From Neil Young in 1992. Background vocals on the recording by Linda Ronstadt. Bringing back beautiful dreamy memories. Think I can stay there for awhile.
Because I'm still in love with youI want to see you dance againBecause I'm still in love with youOn this harvest moon
An introduction and appreciation of the gritty 1973 movie set in Boston starring Robert Mitchum from Turner Classic Movies. Watch the clip, watch the movie. And here's a link to NY Times critic AO Scott on the film. Eddie Coyle was the first novel of George V Higgins to be published, and he went on to write twenty more over the following two decades before dying in 1999. THC has read them all.
THC has written on the book and movie before in The Workingman's Eddie Coyle and Missing George V Higgins, along with his magnum opus on Higgins and his work, Eddie Coyle's Friend, which includes a description of the author's technique:
A Higgins novel relies on dialogue in which the characters converse about what had happened, or was about to happen, or about things that had nothing to do with what had or was going to happen, though sometimes it would dawn on you towards the end of the book that that thing, you know, which the guy talked about way back that didn't seem to have anything to do with the story, did.
That technique found its most exquisite execution in Bomber's Law:
Nominally, Bomber's Law is about Detective Sergeant Brennan of the Massachusetts State Police, who is following a mob enforcer, Short Joey Mossi, in an attempt to build a case against him. After tailing Mossi fruitlessly for years, Brennan is saddled by his boss, Brian Dennison, with a new partner, Harry Dell'Appa, an idealistic and impatient young state cop, who is puzzled why Brennan and Dennison's predecessor, the retired and now very dead Bomber Lawrence, have failed to get the goods on Short Joey after all these years. Most of the novel, which is 95% dialogue, consists of Brennan, Dell'Appa and Dennison telling each other lengthy, and occasionally deliberately distracting, yarns in the course of which we learn a lot about Short Joey and his younger, mentally disabled brother, and eventually the secret of Bomber's Law along with embarking upon many entertaining excursions which have nothing to do with the plot, that is, if there is, in fact, a plot. The story telling is wonderful but dazzlingly complex often requiring the reader to double back and make sure they understand just whom the speaker is referring to or who is actually speaking.
From Fresh, Sly and the Family Stone's 1973 album. That bass line is by Rustee Allen, who replaced long time band bassist Larry Graham (see Fat Bass). The group's final album would be released the following year as Sly descended into drug induced madness.
Legislation involves compromise and compromise requires trust between the parties and institutional parity and safeguards. That is not present at the federal level for most issues.
Take immigration. My compromise is:
1. Deportation for all those who arrived illegally during the Biden Open Borders Party.
2. Deportation for the estimated 1 to 1.5 million illegals with final deportation orders.
3. Deportation for illegals with criminal records (beyond just the initial illegal entry).
- There will be some overlap between these three categories.
4. An end to sanctuary states and cities which privilege criminal illegals over law abiding citizens (including legal immigrants and those residing here legally).(1)
5. Anyone who arrived illegally before January 20, 2021 and (1) does not have a criminal record and (2) is not on public support, should be allowed to stay in the U.S.
However, I would oppose any legislation embodying this compromise because of a structural imbalance within the legislation and between the branches of government. Such legislation if enacted would not operate to effect the compromise. If Republicans agreed to such a compromise, they would look like fools the next time Democrats control the executive branch, because they would have already allowed the presence of millions of illegals, while the Democrats effectively neutered their side of the bargain.
My assessment is based on what has become clear with Democratic opposition to immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Democrats are opposed to removal of any illegals under any conditions and support an open borders policy. When questioned many Democrats mumble about supporting "common sense" immigration reform but when pressed on details fail to provide any evidence of supporting practical steps to control the borders and deal with illegals currently in the country. Their vision is of the U.S. as a bus terminal not a real country.
If legislation is enacted containing the elements I outlined above, this is how it would work in the real world.
The legislation would specifically contain Point 5, allowing millions here illegally to stay in the U.S. If a subsequent administration tried to renege on that deal, their actions would be immediately (and properly) struck down by the courts (regardless of who appointed the judges) because of clear statutory language.
However, implementation of Points 1,2, and 3 reside with the executive branch. If a Democratic administration decided to use its enforcement discretion to "slow walk" deportations, no court is going to order the executive branch to change its process. The executive will be able to effectively undermine the compromise. We have proof on this topic. In 2024, we were told that an immigration reform bill was needed to control the border. That was phony, because the Biden administration decided to ignore most of its statutory authority to control the border, while in 2025 the Trump administration showed it could effectively control the border using the same existing laws. For more on the fake reform bill read No, No, No.
Although the Biden administration killed prospects for immigration reform with its open borders policy, it was President Obama who paved the way in undermining prospects for compromise with his DACA Executive Order. I wrote about it back in 2014 and also noted the Washington Post's editorial opposition to Obama's action. In a 2016 post, More Mush From The NY Times, I explained the damage to prospects for compromise on immigration.
The Times article fails to explore the real problem with the President's unilateral actions, and the approval it has generated from Progressive, leading Hillary Clinton to promise she will be even more aggressive in this respect - the undermining of prospects for compromise on any issue, which is ironic given President Obama's consistent invoking of the need for less partisanship. Or perhaps, more accurately, the President's reference to nonpartisanship is a reflection of Obama's cynicism, as it has become apparent over time he's our most cynical President since Richard Nixon.Under these conditions, the best course is to not change or reform immigration law.
Here's an example of how President Obama's approach discourages compromise. I'm in favor of immigration reform that would both provide some increase in legal immigration and improve border security. But, if he were in Congress today, I would never vote for such a bill or even negotiate with Democrats on it. The reason is that the essence of compromise, is the each side has to give up something to get something. In a world where President's push executive orders, informal rulemaking and arbitrary changing of statutory language, there is no assurance that a legislator would get the value of the deal they thought they made. If a Progressive President has provisions in a compromise immigration reform bill they do not like, they can simply order the agency not to enforce it, or issue an executive order directly overriding the bill, or arbitrarily have the enforcing agency issue an informal notice changing deadlines and announcing a regulatory interpretation that leads to the opposite result intended in the legislation. When Progressives control the Executive Branch, it means they can implement the sections they like and ignore or override what they don't like, leaving the other side feeling like chumps from Palookaville.
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(1) It is not an exaggeration to state that sanctuary jurisdictions privilege illegals over law abiding citizens. Every such jurisdiction has established at either the state attorney general or local district attorney level guidelines requiring prosecutors to take into account the risks to immigration status (that is, deportation) in charging decisions and plea deals. In other words, to favor decisions declining prosecution or making terms easier on plea deals in order to minimize chances of intervention by federal immigration enforcement. California (no surprise!) has actually enacted a statute requiring prosecutors to consider these factors in making charging and settlement decisions. The result is that an American citizen who has committed a crime will likely be prosecuted more harshly and face more several sentencing than an illegal committing the same crime.
