. . . and I'll take you there.
I'll Take You There was a massive hit for The Staple Singers in 1972. Led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples on vocals and guitar, his three daughters, Mavis, Yvonne, and Cleotha, on vocals, and son Pervis on keyboards. Mavis would go on to have a long and successful solo career and also sang with Bob Dylan and The Band. She's 85 now.
"Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours."
- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, First Century AD
via Laudator Temporis Acti, also the source of the quote on this blog's masthead, "The Value of Useless Knowledge"
Along with facing disaster whichever candidate wins next week, we also face the prospect that one of them will lose. Do not expect the loser and their supporters to accept their fate with grace.
Should Trump lose he will roll out the 2020 Stop The Steal Playbook.(1) He will never accept any result when he loses. Remember, he didn't just say he won in 2020, he claimed he won in a landslide. Even when he wins, Trump makes outrageous claims; in 2016 he said that the result in California, a state he lost by 4 million votes, was rigged and he would have carried the state in an honest election.
He will once again rile up his hardcore supporters. Trump will have no strategy, no long-term plan; he just loves stirring stuff up and seeing that his supporters still love him. What happens next, since he is not the incumbent this time around, is hard to predict, but it will be ugly, and likely punctuated with violence, whatever form it takes. Expect to see attempts to get state legislatures refuse to certify electors, although I think the changes to the electoral college Congressional vote counting process made since 2021 make federal obstruction less likely. I see no sign that Trump will fade from the scene unless he is physically and/or mentally disabled, thus delaying the emergence of whatever will come as the next generation of GOP leaders (if there is still to be a GOP).
On the other side it is not a person who is of concern - it's Democrats. Harris is a nothing and if she loses her political career is ended. Other than recriminations in the immediate wake of the defeat she'll be a soon forgotten figure. However, the Democrats and their institutional supporters in the government, academia, media, the foundations & NGOs, and the corporate world will be mobilized; it'll be 2016 on steroids and an amplification of what had been planned in 2020 if Trump won. The goal will be to disrupt and impede any attempt to restore normality if Trump wins.
In 2016 Democrats worked themselves into hysteria over Trump, somehow convincing themselves that a gullible and easily manipulated figure, with little interest in the details of policy, and with erratic behavior and occasionally outrageous rhetoric, was actually a Nazi who kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed (yes, I heard this from people), prepared to become a dictator, and unleash his brown shirt legions on America. Somehow Trump forgot to do all that during his administration but in 2025 he'll supposedly get around to it.
After his election in 2016, the Democrats and their allies in the media and in the government conspired to continue and elevate the Russia collusion hoax. And, breaking with more than two centuries of precedent, the Senate Democrats routinely obstructed the approval process for even noncontroversial nominees for federal jobs in order to prevent the administration from functioning. If Trump had won in 2020 the Democratic plan was to bring the mobs out into the street across American cities and do even more than during his first administration to prevent The Donald from exercising his constitutional powers. This year, Democrats and their allies have been whipped up into a hysterical frenzy far surpassing that of 2016 and 2020. I expect that if Trump wins in 2024, we will see protests, violence, obstruction way beyond that of 2016 along with the federal bureaucracy sabotaging the administration of a democratically elected president.
Good times are not coming.
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(1) I live in Maricopa County, Arizona, ground zero for one of the key alleged steals. Trump narrowly won the county in 2016, narrowly losing it in 2020. I read all of the allegations regarding the steal, the documents from the "forensic audit" by the Cyber Ninjas, the county's response, as well as learning a bit about Arizona election laws. The steal claims here were junk; laughably idiotic.
Worthwhile reading from Mosiac, an essay by Shany Mor, "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7", an essay I find myself mostly in agreement with. Mor does not look at the tactical intelligence and military failures leading up to, and occurring on, that day, instead focusing on the longer-term strategies and the politics resulting in that tragic day. He describes four failures:
The first is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's failure to have a longer-term strategy combined with his delusions about Hamas.
The second "the ideology of right-wing religious settler Zionism" and the policy distortions imposed by it.
Third is the blindness of the "peace processors", primarily in the Western foreign policy establishments who have refused to face into the realities of the Middle East.
