Tag: History

And the Poland Shouts, “Leeroy Jenkins!”

I’ve made a lot of mention of the Ukraine’s Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and Neonazi predilections, on this blog, and while many former Eastern Bloc nations might respond with the equivalent of, “Hold my beer,” it appears that Poland and its judicial system has gone that extra contemptible mile, declaring historians to be criminals, and requiring a formal apology by them for pointing out the Nazi

On Tuesday, a Polish court found Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, two of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust in Poland, guilty of defamation and spreading “inaccurate information.” The two historians had been sued by the niece of Edward Malinowski, the mayor of a Polish town during World War II, for a passage that appears in their 1,700 page Night Without End about the genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the 2018 volume, testimonies are quoted which suggest that Malinowski was implicated in the local massacre of Jews by German soldiers. Engelking and Grabowski were ordered to write an apology to the niece for allegedly defaming her uncle and “providing inaccurate information.”

The trial represents a new milestone in the assaults on historical truth and democratic rights by the Polish state and the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). In addition to the trial against Engelking and Grabowski, a journalist, Katarzyna Markusz, is threatened with a three-year prison sentence for “defaming the Polish nation,” because of a passage she wrote on Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

These actions are part of a state-orchestrated campaign, aimed at promoting anti-Semitism and far-right forces. In 2018, the Polish government passed a law criminalizing any mention of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. Since then, historians have faced increasing pressure, including threats of lawsuits, along with hate mail and death threats from far-right forces which feel so emboldened that they often do not even hide their names anymore. While the lawsuit against Engelking and Grabowski was brought by Filomena Leszczyńska, it was heavily backed and driven by the Polish League against Defamation, a far-right outfit that is directly funded by the state. For many years, the League has been harassing Holocaust historians with threats of lawsuits.

………

The two-volume Night Without End (2018), which they edited together and which formed the basis of the trial, provides an extensive analysis of the life and fate of 140,000 Polish Jews in the countryside in the Nazi-occupied General Government of Poland. The work highlights, in particular, the role played by the Polish police (“Blue police”), a force that the Polish right has long sought to whitewash.

Poland has criminalized publishing the accounts of Holocaust survivors. 

The people of Poland, or the Ukraine, or Germany, or the Baltic States are not responsible for the horrible things that some of their ancestors when the enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “Final Solution.

However, they are responsible for promulgating lies and antisemitism, as well as aggressively condoning, to the point of erecting statues, of the worst of the collaborators criminals who did this.

What they are doing NOW is a stain on their national honor, and makes genocide more likely in the future.

Yeah, About that

This strangest thing about this moment is almost every Dem is acting as if Obama’s first term was a horrible failure but no one wants to explicitly say that. https://t.co/CuyrgEN6XT

— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) February 2, 2021

So, let’s do a rundown of the 2009-10 Obama years and what happened:

  • Democratic Governors, from 29 to 16.
  • Control of state legislatures, and redistricting, from 59% to 31%. (over 1000 state leg seats)
  • Double digit losses in the Senate.
  • Over 5 dozen loses in the House.

Why would even the most psychopathic Democrat, or Jim Manchin (but I repeat myself) want even a small piece of such a disaster?

The answer is that they don’t which indicates that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) might actually have a small learning curve.

I never believed that I would be able to write that in a non-ironic way.

This is Not a Growing Vibrant Economy

Over the past 20 years, total employment in the US has grown by 11,767,000.

Over the same 20 years, employment among workers over 6o has increased by 11,879,000.

To put that in perspective, 101% of all the jobs gained in the past 20 years were among people who would have retired if the economy actually worked for people.

This might explain why the economists’ view of our economy, and that of ordinary people diverge so sharply.

To quote Douglas Adams, “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” 

What is going on, at least if you don’t buy into the rosy scenario promulgated by the St. Louis Fed, is that older people are working longer, because life has become more more precarious, with the end of defined benefit pensions, Wall Street looting of defined contributions (IRA, 401(K), etc.), and the general fall in wages over the past 45 years.

So people CAN’T retire, and younger workers are finding that the jobs that they would ordinarily get during their careers are not opening up.

