Who are the Houthis and what do they want?

Thanks to the ever-expanding conflict in the Middle East triggered by the war that Trump and Netanyahu launched against Iran, the news forces us to confront information about the geography and politics of the region.

As an example, we recently learned that the Houthis (or Ansar Allah to give them their formal name) had made a lightning advance along the coast of Yemen, ending up capturing various strategic locations such as the islands of Perim and the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands, giving them significant control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait that lies at the gateway to the Red Sea, a key artery for shipping in the Middle East.

So who are the Houthis and how have they been able to take over much of Yemen? Western media has painted this as a proxy war between two old rivals, the Houthis being backed by Iran, and the weak Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia. But Yohannes Woldemariam writes that this is a far too simplistic an account of a conflict that long predates any Iranian involvement and that the Houthis should be viewed more as a lately-created informal partner of Iran rather than a proxy.

To understand who [the Houthis] are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. The Iran Primer’s account of the movement’s origins traces this history well before Iranian military assistance became important.
…

Yemen’s history also warns against reducing the conflict to an ancient Sunni and Shi’a confrontation. In 1962, republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt intervened on the republican side, eventually sending tens of thousands of soldiers, while Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Sunni.

[Read more…]

The Lincoln pool debacle continues

I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.

I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.
[Read more…]

US sinks deeper into the Middle East quagmire

It should be no surprise that Trump and Hegseth have been hiding the true costs of the Iran war from the public all the time and the Republican leadership in Congress has abetted this deception. Even right at the beginning, when Trump declared that the US strikes had totally obliterated Iran’s capabilities, it appears that Iran had severely damaged US bases in the region. The evidence is coming out now in the form of photographs sent to US media by service members in the region.

CBS News obtained and broadcast some of the footage.

The Intercept reports on the costs and the unrelenting attacks on US bases that has brought the US to “the brink of a breakdown”.
[Read more…]

AI generates a Navier-Stokes controversy

There is no question that AI systems, in addition to producing vast amount of junk known as AI slop, are also capable of solving major problems in mathematics and science. The problem is that the culture in which these private companies operate is very different for the culture of academic research. While academic researchers can be very competitive and argue over priority, there are some basic norms that they adhere to, such as acknowledging and giving appropriate credit to others in the field. This last week saw those two cultures collide.

Most people are familiar with Newton’s laws of motion that relates the forces acting on a system to its motion. The simplest case that is used in introducing the subject is where there is a constant force acting on single solid object. The situation becomes more complicated when there are multiple variable forces acting on many particles that are under various constraints, and thenthe equations take much more complicated forms.

One of the most important of such cases is where variable forces act on fluids, and the most general form of that situation is the Navier-Stokes equations that were developed by various people and achieved their final form around 1850. These equations are applicable to a vast array of physical phenomena, such as weather or shock waves or currents. They are partial differential equations which are notoriously difficult to solve and my own research did not deal with them at all. But the equations are of such importance that in 2000, one important aspect of the equations was selected as a Millennium Prize Problem, with a prize of $1 million to whoever solved it.
[Read more…]

Will this year be another Texas mirage?

Texas has long been a tease for Democrats. While it used to reliably elect Democrats to major offices, in the mid-1990s, it swung sharply to the right and since then has consistently elected Republicans to statewide positions. Democrats have felt that they had a chance to regain ground in previous election cycles but after some glimmers of hope, Republicans were able to beat back the challenges.

This year seems to provide one of the best chances to get a US senate seat with James Talarico competing against Ken Paxton. Paxton is widely viewed as a weak candidate, who is scandal-plagued on many fronts both major and minor, public and personal, in addition to having a lackluster personality. While being a state official on a $153,000 salary, he has managed to acquire 15 properties and has refused to give an accounting. Since he is the Texas attorney general, no charges were filed against him. Republicans would have had a much better chance if they had renominated incumbent senator John Cornyn but Trump, out of a sense of pique because Cornyn was not totally servile to him, threw his weight behind Paxton and got him the nomination.
[Read more…]

Another view of Gloria Steinem

The death last week of Gloria Steinem at the age of 92 saw many tributes to someone who was widely viewed as a feminist icon. She was outspoken, photogenic, instantly recognizable with her long hair and aviator glasses, and had the knack of saying things that captured attention. She was much sought after by the mainstream media whenever they were looking for someone to provide a feminist viewpoint, especially after she founded the pioneering Ms. magazine.

