Disney World in Florida attracts more than 50 million visitors a year to an area of central Florida that was previously known only for stifling heat, cheap land, and military bases. It generates more than $5 billion every year in local and state tax revenue, it says here, which is handy in a state that prides itself on making do without a state personal income tax. I understand that Disney is also the single biggest employer in the state of Florida.

Today the Florida legislature passed a bill that dissolves a special district that allows the Walt Disney Company to act as its own government within the outer limits of Orange and Osceola counties. “The special district, enacted in 1967 to entice Disney to build a theme park 20 miles south of Orlando, saves the company millions of dollars annually in fees and taxes,” it says here.

There is a righteous debate to be had over the practice of giving big corporations special tax breaks or other incentives to intice them to move to your state or city. There is a lot wrong with that, IMO. But today’s bill will impact a lot of people beside Disney and its employees.

Dissolving the district would mean Reedy Creek employees and infrastructure would be absorbed by the local counties, which would then become responsible for all municipal services. The counties would collect the tax revenue Disney currently pays the Reedy Creek district, but would also be saddled with the districts liabilities. Namely, its debt.

Reedy Creek historically operates at a loss of around $5 million to $10 million each year, according to its financial reports. But since Disney can subsidize its own operations with theme park revenue, that debt doesn’t have much impact on its bottom line.

According to lawmakers, there’s around $1 billion in debt on the balance sheet that taxpayers would become responsible for should the special district get absorbed, leading to higher taxes.

Was this really a smart move for a guy running for re-election? That would be Gov. Ron DeSantis. He’s way ahead in the polls I understand, but it’s a long way to November. On the other hand, the effects of this mess won’t be felt until next year.

I’ve seen commentary saying that today’s bill benefits Disney, because costs formerly paid by Disney will now be paid by taxpayers. Whether Disney agrees that the bill benefits them I cannot say. They might rather be in control of their own maintenance and upkeep. Once they have to wait for taxpayer approval, potholes and general decay are likely to set in.

DeSantis is angry with Disney because it issued a statement critical of DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Apparently dissent is not allowed in DeSantis’s Florida. Jonathan Chait:

After DeSantis signed an anti-gay measure, Disney issued a statement condemning it, and suspended its political donations, which had previously included generous support for DeSantis. In retaliation, DeSantis rushed through a measure targeting Disney’s legal status. He is establishing a new norms in Republican politics: Corporations that publicly question the party’s preferred policy, or withhold donations in protest, will be subject to discriminatory policy. If they enjoy favorable regulatory or tax treatment, they can continue to do so on the condition that they stay in the GOP’s political good graces.

This is one way rulers like Orban and Putin hold power. It is a method that, until quite recently, would have been considered unthinkable in the United States. That bright line has been obliterated. Trump and DeSantis have now made it almost unremarkable.

DeSantis has admitted in interviews that his bill ending Disney’s deal with Florida is purely in retaliation for Disney’s criticism of the “don’t say gay” bill, which IMO Disney pretty much had to release as a public relations measure. Being seen as pro-homophobic is bad for business, I’m sure. But it seems to me an argument could be made that if today’s bill is a retaliation it amounts to a bill of attainder or ex-post facto law, which is prohibited in Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3, of the U.S. Constitution. Not that DeSantis gives a hoo haw about the Constitution.

Right-wing media nearly entirely sides with DeSantis, who has been raving about Disney’s “woke” and “California” values. Anything associated with the words “woke” and “Califiornia” are automatically reviled on the Right.

Jonathan Chait quotes National Review:

“These corporations assume that it’s still 2010, and that our genteel Marquess of Queensberry norms will prevent conservatives from retaliating against their many political campaigns and rhetorical posturing against us.”

It seems the principle that the government should not coerce private firms into supporting the regime was devised by Marquess of Queensberry, who was probably a communist. 