It is a recipe for social unrest and extremism, but the green pieces of paper are quite happy:

Total U.S. employment grew by 11,767,000, or 8.5%, in the 20 years ending in December 2020. All that growth—11,879,000, or 101% of the total—was due to increased employment of people age 60 and older. Meanwhile, the net employment change over the past two decades of people ages 16-59 was -112,000 (-1% of the total change), despite this younger group being 3.8 times as large as the older group in December 2000 and still 2.4 times as large in December 2020. (See the figure below above.)

What’s Driving This Outcome

This age-skewed labor-market outcome was the result of two differences between the groups:

  • The older population (60 and older) grew much faster than the younger population (16-59).
  • The employment-to-population (E-P) ratio among those 60 and older increased significantly while the E-P ratio among the younger population declined, on balance.

With the exception of the large decline in the E-P ratio of the younger population, which is difficult to predict in the years ahead, the basic trend of rising employment among older workers is likely to continue for some time for the following reasons:

  • The older population is likely to continue growing faster than the younger group.
  • The E-P ratio of the 60 and older group is likely to increase further as the health and educational attainment of older people continues to improve and the demand for older workers persists.

Weirdest Thing on Twitter Ever

Today I learnt that in 1995 Iggy Pop reviewed Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for peer-reviewed academic journal Classics Ireland pic.twitter.com/a6dTtlqRer

— Hannah Rose Woods (@hannahrosewoods) January 3, 2021

Incongruous


This is Iggy Pop

Did you know that Iggy Pop was published in a peer reviewed journal? 

Not kidding.

He reviewed Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I always knew that Pop was “eclectic”, but this is WAY more eclectic that I could possibly imagined.

Equally surprising is that when I did a Google search for peer reviewed articles published by Flaming Lips front-man Wayne Coyne, there is nothing.

In fact, I did a rather extensive series of searches, and could find no other Rock and Roller with a peer reviewed article.

Go figure.

Headline of the Day

How Amy Coney Barrett and Barack Obama Transcended Petty Partisanship To Crush Community Activists in Chicago

Jacobin


This is an Architectural Atrocity

This details how Obama’s need for a monument to himself by way of his Presidential library will, as I noted about a year ago, desecrate one of Fredrick Law Olmstead’s crown jewels, and that his has been aided and abetted by one Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett:

Proving that architectural narcissism isn’t a quality limited to the outgoing forty-fifth president, Barack Obama is currently attempting to erect a hideous 235-foot tower, a monument to himself and his presidency, in a park in Chicago, over the objections of community groups. Local organizations fighting the project recently suffered a defeat at the hands of a federal review, which concluded in Obama’s favor. But according to the Wall Street Journal, a key ally in the approval process last summer was then judge Amy Coney Barrett, who has since, of course, become Trump’s latest addition to the Supreme Court.

Obama’s papers will live elsewhere; this $500 million project is not a presidential library but a museum celebrating the former president, overseen by the Obama Foundation, whose board is made up of a distasteful gang of financiers, with private equity well represented. As Wall Street Journal opinion writer James Freeman sardonically noted last week, Obama is impinging on “treasured green space to realize his vision of a self-tribute in stone and glass.” The groups fighting the project argue that it will wreak environmental damage on Jackson Park. They argue that the project will destroy much of the natural life in the park, including four hundred trees. They also say the tower will interfere with needed sunlight during the day, cause light pollution at night, and interfere with bird migration (the park is apparently a well-known route for birds).

The community activists also fear that the project will lure a large number of tourists and car traffic, disrupting what is currently a relatively calm and natural retreat. They also find the design of the project garish and vulgar, at odds with the aesthetics of the Frederick Law Olmsted–designed park, a historic 1893 World’s Fair site which was restored back to naturalistic parkland after the fair. The activists have presented alternative designs and traffic plans, but the Obama Foundation has ignored them — as arrogant multimillionaires tend to do when faced with suggestions from the little people.

This is tremendously apropos of the legacy of a man why my brother calls, “Our President Harding.”

He looked the role, and he gave great speeches, but when push came to shove, he never put anything ahead of himself, and now, he’s going to befoul one of the great public spaces in the world, (plus a f%$#ing luxury golf course) because it’s always about him.

Part of My Childhood has Changed

And I am happy as hell that Portland’s Woodrow Wilson High School is changing its name.  (They have narrowed it down to 5 names)

Woodrow Wilson was a hypocritical racist dirt-bag.

