At Amazon, Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich.
Thursday, July 8, 2021
'Summer Breeze'
This song just popped into my mind yesterday, for some reason. (*Shrugs.*)
Here's Seals and Crofts, "Summer Breeze":
The Full Story on How Rachel Nichols' Comments, Which She Thought Were in Private, Became Public
Following-up, "Rachel Nichols Will Not Work as Sideline Reporter for NBA Finals After Allegedly 'Racist' Comments."
A good read, at CNBC, "LeBron James PR advisor Mendelsohn said, ‘I’m exhausted. Between Me Too and Black Lives Matter,’ report shows."
Read the whole thing at the link.
Los Angles Endures Spike in Homocides
Murders are up since last year.
At LAT, "Los Angles Endures Spike in Homocides":
A bloody Fourth of July weekend that left a dozen people dead across Los Angeles accelerated an already troubling increase in homicides and shootings in 2021, with some of the city’s poorest communities suffering the heaviest toll. Homicides are up 25% so far this year across Los Angeles, although the brunt of the increase has been felt in South Los Angeles, where killings have jumped 50% over the same time last year. Shootings citywide, meanwhile, have spiked by half this year. Police and community activists are bracing for tough months ahead as the summer traditionally brings with it a rise in bloodshed. Like with the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in violence has not been spread evenly in Los Angeles. Watts, Westmont, downtown Los Angeles, Westlake and other largely poor neighborhoods have endured much of the upheaval, though there have been some exceptions. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire division had recorded no homicides this time last year. It now has at least 10. “Black and Latino communities are suffering,” said Najee Ali, a community activist. The worrisome trend is playing out in cities other than Los Angeles. After experiencing decades of historic declines in homicides, many big cities nationwide saw that crucial bellwether sharply reverse course in 2020 and have been helpless to stop the surge in killings in 2021. Last weekend, at least 189 people were killed in violent incidents across the U.S., according to gun violence archives that gather data from police and media reports. Los Angeles police officials say guns are fueling the rise here. The percentage of homicides that involved a firearm has climbed from 66% in 2019, to 70% last year and currently is running at about 75%, said Los Angeles Police Capt. Paul Vernon, who is soon to retire from his job tracking crime trends as head of the LAPD’s CompStat program. “There are too many guns in too many hands,” said Capt. Stacy Spell, the department’s main spokesman who once oversaw its South Bureau Homicide Division. Officers are finding guns at significantly higher rates as well. As of last month, the department had seized 661 ghost guns — unregistered weapons that cannot be traced to an owner — compared to 813 in all of 2020. “At that rate, we could collect 1,500 ghost guns in a year,” Spell said. Spell echoed recent comments by LAPD Chief Michel Moore, who has argued the increased violence is inextricably linked to the pandemic. The lockdown restrictions imposed to slow the spread of the virus, Spell said, further eroded already fraying social safety nets and devastated families’ finances. Gang intervention workers, for example, were unable to break cycles of retaliation by visiting shooting victims or calming mourning family members in hospital emergency rooms. A man was fatally shot and a woman was wounded in a car-to-car shooting that occurred as their vehicle was being followed through a Venice neighborhood, police said. The incident began about 2:30 a.m. near the intersection of Brooks and 6th avenues. CALIFORNIA While gangs have undoubtedly played a role in the killings, police point as well to what they say is a newfound willingness to settle disputes with a gun that goes beyond any gang affiliation. Police say it’s impossible to know where the numbers are going. If the current pace of killings continues, L.A. would end the year with about 433 homicides — a sharp increase over the 254 killings recorded in 2019. Vernon cautioned, however, that 2020 — with 349 killings — was a very unusual year for homicides with a small increase in killings in the first half of the year, followed by a dramatic rise in the second. The volatility makes it difficult to project what might happen in the remaining months of 2021, he said. And while the ongoing rise is troubling, Spell noted the current numbers still pale in comparison to the early 1990s, when more than 1,000 killings in a year were common. Police also took some solace and hope in the fact that the spike in homicides has not been matched by a rise in other types of crime. Overall, violent crime is down slightly from 2020 and property crime is up only by a small amount. Violent crime arrests are down by nearly 10% compared to 2019 levels for the same period, while homicide arrests are up for that time by 60%. So far in 2021 the LAPD’s Southeast Division, which includes Watts, has seen the city’s largest increase in homicides —24 — compared with 10 during the same period last year. Violence over the last week cut short lives across the city.
