The US is a dying democracy

One way that democracies end is suddenly, by means of a coup or other other extra-legal or quasi-legal means that replace an elected government by an unelected one.

But democracies can also die slowly. While the functions of governments are supposed to be based on the laws and constitutions that prescribe how they should operate, those cannot cover every possible eventuality. The filling of those gaps is heavily dependent on institutions and norms that have been built up over time. These institutions are the legal system, a free press, trade unions, and public interest groups that protect the rights of minorities and individuals against the unchecked use and abuse of governmental power. Democracies die more slowly when those institutions and norms that form the foundation upon which democracies are based are eroded and become merely shells and thus effectively eliminated. [Read more…]

How much license does a writer of nonfiction have?

The 1936 Berlin Olympics is recalled as the effort by Adolf Hitler to showcase Germany as a prosperous modern state that showed the superiority of the Aryan race. This effort was dented by Jesse Owens, the Black American athlete who won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay. But there was another event, rowing, in which the American team edged out the Italian team to second and the German team to third place. The nine-member American team was all white so this result had no racial implications but it still stung for the Germans who had hoped to get the gold. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering all were present for this event and were seemingly excited when it seemed like the German team would win, only to be deflated at the last minute.

The book The Boys on the Boat by Daniel James Brown tells this story. Rowing had long been dominated n the US by the east coast Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and by Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, but this American team was made up of mostly people with working class backgrounds at the University of Washington.
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Distinguishing between long-term and short-term trends

When it comes to gauging the public mood on issues of importance, we tend to be overly swayed by the results of high-profile elections. For example, when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, it seemed to suggest that the country was beginning the process of overcoming its deep history of racism. But other than those conservatives who argued that this showed that systemic racism was over, few were naive enough to think that it marked the end of racial discrimination, and that much still needed to be done. But the feeling was that there was a positive trajectory. Trump’s election in 2012 shifted the mood back towards darkness, suggesting that overt racism was indeed alive and well. Joe Biden’s election seemed to suggest a swing back towards more positive attitudes on a whole range of social issues. But the last election has made many people feel depressed, that we have actually regressed quite a bit, and maybe entering a period that has attitudes more reminiscent of the 1950s when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

I think that this deep pessimism is mistaken. There are surface and deep changes that take place in any society at the same time and one must distinguish between them. The former are like the ripples on waves on the ocean that can change fairly quickly while the latter are the deep ocean currents that change slowly. The former are short term swings in attitudes while the latter are deep-seated. We have to remember that relatively small changes in voting patterns, of the order of a few percent, can produce huge swings in election results, and some of that swing may be due to ephemeral factors.
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Book review: Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain

This book by one of the best-known celebrity chefs, that has the subtitle Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, describes the world of haute cuisine, of fancy restaurants serving French food or offering other forms of high-end dining, and what goes on behind he scenes in the kitchens. The food that he talks about is completely foreign to me, not even recognizing the names of the dishes or the chefs and restaurants he talks about. For me, food is something I feel that I have to eat in order to stay alive. I am not a good cook and tend to prepare and eat the same damn dull things over and over. So when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book and can strongly recommend it, it has to be because it is much more than about food.

So what made me decide to read the book in the first place? I first encountered Bourdain when I learned that one of his episodes on his long-running CNN documentary series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown dealt with Sri Lanka. I watched that and then watched a few other episodes. These shows were much more than about food, they were about the countries and the cultures he visited. What struck me about Bourdain was how comfortable he seemed in the many diverse cultures he encountered. He seemed to fit right in. He would eat whatever food they ate, without reservations. In his book, he says that he never shied away from any food at all as long as he was pretty sure it would not kill him. And the test of that was whether the locals ate it. He would eat and live in the way the locals did. If they sat on the floor, he sat on the floor. If they ate with their fingers, he ate with their fingers. If they ate with chopsticks, he ate with chopsticks. If they used banana leaves as plates, so did he. If they killed their food in the wild before eating it, and even ate it raw, so would he. He seemed to be completely at home, wherever he was.
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Biden will leave office with the blood of Gazans on his hands

There is finally talk of a possible ceasefire to end the carnage in Gaza, although the Israeli government is still delaying full acceptance, no doubt because the bloodlust of its extremists has not yet been satiated. While any cessation in the wanton killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military is to be welcomed, Jonah Valdez writes that the details of the deal show that it is almost the same as the one that fell apart over the past summer.

