Crisis week for Biden?

     To read the NYT or Washington Post, you would assume the Biden administration was going down in disgrace.  Instead of celebrating or at least citing the statistics of the largest ever airlift of civilians from a war zone, all the media can do is push the " bungled" operation.   In the wake of the most powerful storm ever to hit Louisiana, all the pundits can do is lament the situation is not as bad as after Katrina, hoping for photos of people clinging to rooftops awaiting rescue.

      Biden is far from perfect, but so far an administration built on people with real world expertise instead of political connections or nepotism has so far negotiated the challenges of a balky congress, the Afghan withdrawal and Hurricane Ida with competence if not aplomb.   

The Brown Ocean

       Amid the coverage of Hurricane Ida as it hit Louisiana yesterday, I was struck by a phrase used by Al Roker to describe the counterintuitive status quo as the storm stayed a category 4 even several hours after making landfall.  Roker said the saturated soil and wet marshy areas acted like a "brown ocean", supplying the storm with moisture.   I guess we'll have to get used to a new nomenclature as climate change becomes more entrenched.

      Hurricanes which strengthen from a Cat 1 to a monster 4 overnight.  Western states where wildfires burn areas the size of Connecticut in a week and third world countries facing drought induced famine.  Meanwhile, we argue about whether to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.  What is wrong with this picture?

This ain't beanbag

       Nearly 24 hours after an attack at the Kabul airport left 13 soldiers dead, howls of grief from left, right and center bombarded anyone watching cable news.  Had these same men and women died at a remote outpost in the Afghanistan while the country was fully occupied I wonder how much outrage would have been displayed.

   Of course the above was a rhetorical question.   The American foreign policy blob is firmly in favor of continuing the policy of Empire, built on the bones of thousands of American casualties and hundreds of thousands of dead in occupied countries.   Ask Vietnam, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan how they like American intervention in their countries.   The constituency for empire is outraged Biden is ending the profitable Afghan intervention.  He is one of their own, but has proved less pliable than his predecessors.  Does he have the courage to end the Pax Americana?

Messy, but realistic

      The Biden administration is being tested by two very different crises which will impact its ability to govern through 2024.   The withdrawal from Afghanistan is being handled about as well as can be expected considering the policy goals Biden has advocated for years.  No matter what the armchair generals and keyboard commandos say, there was no realistic way to make up for 20 years of bad decisions in 6 months.   Combine that with the military brasses' slow motion sabotage of the withdrawal and you have handed the war cheering media a club with which to beat the government.

      The Covid crisis presents a very different problem to Biden's administration.  A small but very vocal anti-vax and right wing minority are willing to swallow any anti science stupidity if it advances their nihilistic agenda.   Again, the media has in many cases played the useful idiot for the unvaccinated, portraying thugs like Ron Desantis as heroes.   Meanwhile, no matter what we do in the US, the majority of the global population remains out of reach of the vaccine and perhaps worse strains than the Delta variant are even now breeding among them.   

     As Ezra Klein points out in a column in the NYT, America's foreign policy for too long has defaulted to a militaristic solution.   We have put ourselves in an impossible position in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan by using military force as policy.   We can do better.  

National politics gets local

       The front page of my local paper reflected a more national issue this morning as a local man with a shotgun was arrested yesterday after he aimed the weapon at another man and screamed at him "You don't belong here" or words to that effect.   Casey Nolan, whose name would seem to bely a foreign ethnic background immediately called police who arrested the unnamed man on weapons charges. 

      What is going on in our country?   Obviously, the arrested man has been mainlining far right wing news for a very long time to get to where he is right now.   The fact he was willing to wave a weapon in the direction of a fellow citizen and scream racist rants is a troubling escalation in the direction pointed to by the January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted the Capitol.   These people are starting to confuse right wing fantasy with reality and it is likely to get worse instead of better.  Fortunately in this case, no one was hurt.  However it is just a matter of time before someone's perceived grievance leads to tragedy.   I would like to say we are better than this, but stories like this sometimes make me doubt the comity of my fellow Americans.

A definite upgrade

        As of 12:01 this morning, New York has a new governor.   Kathy Hocul, an upstate politician who served as Lt. Governor under Andrew Cuomo during his second and third terms becomes the first female governor of the state.

       Much like Kirsten Gillibrand, Hocul was elected to Congress from a fairly conservative upstate district in 2011 in a special election to replace a Republican accused of sexual impropriety.  After losing following redistricting, she became Cuomo's running mate in his second run for governor.  She has moved far to the left of her original political views as she ran statewide campaigns.  It remains to be seen how she will act as governor in blue state NY.