Finally there is the way "the international community, UNRWA, and sundry human-rights organizations at every step have acted as a force multiplier for Hamas and Hizballah".
Here's an excerpt from each part of the essay, though you should read the entire piece to get the complexity of the argument Mor makes.
Netanyahu
The basic contours of Israel’s position vis-à-vis Hamas, Gaza, the Palestinians, and the Arab world on October 6 are a catalog of Netanyahu’s wishes, fears, hopes, illusions, and procrastinatory temptations.
Netanyahu isn’t just stricken by decisional paralysis or lazy procrastination. He came into power believing the time wasn’t right, and at each decision node since, he has discovered new reasons why the time just isn’t right. He keeps poking his head out and seeing no parking ticket on the state’s windshield, so he goes back in and promises to keep checking. True on the West Bank, and true on the issue he rode back into power on in 2009: the need to confront the Iranian nuclear program. For years he was mocked for his indecision by experts in Israel and abroad whose prognostications often invoked the image of a “tsunami” of one kind or another that was about to wash over Israel due to Bibi’s negligence.
As for messaging, Netanyahu’s career has been a continuous exercise in public diplomacy, his polished English employed to impress not so much foreign audiences as the domestic Israeli one. His skill (real or imagined) at making Israel’s case—at the UN, the U.S. Congress, and elsewhere—came to substitute for actual strategic thinking. And, as with skepticism and deferral, experience kept teaching him the wrong lessons—until disaster struck.
The religious settler movement:
The long march of the West Bank settler movement has been a generational project that has resulted in what might best be termed state capture.
To discuss the West Bank settler movement and its impact on policy in terms of state capture is to imply two things. First, that the policy priorities of the movement do not represent those of the majority of the Israeli public or any reasonable aggregation of diverse interests and desires. Second, that the result is to distort the state’s policies in a way that are inimical to its actual strategic interests but to the benefit of the particular interest that has effected the capture.
When I speak of the “settler movement” of “right-wing religious settler” ideology, I am not talking about the motives of all the Israelis who chose to make their lives beyond the Green Line. . .The Palestinians’ defeat in the second intifada, and the tectonic shifts in Arab politics after the failed Arab Spring, opened before Israel genuine diplomatic opportunities. These have already resulted in the Abraham Accords. But to exploit these opportunities fully, Israel needed leaders dedicated to the pursuit of the state’s strategic interests. It has been years, maybe decades, since Israel had a leadership that was able to set aside the settler movement’s special pleas and pursue those interests rationally. By the time the far-right swept into power on the coattails of Netanyahu’s return in 2022, these were no longer even special pleas. The call was coming from inside the house.
In short, Israel lulled itself into complacency on the Gaza front not just because of an overabundance of confidence in its deterrence and not just because of its prime minister’s vices, but because both of these were nurtured by, and reinforced, a comprehensive ideological worldview that places the West Bank settler enterprise above the state’s considered interests.
Mor notes that, on October 7, there were 32 IDF combat battalions deployed in the West Bank, many in response to turmoil created by the religious settlers, while only two battalions were deployed along the Gaza Strip.
The peace processors:
. . . the peace-processor concept of mediation ignores all the conventional rules of negotiating and diplomacy, not to mention common sense, and hasn’t changed despite the fact that it has failed consistently.
The most exemplary instantiation of this failure is the string of diplomatic initiatives following the failure of Camp David and the eruption of the second intifada. In all of them, whether at Taba or Geneva, whether by informal negotiators or international mediators, whether in talks or UN Security Council resolutions, the Palestinians are offered better terms than what they have rejected and the Israelis worse terms than what they previously agreed to. The implication is that previous initiatives failed and violence erupted because the Palestinians just weren’t given enough.
Imagining this method in any other kind of conflict shows just how perverse it is. Offering better terms to the side that rejected a previous compromise, resorted to violence in the hopes of securing for itself a better outcome, and was defeated in the war it initiated incentivizes all the worst behavior of all sides. The losing side has no incentive to agree, because losing again only improves its position. The winning side has no incentive to agree, but the status quo of conflict gives it a better position than the proposed compromise.