If you want to know how insane sanctuary enforcement is, look no further than the despicable Soros-backed DA of Fairfax County, Virginia - Steven Descano. Descano's campaign pledge:
Wherever possible, Steve will make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences. Following such a policy will keep our communities united and strong and demonstrate our Country's commitment to equal justice for all. If two people commit the same crime, but only one's punishment includes deportation, that's a perversion of justice and not a reflection of the values of Fairfax County.
It could not be any clearer. It ignores that the illegal has committed two crimes, one being entry into the U.S., and allows an American citizen to be prosecuted more harshly. This is not justice, it is privilege for criminals here illegally.
This wasn't just a campaign pledge by Descano. He's followed it in practice, releasing several violent illegals, and is now mired in controversy, as those released have committed further violent acts, including murder. Descano gives no indication of caring about the consequences of his actions for law abiding Americans. His sole concern is protecting those who have illegally entered this country.
This also points to another problem in arguments about illegal immigration; discussions about how to measure criminality of illegals and whether it is a problem. After looking at a number of these analyses it is evident there is a major methodological problem. Some studies combine legal and illegal immigrants in the analysis. Most do not distinguish among the origin countries for illegals, despite evidence that crime rates significantly differ depending on country of origin. There is also the data source problem because a careful review reveals that in many instances the data used in the analysis is not uniform, or missing key jurisdictions. Finally, the sanctuary jurisdictions preference for no charging, or reducing charges, and allowing pleas to lesser offenses, brings into question any analysis on this subject. The truth is we simply don't know about comparative crime rates between illegals and citizens and others lawfully residing here.
But that isn't the biggest problem. Looking at comparative rates is the wrong metric in this situation. There certainly are instances where comparative rates are the right metric, but in the case of illegal immigration every crime is one that would not have occurred but for the illegal entry. It is the additive absolute number, not comparative rate, that is relevant. For instance, there are about 20,000 homicides in the U.S. annually. There are a few jurisdictions that report crimes committed by illegals by category. A reasonable extrapolation of that data leads to the conclusion that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 homicides in the U.S. are committed annually by illegals. The illegal homicide rate is simply irrelevant, if you have any interest at all in preventing homicides by illegals.
On this date sixty years ago, The Beatles began recording Tomorrow Never Knows, the revolutionary and groundbreaking track from the album Revolver, released in August 1966. Though it was the last song on the second side of that album, it was the first song recorded in the sessions for the record, something I was surprised to discover decades later. At the time, we'd never heard anything remotely like this before, and thought its placement as the closing song was a signal that big musical changes were coming for The Beatles. As with A Hard Day's Night, the title is from an off hand remark by Ringo. Before settling on Tomorrow Never Knows was called The Void and Mark 1.
Tomorrow Never Knows is primarily a one-chord song with a droning tone, interspersed with weird, swirling snippets from something strange, and backwards guitar bits. Behind it is Ringo's drum pattern, which remains unchanging throughout. I've seen recent commentary from younger listeners thinking that because the drum pattern is so unerringly accurate Ringo must have played a small part that was then digitally repeated. However, the technology did not exist at the time and it really is Ringo from start to finish. George Harrison plays sitar or tamboura, depending on the analysis, on the track.
Topping it off are Lennon's lyrics, "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/ All play the game
Existence to the end, of the beginning". John's instruction to George Martin was to make his voice sound like he was the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, which, with some studio ingenuity, Martin accomplished by feeding the vocal through a revolving Leslie speaker inside a Hammond organ (the effect starts 87 seconds into the song).
The most innovative aspect was the use of tape loops This description is from The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes by Mark Lewisohn (1988):
Perhaps the most striking sound on Tomorrow Never Knows is one of tape loops [the sound achieved by tape saturation, by removing the erase head of a machine and then recording over and over on the same piece of tape]. . . . The seagull-like noise on Tomorrow Never Knows is really a distorted guitar. (According to studio documentation, other loops used included the sounds of a speeded up guitar and a wine glass.) "We did a live mix of all the loops," says George Martin. "All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff [Emerick] did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning." . . . "It was done totally off the cuff. The control room was as full of loops as it was people". "I laid all of the loops onto the multi-track and played the faders like a modern day synthesizer" says Emerick.
You can watch a video about the recording here which contains additional details and differs in some respects from the Lewisohn book. You can listen to the isolated tape loops here.
Mastering The Tides of the World told of the difficulty in knowing what courses of action are the right path to take, despite our best efforts to reason our way forward and predict outcomes.
We are at war once again, this time with Iran. Before it started I did not know what the right course of action was. Now that it has commenced I think it essential we achieve victory along the lines outlined by Secretary of State Rubio. This is a circumstance where, having started the task, failure to achieve these outcomes will have serious long-term negative consequences for the United States. I am aware of the sunk cost fallacy but, in this case, we need to continue. I'm also painfully aware of the potential for unforeseen consequences, a theme that has prompted a number of THC posts.
The Event At Sarajevo reflects on the unforeseen consequences of World War I and the lessons for future conflicts.
Japan's disastrous 1941 decision to attack the U.S. and other Western nations is the subject of Japan Decides On War.
Dereliction Of Duty discusses the U.S. decision for escalated involvement in Vietnam in 1964-65.
America's flawed decision to attack Iraq in 2003; Pausing At The Precipice.
In his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), President Lincoln spoke of the unpredictable nature of war:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
We see that unpredictability in how the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a resolution I had not thought possible nor, for that matter, had the legions of American experts on the Soviet Union. Perhaps Ronald Reagan was the only one with the foresight to predict that ending and he was considered delusional until it happened.
There is also a delusion that those opposed to the use of force can fall prey to. That inaction will allow things to continue unchanged on the same course. They don't. I wrote about this in the Iraq section of the essay Reflections On The Middle East Wars.
Nor does it mean that victory is an end to history. In his Finest Hour speech on June 18, 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill held out a vision of victory that would lead the world into "broad, sunlit uplands".
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Yet only fifteen years later on March 1, 1955, merely a decade after victory over Hitler, the emergence of the Cold War and the threat of mutual annihilation by nuclear weapons led Churchill, only weeks before his resignation as Prime Minister, to address these words to Parliament:
The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell.
Of course, being Churchill, he closed his remarks with the stirring admonition: "Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.”
