The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, a book about the Battle off Samar, in which puny destroyer-escorts and destroyers charged heavy Japanese cruisers and battleships in an attempt to prevent destruction by surface fire of American escort carriers (cargo ships with a flight deck, essentially).

The situation was the opposite of the typical American military engagement, in which we enjoy an overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment. Most of the American fleet had steamed far away, distracted by a Japanese decoy force.

The book is also timely because the events are the opposite of what happened in Uvalde, Texas. There, the heavily armed, full armored, and numerous police were so intimidated by a single teenager that they took no action. Off Samar, however, captains of absurdly small vessels steamed forward into what they expected to be near-certain death in order to protect the escort carriers and their crews.

Here’s the Samuel B. Roberts, at 1350 tons:

She was sunk by the Kongō, 36,600 tons.

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Is Joe Biden fighting an undeclared war against Russia?

by philg

According to the Constitution, it is Congress’s job to decide when to declare and wage war on a foreign country.

What is the Biden administration doing?

“U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say” (NYT, May 4, 2022):

The United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.

Ukrainian officials said they have killed approximately 12 generals on the front lines, a number that has astonished military analysts.

The targeting help is part of a classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes anticipated Russian troop movements gleaned from recent American assessments of Moscow’s secret battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said. Officials declined to specify how many generals had been killed as a result of U.S. assistance.

The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently.

If a country did that to the U.S., would we call it an “act of war” and flatten their capital in retaliation?

“U.S. Intelligence Helped Ukraine Strike Russian Flagship, Officials Say” (NYT, May 5, 2022):

The United States provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month, another sign that the administration is easing its self-imposed limitations on how far it will go in helping Ukraine fight Russia, U.S. officials said.

The targeting help, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the flagship, the Moskva, is part of a continuing classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine.

What if a country helped some jihadists conduct an operation similar to the USS Cole bombing, e.g., by letting the attackers know exactly where one of our ships was?

What about funding? One way to figure out if a country is at war is if its taxpayers are funding a war. From a May 4 NYT article in which the President actually does run a proposal by Congress:

This week, the Senate will take up a request from President Biden to send $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, mostly in the form of artillery, antitank weapons and other military and security assistance. If the measure goes through, the United States will have authorized a total of $46.6 billion for the war, equal to more than two-thirds of Russia’s entire annual defense budget.

The request comes just weeks after President Vladimir Putin of Russia called on the Biden administration in a formal diplomatic letter to stop supplying advanced weapons to Ukrainian forces. If it didn’t, Putin warned there would be “unpredictable consequences.”

It sounds like Americans been doing everything on the Ukrainian side except the final trigger pull. We are funding the entire Ukrainian military, just as we fund our own military. We are directly running the Ukrainian military’s electronic and satellite intelligence branch. With some assistance from NATO allies, we are designing and building the weapons that the Ukrainian military uses in combat.

The above should not be intended as an opinion regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. (I don’t understand the languages, the history, etc.) The topic for this post is the process of governing the U.S. If the Constitution says “Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11), how is Joe Biden allowed to do all of the stuff that he is apparently doing without specific Congressional authorization?

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If you’d like to help Ukrainian refugees, I have two options

by philg

If anyone expresses support for low-skill migration into the U.S., one of my standard tropes is to offer to pay for a year of food for any migrants that the gracious welcomer wants to shelter in his/her/zir/their own home. After 20 years of making these offers, I have not had to spend one penny. Here’s the typical exchange:

  • friend posts hatred regarding the Texas governor busing migrants to neighborhoods in D.C. where every lawn has a “migrants welcome” sign (and the Florida governor piling on with “I hope these welfare-dependent migrants don’t show up in Orlando wanting taxpayer-funded gender ID education at Disney World)
  • I respond with “If you’d like to house any asylum-seekers or migrants in your own home I will be happy to pay for a year of Costco food for them. Just let me know how many you’re planning on welcoming!”
  • friend responds to the above with “not the point”

It seems that my bluff has been called, however, by an Irish helicopter enthusiast friend. He and his wife have welcomed a Ukrainian and her 15-year-old son into their suburban Dublin house (to occupy a couple of bedrooms that have been vacated by adult children). From WhatsApp: “They arrived last night with a cabin size bag and 2 shoulder bags.” Although he didn’t ask for any help, I decided to send 500 euro for a gift card at the local shopping mall (impossible to buy online with a U.S. credit card, so I did a bank transfer with his IBAN number and he will buy it; I trust him not to spend the money on essential-in-Maskachusetts-and-California marijuana because weed is illegal in Ireland). The mom will have a “PPS number” by next week and, therefore, will be allowed to work in Ireland.

One of our loyal readers (I won’t share his name until I get his permission) is married to a Ukrainian and is sheltering up to 7 of his wife’s relatives in his suburban Paris home. They’ve gotten health coverage from the French government, but, as in the U.S., housing is a human right to which a 10-year waiting list is attached. We could get together and try to cover some of his hypermarché bills. I met this reader in person when I was in Paris with my mom so I can vouch for him. And I’ve seen the pictures of the crowded kitchen table.

Why send money direct to individuals in this manner? Donating to a non-profit org has the advantage that it might be tax-deductible, but Elvis Presley wouldn’t deduct any of his donations because he said that it “took away from the spirit of the gift.” Also, I don’t want to help a non-profit executive boost his/her/zir/their salary from $1 million per year to $2 million per year, even if that only keeps pace with housing inflation.

Finally, let me add that the Ukrainian friend whom I talk to most regularly is ambivalent about aid to refugees. He prefers to assist those who’ve chosen to stay in Ukraine (his own father has refused to bug out despite a quiet suburban American existence being within relatively easy reach (dad is over 60 and therefore free to leave Ukraine at any time)).

On the third hand, I feel sympathy for anyone who has to live under Irish weather conditions…

(above: part of Newgrange, where no refugees will be housed, from a May/June 2019 trip in which it rained for an entire week)

Comment here and/or email me (philg@mit.edu) if you want to be connected.

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