      It is really not a tough act to follow.  Cuomo was/is widely reviled in New York.  Even before his sexual harassments were revealed, his penchant for hardball politics, often at the expense of the liberal agenda made him a pariah in progressive circles.   Hocul starts her time as governor with a honeymoon as politicians on both sides of the aisle try to determine how she will handle the reins of power.  As I said, as long as she can avoid scandal, she can hardly do worse than Cuomo.   I look forward to a less corrupt New York and hope she can build momentum to run for a full term next year.

I'm seeing fire and rain

      Apologies to James Taylor, but his aptly titled song fits the time today perhaps more than when he wrote it.   Central Tennessee was inundated by up to 17 inches of rain which turned placid creeks into raging rivers and has killed 22 people and counting.   Tropical Storm Henri while not a significant wind event continues to pound the coastal northeast US with up to 8 inches of rain in some places.  Scientists tell us a warming atmosphere can hold much more moisture leading to the tragedy in Tenn. and the ongoing thrashing of the Northeast.

     Meanwhile, the west continues to burn as the years long drought conditions also exacerbated by climate change place agriculture and people in the crosshairs of water restrictions.   There may be enough water for continued growth in the west, but the spectacle of watering lawns in the desert will rapidly become an historic anomaly.  

     Our response to the slow motion disaster which is climate change will be judged harshly by future generations.  I don't subscribe to doomsday scenarios, but our descendants will be cleaning up our mistakes for generations and they won't be happy about it.   Like the tobacco companies before them, the fossil fuel industry has known about the pernicious effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for at least 50 years and has passively and actively sabotaged efforts to reduce our dependence on coal and oil.   The industry must acknowledge its complicity and begin amelioration efforts.  In other news, the government has announced we will all be getting ponies for Christmas...

Time to suck it up

     As one commentator put it yesterday," There is no plan for the loser of a military engagement to disengage without a certain amount of chaos".   Ask Napoleon about the retreat from Moscow, or the German army from Stalingrad!  As the armchair quarterbacks spend time second guessing how the withdrawal from Kabul could have been better planned, most could offer no better solution than putting more troops in harm's way.  

     The whiplash effect of the war's cheerleaders is stunning.   The same people who would pour more soldiers into the meat grinder to supposedly safeguard Afghan women and children oppose any efforts to resettle our allies in the US as the war winds down.   Suck it up buttercups!

The weeds are coming for you

       As a young man, I was managing a wholesale nursery in the 1970s on Long Island.   The number one cost  to management was weed control.  At the time there were a limited number of approved herbicides to control the pests.  Hand and machine cultivation, including mule powered implements were the go to methods until the advent of Roundup.  Targeted application enabled control of perennial weeds such as quackgrass that spready by underground rhizomes.  

      Simultaneously, corn and soybean growers across the country were planting so called "Roundup ready" seeds which provided genetic resistance to Roundup.   Farmers merely waited until the weeds sprouted, sprayed their fields and waited for the weeds to die.   Roundup took over the market because it was cheap and effective on commodity crops.

     The corollary was chemical companies quit trying to develop new chemicals due to the cheapness and effectiveness of Roundup.   An article in today's NYT chronicles the rise of weeds resistant to Roundup and older, more problematic chemicals such as dicamba.  So called "no till" farming depends on herbicides to control weeds and provide cheap animal feed which allows us to indulge our taste for beef, pork, and chicken.  Now, with the rise of "superweeds", our entire agricultural economy teeters on the brink of disaster and most of us don't realize how close we are to $20.00/lb. hamburger.  

To go or not to go

       The American public reminds me of an episode in my oldest daughter's childhood.  The Divine Mrs. M was going to the store and asked Alicia if she wanted to go with her.  My precious 5 year old said yes, until I offered an adventure at home, the nature of which I can't recall.  Alicia said yes, I want to stay.  Over the next couple of minutes, she vacillated between staying and going, finally bursting into tears.

     Long story short, that is how many Americans are treating the shit show in Afghanistan.   Most people want to see the intervention end after 20 fruitless years.   However, under the constant bombardment of media coverage of the chaos at the Kabul airport many now support pouring more troops into the maelstrom.  A calm day at the airport changes public opinion yet again.   No matter what the talking heads and opinion pages say, it was always going to be a traumatic experience.  Disengagement without a clear winner is distasteful to a public led to believe in the omniscience of the military.

    The Biden administration has opted to go, believing that ultimately, the public has had enough of this particular quagmire.  If we can somehow pull our Afghan allies out of the maelstrom in the coming weeks, Joe and company will be vindicated.  If, however there is escalating media coverage of innocents being killed by a vicious Taliban, all bets are off.

Dreaming an impossible dream

        At least one media pundit, Nicole Wallace on MSNBC, predicted 95% of the American people agree with Joe Biden's decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, while 95% of the media will oppose it.   As the endless loop of images of the chaos in the last open airport in the country is beamed at a relatively apathetic American public, Wallace's prediction is being borne out.