On to other Florida news:

The state of Florida released a list of the textbooks rejected in its recent math adoption. Because I’m a veteran of the textbook wars I scanned this with some interest. It appears that two of the big guns of the K-12 textbook industry, Pearson and Scholastic, decided to sit this one out. This doesn’t surprise me a whole lot. The publishers submit printed and bound books with ancillaries, not manuscripts. To develop, print and bind even a few copies of a K-12 textbook series requires an army of staff and suppliers and is an investment of a few million dollars, easily. I read in an article from 2004 that producing a K-8 reading program can cost as much as $60 million. If there’s a significant chance the books will be declared unsalable by a handful of political appointees on a textbook adoption committee, would you risk it? Especially since the books have “Florida” all over them and couldn’t be used in other states?

And people wonder why textbooks cost so much.

Now, why were they rejected? Florida claimed it was because they taught Critical Race Theory, among other things. Three people at Popular Information — Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby — got hold of some of the rejected books. And here is what they found.

There was no discussion of race, racism, or anything that could be construed as related to CRT in any of the textbooks. While the vast majority of the textbooks focused on basic math skills, they also encouraged students to reflect on how they learn and work with their classmates. In general, the textbooks encouraged young students to be nice to each other and themselves. 

That’s right. Florida objects to children being nice.

Florida Reveal Math Grade 5, which was also rejected, uses similar prompts to encourage students to think critically about how they work with others in the classroom setting. “When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,” the book states in the introduction. 

Other prompts encourage critical thinking and highlight relationship skills, such as: “What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?” and “What can you do to help all classmates feel comfortable in math class?”

This being nice stuff is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which Ron DeSantis opposes.

In a press conference on Monday, DeSantis defended the decision, focusing on SEL. Right-wing activists claim that SEL is CRT by another name but that is inaccurate. SEL focuses on the development of “critical thinking, emotion management, conflict resolution, decision making, [and] teamwork” — skills that are necessary for students to excel in school and in life. The term dates back to a 1997 book but the concept of character development dates back at least to Benjamin Franklin in the mid-1700s.

“You know, math is about getting the right answer and we want kids to learn to think so they get the right answer. It’s not about how you feel about the problem or to introduce some of these other things,” DeSantis said. 

Teaching children to work collaboratively without fighting and to develop emotional intelligence is not a bad thing, IMO. The Mahadaughter, who writes and edits K-12 math textbooks for a living, weighed in on Facebook and pointed out that the stuff Florida opjects to is basically the same stuff they teach on Sesame Street. “SEL teaches such Sesame Street concepts as ‘be kind and courteous ‘ ‘be curious about the world’ and ‘be a good sport,’ and I legit don’t understand why this is controversial, unless you want your kids to be angry monsters?”

Well, maybe they do want their kids to be angry monsters.

The three reviewers are genuinely baffled as to why some high school level books were rejected.

Florida’s decision to reject several high school math textbooks is especially puzzling. Popular Information obtained a digital copy of Functions Modeling Change, one of five precalculus books that were rejected by Florida for the inclusion of prohibited topics. 

Functions Modeling Change contains 10 mentions of “race” but all are related to running and biking. There is no discussion of racism and no math problems that deal with racial issues. There is also no discussion of emotions, teamwork, conflict resolution, or anything else associated with SEL. Instead, it is full of quadratic functions, trigonometry, and parametric equations. Another rejected precalculus book, Precalculus with Limits, has very similar content. So why were these textbooks rejected?

Maybe DeSantis thought Calculus and Precalculus were degenerate Roman Emperors?

Dana Milbank also reviewed Precalculus With Limits. This is brilliant:

At a time when Floridians by law “don’t say gay,” much less “trans,” this banned book brazenly teaches about the “Transitive Property of Equality.” Not only are impressionable minds taught about the “transformation of functions,” but also they are even indoctrinated in “describing transformations” and — appallingly — “sketching transformations.”

At a time when DeSantis is trying to restore the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, “Precalculus With Limits” has endless references to “sin” and “polynomials” — even “multiplying polynomials.” On Page 318, for example, it tells children to believe that “sin x takes on its full range of values.” Valuing sin! On Page 734, incredibly, it orders children to “sketch the graph of the degenerate conic.” Disgusting.