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Afghanistan's Most Successful Flee Before Taliban Takeover
Well, this year the U.S. would've marked its 20th anniversary in Afghanistan, minus the troop withdrawal.
Of course, we can't stay there forever, but's not just a Taliban "advance" that has Afghani's fleeing. It's that in all likelihood the Taliban will topple the government in Kabul and take over the country.
This is interesting. At WSJ, "A Generation of Afghan Professionals Flees Ahead of Taliban Advance":
KABUL—Afghanistan’s professional class of men and women, part of a generation that came of age under the shield of the U.S. military, are weighing the danger of rapidly advancing Taliban forces. Many are packing their bags. Hasiba Ebrahimi is already gone. The 24-year-old actress, who embodied modern Afghanistan’s optimistic youth, was raised, like many Afghans, as a refugee in Pakistan and then in Iran. She returned to Kabul in 2014 and has since become a star in the country’s new film industry. In a video released in November, Ms. Ebrahimi urged young Afghan women not to lose hope: “Everything is hard, but nothing is impossible.” She traveled to Australia soon after—for what she thought would be a short reunion with her New Zealand-based sister. She is still there. “My mom is telling me, ‘I am begging you, I love you so much, but I can’t let you come back, I can’t let you put yourself in danger,’ ” Ms. Ebrahimi said from Sydney. “We have all had hope. We were thinking that we would do something out of that country, working harder and harder each day. It’s really sad to think that you don’t have any future in your own country.” Long before President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal in April, hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled to Europe, Australia and the U.S. Now, many of the well-educated people who prospered in the new Afghanistan and hadn’t dreamed of leaving have also concluded that staying put is no longer an option. Even though the U.S. has said for years it would withdraw its troops, Mr. Biden’s announcement caught many Afghans by surprise. So did the meltdown of Afghanistan’s U.S.-equipped and trained security forces. Afghan soldiers surrendered en masse in recent weeks, handing over their weapons and Humvees to the Taliban, who have conquered about a third of the country’s districts since April and now surround several major cities. A recent U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Kabul could fall to the Taliban as soon as six months after the U.S. military pullout is completed this summer. Hamid Haidari was seven years old when he woke to see Taliban fighters fan into his western Kabul neighborhood in September 1996. The Afghan capital had fallen overnight, and militants soon were banging on doors and pulling men aside for execution. Mr. Haidari now heads the news operation for 1TV, a booming television network, one of the many new fields that have flourished in Afghanistan over the past two decades. With only a few hundred American troops remaining in the country, mostly to protect the U.S. Embassy, Mr. Haidari said he hears the same questions from his staff: What shall we do if we wake up to see the Taliban occupy Kabul again? Shall we leave? If so, where and how Mr. Haidari went to India in January after warnings of an assassination attempt by insurgents. He returned three months later and intends to stay in Kabul for as long as he can. Since meeting with Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar—part of the stalled Afghan peace process—Mr. Haidari has concluded that a freewheeling TV network wouldn’t survive under the Islamist movement’s rule. The network has already pulled several journalists from Taliban-besieged cities to Kabul. “No one knows what will happen,” Mr. Haidari said. “It’s Afghanistan. In the future, there will be bloodshed, there will be killings and maybe civil war. But if there won’t be any free media, if we shut down, no one will know what kinds of crimes will be happening in Afghanistan.” The TV company’s owner, Fahim Hashimy, said he was looking at contingency plans, moving parts of the network to Turkey or Uzbekistan. “I am joking to my people, we need to turn into a portable TV channel, a movable TV channel, a mobile TV channel so we can keep moving around the world and keep broadcasting,” he said. More affluent Afghans are paying thousands of dollars on the black market for visitor visas to Turkey, India, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the few destinations that remain relatively accessible. “Even the friends who want to stay here are taking their families out because, when the war comes, children and women cannot fight and will be vulnerable,” said Omar Sadr, a political scientist at the American University of Afghanistan. His backup plan is moving to India, where he was educated...