      It seems literally hundreds of thousands of Afghans want out of their country now the Taliban has taken it.   If Biden opened wide the Golden Door to admit most of these refugees, the same media that has played these images of anarchy would crucify him for admitting potential terrorists.

     The national security state we have become under all the presidents since 9/11 became committed to the conflict in Afghanistan.   Despite the fact we defeated the Taliban in 2001 the Bush administration refused to accept their surrender.  20 years later, we now have a significant portion of the population dependent on American money and protection.   The military-industrial complex in this country is invested in "forever wars" like Afghanistan for fun and profit and the human suffering the warfare causes is collateral damage.  Biden ripped off the band-aid and it remains to be seen if the wound will heal.

Who indeed

       If the collapse of Afghanistan and the US policies which brought about the debacle we witnessed yesterday had occurred in the 1980s, whole forests' worth of newsprint would have been required to document the various causes.   Thankfully, in the digital age, most of the BS is online, so at least we are better off ecologically speaking.

      Joe Biden got it right yesterday when he said it would not have mattered if America spent another 83 billion dollars to prop up the government and military we installed in Afghanistan.  The result would have been the same 5 years or 50 years later.  The foreign policy and military elites of our country are committed to a policy of defending the American Empire even as its underpinnings melt away in the 21st century.   Forever wars in places like Afghanistan are to these people the price the rest of us must pay for the privilege of letting them decide the fate of the world.

     In the frenzy of the moment, let's not get caught up in blaming tRump or Biden as the architects of the stunning events in Kabul.   The "loss" of Afghanistan began the day the shrub, Cheney and Rumsfeld began to plan the invasion of Iraq.  To their credit, tRump and Biden had the courage to at least begin the reversal of a shameful and wasteful episode in our history.  It may take a while, but they will be judged more kindly in this regard than their predecessors, including Obama.

It's about time

      As the Delta variant of the  Covid 19  coronavirus continues to rampage across the country, those of us who did the right thing and got vaccinated are calling out the anti-vaxxers for the idiots they are.  In a powerful tik tok video I saw this morning an outraged man whose wife's cancer treatment was cut short by the hospital because of Covid admissions had a message for unvaccinated would be patients.   If you are truly convinced the pandemic is a hoax, then live or die by your conviction.  If you don't trust the healthcare professionals who advised you to get the shot, why should you trust them to treat you if you contract the disease.  Stay home and let those with non Covid medical issues get the treatment they need. In an F bomb sprinkled appeal, the tik tok man basically advised non vaccinated people with Covid to stay home and die.

      Meanwhile, we fight about mask mandates when data tells us masking and social distancing can cut transmission by up to 83%.   The Divine Mrs. M and I are renting a cabin on a bucolic lake in the Southern Adirondacks along with our eldest daughters and their families and are sweltering in non airconditioned glory.  We made a trip to Lake George to indulge in some ice cream at a local landmark and along with several hundred people we waited patiently in line for our treats.  A very small minority of those in line were masked in the sultry night air.  I wonder how many were vaccinated...

Meeting the challenge

       As the brief reign of the Olympics coverage begins to recede, the drumbeat of  Covid stories and climate change Op-Eds are taking center stage.  A 100,000 Americans contracted the Covid virus on Friday.   Major league baseball was impacted as players are experiencing breakthrough infections which will potentially change  playoff races.   Meanwhile, three quarters of a million people are gathering in Sturgis, S. Dakota for the annual motorcycle rally and supespreader event.

      Most Americans believe in science, endorse the idea that climate change is an existential threat and are being vaccinated against Covid.   However,  a significant minority which seems to overlap with membership in the Republican party want to deny human induced climate change and vaccination to combat Covid.   They are in turn driven by a small group of grifters, influencers and cranks who are either making money or tying to score political points from these twin disasters.

      The Divine Mrs. M is of the opinion one of the major political parties in our country has gone off the rails and she is frustrated that so many of her countrymen cannot see the proverbial forest for the trees.  I have argued that many of these people are scared and scared people sometimes do stupid things.  It is up to everyone to unite to meet the challenges ahead.   As the pictures of floods, wildfires and other manifestations of climate change innundate the media and Covid surges, I  believe a large majority of my fellow citizens will realize collective action is needed in both cases.  We don't have a Plan B...

Soft fascism

       I mentioned to the Divine Mrs. M the other night over dinner that Tucker Carlson was in Hungary for the purpose of plumping Victor Orban.   Who is Victor Orban and what is so important about Hungary she replied.

     Aside from political science majors or eastern European immigrants, very few Americans have followed the descent of many nations in this region to the soft fascism exemplified by Orban.   From throttling the media to enlisting labor unions and thought leaders to spread the gospel of illiberalism, Orban is supplying like minded Americans (looking at you, Ron DeSantis) with a blueprint for destroying real democracy with a version which leaves him with a dictator's prerogatives.

