Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Bob Butler]

As you say, after the riots, there was a long term response. The elected government of LA did go a long way toward fixing it.

It was well known that LA had a problem all the way back in 1982 when Daryl Gates was trying to explain why police were choking blacks to death. He said when the choke holds were released, "The throats of blacks don't open up like they do with normal people's." At that time, Tom Bradley and his liberal coalition had been firmly in charge of Los Angeles for 10 years and they still were 10 years later when the riots happened.

Another point I want to make was you keep talking about Trump and the "insurrection". When the jury made their verdict in the Rodney King incident, Tom Bradley made a public statement and that was what some attribute to triggering the riot. President George HW Bush invoked the insurrection act. The LA riot was not an insurrection. Neither was January 6.

As far as overtly imposing dividing lines, there is no proof of it, but there wouldn't be in most situations. Public servants know who they are supposed to serve and by the very nature of who gets into those positions they jump and bark on cue according to how people with money and power expect them to. That has a lot lot do with how policing or other government functions get done or don't get done as the case may be and why it is so corrupt at this time in history, as those are the expectations that are set. With covid it was essentially the same thing. Nobody with wealth and power had to leave their homes.

Agreed, the target of the Rodney King riots was not the US Government. However, the target of the January 6 Insurrection was.

In the Dominion v Fox lawsuit, Murdock made a statement that it wasn’t about red and blue, it was about green. If they told their audience what they wanted to hear, they would get a larger audience share, be able to charge more for ads, and thus make more money. Discovery resulted in e-mail and memos where various Fox hosts with malice and scorn gave very poor opinions of common guests like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell The overall result was a self generating view which make for rather warped perspective. Months later, folks are still wrapped up in the for profit lies. People so badly want the lies to be true that they suspend rational thought.

To what extent will this continue when the televised trials start? I don’t see MAGA being able to win a general election. Will MAGA hold control of enough of the base to keep control of the Republicans? Will Trump continue to be able to eliminate non MAGA Republicans in the primary? There is a need in our system for a second party to contest the dominant one. MAGA can’t. Will the money folk have to try to create another party that doesn’t seek their traditional base? Can they win without it?

Not that I really care. Just pass the popcorn.

During the unravelling, governing through money worked. If you made the rich happy and collected campaign funding, you wound up on top. During the crisis, it is governing through votes. The crisis issues are dominant. If you present solutions to the crisis issues, you get the votes to be dominant. The Republicans seem to be sticking with the unraveling policy. I am counting on the crisis policy giving the Democrats a clean hold on Congress in 2025.

[aeden]

I wish I could go back to 1996 and live there for the rest of my life:

90s music, J. CREW, great food that was affordable, and good friends.

AP photographer Liu Heung Shing were sternly warned not to ask questions or take pictures.
"It was an extraordinary speech. I remember thinking that Gorbachev looked very tired," Cooperman said. "He expressed trepidation about the future. But I thought he just seemed relieved."

Gorbachev announced that after 74 years as one of the world's most powerful nations, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and would break up in 15 separate countries.
As Gorbachev finished speaking, Liu ignored the warning he'd been given and quickly snapped a photo that became an iconic image: Gorbachev closing the folder that held his speech, marking the end of the Soviet empire.
Seconds later, a Soviet security official approached Liu and "slugged him, hard, right in the stomach," Cooperman said.
But he had the photo.
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/1 ... 0-c85.webp

“We’ll be back on a hair-trigger” said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, during the debates in the Senate. Moynihan continued: “We’re talking about nuclear war. It is a curiously ironic outcome that at the end of the Cold War,we might face a nuclear Armageddon.”
Clinton also meddled in Russia’s 1996 presidential elections. Then he started the first round of NATO expansion despite the objections of many prominent experts, including former US government officials, Members of Congress, and diplomats. For example:
Fifty members of the Arms Control Association wrote a letter to Clinton saying “We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.”
Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delaware), while calling Moynihan “the single most erudite and informed person in the Senate,”
said he disagreed with him and pushed for NATO’s expansion.


Putin Says He Discussed Russia's Possible NATO Membership With Bill Clinton.
They mock us to this day as we donated money to bury the frozen dead then.
We will never know. Ask the think tanks. No winners.