At a time when Florida is banning the acknowledgment of gender fluidity or any identity outside male and female, this subversive textbook unabashedly tells suggestible children that such things exist as “reciprocal identities,” “cofunction identities,” “additive identity property” and even “multiplicative identity property.”

Right now, all Floridians should be fighting the radical socialists, but “Precalculus With Limits” is inviting children to find the “simplest form of a radical equation,” or even to take a perfectly normal equation and “rewrite with a radical.” Which radical? Saul Alinsky?

Next thing you know, Disney World will be celebrating Polynomial Day, and all kinds of openly polynomial characters will show up and flaunt their polynomialism in public. I can see why DeSantis was appalled.

See also Steve M.

One of the abiding characteristics of righties is that they don’t know how anything works. They blame high gas prices on President Biden, for example. They never did grasp what covid is or how it spread or why masks have been recommended or why getting vaccinated is a good idea. They don’t understand why broken supply chains are causing shortages and higher prices. I have no idea what percentage of them could define “supply chain.”

A couple of days ago, Paul Waldman described the Ohio Republican Senate candidates’ fantastic promises to, among other things, end inflation. For example, Ted Cruz made a television ad for Josh Mandel in which he said “Want to stop Biden’s inflation? Send someone who’s done it before.” Mandel has never in his life stopped inflation anywhere, mind you.  Paul Waldman continues,

Is one backbench senator going to repair global supply chains, accelerate production of computer chips, reduce demand for consumer goods, increase the supply of construction materials and bring down international shipping costs?

The entire federal government has limited options for addressing these issues in the short term, especially since many of the supply chains originate in other countries. Most of the supply problems are the result of many private business decisions that resulted in all of us being way too dependent on a few foreign suppliers for too many essential products or parts. This is the fruit of free market capitalism, in other words.

I was in a grocery store today and overheard a fellow complain about the price of beef. Does he know that only four meatpackers control the U.S. beef industry? The CEOs of those four companies recently agreed to testify to the House Agriculture Committee why consumer prices keep going up while cattle growers’ profits keep going down. I’m looking forward to that.

Oh, and avian flu is causing egg prices to go up. Shit does happen.

Another Ohio Senate candidate, Jane Timken, has released an ad promising to “stop Biden’s socialist agenda and runaway inflation.” Yeah, righties don’t know what socialism is. But how does she plan to end runaway inflation? By balancing the budget. Hello? Federal deficit spending is not a cause of inflation.

And Republicans don’t balance budgets. The last Republican to balance the federal budget was Dwight Eisenhower. He accomplished that in part by not cutting taxes. This was when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent. You know that as soon as Republicans take over the federal government again they’ll cut the top tax rates again, and the deficit will grow. That’s what always happens when Republicans are in charge of the budget. From Ford onward every administration has had a budget deficit in excess of 2 percent of GDP, with the exception of Bill Clinton, who really did balance the budget. Then George W. Bush was handed a balanced budget, so he promptly cut taxes and got us into a stupid war that was mostly funded off the books with emergency wartime supplemental appropriations so that the cost wouldn’t show up in the official budget and upset people. But I digress.

Back to Paul Waldman:

Another candidate, Matt Dolan, tells a lie about Biden — that he “banned oil exploration” on his first day as president — and says that’s the cause of all our inflation. Dolan vows to solve inflation by fighting Biden’s “energy agenda.”

Do these people grasp what the word “inflation” means?

Of course, in 2016 Donald Trump made all kinds of promises that any sensible person knew he couldn’t possibly keep, and he didn’t, yet he doesn’t seem to have paid a price for his incompetence with his devoted base. I’m not sure that righties actually grasp cause and effect.

Since I wrote a long post yesterday I wasn’t going to post today, but this is too funny.

Tallahassee, Fla., April 15, 2022 – Today, Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran approved Florida’s initial adoption list for mathematics instructional materials properly aligned to Florida’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) Standards. The approved list followed a thorough review of submissions at the Department, which found 41 percent of the submitted textbooks were impermissible with either Florida’s new standards or contained prohibited topics – the most in Florida’s history. Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics. The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies. Despite rejecting 41 percent of materials submitted, every core mathematics course and grade is covered with at least one textbook.