But Jenny Brown argues that there was another Gloria Steinem who was no feminist trailblazer but someone who actually betrayed the radical roots of the feminist movement by taking it in a neoliberal direction, which was why she became a favorite of the political establishment and the mainstream media, sucking attention way from the more radical feminists who came before her. Her dominance tended to obliterate the major role that many other feminists played in laying the groundwork for the advances. Her focus on individual liberation also undermined the collective liberation that more radical feminists felt was necessary for full emancipation.
[Read more…]

Laughable status seeking

I am aware that there is an accessory known as the ‘Birkin bag‘, created by the fashion house Hermès in response to a need expressed by the late actor Jane Birkin. It has become a much-sought-after status symbol that the manufacturer exploits by imposing scarcity that results in prices ranging from $10,000 to $500,000. It has a waiting list for up to six years and is often resold at higher prices. It is an example of a Veblen good, named after the economist Thorstein Veblen who described “a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve”, making them visible examples of conspicuous consumption and thus status-seeking symbols.

But just having a lot of money is not enough to get this bag and some people go to extraordinary lengths to try and obtain one, as this article attests.
[Read more…]

The Fetterman problem

There has been a long-standing feature in the Democratic party of people being elected as Democrats, even on somewhat progressive platforms, and then abandoning their constituents and cozying up to Republicans. While they often vote against their own party on crucial issues, the party leadership hesitates to call them out, partly because they need their vote on other issues and partly because their potential defection gives the party leadership an excuse to water down their policies in the service of their neoliberal ideology. In the House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard is an example. In the US Senate, examples are Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema, all of whom thankfully have died or left office. But now we have John Fetterman.

This article says that former Fetterman staffer are revealing that he does not seem to be interested in doing the work of being a senator.
[Read more…]

Is Mitch McConnell alive?

There is nothing that illustrates how privileged members of the US legislature are than the situation with Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell who is 84 years old and has been in obvious serious physical and cognitive decline for quite some time. He was last seen taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Public emergency services records indicate that paramedics were called to his Washington address on 14 June, where they administered CPR on an unconscious person who was allegedly suffering a cardiac arrest – one whose identity has been withheld. McConnell had been in a Washington DC area hospital ever since.

Since then he has not been seen or heard from in public. The long silence resulted in demands for proof that he was still alive. Although some congressional Republicans say that they have spoken to him, Republicans now routinely lie about pretty much anything as long as it serves their interests so this was greeted with some skepticism. You can see why they would lie. If McConnell is dead, then the governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear would be able to appoint an interim until a special election were held and Republicans would not want to have a Democratic senator replace a Republican one, given how small their current majority is.
[Read more…]

The value of public libraries

I am a big believer in public libraries, seeing them as one of the great egalitarian institutions, enabling anyone to gain access to the world of information and entertainment even if they have no money. But for precisely that reason, the rapacious capitalists in the US dislike them, since in their view the idea that something should be offered free to everyone is anathema. It is part of their effort to undermine access to what are clearly social goods, such as universal free health care and free public education.

So defenders of libraries need to have all the arguments to combat the capitalists who use social conservatives to attack libraries because they have offerings that do not conform to their personal prejudices.

Ashlie D. Stevens writes that the Chicago Public Library system has introduced a novel idea. At the bottom of each check out receipt, it tells the user how much money they saved by using the library and not buying the items.

One afternoon I came home with “Magic Is Dead: My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians,” “Village School” and “Cold Comfort Farm,” a stack suggesting either eclectic tastes or a person throwing darts at a bookshelf. Shortly afterward, I received the standard email from the library listing my new acquisitions and their due dates.

Then, underneath the administrative business, came a little piece of information I had somehow never noticed before: You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!

I stared at this. My first thought was not, “What a compelling demonstration of the economic value of municipal services.”

My first thought was: I want that number higher.

I took a screenshot and sent it to my sister, who lives in another state.

“Oh, that’s satisfying,” she replied. “I wish my library did that.”

She was right. Somewhere inside me, a tiny rewards-program customer had been activated.

After that, I started browsing the library website differently: less like a catalog, more like a streaming service with unusually eccentric licensing agreements. Did I need the complete box set of “Nip/Tuck”? Maybe. A Blu-ray collection of British noir? Quite possibly. What about both movies called “The Illusionist” — the bittersweet French animated one about an aging magician and the Edward Norton one in which he is also, confusingly, a magician?

If the library adds up all the savings of all its users, the number it arrives at would be a powerful and tangible demonstration of how important libraries are to people and communities. I am going to suggest this idea to the two local libraries that I frequent.

I own a lot of books. But many of them, including the one I am currently reading, were first borrowed from the library and then, while reading them, I decided that I wanted to own them for future reference or other reasons.