Now change the mascot, the teams are called the “Trojans”, and I don’t think that you should name a team after a brand of condoms and ……… What? ……… Homer’s Iliad? ……… Never mind.

Great Pea Soup, the Toothpick Dispensers, Not So Much, a Decades Delayed Restaurant Review

Last night, I made some pea soup for the Shabbos mean, and it brought back some memories.

In 1977, my family went down to Los Angeles to visit with my grandparents, and to pick up grandma’s old car for my older brother, Stephen (The Bear Who Swims).

It was a 1963 Chevy nova.

Given that Stephen, who was relatively new to driving, was going to do some of the driving, and the fact that the Nova had never really done highway driving, we went north along the Pacific Coast Highway

Just off of the PCH, in Buellton, California, is a restaurant which is renowned for its pea soup, Pea Soup Andersen’s.

We were in the area around dinner time, and my dad decided that we would eat dinner there.

I don’t remember what I had, except for the soup, which was truly first rate.

What sticks in my memory was what happened after dinner.

I tried to get some toothpicks out of the toothpick machine, but it was jammed.

I tried to unjam it, and when I turned it upside down, because it appears that a toothpick was stuck underneath the roller, the top came off, spilling toothpicks all over the floors.

While the tres of the family remained in the booth, staring at me in poorly disguised amusement, I had to flag down the waitress and apologize.  (I did unjam the machine)

I’m still getting razzed by my brothers over this, after almost 44 years.

Family, nu?

And Now, a Completely Naked Video

Don’t worry though, it violates no standards, because it is a naked B-52H Stratofortress.

The bomber, 60-034, also known as, “Wise Guy,”  had to be stripped down and rebuilt after being returned to service after storage at Davis-Monthan AFB, AKA the “boneyard”:

As already reported in detail in this previous article, “Wise Guy” is the nickname of the B-52H Stratofortress bomber tail number 60-0034, that is being prepared to return to service with the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, by the Tinker Air Force Base’s Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex.

The aircraft has arrived at Tinker AFB, on Apr. 1, 2020, to undergo PDM (Programmed Depot Maintenance), the final part of a three-phase process to resurrect the aircraft, that had been retired after logging more than 17,000 flight hours at the 309th AMARG (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group) at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, in 2008.

Sock and Awe

 12 years ago today:

12 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/g2W14AywFm

— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) December 14, 2020

A tip of the hat to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, a journalist’s journalist. 

Unfortunately, I could not find any games that came from this meme that still worked.  They were all done in Flash, which uninstalled itself from my computer a few months ago.

And yes, the “Sock and Awe” title is my own joke.

A Correction

Yesterday, in writing about the poo flinging between Senator Marsha Blackburn and various personalities in Chinese media, I quoted something that I had believed was originally said by Clarence Carrow Darrow.

I was wrong.  The quote was made by American writer and humorist Harry Golden

Additionally, I got the quote wrong:

While Anglo-Saxons were still roaming the forests of Great Britain, painting their bodies blue and eating wild strawberries, the Jews already had diabetes.

My apologies for misinforming my reader(s).

Crap

While waiting to be demolished, as it was deemed irreparable, Puerto Rico’s giant Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed.

So not only can the United States not build big things any more, not only can the United States not maintain big things that it cannot build any more, but it cannot even demolish them in a timely manner:

A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.

The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.

………

The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the US defense department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. It had endured hurricanes, tropical humidity and a recent string of earthquakes in its 57 years of operation.

This sucks.

Hunter S. Thompson Prophesied the Spite Voter

On a number of occasions, I have referenced Mark Ames seminal essay, “Spite the vote,” in which he posits that the hoi polloi (οἱ πολλοί) are not mindless zombies brainwashed by Fox News and Karl Rove (this was written in 2004), and realized that they literally had no place in the future envisioned by liberals, and so tried to pull everything down around the heads.

This sounds even more relevant 16 years later, but I think that using the word seminal may have been an overstatement, because before Mark Ames, there was Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote about this same phenomenon in his breakthrough book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966:

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state’s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. “He came in on his Harley,” Trump said of Walker, “but he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy.”

“The motorcycle guys,” he added, “like Trump.”

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

………

Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures—even at elections. They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game. 

Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is “populist” seems misplaced. Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule. Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary people aren’t going to get any chance to rule no matter what they do, so they might as well piss off the political insiders using the only tool left available to them: the vote. 