Oh, those dastardly textbook publishers. But this left me wondering how they brilliantly managed to work critical race theory into math textbooks. Are there problems that discuss housing discrimination? Tampa Bay broadcaster WTSP says most of the rejected books were for grades K through 5, which kind of deepens the mystery.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel wondered the same thing.

The education department didn’t provide an example of critical race theory in the rejected textbooks, instead sending a list of two documents that did not contain specific examples.

Critical race theory, first proposed by legal scholars, says racism is embedded in the country’s institutions. Historically, the theory has been a law or graduate school subject and not one taught in public schools.

I am a veteran of the K-12 textbook industry. I assure you that it’s the primary goal of textbook publishers to sell books, not to indoctrinate anybody. And usually they bend over backward trying to accommodate what state textbook adoption committees want, even if the editorial staff grumbles about it.

But it’s also the case that textbook series are expensive things. They are supposed to be visually appealing, meaning they have lots of pretty color illustrations, usually on every spread (two facing pages). Spreads with just type are to be avoided. But this is expensive, and a lot of the cost happens in the printing set up, or prepress, phase. That cost is the same whether you are printing 10 books or 100,000 books. So, obviously, the per unit cost goes down the more identical books you can print and sell.

It’s also the case that there are new printing technologies that allow for small-batch printing of books with color illustrations at lower cost, but I don’t know where the industry is with that. It’s possible smaller publishers who aren’t going for nationwide sales would be better positioned to produce boutique books to order.

Anyway, for this reason, publishers don’t want to publish 50 wildly different editions of the same series. Ideally, they can publish textbooks that are innocuous enough to not push the buttons of anyone on a textbook committee. If one state insists on something that would be a poison pill elsewhere, ideally this can be accommodated by minor text tweaks that don’t require changing the illustrations, which reduces prepress costs somewhat. What they don’t want to do is develop a math textbook for one state that is based on an entirely different approach to math teaching than what is commonly used elsewhere.

Of course, I really, really wanted to know which textbook publishers were rejected, but I couldn’t find that information. On the list of publishers accepted, the only names I recognized were Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw Hill, for whom I worked for a while to produce a math K-12 series, ca. 2003-2004. Two of the big shots of the industry that don’t seem to be represented are Pearson and Scholastic. I’d love to know if they were rejected or just decided to not bother.

WaPo:

What could be in a math textbook that would promote critical race theory and other “prohibited” subjects? Though the department described the textbook review process as “transparent,” it did not mention which textbooks had been rejected or cite examples from the offending passages.

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was quoted as saying in the announcement.

What “race essentialism”? Especially in K-5 textbooks? The only way race was ever represented in any math textbook series I worked on was in the illustrations, which back in my day were required to depict children of all races and not just white ones. Did DeSantis see photos of black and brown children in the textbooks and freak out?

Maybe 2 + 2 no longer equals 4 in Florida. Who knows?

Here’s some history that may seem irrelevant to anything going on now, and maybe it is, but I want to use it to make a point.

While researching my book The Circle of the Way I learned a lot about Japanese history, beginning about 552 CE, when Buddhism was introduced to Japan, to the present day. This includes the militarization of Japan that began in the late 19th century and which terminated in defeat in the Pacific War, 1945. With the caveat that I’m hardly an expert on Japanese history, it does seem to me that the driving purpose behind that militarization arose from things buried deeply in Japan’s history, and in the Japanese psyche. The reasons for Japan’s wars of aggression were more sociopsychological and sociocultural than geopolitical.

Beginning in the 8th century, Japanese emperors developed a unique problem — too many sons. These sons were delivered of several women, but Japan didn’t seem to have developed the concept of illegitimacy, so all the sons were considered noble and potential heirs to the throne. And they all required an inheritance, so they were not only a potential source of political instability but also a drain on the budget. Daughters could be married off, but what do you do with surplus sons?