ARTEMIS II AS SEEN BY THE OFFICIAL NASA CESSNA
— Chris Combs (iterative design enjoyer) (@DrChrisCombs) April 3, 2026
THIS IS THE BEST LAUNCH VIDEO AND IT ISN'T CLOSE pic.twitter.com/ikLxSYbHKW
It's good to see America returning to the moon with the launch of Artemis II, after an absence of more than a half-century. Though this mission only entails a fly around, future missions will be landing.
Twenty four Apollo astronauts flew around or landed on the moon between December 1968 and December 1972. Of the twelve who remained in the command module, only one still survives; Fred Haise (92). Of the twelve who walked on the moon, four are living; Buzz Aldrin (96), David Scott (93), John Young (87) and Harrison Schmitt (90).
The astronauts were selected in part, because of their good health, and it is reflected in their longevity. All were born between 1923 and 1936 and were in their 30s and 40s at the time. Even in a worst case assumption that all of five living moon astronauts die this year, the average age for the moon walkers would be 82.7 years and for the circumnavigators 82.3. Under the same assumptions the median age for moon walkers is 86 and for orbiters 89. Ten of the 24 made it to 90, with one more possible, and another five between 87 and 89.
Godspeed and may the mission be a success.
We'll close with The Byrds' tribute to Armstrong, Alden, and Collins; "The team below, that gave the go, they had God's helping hand"
"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. Do you understand?"
- The young Tancredi to his uncle and guardian, the Prince of Salina, explaining why he is joining the rebels seeking to unite Italy in the 1860s. From The Leopard, the masterpiece by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa which I am currently reading for the second time. (1958)
The quote is well-known. What is less known are the passages just before and after Tancredi's remark:
Before:
"You're mad, my boy, to go with those people! They're all in the maffia, all troublemakers. A Falconeri should be with us for the King."
"The eyes began smiling again. 'For the King, yes, of course. But which King?'"
After:
"What a boy! Talking rubbish and contradicting it at the same time. . . . The Prince jumped up . . . and rummaged in a drawer. 'Tancredi, Tancredi, wait!'. He ran after his nephew, slipped a roll of gold pieces into his pocket, and squeezed his shoulders."
"On his way downstairs, he suddenly understood that remark of Tancredi's, 'If we want things to stay as they are . . .' Tancredi would go a long way: he had always thought so."
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There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnightMeet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Hey, nineteenThat's 'Retha FranklinShe don't remember the Queen of SoulIt's hard times befallenThe soul survivorsShe thinks I'm crazyBut I'm just growin' oldHey, nineteenNo, we got nothin' in commonNo, we can't dance togetherNo, we can't talk at all
From the new remake of The Lord of the Rings.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
— Josh RR Jokien (@joshcarlosjosh) August 6, 2021
“lmao" said Gandalf, “well it has.”
Our 12+ year old dog, Koji, passed today. A wonderful companion, named for Koji Uehara, closer for the 2013 world champion Boston Red Sox. We knew we were getting a Lab puppy that November and decided if the Sox won the World Series she would be named Koji.
A mellow and loving dog, great around children. Diagnosed recently with multiple tumors, which Labs are prone to, and having a couple of seizures, she was rapidly declining. Hard for us to see her go, but it was the right thing to do at the right time.
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”- Abraham Lincoln, note written to himself, date unknown
I'm currently reading Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and The American Experiment by Allen Guelzo. So far, I've not run across the quote in the book but have noticed that Guelzo's take echoes some themes that have come up in this blog in recent years. More on that later.
Ran across this site which has a lot of funny takes on home design, construction, and municipal planning.
Out with the old
— Mason Home Builder (@bankertobuilder) March 27, 2026
Our client wanted their old fashioned hallway transformed into a modern corridor
I think we did pretty well pic.twitter.com/meLWC0EbS4
2 car garages aren't large enough for most families
— Mason Home Builder (@bankertobuilder) March 24, 2026
That's why we made the 2 story garage that blends seamlessly with the rest of the house
5 covered parking spots + an elegant parking ramp
Optional upgrade: Add parking meters for your guest parking spots to add some passive… pic.twitter.com/hkQFmCw6GW
Smart, walkable neighborhoods like this are illegal to build in most parts of this country pic.twitter.com/udS8KQ9u9i
— Mason Home Builder (@bankertobuilder) March 24, 2026
Just completed another wildlife bridge
— Mason Home Builder (@bankertobuilder) March 20, 2026
This stunning structure came in well below budget: just $97 million versus our initial estimate of $100 million
This bridge will allow wild cougars with rabies to roam freely around their natural habitat pic.twitter.com/x8Qj03MX6P
To note the recent death of Paul Ehrlich, it seemed appropriate to reference Apeman, a song from The Kinks 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Go Round, Part One (for my ridiculously compulsive exploration of a little known period in The Kinks discography read Kinkdom). It was the lyrics in the first two verses that made me think of Ehrlich and gave me an excuse to show the band playing the entire song.
I think I'm sophisticated'Cause I'm living my lifeLike a good homo sapiensBut all around meEverybody's multiplyingAnd they're walking round like flies, manSo I'm no better than the animalsSitting in the cages in the zoo, man'Cause compared to the flowersAnd the birds and the treesI am an apemanI think I'm so educatedAnd I'm so civilized'Cause I'm a strict vegetarianAnd with the over populationAnd inflation and starvationAnd the crazy politiciansI don't feel safe in this world no moreI don't want to die in a nuclear warI want to sail away to a distant shoreAnd make like an apeman
The economist Julian Simon argued in 1980 that overpopulation is not a problem as such and that humanity will adapt to changing conditions. Simon argued that eventually human creativity will improve living standards, and that most resources were replaceable.[50] Simon stated that over hundreds of years, the prices of virtually all commodities had decreased significantly and persistently.[51] Ehrlich termed Simon the proponent of a "space-age cargo cult" of economists convinced that human creativity and ingenuity would create substitutes for scarce resources and reasserted the idea that population growth was outstripping the Earth's supplies of food, fresh water and minerals.[8]
This exchange resulted in the Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for resources during a ten-year period that was made with Simon in 1980.[8] Ehrlich was allowed to choose ten commodities that he predicted would become scarce and thus increase in price. Ehrlich chose mostly metals, and lost the bet, as their average price decreased by about 30% in the next 10 years.
Ehrlich's prognostication failings reminds me of the quote attributed to Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli after reviewing the paper of a young physicist, "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong".
I never met Ehrlich but did have the opportunity to sit with one of his acolytes (they'd co-authored papers and was involved in setting up the Ehrlich-Simon bet), Paul Holdren, at a small dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2008. Like his mentor, Holdren has had a distinguished academic career with positions at Harvard and Berkeley and receiving a MacArthur Foundation "genius" Fellowship. In 2009, President Obama appointed Holdren as his chief science advisor and director of the White House's Office of Science & Technology, a role he served in both of Obama's administrations.