54 Years ago, and it sounds like today.

It’s telling that this awareness seems to flow down dynastic lines, Susan McWilliams’ grandfather gave Thompson the assignment to cover the motorcycle gang, and her current position as a tenured professor at an expensive and respected private liberal arts college, (Pomona) certainly as a results of advantages that came from who her parents (and grandparents) were.

Far too many people who have won the birth lottery, and so were born on third base think that they hit a triple.

This Was the Weirdest Bit of TV I’ve Seen in a Long Time

I watch Perry Mason reruns. The real show, not the Freddie Silverman semi-regular movies that resembled Matlock more than the the original TV noir show that ran for more 9 seasons.

In the original series there was only color episode, The Case of the Twice-Told Twist, which was the only episode of the original series to be filmed in color.

It was intended to be a dry run for a 10th season, which was to go full color, but it was canceled at the end of season 9.

It was just ……… wrong.

First, Perry Mason is clearly a product of black and white TV, but second, the script just ……… off somehow.

In going for color, they decided for a more frenetic direction, with William Hopper as Paul Drake chasing a potential witness down a Mexican street, and repeated split second car stripping that looked like they had come out of a heist movie.

The full color version makes the episode more real, and some of the conventions of the show, smoking, drinking, and ethnic stereotyping, become far more jarring, as opposed to a relic of a bygone era.

Finally, the episode was replete with references to Dickens, specifically Oliver Twist.

If you are a Perry Mason fan, I’m not sure if I would recommend it unless you want to watch it stoned.

I think that it would be good to watch stoned.

All in all, it’s the second weirdest bit of TV I’ve seen this year, after the Presidential debates.

Could Someone Please Confirm this Bit of US Senate Minutiae?

According to this account, the power of the Senate Majority Leader is a matter of tradition in the US Senate, and so the president of the Senate (the Vice President of the US) can simply recognize some other member of the body to bring a motion to the floor.  (A quick Google finds similar arguments here.)

This is intriguing, but I do not think that this is particularly realistic.

Joe Biden pines for the “good old days” of the Senate, and I don’t think that Kamala Harris would be particularly interested in presiding over the Petri Dish for narcissistic sociopaths that is the US Senate 4 days a week, but it would be useful to raise this possibility on the down low, and when questioned, issue a non-denial denial, to move things along.

This would be analogous to what happened during various showdowns about the US debt limit, the Obama administration denied that it was going to use seigniorage (the platinum coin of arbitrary value) to make an end run around Republican demands, but it does appear that the buzz around the concept did moderate reactionary intransigence:

Even if the Democrats don’t win control of the Senate, there is a wayto strip Mitch McConnell of his power for good: priority recognition.

According to Article I, Section 3, Clause 4 of the Constitution, the Vice President is also the President of the Senate. The Majority Leader is not a position that exists anywhere in the Constitution. The reason that the Majority Leader has near-dictatorial powers to control floor votes is because of a tradition that dates back to 1937. The tradition is that the Vice President gives the floor leaders priority recognition. Most notably, this is not a rule in the Senate.

As President of the Senate, Vice President Harris could give any senator priority recognition. That senator could then decide on all legislation that is brought before the entire Senate. Even with a minority in the Senate, Vice President Harris could simply give Chuck Schumer priority recognition. He could decide what is voted on and what isn’t.

This would change everything. Without Mitch McConnell to hide behind, the moderate Republican Senators would be forced to vote down every Cabinet member, bill, resolution, everything that Harris would want done. Without McConnell, anything even remotely popular with at least two [Republican] senators would pass. Including getting a cabinet assembled.

Given that Mitch McConnell is indicating that he will be even more obstructionist and intransigent about Biden than he was about Obama, the threat of this sort of action needs to be on the table as a subtext at the very least.

About Bloody Time

The Philadelphia City Council has finally apologized for bombing its own citizens and allowing a city block to burn to the ground

It would have been nice if some of the people behind those decisions had actually faced consequences for their actions:

The Philadelphia City Council this week formally apologized for the decision in 1985 to drop an improvised bomb on a rowhouse occupied by the MOVE separatist group, a desperate action that resulted in a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed 61 homes.

The resolution, approved on Thursday, marked the first time that the city had formally apologized for the action. The measure, which also calls for an annual day of remembrance on May 13, the anniversary of the bombing, was sponsored by Jamie Gauthier, a city councilwoman who grew up near the West Philadelphia neighborhood where the bombing happened.