     Fear of the other and convincing the average Hungarian that he has all the answers to the questions that bedevil people in a time of rapid change.  The wave of Muslims from the Middle East who fled to Europe in the wake of the Iraq war and its aftermath are the issue Orban rode to power and despite the mere trickle of said immigrants allowed into his country, he has convinced many they are the root of all problems facing the average citizen.  

     Carlson and his ilk on the American right are looking for a homegrown Orban to lead the movement.  Donald Trump was an imperfect vessel for the movement.  tRump is far more interested in self enrichment and aggrandizement to connect with the American everyman who is receptive to the Orban message.   If the Koch supported right finds such a person, they will relentlessly promote him and a vision of a dystopic America most thinking people would find abhorrent.  Keep your eye on Hungary.  It may be our future.

Constant uncertainty

       Maybe nowhere else in the world has life been so certain as it has been for white people in America during the past 70 years.  For the most part, weather was benign and predictable, middle class life was attainable for most whites and America was indisputably the leader of the "Free World" of other countries dominated by white people.   The overwhelming majority agreed with the tenets of science and expected their children to be better off than themselves.

     The past few years have upended virtually all these assumptions.  No longer can whites expect their children will do better.   The climate we took for granted is going to hell, America is now more a pariah than a leader in the international community.   A numerous minority of our fellow citizens disdain science.  Finally, the coronavirus has made daily life a gamble as science deniers and anti-vaxxers refuse the vaccine which will potentially bring the disease under control.  

     How did we come to this pass?   Which generation do we blame?   What can we do to reverse the malaise?  I don't know the answers, but I do no we must keep asking the questions.   

Andrew, we hardly knew ye

       It's time for Andrew Cuomo to say goodbye to politics.   The evidence of sexual harassment against him is overwhelming.   His sense of entitlement in the face of charges against him is nearly unbelievable.

    Virtually every New York state Democrat as well as both NY Senators and the president is calling for his resignation.   I have to laugh at my local congresscritter, Elise Stefanik.  Self righteously calling for Cuomo's head, she conveniently forgets how she made excuses for the serial sexual escapades of the former guy.  Virtually no Republican can call out Cuomo if they continue to  support tRump.

     It's time Andrew.   Do the right thing for the sake of democracy if not for your own personal legacy.

Freedom or defense of privilege

        One of the problems with the Covid 19 epidemic is its resemblance to the flu.   Both are respiratory diseases capable of causing hospitalization and death.   However, Covid is much more deadly.   As many as 30,000 Americans will die this year from complications arising from a flu diagnosis.  Nearly 600,000 of us died last year from Covid.   The other difference is the normal flu vaccine is a hit or miss proposition.  Since I turned 65, I have gotten a flu shot every year in hopes of avoiding flu.  But in a bad year, the shot provides little or no protection.   The Covid vaccines on the other hand are up to 95% effective.  It's a no-brainer to get the shot.

     Many people have decided with lots of help from social media, GOP politicians and Faux News they have the "Freedom" to not be vaccinated as if it is some heroic act on their part.  Some have a real hesitancy, based on historical abuse of the system, but for most it is a decision framed by political and tribal loyalties, which are in turn in many cases driven by dark money flowing into ads designed to encourage hesitation.

    If you bragged about your ability to drive drunk, most people would think you a social monster who has no empathy for her fellow citizens.  Why then aren't you doing the exact same thing by refusing to help prevent the spread of a deadly infection by receiving an effective vaccine?   

    As Paul Krugman points out in today's NYT, politicians like Ron DeSantis in Florida who oppose mask and vaccine mandates are doing so to protect the privilege of mostly white people to do as they please, regardless of consequences.   In this case, freedom is literally just another word for nothing left to lose, including your life and that of those you cherish.

Climate change follies

       Heading out to the store on the 1st day of August, I felt the need for a sweatshirt and long pants to combat the 60 degree temperature at noon in Plattsburgh.   The first week of August  is traditionally the hottest of the year.   As I embarked on my expedition, people were sporting a mixed bag of apparel ranging from summer gear like shorts, tank tops and sandals to several people dressed to handle a noreaster.  I eventually shed the heavy sweatshirt, but the forecast for the week ahead provides opportunities to continue to dress like it is late September.

     While much of the nation sweltered through July and is promised more of the same in August, partsof the northeast and eastern Canada have experienced extremely cool and wet weather.   According to the long range forecast under a climate change regime this kind of weather is to be expected in this area.  As the Greenland ice sheet continues to melt at a rapid pace, it disrupts the normal atmospheric conditions which bring summer warmth to this corner of the world.  So, no palm trees will be lining the streets of Montreal, at least in the short term.