While I don't remember most of the details of the dinner discussion, my overall impression was Holdren fit the pattern found in Harvard academics in encounters during my twelve years working in Cambridge and, for a decade after, being a frequent visitor; they tended to be close-minded, provincial, and intolerant of dissenting opinions, not something I would have predicted when I began working in the city in 1980. Most found it incomprehensible that anyone would disagree with their political opinions or general thoughts on the world out of anything other than ignorance and/or bigotry, and automatically devalued the views of anyone lacking the "right" credentials.
In the wake of Ehrlich's death I came across a tweet he'd sent on January 3, 2023 after a 60 Minutes appearance, which explains how he and Holdren maintained their academic reputations. It is quite an indictment of academia:
"60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor."
Notice one of the tactics he, and many other academics, employs is to call any criticism "right-wing" thus casting those criticizing him into the outer darkness where the substance of the criticism can be completely disregarded. The funny thing is I came across the quote in a tweet from Roger Pielke Jr, a traditional liberal and critic of Ehrlich. Pielke wrote a longer piece, Gravediggers of Science, on Ehrlich in his substack, relating his encounter with Ehrlich in 2010, in which Ehrlich and the scurrilous climate scientist Michael Mann engaged in their favorite smearing tactic and making completely false allegations.
Ehrlich and others employ these tactics because in the circles they swim in it works. There is no price to pay for being wrong or for trying to destroy others with false innuendo and worse. In fact, they are rewarded for doing so.
Rereading The Population Bomb and some of Ehrlich's other work one is struck by what a miserable and misanthropic view of humanity he holds.(1) It probably explains his desire of widespread sterilization and a powerful world government to enforce his views.
I'll give the last word to this summary from The Free Press. They are unfortunately correct that his worldview has infected society:
Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to economist and professional eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.
Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.
Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.
Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.
Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully, they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.
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(1) In that regard, Ehrlich reminds me of the leaders of the AI crowd. Though Ehrlich preached scarcity and the AI dudes abundance, at heart they are all anti-humanists. If AI can perform better than humans, of what use are people? The AI leaders have clearly said this and don't care about the implications. In February 2025 I summarized Elon Musk's worldview but it can be said for all of the AI proponents:
Musk and a small group of "creatives" run society, with robots operating our factories, and AI, using Musk-designed algorithms, running everything else. Enough wealth is created to fund a Universal Basic Income for the rest of Americans, who live in a ketamine and cannabis induced haze.
The remains of Pfc. Norton V. Retzsch, who died on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands were recently identified and will be buried on April 13 in Marana, Arizona, a town near Tucson, 83 years after his death.
Retzsch, 25 years of age and recently married, was with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. On July 9, 1943 he and two fellow Marines were caught in a Japanese ambush and killed. It took decades after the end of WW2 to identify possible remains and have them DNA tested and compared to one of his relatives.
After Norton's death his wife, Margaret, enlisted in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve. She eventually remarried and passed in 2005.
The New Georgia campaign, from June 30 to October 7, 1943 and cost 1,195 American lives, is one of many almost forgotten battles in the U.S. effort to capture the Solomon Islands with most of the fighting occurring between August 1942 and April 1944
The search for remains of the missing continues. The difficulties in this process can be seen in the Military.com article on the search for Norton Retzsch.
After the war, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company searched the Bairoko Harbor and Enogai Inlet area from November to December 1947 but found no trace of Retzsch. The military declared him non-recoverable in 1949 and inscribed his name on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.
What the military did not know at the time was that Retzsch's remains had likely already been recovered. In December 1943, unidentified remains buried at the Enogai Cemetery were exhumed and transferred first to a New Georgia cemetery, then to Finschhafen, Papua New Guinea, where they were designated as Unknown X-182. After multiple failed identification attempts, X-182 was interred at the Manila American Cemetery in 1950.
The case remained dormant for decades until DPAA turned its attention back to New Georgia. Agency researchers flagged a group of unidentified remains from the Enogai and Bairoko area as possible matches for missing Raiders, and in January 2019, X-182 was pulled from the Manila cemetery and sent to the DPAA laboratory.
In 2013, I wrote of another missing Marine, Alexander "Sandy" Bonnyman, killed during the attack on Tarawa in November 1943. Bonneyman is the only Medal of Honor recipient photographed during the action for which he received the medal. In 2015, Bonnyman's remains were finally identified and he was returned home.
Nowhere is there warmth to be foundAmong those afraid of losing their groundRain gray town, known for its soundIn places, small faces unboundRound the squares, huddled in stormsSome laughing, some just shapeless forms
Released as a single 60 years ago this month by The Byrds. I'd never heard anything like this on AM radio before. Composed by band members Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark. A very heavy song for its time, featuring the weirdest, chaotic, atonal lead guitar (inspired by Coltrane according to McGuinn) ever heard on a rock recording, peaking on the last part of the second solo.
Beyond that is Chris Hillman's pounding bass, Crosby's strong rhythm guitar, the harmonies of Clark, McGuinn and, above all, Crosby, and the finest drumming of Michael Clark's career with the group. The song is pulsating and relentless.
Between 1965 and 1968 The Byrds pioneered folk rock, introducing Dylan to a wider audience (Mr Tambourine Man), psychedelic music (Fifth Dimension), and gave many rock fans their first taste of country music (Sweetheart of the Rodeo).
From a 2015 article by Arnold Kling's Askblog.
from Megan McArdle:
1950s health care isn’t expensive; this same regimen would be a bargain at today’s prices. What’s expensive is things that didn’t exist in 1950. You can say that “health care” has gotten more expensive—or you can say that the declining cost of other things has allowed us to pour a lot more resources into exciting new health products that give us both longer and healthier lives.
In Crisis of Abundance, I wrote,
The American middle class can still afford the wonderful health care that was available in 1975–easily. . .as a thought experiment, a return to 1975 health care standards would completely resolve what is commonly described as America’s health care crisis.
My guess is that if you could find a health insurance policy today that only covered diagnostic procedures and treatments that were available in 1958, the cost of that policy would not be much higher than it was then. Much of the additional spending goes for MRIs and other advanced medical equipment, as well as for health care professionals with more extensive specialization and training than what was available 50 years ago.
These observations get at the distinctions between healthcare, health insurance, and health outcomes which too easily get mashed together.
I'd like to have 1950s or 1975 healthcare costs. But I don't want 1950s or 1975 health care.
I've been on Medicare and a supplemental plan since 2016. If I add up what Medicare has paid since then and compare it to what I pay for Medicare each year plus what I paid in Medicare taxes over the years, the government is still way ahead on the deal.