The root of this line of thought the front lines today. He said they will stick a knife in you any chance they get.
Pretext is was the Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" strategic bomber that was built by Convair and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) from 1949 to 1959. He helped the Hungarian survivors in November 1956 who where crushed beyond measure you could understand today.

The dead deserve the truth and any common man lost is tragic.

[Guest]

‘There was no promise not to enlarge NATO’
Robert Zoellick, the U.S. diplomat who helped negotiate the end of the Cold War, says Vladimir Putin’s claims about Ukraine are part of a disinformation campaign

The British Defense Minister also talked about this in Parliament in 2022. No such promise was ever made.

Harvard Law Today

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/there-was ... arge-nato/

When President George H.W. Bush sat down with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the peaceful end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, former Under Secretary of State Robert Zoellick ’81 was in the room where it happened.

During the 1990 summit, Zoellick says President Gorbachev accepted the idea of German unification within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, based on the principle that every country should freely choose its own alliances.

Zoellick Robert
“I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement. Those facts have undermined one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine — that the United States had agreed that former Warsaw Pact nations would never become part of the North Atlantic security alliance.

Zoellick, a former deputy and undersecretary of state, deputy White House chief of staff, U.S. trade representative, and World Bank president, shared his recollections about the Cold War’s end and its ties to the ongoing war in Ukraine as part of a broader conversation with Harvard Law Today about the 75th anniversary of the Truman Doctrine, an American foreign policy aimed at containing Soviet expansion following World War II.

He is the author of “America in the Word: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy.” An alumnus of both Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, where he is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Zoellick believes Putin’s false claim about NATO enlargement is part of a disinformation campaign by the former KGB agent to mask his true intentions.

Zoellick vividly recalls the White House meeting he attended nearly three decades ago in which Bush asked Gorbachev if he agreed with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe principle that nations are free to ally with others as they see fit. When Gorbachev said yes, he says, the Soviet leader’s “own colleagues at the table visibly separated themselves.”

Sensing the import of the possible breakthrough, he says a colleague at the meeting, Robert Blackwill, sent him a note checking what they had heard and asking if they should ask Bush to repeat the question. “Gorbachev agreed again,” Zoellick recalls, to the principle that Germany could choose to enter NATO.

Putin does not see Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state … He believes that they are all Russians, living in a greater Russia.

“The reality was that, in 1989-90, most people, and certainly the Soviets, weren’t focusing on whether the Eastern European countries would become part of NATO,” Zoellick says. Knowing Soviet and Russian diplomacy, he believes Moscow would have demanded assurances in writing if it believed the U.S. had made such a promise. And even in 1996, when President Bill Clinton welcomed former Warsaw Pact nations to join NATO, he says that, “[o]ne of the German diplomats involved told me that as they discussed the enlargement with the Russians, no Russian raised the argument that there had been a promise not to enlarge.”

But if the West never gave the promise Putin has used to explain his decision to invade Ukraine, what does Zoellick think motivates the Russian president’s decision to inflict death and destruction on one of Russia’s nearest neighbors? “Putin does not see Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state,” he says. “He has a view of Russian history where the Rus [the medieval ancestors of the people who came to form Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine] began in Kyiv. He believes that they are all Russians, living in a greater Russia. And I think at age 69, Putin feels that this is a question not only of Russian history, but his place in Russian history.”

Zoellick says that when Putin’s earlier attacks in the Crimea and country’s eastern regions failed to halt Ukraine’s drift towards the West, the Russian leader believed he had no other choice but to invade. “That’s his motivation. And I think we need to be aware that he’s going to double down. The resilience and resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist has been a surprise to him and everybody else. I don’t think he’s going to ultimately be successful. In addition to today’s brutal battles, Russia faces a difficult occupation and insurgency, even if it can seize cities and territory.”

The experienced diplomat also credits Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with rallying the Ukrainian people by refusing to flee Kyiv and through adept use of social media and language.

“We’re seeing that the skills that he developed as an entertainer and a communicator can be used in different ways, just as Ronald Reagan did,” he says. “It does raise a concern that, if something happens to Zelensky, what will that do to morale? Will he be a martyr or will his loss break the public will?”