Ms. Gauthier recalled watching the aftermath of the bombing on television as a child, and said that the neighborhood was only now starting to fully recover from the devastation.

“There have been divisions in our city between police and community for decades, and I think if we had done the true work of acknowledging what happened with MOVE and with other acts of police violence, and we had really worked on not only the acknowledgment but building better relationships and working towards reconciliation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the place we are now,” she said in an interview on Friday.

“It was always striking to me that we did this, that our city did this and that no one ever was held accountable,” she added. “I thought that was unconscionable.”

People should have gone to jail and lost their jobs, but a 11 people, including children, were murdered, and a whole block was wiped out, and no one cared because they were black.

True

Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world:

That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.

The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.

………

I began writing about politics in 2005 as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism.

They invented new theories of secrecy to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall’s entire career is based on a well-documented claim that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act — enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I — than all prior presidents combined.

………

That the War on Terror itself was racist and Islamophobic — how else to explain year after year of predominantly Muslim countries being bombed by the Bush and Obama administrations? — was barely disputed in liberal discourse. Karl Rove’s core campaign strategy in 2002 and 2004 was to place anti-gay referenda on as many state ballots as possible, and disseminate slanderous propaganda about same-sex couples, all to incentivize evangelicals to vote. And now we’re subjected to the revolting sanctimony of the very same same operatives and supporters who did that, trying to prove the unprecedented evil of Trump by insisting that at least prior administrations did not rely on bigoted tropes or racist rhetoric.

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the division on the center-left over the past four years has been shaped by whether one sees Trump as a symptom of American pathologies or as its primary cause, of whether one views the return of pre-Trump “normalcy” as something to loathe or something to crave, of whether one views the Bush/Cheney years and War on Terror abuses (to say nothing of the horrors of the Cold War) as at least as bad as anything Trump has ushered in or whether one sees those pre-Trump evils as somehow more benign and less ignoble. 

Bush killed more people, Obama deported and assassinated more people, and both of them normalized the excesses of the US state security apparatus.

Trump is a lesson that can be learned from, because the evil that put him in power did not come from him, though he certainly has no lack of personal evil, it came from a broken and corrupt society.

No fundamental change means that in 4 or 8 years something worse, if just because it is more subtle and more competent, will be knocking at the orifices of the American body politic.

Here is a Shocker

It has been obvious for decades, ever since the child abuse scandal broke in the Catholic church, that John Paul II, in addition to aggressively embracing murderous right wing dictators, was wilfully blind about priests f%$#ing kids in their charge.

In response to scandals involving defrocked cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Pope Francis commissioned a study to find out what happened, and they determined that Pope John Paul II ignored repeated and credible warnings about the former priest

This is not a surprise.  Ignoring this sort of thing was a direct outgrowth of JPII’s view of the church and spirituality.

His successor, Benedict, was found to have been insufficiently forceful in dealing with this:

An unprecedented Vatican internal investigation has found that Pope John Paul II knew about and overlooked sexual misconduct claims against Theodore McCarrick, instead choosing to facilitate the rise of an American prelate who would be defrockedand disgraced two decades later.

The Vatican’s reportamounts to a stunning play-by-play of the kind of systemic failure that the Catholic Church normally keeps under wraps, describing how ­McCarrick amassed power and prestige in the face of rumors, and sometimes written evidence, of his sexual misconduct with seminarians, priests and teenage boys.

The report devotes a good deal of attention to John Paul II and the pivotal years of McCarrick’s rise, but it also portrays Pope Benedict XVI as trying to handle the cardinal quietly and out of the public spotlight, and Pope Francis as assuming that his predecessors had made the right judgments. It shows how U.S. bishops sanitized reports of what they knew and all but ensured that warnings would arrive at the Vatican unsubstantiated or dismissible. In Rome, church leaders found every rationale for believing a “good pastor” over a victim.

For a church that has grappled for a generation with its sexual abuse crisis, the report— 449 pages, and two years in the making — goes further than any previous effort in naming names and providing details of a coverup. Such assessments have been long requested by victims of abuse, but they are nonetheless fraught for the church, because revelations have the potential to recolor the reputations of major figures within the faith, including John Paul, who was named a saintin 2014.