It's still true, even though a year ago today my heart stopped for a bit, I went to another place momentarily, and ended up transported by ambulance to an ICU in Tucson, where I spent the next two days and underwent an emergency procedure. I was informed that most with my condition do not make it to the hospital. I recovered quickly and completely, but the procedure I underwent was not invented until about fifteen years ago. Prior to that time I would have had a lengthier hospital stay and been sent home for extended bed rest until my condition improved, while remaining at risk the entire time, and with a much likelier outcome where, if surviving, I'd have permanent heart damage. The drugs I would have been prescribed also had major side effects.
Instead, the operation went well, I was discharged in 48 hours with no permanent damage, and the new medication for my condition, which only reached the market a decade ago, has had no side effects.
I like today's medicine and the new medication and wrote about it in December.
When I got my Medicare statement a few weeks later, the nominal "cost" for those two days was $194,000 of which Medicare and my supplemental paid $38,000 and I paid $16. The statement informed me that Medicare had "saved" me $156,000. I put "cost" and "saved" in quotes because those words have no meaning in the healthcare lingo we use today. If I go to a car dealer and see a car with a $50,000 sticker price and the dealer accepts my $10,000 offer, that 50K price is not real and I did not save 40K by making the purchase. Healthcare pricing is simply crazy.
The pricing may be crazy, but I'm happy to be here.
My thanks to the doctors, nurses, techs, EMTs, and park rangers who got me through the experience.
One of my favorites from The Temptations from among their cascade of hits from the mid-60s into the early 70s. Composed by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, released in 1969, hitting #1 and ranked by Billboard as the third most popular single of the year. From their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1969.
Twenty years ago on a business trip to Brazil, I arrived in Sao Paolo on a Saturday morning and took a car to spend the weekend in the city of Santos on the coast before beginning my work week in Sao Paolo on Monday.
The initial part of the drive was on the plain on which Sao Paolo and its suburbs sit at about 2500 feet above sea level. Suddenly, we entered a heavily forested area as the descent to the coast began. This was the Rodovia dos Imigrantes with its 44 viaducts, seven bridges, and eleven tunnels on its nearly 40 mile stretch. The startling part of the drive was when I realized we were on an elevated highway high above the coastal rain forest, a beautiful and stunning experience.
Immigrantes Highway — one of the most beautiful in Brazil, during the manacá flower season.pic.twitter.com/e95jcTHEIx
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 20, 2026
Best comedies of the 2000s - Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder, The Hangover
I'll always remember Chuck Norris as the man who changed the course of dodgeball history by casting the deciding vote that allowed Average Joes to play in the championship of the Las Vegas International Dodgeball Open where they upset the heavily favored Globo Gym Purple Cobras.… pic.twitter.com/X2urhv236o
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 20, 2026
And the man who saved Sly Stallone and The Expendables!
Over the past few months I've been reading and listening to Israeli Haviv Rettig Gur. He's active on twitter, YouTube, and with a podcast Ask Haviv Anything which alternates between longer in depth episodes and quick 10-15 minute explainers on a specific issue. I find him thoughtful and able to provide some clarity to complex matters.
I'm not sure how to categorize him politically as he's not clearly on the right or left. This, from two days ago, gives you a flavor for his views.
Y’all know I have my disagreements with Bibi [Netanyahu]. Budget priorities, haredi welfare spending, import reforms, judicial reform, information war, avoidance of accountability, Gaza war - okay, a lot of disagreements, including on big, critical things that affect our lives and the lives of our neighbors. But the man has been planning the ayatollahs’ fall for two decades. He believes it’s why God (inasmuch as he believes in God) put him on this Earth. And damned if he isn’t seeing through this thing he has always believed was his destiny. I’ll keep criticizing the bad stuff. I’m a citizen. He works for me. That’s how the system is supposed to work. And I’ll keep praising and being grateful for this one great big huge thing. I don’t know if he’ll succeed. I can’t think of anyone else who would have been so grimly single-minded and so specifically competent in the specific skillset required to bring us to this point.
I'll also add he's been very critical of corruption involving Netanyahu and his associates.
Some episodes I'd recommend.
Episode 69 - Israel's Great Divide - an insider's look at the judicial reform, with Moshe Koppel. This was the first of Haviv's podcasts I listened to. Prior to 10/7/23 the issue dominating Israeli politics was Netanyahu's proposed reform of the judiciary. From an American perspective, the power grabbed by Israel's Supreme Court over the past four decades would never be tolerated. The lack of a written constitution has enabled the court's actions. However, the proposed reform amounts to a reverse power grab by the executive and the lack of trust between right and left makes compromise impossible (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). Moshe Koppel is an academic, not a politician, who was one of the authors of the reform and sounds like a man with intellectual integrity but comes across as naive about the political process. An excellent overview of both the legal and political aspects of the dispute.
Episode 99 - Are We Winning? Released yesterday about the Iran War. Brings an interesting perspective not often heard in the U.S.
Episode 92 - Why does Israel hate UNRWA? A short episode about the Palestinian relief agency. The best quick answer to this question, which I've touched on before.
Episode 78 - Do You Still Want to Globalize the Intifada? Short episode on the significant difference between the First and Second Intifadas and what the Globalize the Intifada means to Israelis.
Episode 76 - How Elites drive Jew-hatred with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. A discussion of the situation in Western academia and in the Muslim world and why it has developed in similar ways. Mansour is an Egyptian and Muslim, now living in the U.S.
Episode 65 - The unseen editors rigging the information war with Ashley Rindsberg. Rindsberg has been doing deep dive detective work on how the manipulation of information is occuring in social media, with a particular focus on Wikipedia, in which the current head of NPR played a significant role in its deterioration as a credible source of information.
I first listened to Haviv via the Unpacking Israeli History podcast of Noam Weissman, which I also recommend. There were two particular podcasts featuring Haviv that caught my attention; the first a look back on thirty years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the other on settler violence in Judea and Samaria, which I think a disgrace with not enough done to prevent and punish the perpetrators.
I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to.
President Franklin Roosevelt to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, March 18, 1942, from Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence
I think if I give him everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.
President Franklin Roosevelt to former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C Bullitt, January 29, 1943, from For the President: Personal and Secret: Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt
There are many things President Franklin Roosevelt got right in the run up to, and during, the Second World War. He recognized Germany as a threat, not just in Europe, but globally. FDR also had an ability to spot and promote talent. Selecting George C Marshall as Army Chief of Staff in 1939 was not obvious, as he was promoted ahead of more than three dozen more senior officers, yet FDR did so after Marshall disagreed with him in a large meeting (for the full story read Management Lessons). Marshall proved to be a brilliant choice as was Admiral Chester Nimitz, hand picked by FDR to command the Navy in the Pacific. He also had the good sense to keep Marshall in the U.S. and instead appoint Dwight Eisenhower as commander of Allied forces for D-Day.