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Prestige Boston Art Museums Will Not Return Objets d'Art Once-Owned by German Collector Curt Glaser
These Nazi art cases are always fascinating to me.
The Nazis took control of Glaser's collection after persecuting the man for his Jewish faith. The dude must have emigrated to the U.S., as according to Wikipedia he died in 1943, at Lake Placid, New York.More than a dozen institutions and collectors have concluded that Curt Glaser sold his art collection in 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have rejected his heirs’ claims.
July 6, 2021More than a dozen institutions and collectors have concluded that Curt Glaser sold his art collection in 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have rejected his heirs’ claims. https://t.co/lzC5gQT4TN
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 6, 2021
The Nazi authorities removed Curt Glaser from his post as director of the Berlin State Art Library in April 1933 because he was Jewish. He was also evicted from his home and, the following month, sold most of his art collection at two auctions. Since 2007, 13 private collectors or institutions — including the Dutch Restitutions Committee, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the city of Basel — have concluded that Glaser sold his collection in May 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution, and agreed to either return or pay some compensation to his heirs for art he sold that wound up in their collections. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have repeatedly rejected the heirs’ claims for paintings that were sold at the same auctions. They argue there is not enough evidence that Glaser sold under duress. The disparity in the decisions highlights how, 76 years after World War II ended, the criteria for determining whether a work of art that changed hands during the Nazi persecution of Jews should be returned still remains a matter of debate. Both the Met and the Museum of Fine Arts have a record of recognizing claims on art sold under duress. The Met has settled eight claims for art looted by the Nazis or sold under duress since 1998, when the United States endorsed the international Washington Principles, which called for “just and fair” solutions in handling claims for looted art. In 2009, the Terezin Declaration, also approved by the United States, specified that this requirement also applied to sales under duress. The Museum of Fine Arts has previously settled heirs’ claims for 13 objects sold under duress. But in the cases of two works sold at a May 9, 1933 auction — Abraham Bloemaert’s 1596 painting “Moses Striking the Rock,” which is owned by the Met, and Joachim Anthoniesz Wtewael’s “Actaeon Watching Diana and Her Nymphs Bathing” from 1612, which is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts — the museums have taken a position at odds with other institutions who held Glaser works from that sale.