On the international community:
None of Gaza’s population would qualify as refugees under the UN’s official definition: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” Those who fled one part of Palestine during the 1947–9 war for another are considered internally displaced persons (“someone who has been forced to flee their home but never crossed an international border”). . . . Arabs who fled from Palestine into Lebanon would certainly count as refugees under the standard UN definitions, but not their descendants. Many others fled to Jordan or to places that Jordan would occupy, but as they quickly became Jordanian citizens, they would, by standard legal definitions, be considered “rehabilitated” and no longer refugees.
Gaza, though, has no refugees. Not the tiny handful of people still alive who lived in what is now Israel before 1948, and certainly not their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The idea that a Palestinian living in Palestinian territory under a Palestinian government is somehow a refugee from Palestine is a deadly contrivance, the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
The constitutions of Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza can be best described as anti-sovereign governance, and, for all the variation among them, they are all the creation of the international community and its unique approach to the Arab conflict with Israel. These constitutions are anti-sovereign in two senses, an internal one and an external. Internally, they exercise stable political and military power without full sovereignty and without any of the responsibilities that come with full sovereignty. And externally, the ideological basis of their entire political project is the denial of sovereignty to the Jewish state they live next to.
Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. The incendiary bombs, carried by balloons, which burned so much productive Israeli farmland during the five years before the October 7 attack were far too small a provocation to warrant an Israeli response. Attempts by Hamas militants to breach the fence in 2018 were best understood as a protest against the Palestinians’ righteous victimhood and not a security threat (as October 7 clearly showed them to be) to the Israeli communities just outside the Strip. Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.
When wars did break out in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the consensus suddenly shifted. Now any action Israel might take to eliminate the threat was too costly and impractical. Hamas was too embedded in the territory, its rockets too numerous, and any invasion would result in too many casualties.
The problem is, given the truth of the above analysis, what is to be done next?
Theoretically I still support a two-state solution but, as a practical matter, that is not going to occur in the foreseeable future because it is abundantly clear that Palestinian public opinion much prefers not having a state if the price of its creation results in the continued existence of a Jewish state alongside it.
Disbanding UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) is an essential first step towards any type of eventual settlement but that is not going to happen with a United Nations dominated by dictators, oligarchs, and authoritarians. Even the next best solution, permanently stopping UNRWA's funding by the U.S. and other Western nations seems like it will not happen. As of 2022, 85.5% of UNRWA funding came from the U.S. (29.4%), Europe, and Japan. We are paying to perpetuate the problem and impede its solution, but generations of US and European diplomats refuse to recognize the obvious.
Beyond that, who knows?
Watching post season baseball with its parade of pitchers used in every game, prompts me to write up this episode I came across while doing some research after the recent passing of Luis Tiant.
On June 14, 1974 the Red Sox played the California Angels in Anaheim, with Luis starting against Nolan Ryan. In 1974 Tiant would set a career high in wins with 22 and innings pitched with 311, completing 25 of 38 starts and tossing 7 shutouts.
Nolan Ryan would also win 22 games that season, tossing 332.2 innings and leading the league in both walks (202) and strikeouts (367).
Luis was pitching on three days rest, having beaten the eventual World Series champs Oakland Athletics at Fenway 3-1, with the A's one run unearned. The Ryan Express had four days rest, having been roughed up by the Tigers in his previous outing, giving up 11 hits and 5 runs in eight innings while only striking out 6.
Ryan started out on fire, striking out 13 in the first six innings. He did give up a run in the 4th, when he walked four Sox; he struck out the other three. At that point the Angels were leading 3-1 because Luis gave up three on three hits and a walk in the 4th.
The Angels lead held until one out in the top of the 9th, when Carl Yazstremski hit a two run homer off Ryan, sending the game into extra innings. In today's game, Ryan would have already been removed no later than the end of the 7th and he certainly would have been pulled after giving up the home run. Manager Bobby Winkles left Nolan in. In fact, he left him in for 13 innings. The game was still tied at that point. Ryan had given up eight hits and three runs while walking ten and striking out 19. It is estimated he threw well over 200 pitches.
Both Luis was still throwing, setting down the Angels in the 14th before finally giving up the winning run with one out in the 15th inning. He'd given up 11 hits, four runs, four walks, and struck out five. The game was played in four hours and two minutes. Tiant threw more than 160 pitches.