FDR also encouraged dissent. The military chiefs and his war cabinet engaged in ferocious arguments at time, particularly from 1939 through 1942. At one point in 1942, Marshall threatened to resign because of his disagreement with the president on the issue of invading North Africa, an issue on which FDR was proven correct - the American army was in no shape to fight the Germans in northwest Europe in 1942, or even 1943. Marshall, who believed military officers should be apolitical and never voted, was initially a doubter about FDR but became an admirer during the course of the war.
Roosevelt exhibited a good strategic sense in the run up and early years of the war, agreeing with the military chiefs that Germany would be the priority in the event of a conflict with both that country and Japan, and in his sense of where American military priorities should be in the critical eighteen months after Pearl Harbor. He also had top notch instincts as to what issues required his involvement and decision making and what didn't.
As I've noted before, in Harry Hopkins he had an informal channel through whom the military chiefs could take issues, trusting Hopkins to decide whether, and how, to make the case to FDR. This stands in stark contrast to LBJ, who in the run up to the Vietnam War, had no such route outside the one channel station operated by Robert McNamara. For a comparison of FDR with LBJ on this issue read Dereliction of Duty.
On the debit side was FDR's obsession with China in the lead up to the war. The military chiefs constantly admonished him for writing checks that could not be cashed, refusing to recognize the weakness of America's position in the Pacific and its very limited ability to do anything to assist China in resisting Japan's invasion. They believed his actions ran the risk of precipitating a Japanese attack on the U.S. would ran counter to the agreed upon strategy of focusing on Germany first. On this the chiefs proved correct.
However, the biggest debit item was FDR's failure to understand the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin and what that meant for his vision for the post-war world. Chip Bohlen, a Soviet State Department specialist who, in 1953, would become Ambassador to the Soviet Union said of Hopkins that "Harry was inclined to dismiss ideology" and the same can be said of FDR. Roosevelt had a vague notion that the American and Soviet systems would, over time, converge in some unspecific way.(1) He believed in personal diplomacy and in his ability to charm anyone. The colonial empires of Britain and France offended FDR and he thought the war should spell an end to them. Why he did not understand the same thing about the USSR, which in that respect was merely a continuation of the land-based colonial empire established by the czars is an interesting question.
That's why even into 1944, when the Allies were clearly winning and the first signs of problems with the Soviets were arising, FDR insisted on continuing lend-lease supplies to the Soviets, including shipping materials that had no obvious short-term value to the war against the Nazis and despite increased evidence of Soviet industrial espionage in America. At the Tehran conference in November 1943 and even more so at Yalta in February 1945, FDR went out of his way to ingratiate himself with Stalin while poking fun and, at times, insulting Churchill. The President simply could not fathom that Stalin was an ideologue and had no deep understanding of communism. He completely lacked an understanding of how the Soviets thought.
To illustrate how different the thinking was let's look at Kim Philby, the Englishman turned Soviet agent who ended up in a senior position in Britain's intelligence agency. Philby would thoroughly betray his country (and the U.S.) leading to the deaths of many East Europeans fighting Soviet tyranny after the war.
After Germany's attack on Russia in June 1941, Philby advised his Soviet handlers that Churchill ordered all British espionage efforts against the USSR to cease, causing the Soviets to wrongly suspect Philby had been turned and become a double agent working for Britain because, in their world, suspending espionage operations made no sense (the U.S., both before and during the war, did not conduct espionage against the Soviets). After all Soviet espionage against Britain and America during the war not only continued, but was expanded. After an extensive investigation of Philby the Soviets concluded that his reporting was accurate.
FDR's obsession with the creation of the United Nations, something not a high priority to the Russians, allowed Stalin to winkle more concessions from the U.S. before grudgingly agreeing to its creation.
Unlike Churchill, FDR remained aloof from Stalin's domination of eastern European countries which became evident during the last months of the war. In August 1944, when the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupation of Warsaw, while Stalin's forces halted their advance to let the Nazis eliminate the Poles, who they saw as a threat to the communist future plans for that country, Churchill pleaded with Stalin to allow British planes to fly over Warsaw to drop supplies and then land in Soviet territory to refuel, a request refused by the dictator. FDR refused Churchill's request to join the British in making the request to Stalin. For more on this episode read Warsaw Does Not Cry.
Given Roosevelt's death in April 1945, less than three months into his fourth term, we can only be thankful for the big city Democratic party bosses who, in the summer of 1944, rejected FDR's plan to retain Vice-President Henry Wallace on the ticket. The eccentric and naive Wallace was an unwitting tool for the communists and would have been a disaster as president.(2) Instead Harry Truman joined the ticket, becoming FDR's successor and proving a much better post-war president on foreign policy than Roosevelt would have been.
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(1) According to Bohlen, on a return flight from Moscow, on Hopkins last mission to Moscow in June 1945, Harry expressed "serious doubts as to the possibility of genuine collaboration with the Soviet Union", predicting "the American belief in freedom might lead to serious differences."
(2) In 1948, Wallace ran as the Progressive Party candidate for president. He blamed the U.S. for the start of the Cold War and urged America to give up West Berlin in response to the Soviet blockade (for more read Berlin Divides). Several years later, Wallace wrote that he had been deceived during the campaign, later realizing he had been managed by communists.
Coming across an artist I'd never heard of before is a joy. This is Tohickon by Daniel Garber (1880-1958). Born in Indiana, Garber settled in an artist's colony in New Hope and later in the hamlet of Cuttalossa, both in Pennsylvania. He often painted Delaware River scenes and Tohickon is a creek branching off the river. This painting is in the Smithsonian. You can feel the summer haze as you peer across the water.
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On Tuesday night he appeared as General Grant at the end of the war at the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable at which we had a turnout of 200, our largest since before Covid. Wednesday night, Curt was at the Sun City/Surprise Roundtable for a dinner with sixty. Thursday morning was an appearance at the Scottsdale's Museum of the Western Spirit speaking to 75 senior citizens as President Grant. That evening Curt wrapped up his schedule with another appearance at the Museum, speaking as the former president to an audience of one hundred, this time with a focus on the Indian policy of his administration and reflecting upon its failure.
At each event Curt captivated his audience, taking us back in time. We hope to have him back.
Below is General Grant and Grant with his personal secretary, Colonel Horace Porter.