The resilience and resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist has been a surprise to Putin and everybody else. I don’t think he’s going to ultimately be successful. In addition to today’s brutal battles, Russia faces a difficult occupation and insurgency, even if it can seize cities and territory.

Zoellick also notes that, as the war in Ukraine has garnered the world’s attention, many of the questions being asked today about the West’s relationship with Russia are similar to those he had dealt with at the end of the Cold War, including “Russia’s sense of whether it feels like a great power or threatened by NATO … those are the issues that are at very much at play in dealing with Ukraine.”

“Can Russia forge peaceful, constructive ties with the West?” he asks. “Failed economic and political reforms left Russia behind. Its economy depends on energy production. Putin played off public frustrations, but many Russians don’t want war and isolation.”

When thinking about global diplomacy and the factors that might have led to the Russian invasion, Zoellick harkens back to a comment made by his boss for eight years, James Baker, who served both as secretary of state and the treasury, as well as White House chief of staff: “As you address the problems of one era, you’re often planting the seeds for the next set of challenges. History doesn’t stop.”

More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Zoellick says the legacy of decisions made at the end of the Cold War are echoing throughout Europe today: “Would we keep NATO alive? Would it enlarge into Central and Eastern Europe? How far? What would be the effects on Russia of its loss of empire?”

“That leaves the question of whether the U.S. could have avoided Russia’s turn,” he says. The answer, he believes, depended on Russia’s choices. “Certainly, we wouldn’t have wanted East and West Germany to remain divided.” The related questions are many: What if Eastern European countries had been barred from joining NATO and therefore remained, like Ukraine, outside the western security umbrella? And how would they react to the Russian threat and being left again as “lands between” Germany and Russia? The U.S. and Europe, he notes, offered Russia partnerships, but Russia felt humiliated by the loss of its empire.

“I was the U.S. negotiator for German unification,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that a democratic Germany was unified in NATO. I don’t think anybody would think that’s a bad idea today. And if anything, we’re now seeing Germany stepping up to a security role for NATO and the European Union.”

In 1989-90, Zoellick was also focused on the idea that Poland — long subject to invasions by Russia and Germany — should be able to eventually join NATO. He made sure that the treaty on German unification kept that possibility open. “Given Putin’s behavior, can you imagine what the effect would be on Poland today if it weren’t in NATO? I think it’s wise to have Poland and Germany on the same side. The Baltic countries were a tougher choice for NATO, not because they don’t deserve the security, but they’re very hard to defend.” Nevertheless, he adds, because the Baltic states are now NATO members, he believes we must “take serious steps to defend them from both direct and hybrid threats.”

Ultimately, he believes supporting Ukraine economically and supplying arms for self-defense, rather than opening the potential for eventual NATO membership, would have been a better approach than the one the West has taken in recent years.

“If NATO gives a security guarantee, it has to mean it,” he says. “It has to be serious about providing deterrence under Article Five of the North Atlantic Alliance treaty. … I support Ukraine’s economic reforms and its democracy, [but] I doubted that the American people were ultimately willing to fight for Ukraine. The worst thing to do was to suggest Ukraine might join NATO, but without a serious pathway to membership.”

The U.S., he adds, “isn’t going to defend everybody all the time, everywhere in the world; we have to know what we will and won’t defend. Having said that, I think the Obama and Trump administrations erred by not giving more military support to Ukraine. I believe that we should help the Ukrainians defend themselves. But those are the exact issues debated today.”

[aeden]

https://time.com/5564207/russia-nato-relationship/
Do we believe time or the other at Auckland, New Zealand 12 September 1999

1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they had a clear goal.
“Keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” said Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay,
NATO’s first Secretary General.

In 1994, Russia officially signed up to the NATO Partnership for Peace,
a program aimed at building trust between NATO and other European and former Soviet countries.
President Bill Clinton described it in January 1994 as a “track that will lead to NATO membership.”

Former Kremlin adviser Sergei Karaganov tells TIME that history could have looked different.
Not allowing Russia to join NATO was “one of the worst mistakes in political history,” says Karaganov.

On this issue no winners. Just dead common men and levels of pragmatic lunatic's.