Ryan would next pitch on June 18 against the Yankees, going on three days rest and pitching six shutout innings.
Tiant got four days rest, starting against Oakland on June 19, throwing ten innings while giving up only three hits and winning 2-1. In 14 starts after the Angels game, El Tiante would go 12-2, with nine complete games and four shutouts.
Live feed from outside the Roman Colosseum in 283 AD.
— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) October 14, 2024
Take a moment to soak in the sights and sounds around the arena on the day of the games.
(Immersive experience created by Faber Courtial) pic.twitter.com/nJjvOxD2FZ
The Roman one that is. Via Gareth Harney, who has an excellent Roman history feed, this was created by Faber Courtial (you can find other of their historical recreations on YouTube). The visual setting of the scene is just behind and above the 100 foot tall statue of Colossus, located just outside the Colosseum. The statue was erected prior to the building of the Flavian Amphitheater. The building of the Colosseum began under Emperor Vespasian (69-79 AD) and completed under his son, Emperor Titus (79-81). The statue was erected near the end of Vespasian's predecessor, Nero (54-68) and was intended to portray the young emperor. After Nero's overthrow and suicide, the statue was repurposed.
On the left is the Colosseum. Late in the video you can see poles along its edge. Those could be extended and covers deployed from them to shade spectators from the sun. Just to the right of the amphitheater is the Arch of Constantine, the existence of which indicates there is an error in dating this scene to 283 AD. The Arch was constructed only after Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 which enabled his capture of Rome. Just to the right front of the Arch is the conical shape of the Meta Sudans, a large fountain. It still existed in damaged condition until the 1930s when Mussolini ordered its removal as part of a project to improve traffic flow.
On the hill above the Meta Sudans is the Palatine, home of the palace of the emperors which, by this date, covered the entire elevation. Just to the right of the Colossus is the Temple of Venus and Roma, construction of which was initiated in 135 AD under Hadrian and completed in 141 during the reign of Antoninus Pius. By the trees at the far end of the temple is the entrance to the Sacred Way which ran up a small hill, passed under the Arch of Titus, and then entered the Roman Forum.
The open space in front of the statue is filled with vendors selling food and trinkets to the crowd. Well, I better get going so I don't miss the show. Make sure to listen to this with the sound on.
The Colossus may have been still standing as late as the seventh century. It was eventually broken up and used for building material.
Having recently returned from a summer around Acadia National Park it seemed like a painting titled Acadia would be close enough. By Austrian artist Johann Nepomuk Schodlberger (1779-1853), it represents a fantasy landscape.
(Enjoying a victory cigar in the whirlpool after the game)
Back in the 70s, I used to imitate his pitching motion. After bringing the ball down from your chest to your waist in herky jerky fashion, you twisted your body around, back to the batter, looked up at the sky, and then turned back around and threw a strike. At least Luis did. I never could.
Luis Tiant passed today at 83. Written about him a few times; here's one - pitching against Mark Fidrych.
A joy to watch. Near the end of his time with the Red Sox, I went to Fenway solo and got a ticket a few rows behind home, enabling me to closely observe Tiant. By that time, he'd lost the blazing fastball, but I was surprised at how slow his fastball had become. He was still able to fool the batters using different pitching motions and changing speeds. I was watching a masterclass in the art of pitching.
One of the most beloved players in the history of the franchise. He should be in the Hall of Fame.
Carlton Fisk agrees. https://t.co/9LxtG16N3V pic.twitter.com/PYDuAqDudl
— Honest☘️Larry (@HonestLarry1) October 8, 2024
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain's trademark is well done and humorous covers of pop and rock songs. In this case, they do a serious, straight, and very well done cover of David Bowie's Heroes, that captures well the song's sentiment. Bowie wrote the song in the late 1970s while in West Berlin. The last verse refers to a moment when he observed a couple kissing by the Wall.
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing by the wall (By the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads (Over our heads)
And we kissed as though nothing could fall (Nothing could fall)
And the shame was on the other side
Oh, we can beat them forever and ever
Then we could be heroes just for one day