Rachel Nichols Will Not Work as Sideline Reporter for NBA Finals After Allegedly 'Racist' Comments
At NYT, "Rachel Nichols Out for N.B.A. Finals Coverage on ABC":
Comments made by Nichols that were caught on tape caused tremendous upheaval within ESPN over the past year. Nichols, who is white, suggested that a Black colleague, Maria Taylor, had been selected for a marquee job because of her race. When a sideline reporter first appeared on ABC’s broadcast of the N.B.A. finals on Tuesday night, it was not Rachel Nichols, an abrupt change announced by ESPN earlier in the day. It was an attempt to stanch a yearlong scandal that has spilled into public view about the company’s handling of conflicts centered around race. The decision to have Malika Andrews be the sideline reporter instead was made after The New York Times reported that Nichols, who is white, made disparaging comments about a Black colleague, Maria Taylor, last year. Among other things, Nichols said that Taylor was picked to host N.B.A. finals coverage last season because ESPN was “feeling pressure” about diversity. Nichols’s comments came during a private phone conversation while she was quarantined in a Florida hotel last July before the N.B.A. resumed its season, which had been paused because of the coronavirus pandemic. She was seeking career guidance from Adam Mendelsohn, the adviser and political strategist who works closely with the Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James. The phone call was accidentally captured on camera and uploaded to a server at the company’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn., then quickly spread widely among ESPN employees. “I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball,” Nichols told Mendelsohn during the call. “If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.” There have been wide-ranging discussions about the comments inside and outside of ESPN over the last two days, with former employees and even N.B.A. players weighing in. The Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant tweeted in support of Taylor, while some high-profile former ESPN employees — including Dan Le Batard and Jemele Hill — discussed the matter on Le Batard’s show Tuesday morning. In a sign of the sprawling complexity of the scandal, commentators weighed in on numerous topics, including ESPN’s discipline and management as well as the friendship and professional relationship between Nichols and Mendelsohn. Some focused on the privacy issues at play with the recorded phone call. Others, in a discussion about white privilege and career advancement, raised that Nichols is related by marriage to the famed broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer and the Academy Award-winning director Mike Nichols. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., addressed the situation at length during a news conference before tip-off of Game 1 between the Phoenix Suns and the Milwaukee Bucks. “It’s disheartening,” Silver said. He said that both Nichols and Taylor are “terrific” at their jobs, and that it was “unfortunate that two women in the industry are pitted against each other.” He said he would have thought that through difficult conversations “ESPN would have found a way to be able to work through it. Obviously not.”
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
The Return of Great-Power Subversion
It's Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, at Foreign Affairs, "A Measure Short of War: The Return of Great-Power Subversion":
In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a foreign power managed to exert what seemed like unprecedented influence over the sacred rites of American democracy. On social media, a legion of paid Russian trolls sowed discord, spreading pernicious falsehoods about the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and seeking to boost turnout for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Powerful Russians close to the Kremlin sought out contact with Trump and his courtiers, dangling the promise of damaging information about Clinton. State-sponsored hackers stole and leaked her campaign aides’ private emails. They went on to target election systems in all 50 states and even managed to infiltrate voter databases. The meddling set alarm bells ringing. “We have been attacked; we are at war,” the actor Morgan Freeman solemnly announced in a video in 2017 released by a group calling itself the Committee to Investigate Russia, which was backed by old U.S. intelligence hands such as James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA. A New York Times headline announced that “Russian cyberpower” had “invaded” the United States. Foreign policy experts predicted a coming wave of digital subversion, led by authoritarian states targeting their democratic rivals. “This digital ecosystem creates opportunities for manipulation that have exceeded the ability of democratic nations to respond, and sometimes even to grasp the extent of the challenge,” Alina Polyakova of the Brookings Institution testified before a congressional committee in 2019. “All democracies are current or potential future targets.” U.S. policymakers scrambled to react. In its final months, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats, seized Russian diplomatic property, and pledged that the United States would retaliate at a time and place of its choosing. In 2018, Congress created an entirely new agency—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security—to prevent similar intrusions in the future. The 2016 election may have been a rude wake-up call, but no one should have been surprised. Russia’s operation was just the latest instance of a pattern that stretches back in history as far as the eye can see. Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—has always been a part of great-power politics. What stands out as an anomaly is the brief period of extraordinary U.S. dominance, beginning after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United States appeared immune to malicious meddling by peer competitors, in large part because there weren’t any. Now, that dominance is beginning to wane. Great-power competition has returned—and with it, so has great-power subversion...