[Higgenbotham]

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/20 ... ems_00-05/

So what are the crisis issues of today? In Black Lives Matter there was police prejudice killing and spree killing of not just black minorities, protesting toward an end of prejudice and more equality. In abortion there was an attempt by religious fanatics to spread their religious doctrine to unbelievers, countered by a press for independence and freedom. In the insurrection there was opposition to rule of law. In Covid there was money valued over lives.

Admittedly, "crisis issues" and "top national problems" may not be exact matches. Not all issues may have been included in the poll.

But...

police prejudice killing
spree killing
prejudice
abortion
money valued over lives

I'm having a hard time finding any of this.

Gun violence, yes. But spree killing is a very, very small fraction of gun violence.

Racism is way down the list.

Affordability of health care, anyone?
Cost of living? As in inflation?

The Pew poll is interesting, but reflects the current issues rather than issues which have been important at various times during the crisis. For instance, there is no mention of Covid, police killing of minorities which was at the center during the BLM protests are missing and I don’t note the Insurrection. They also avoid taking policy positions, and so many crisis issues were/are partisan.

I believe you are saying it's what people are passionate enough to come out and protest against that are the crisis issues rather than what people say are the top issues. Health care costs have been at or near the top of the list of the Pew polls for several years. I believe I read once that medical bills are the top cause of bankruptcy. Yet we don't see people in the streets protesting against high health care costs.

[Bob Butler]

I believe you are saying it's what people are passionate enough to come out and protest against that are the crisis issues rather than what people say are the top issues. Health care costs have been at or near the top of the list of the Pew polls for several years. I believe I read once that medical bills are the top cause of bankruptcy. Yet we don't see people in the streets protesting against high health care costs.

About right. Like, on tonight's news I expect all sorts of stuff about Trump's legal woes and Hunter's laptop, but I agree health care costs ought to be an area of concern. Just less to do about it or learn.

[Guest]

In fact, the Africans are likely to have made
the world their own during the dark age, for they
will have swarmed all over the rich lands as the
new barbarians. When the smoke of the dark age
lifts, they may well be found to be in control of key
parts of the planet. They will be the new aristocracy
in regions far from their (now forgotten)
homelands. The formerly ascendant Europeans will
cringe before these haughty paragons. A bold but
reasonable prediction is that the next era will be the
African era. That will be sweet revenge. The most
despised basket cases of the present day, the people
that the world writes off, will soon lord it over the
planet. It could be only a dark age away.

If Zimbabwe and South Africa are any indication of African potential, well...

Obviously the writer has never lived in sub-Saharan Africa or any other black country. I hate virtue signalling. I find many people find it necessary to say something positive after criticizing 'protected groups' as to not be labelled racist. They retreat, run away, and escape the city to avoid what is unfolding around them. They leave their impoverished brothers behind unconcerned and unbothered with their horrific fates.

And that is why we are in the situation we are today.

Working in commercial security in SA, we worked closely with the police - the robbery reaction unit at John Vorster. With the company having the contract to investigate theft from the hospitals, visited Baragwanath and was shocked at the absolute barbarity in nearly every ward. Then one of the black women heard we were having trouble with some vagrants who had been breaking into homes, she volunteered the info that she could arrange for them to be followed home and necklaced for R50. People who have never been to the continent, nevermind the country, can never understand or accept that someone could be so cruel. They refuse to accept the farm murders being so horrific based on their own mindset that people arent that barbaric.

[guest]

I asked about this on the general thread, but I want to ask here too.

Will there be any real push back or will westerners just go the way of the dodo?

This is how it ends?

[Higgenbotham]

Well, I would start by saying that in my opinion we are a long, long way from the equivalent of the underlined part of this quote. Opinions on this board seem to vary on that.

Pushback will be happening but it will be ineffective, similar to the third paragraph.

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.

The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

[aeden]

Thanks to all for driving without guard rails to complicated metrics in the mud hut hovel.
Inputs will decide as the paper tigers find out bish zones have blown past liabilities
with underwater propaganda pits with no bubbles to cater in headings dead ahead already known.
We will incrementally add to short positions going forward.
We may not be dead center as we leverage short. H appears current and correct
and we expect allot more geniuses to paper over lost Aston Martin in garages
and national debt fools also.

As far as the eye could see the coal cars from Mexico where full heading to the border in plain view from actual news.
Some guy incoherent running the Zone under collapse babbling out things unable to function or afford.