“This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring,” Biden said, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “The road to this deal has not been easy — I’ve reached this point because of the pressure that Israel put on Hamas, backed by the United States.”

It was a clear attempt by Biden to claim credit for the historic agreement forged in Doha, Qatar — a final part of his legacy on his way out of the White House. And it was a bid to take some of the spotlight from President-elect Donald Trump, who declared the deal “could have only happened” because of his involvement. 

But experts and Palestinian Americans who have been advocating for a ceasefire for months saw Biden’s speech as an admission that a deal should and could have happened far sooner, a delay resulting in the deaths of thousands more Palestinians, as well as Israeli hostages. And now, as the deal is set to go into effect on Sunday, many worry about how many more lives could still be lost between now and then. 

“It’s welcome, of course, and very, very, very long overdue — this could’ve been reached six, seven months ago,” said Khaled Elgindy, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. 

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Kurt Gödel’s belief in the afterlife

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a powerful logician whose contributions to logic, mathematics, and philosophy were immense. He was deeply interested in those aspects of philosophy that touched on religion and one of those was his ontological proof for God’s existence.

The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm’s ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.” A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.
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Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was “satisfied” with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”[2] Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott’s, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott’s version, in 1987.

(For more see Oppy, Graham. 2017. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.)
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Palisades fire and Monday morning quarterbacking

The fires that are raging in southern California are taking a terrible toll on lives and property. They have been intensified by the strong Santa Ana winds that reached high speeds passing through the funnel that makes up the valley and feeding on the dry vegetation.

Of course, whenever a disaster like this strikes, there is immediate finger-pointing at :(1) who or what might have been the cause of the fire; (2) who might be responsible for not responding correctly and quickly enough; and (3) who might be responsible for not anticipating the scale of the disaster and making sure that the response would be adequate. Some of this finger pointing is by people acting to deflect attention from themselves. But others indulging in this activity are those who have no connection to the events nor have any particular expertise in this area but still think they know what should have been done to deal with it and are not shy about sharing their conclusions.

Kevin Drum writes that this kind of after-the-fact pontificating is useless when you are dealing with events that lie outside the normal range that can be, and have been, anticipated, and this fire is one such event. He takes aim at one particular accusation, that authorities had not taken into account the amount of water needed is such a fire occurred in this location, and that using sea water or desalinated water would have helped.
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Would-be ‘Pizzagate’ avenger shot dead by police

One of the more bizarre episodes of the lunatic QAnon conspiracies was the widely circulated ‘Pizzagate’ story of how the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria known as Comet Ping Pong was the location where prominent Democratic politicians indulged in sex with minors, and where their orders for pizza were in code where the toppings represented the kind of victim they sought.

One man Edgar Maddison Welch believed the story and felt that it was his duty to stop this crime and so in 2016 he heavily armed himself with an AR-15 and other guns and drove about 350 miles from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina to stop it. Along the way, he made a recording to his family explaining what he planned to do and telling them that he would likely end up dead. Fortunately, things did not end badly, at least on that day. Arriving at the pizzeria, he searched the place after the terrified customers had fled and found that there was no basement and no nefarious activities going on and decided that he had been misled about the whole thing and surrendered himself. (You can read the more lurid details in my post from back in 2016.)

But last weekend, Welch was killed by police at a traffic stop in North Carolina.
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New DC ‘think tank’ staffed entirely by AI robots

Over at Drop Site, Waqas Ahmed, Murtaza Hussain, and Ryan Grim have unearthed a new DC ‘think tank’ called Beltway Grid. What was interesting was that they could not find any background to any of the people listed in its ‘About Us’ page. It seems to be populated entirely by non-persons.

In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.’s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.
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Peter Yarrow (1938-2025)

The folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary formed a major part of the soundtrack of my adolescence. Mary Travers died in 2009 at the age of 72 and today came news of the death of Peter Yarrow at the age of 86. They had wonderful harmony and were also politically progressive, lending their. names to all manner of actions in support of civil rights and opposing US wars. They had a string of hits.

Below is one of their less-well-known songs I Dig Rock and Roll Music that poked gentle fun at that other genre and contained impressions of The Mamas and the Papas, Donovan and The Beatles. Travers and Paul Stookey did the vocals on this one with Yarrow providing most of the guitar work.