Earlier today I was doing one of my infrequent reviews and updating of the blogroll on my home page. The very concept of a blogroll is a reminder of the olden days before social media conquered all. I've had Normblog on that roll for many years. It was the first major circulation blog to put THC on its blogroll and it was run by the Norman Geras a British Marxist, a genial and generous man I admired. Norm passed in 2013 from cancer but his family maintained the blog in its frozen status for many years and so I kept it on the blogroll as a tribute. I see that the domain for the blog is now gone, so will be removing it, but wanted to take note again of Norm and link to what I wrote upon hearing of his death. He represented a lost world where interesting and informative discussions could take place across political lines.
On this date eight years I published Normalizing Mass Murder and Repression, on the New York Times year long, 40 installment series, about the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. I ended with a comment on the final installment by Simon Sebag Montefiore which had a negative take on the Bolsheviks and included a swipe at Donald Trump.
One wonders if he was contractually obligated by the Times to insert the reference to Trump. However gross Donald Trump may be, the attempted comparison is so absurd it diminishes the power of Montefiore's article. It is also another example showing why decent liberals are proving so ineffective in taking on the growing authoritarian trend on the Left. They seem to be unable to take the threat seriously, finding it easier to take potshots at the Right for which they will be applauded by their constituency. One day we will look back and wonder what was the flaw in traditional liberalism that allowed it to reject the illiberalism of the Right, but cede its position in our institutions to the illiberalism of the Left.
We now can look back and wonder, but sadly the struggle, to the extent it even occurred, is over, and the illiberal factions of the Left have solidified their hold on most of our institutions, including the Democratic Party. At the same time, the traditional elements of the GOP have dissolved in the face of MAGA worship, resulting in incoherence on the right and the unleashing of some dark forces. The 20th century categories of liberal and conservative no longer exist as effective political groupings at the national level. We have entered a New World, one that, as of yet, has no Order.
The consequences of the refusal of the New York Times and the rest of traditional media to normalize Donald Trump and to instead create a continuing narrative designed to impede his administration and drive him from office was a disastrous decisions with reverberations that impact this country today. The then-editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, announced after the 2016 that Trump would not be normalized in the news section (for more on Baquet read Closed Ecosystem 2). The result was the creation of the Russia Collusion Hoax, (for more read Reassessing The Assessment and He's Not Your Bro). There were plenty of legitimate problems with Donald Trump that a "normal" press could have reported upon. Instead, a gullible and conspiracy-obsessed president had a real conspiracy constructed against him. We are seeing the consequences in Trump's second administration.
Below is a reprint of that article.
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With the election of Donald Trump, cries abounded on the Left that society and media needed to avoid "normalizing" the new President. In this context "normalizing"
does not mean agreeing with Trump, but rather accepting that his
statements and actions can, and should, be evaluated with some degree of
objectivity.
But while progressives decried any reasoned discussion of Trump as
normalization, one of the left's leading organs, The New York Times
(though even the Times is, based on comments on its articles, apparently
not always as crazy left as its readership demands), devoted all of
2017 to normalizing communism, one of the ideologies that along with
Nazism and fascism, made much of the 20th century a charnel house.
Last year, the Times ran a 40-part series called "Red Century: Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution".
The series included, as you would expect for a normalization project, a
great deal of civilized discussion about the pros and cons of the
communist experiment.
But it was also carefully curated, finding little or no space in its
forty episodes to discuss communism in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, or the
recent experiment in Venezuela. It was also remarkably unreflective
about what went wrong, with little discussion of dissidents and critics
of the communist system such as Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia. Most
surprisingly there was no assessment of the monumental impact of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's revelations on the tottering edifice of Soviet
Communism. And there was a complete absence of the big picture questions
- how does human nature fit into the idea of the Soviet New Man? Is it
possible to prevent any communist society from descending into the
darkness that each Red regime has done so far?
What the articles in the series did unintentionally highlight was the
ability of idealists, or ideologues if you prefer (ideologues being
idealists you disagree with), to walk optimistically into the future
with their heads held high as they search the skies for their new world,
enabling them to avoid seeing the sea of blood they wade through.
Let's look at some examples from start to finish, with some THC comments added in brackets:
What's Left of Communism by David Priestland (February 24), an
Oxford historian and man of the Left, in which he espouses communism
with a smiley face, without ever reflecting on its feasibility. Here
are some snippets:
"So did I witness Communism’s last hurrah that day in Moscow, or is a Communism remodeled for the 21st century struggling to be born?"This piece was quickly supplemented with a very amusing correction by the Times:
"But the flaws of laissez-faire soon came to Communism’s rescue. The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed made socialist ideas of equality and state planning a compelling alternative to the invisible hand of the market. Communist militancy also emerged as one of the few political forces prepared to resist the threat of fascism." [THC here: Priestland ignores that in the end game of the Weimar Republic, Stalin ordered the German Communist Party to focus on destruction of the centrist parties and not attack the Nazis. And, of course, we have the communist parties of Western Europe and the U.S. happily supporting Stalin and Hitler from 1939 to 1941.]
"A new left might then succeed in uniting the losers, both white-collar and blue-collar, in the new economic order. Already, we’re seeing demands for a more redistributive state. Ideas like the universal basic income, which the Netherlands and Finland are experimenting with, are close in spirit to Marx’s vision of Communism’s ability to supply the wants of all — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” [THC: And how exactly is that to occur without the use of government force]
"There will be no return to the Communism of five-year plans and gulags." [THC: Glad he feels so confident about that.]
"Lenin no longer lives, the old Communism may be dead, but the sense of injustice that animated them is very much alive."
Correction: February 24, 2017On March 13, we had Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today, by Stephen Boykewich, described as a consultant to social justice organizations. His piece isn't even about the communist revolution or communism, it's merely an anti-American screed blaming the United States for everything that's gone wrong with the Soviet Union and Russia.
A picture supplied by Getty Images was initially posted with this essay. Editors later learned that the photograph, of Lenin giving a speech, had been manipulated by the Soviet authorities to erase several figures near Lenin, notably Leon Trotsky. The picture has been replaced because such unacknowledged alterations violate Times standards.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, the Soviet state became a beacon of hope for the left, and Moscow a place for pilgrimage. It was four decades before the magic faded, and the world is still waiting for something to replace it. [THC: the kind of people who are still waiting for something to replace it are precisely the people you do not want anywhere near the levers of power.]On April 3 it was the turn of Tariq Ali, of the New Left Review, and fanboy of Hugo Chavez, on What Was Lenin Thinking?, furthering Beckett's theme of the prior week regarding the brilliance of Lenin and the sadness that under Stalin things went awry.