Monday, June 14, 2021
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
What Comes Next for Portland? (VIDEO)
At the New York Times, "After a Year of Protests, Portland Is Ready to Move On. But Where?":
PORTLAND, Ore. — Defund the police? City leaders in Portland tried it. A unit in the fire and rescue bureau, one of the first of its kind in a major city, began this year taking some 911 calls about people in crisis, especially those who are homeless. Instead of police officers with flashing lights and guns, a paramedic and a social worker would drive up offering water, a high-protein snack and, always and especially, conversation, aiming to defuse a situation that could otherwise lead to confrontation and violence. No power to arrest. No coercion. “Having someone show up and offer you goods rather than run you off is different, and people respond to it — it softens the mood,” said Tremaine Clayton, a burly, tattooed veteran of 20 years at the fire and rescue bureau who helps run the program. But this spring, just as the project was preparing for a major rollout into more neighborhoods, there was another plot twist: The new policing alternative was itself mostly defunded. The city decided on a go-slow approach, and the promised $4.8 million expansion evaporated. Portland, the Oregon city of bridges, bike lanes and left-leaning idealists — beloved, abhorred and caricatured in just about equal measure — is wrestling mightily with the question of what it means to make a city safe and, as it gradually opens up from the Covid-19 shutdowns, to feel safe, too. It is an issue that many American cities are addressing as the economic and societal disruptions of the past year linger and resonate. Violent crime, especially homicide, has spiked in most urban areas during the pandemic, and many police departments are facing new scrutiny about training and bias since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis a year ago. But here in the nation’s 25th-largest metropolitan area, with about 2.5 million people, there is an additional factor that ripples through every public policy choice, and that even the city’s top prosecutor said has to a degree warped the debate about what to do to rebuild a city that Portlanders want and love. A hardened core of street activists, many of them professing opposition to authority in general, has dug in and shows no signs of going away. (Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has asked people to stop calling them protesters, but rather what they call themselves: anarchists.) Their numbers are now down to perhaps 25 to 75 on any given night, compared with hundreds in late 2020 and the many thousands who marched last summer in protests after Mr. Floyd’s murder. But they have shown themselves at times to be violent — one was charged with attempted murder after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the police — destructive of property and highly adaptable, using social media tools and other strategies to divert the police from the targets they select. Direct actions are promoted on social media with the phrase “No gods, no masters,” a 19th-century anarchist term that indicates a rejection of all forms of authority. More traditional protesters from Black Lives Matter and other movements who try to curtail violence are now ridiculed as “peace police” by the anarchists, who mostly consist of young, white men. Demetria Hester, a member of Moms United for Black Lives, continues to push for defunding the police but disagrees with the current call for dismantling the entire political system. “Breaking windows is performative,” she said. “That satisfies them at night, but they don’t have a plan.” Some prominent Black leaders have been formally distancing themselves, with some calling the anarchists’ rejection of gradual progress just another symbol of privilege that Black people do not have. “Being able to protest every night is a white privilege, being able to yell at a police’s face is a white privilege,” said Gregory McKelvey, a prominent Black organizer who ran the mayoral campaign last year for Mr. Wheeler’s opponent, Sarah Iannarone. “Most Black people across the country do everything they can to avoid cops.” Still, Mr. McKelvey has empathy for those who feel that taking to the streets is their only outlet. “These are people who have felt like they’ve had no agency or power in their life or in the political system,” he said. “They want to feel powerful, and when you can have the mayor talking about you every single day, and hundreds of police officers show up to fight you every day, you feel more powerful than when you’re sitting at home.” The protests have led to vicious finger-pointing over who was to blame for the serial destruction that has left so many downtown storefronts shattered and covered with plywood.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Monday, June 7, 2021
Odds Are You Won't Live to See Tomorrow...
I drop my youngest son off at school on M-W-Fridays.
Our normal routine is to put his shoes on when we get there, as it's easier to get him out of the house. I nevertheless have to be inventive sometimes while tying his shoes ... because my boy's so full of energy, he sometimes forgets to focus on the task at hand! So, a couple of days ago I starting singing to distract my son a bit ... I sang, "Secret Secret agent man, secret agent man ... They've given you a number and taken away your name..." It worked, and now my boy wants me to sing Johnny Rivers to him every morning! It would help to have the rest of the lyrics down, so please enjoy this raw footage of "Secret Agent Man":
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