To be sure, Communist parties around the world kept the allegiance of many hard-liners and still recruited some young idealists, but 1956 was a turning point, and the Soviet Union as an idea was irretrievably tainted. Thereafter, Communists were as likely to define themselves as against Moscow as for it. [THC: Yet they would always turn to the next group of Communist heroes who would finally get it right - we had Mao (40-50 million dead), then Ho Chi Minh killing anyone who opposed him; next was Cambodia Year Zero (20% of the population dead) and Fidel (arbitrary executions, imprisonment of homosexuals, destruction of one of Latin America's most prosperous economies).]
While its final details were obviously not advertised beforehand, the takeover was swift and involved minimal violence. [THC: Ali is actually describing a coup against the real revolutionary government, consisting of social democrats! There is also no mention in his paean to the great man that a month later he ordered the forcible dissolution of the only legislative assembly ever freely elected by the Russian people.]
That all changed with the ensuing civil war, in which the nascent Soviet state’s enemies were backed by the czar’s former Western allies. Amid the resulting chaos and millions of casualties, the Bolsheviks finally prevailed — but at a terrible political and moral cost, including the virtual extinction of the working class that had originally made the revolution. [THC: Tariq Ali is not stupid. Here he is deliberately misleading readers not familiar with history by blaming what happened next on Lenin's enemies. Anyone who has read Lenin's own bloodthirsty words and directives, which do not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, and were designed to instill terror in all, knows better.]Nor should we forget that a few decades later, it was the Red Army — originally forged in the civil war by Trotsky, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Mikhail Frunze (the former two killed in the 30s by Stalin) — that broke the military might of the Third Reich in the epic battles of Kursk and Stalingrad. [THC: No mention of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. I guess it must have slipped the author's mind.]"
“America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.”"The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them — and they are in history."
In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” It was the black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as the varying dictates that came from the Communist International, Moscow’s directorate for foreign parties. [THC: This is a continuation of the carefully cultivated academic myth that Soviet communism was the only social justice alternative in the America of those times. Conveniently ignored is that in the 1920s and 1930s the Socialist Party under Norman Thomas was fiercely anti-communist precisely because its members understood that the inevitable result of communism was intolerance, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.]And we have an unexpected bonus from Ms Jaffe. Turns out intersectionality, the latest poison introduced into our society, a poison designed to turn Americans against one another, actually originated with communists!
These arguments were championed by organizers like Claudia Jones, a black leader within the Communist Party U.S.A. and a journalist for its newspaper, The Daily Worker. According to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, Ms. Jones expounded the idea now known as intersectionality decades before that term became so ubiquitous that Hillary Clinton used it in a tweet on the campaign trail. For Ms. Jones, understanding the lives of black women and the economic and social position they occupied would create a better understanding of the system of capitalism as a whole. It followed, Ms. Carruthers explains, that black women’s work was central in the struggle to replace the system.
On August 7, Fred Strebeigh may have written the most preposterous entry in a series already chock full of ridiculous attempts to normalize the abnormal. It's titled Lenin's Eco-Warriors about how, under Lenin, a "longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping", the Soviet Union became a global pioneer in conservation! For anyone familiar with the wreckage of the Soviet Union's natural environment (see, for instance, the Aral Sea) and the incredible levels of pollution caused by its insane push for centrally planned industralization at the expense of every other consideration in society this article is an insult.What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world. [THC: One is sometimes left just speechless.]
Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.”
One effect of the failure of revolutionary forces to mobilize under the joint banner of Communism and Islam was to deeply divide Muslims, weakening their capacity first to fight colonialism during the first half of 20th century and then to resist the rise of authoritarianism across the Muslim world. [THC: Wait, you're saying communism is not authoritarian?]Later the same month we had yet another lament from a professor; this one an American from Hamilton College, When New York City was the Capital of American Communism by Maurice Isserman. The good professor regrets that:
With the onset of the Cold War, and of a second Red Scare more pervasive and longer-lasting than the original, Communists found themselves persecuted and isolated. [THC: I wonder why secret members of a party who accepted direction from a totalitarian foreign power devoted to the destruction of American democracy would find themselves persecuted and isolated?]On a serious note, the Isserman piece is part of a larger, and largely successful effort to rewrite the history of American communism.(1) As with many of the pieces in the Times series it cast American communists as idealists who were just ahead of their time. A couple of years ago I watched a panel discussion on C-Span. The panelists were authors and researchers who, in recent decades, have done remarkable research exposing the depth of Soviet espionage in the United States and the complicity of American communists in the spying, as well as the evidence of direct Soviet control of the American Communist Party (the most prominent of the researchers being Harvey Klehr, whose work I recommend). They had their own lament. According to the panelists there is no new research work in academia looking further into this aspect of American communism even though the speakers said there is still much unreviewed documentation out there. Instead, grad students are discouraged from pursuing such research and the academic journals devoted to this subject focus on articles stressing the reformist nature of American communism and the undeserved repression party members experienced.
The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.That virtuous idealism justified any monstrosity. The Bolsheviks admired the cleansing purges of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror: “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,” Lenin said. The Bolsheviks created the first professional revolutionaries, the first total police state, the first modern mass-mobilization on behalf of class war against counterrevolution. Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. Their zeal justified the mass killings of all enemies, real and potential, not just by Lenin or Stalin but also Mao, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. It also gave birth to slave labor camps, economic catastrophe and untold psychological damage. (These events are now so long ago that the horrors have been blurred and history forgotten; a glamorous glow of power and idealism lingers to intoxicate young voters disenchanted with the bland dithering of liberal capitalism.)
But Lenin’s tactics, too, are resurgent. He was a sophisticated genius of merciless zero-sum gain, expressed by his phrase "Kto kovo?" — literally, “Who, whom?” asking the question who controls whom and, more important, who kills whom. President Trump is some ways the personification of a new Bolshevism of the right where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears, and the exploitation of what Lenin called useful idiots.
(1) 2026 Update In October 2023, Maurice Isserman resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that NYC Mayor Mamdami and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain members of. In 1982 Isserman was a founding member of the DSA, the lead founder being the late Michael Harrington. Isserman and Harrington actually were Democratic Socialists. I believe Harrington was mistaken in many of his political ideas but he was a decent and moral person, unlike the current leadership of the DSA. The DSA is another of the many institutions in America that carry the same name from decades ago but have been subverted from within and are now completely different in substance. The current DSA is a authoritarian communist organization heavily seasoned with settler-colonist ideology. It is an enemy of civilization.
Isserman resigned for several reasons, including:
1) The DSA's failure to denounce what he described as the "anti-Jewish pogrom" by Hamas on October 7, which he characterized as "politically and morally bankrupt".
2) The capture of the DSA by groups like Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and the Communist Caucus—which value ideological purity over democratic socialist values. He described these groups as "entryists", writing, "In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members".