The answer, for several emperors, was to strip the sons of lesser mothers of their rank and titles and exile them from Kyoto, then the capital city. Many of these once-privileged men had a burning desire to claw their way back to importance. They did this by conquering territories in what is now northeastern Japan that had not been part of the empire before. This territory was populated by a fierce warrior people called the Emishi, who fought on horseback with curved swords designed for slashing. Eventually the conquered territories were a patchwork of hereditary fiefdoms owned by the families of the exiles, who collectively adopted a new name for themselves — samurai, those who serve.

To very oversimplify, the samurai came to power in the 12th century through military conquest and a lot of court intrigue, and from that time until the Meiji Restoration began in 1868, Japan was a military dictatorship ruled by the Shogun and the samurai class. In time, only those born into the samurai class were allowed even to carry weapons. There was still an emperor, mind you, but he was a figurehead. In that culture, loyalty and discipline were so valued that if you displeased whatever lordly samurai you answered to, usually you would not be executed but ordered to commit ritual suicide. And you would do it.

When European merchants and missionaries began showing up in the early 16th century, at first the Japanese tolerated them and even found them interesting. But it didn’t escape notice that other Asian countries were becoming European colonies. The merchants and missionaries came to be seen as the tip of the spear of European conquest, and in 1603 the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu ordered that Japan be almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. Trade with China continued through the port of Nagasaki, and an office of the Dutch East India Company in Nagasaki was allowed to remain in operation. So information about the wider world did get through the barrier. But most Japanese were not allowed to leave Japan, and as a rule foreigners were not allowed inland beyond Nagasaki.

So it was that when Admiral Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with a fleet of cutting-edge steam-powered warships, armed with guns that fired 150-pound shot, the Japanese suddenly realized the uncouth barbarians had gotten ahead of them in technology.  They realized also that their coastal cities could not be defended against a modern navy. Admiral Perry’s little visit touched off a series of events that toppled the last shogunate and restored power to the teenage Meiji Emperor in 1868.

The Meiji Emperor was a forward-thinking young man who decided Japan had to stop being a medieval backwater and join the modern world. Within a few short years the old fuedalist system of ancestral fiefdoms was demolished. The country was reorganized into prefectures with state-appointed governors. Industrialization and the introduction of new technologies and modern banking systems quickly followed. There was even an elected parliament and prime minister, although suffrage was limited and the Emperor still pretty much was in charge of the big stuff.

And the samurai class was abolished. Japan built a modern military based on European models, and young men of all backgrounds were consripted into it. But no more samurai.

Then Japan got to try out its new, modernized army, first against China and then against Russia. In the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Japan fought Qing Dynasty China over influence in Joseon Dynasty Korea. China had not modernized its army and sued for peace. The defeat for China touched off events that led to the 1911 revolution that deposed the last emperor. The victory for Japan persuaded the Japanese they should be considered the great power of Asia.

Then there was the Russso-Japanese War, 1904-1905. There is quite a good article about this war and its effects on 20th century history at the Association of Asian Studies that I recommend.  Very briefly, both Russia and Japan had imperialist plans for Korea and Manchuria, so they had a war. And Russia did very badly. In fact, the war should have ended more quickly, but Tsar Nicholas II refused to believe his army would lose to Japan. Many years earlier he had visited Japan as Tsesarevich and barely survived an assasination attempt there. He considered the Japanese to be “a bunch of monkeys” ever after. How could Japan possibly defeat Imperial Russia? More to the point, how could a nonwhite nation defeat a white one? It soon became obvious that the Japanese had a superior military to Russia, but even so both sides were depleted when President Theodore Roosevelt offered to broker peace.  One problem with the peace deal is that TR denied the Japanese an indemnity it expected, which led to two days of rioting in Tokyo. Per the Assocation of Asian Studies:

After courting the Japanese, Roosevelt decided to support the tsar’s refusal to pay indemnities, a move that policymakers in Tokyo interpreted as signifying that the US had more than a passing interest in Asian affairs. Indeed, the argument can be made that the conduct of the United States during the treaty negotiations that ended the Russo-Japanese War not only contributed to the broader recognition of its growing role in the Pacific, but also started US and Japanese policymakers down the road that resulted in Pearl Harbor and culminated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in the early 20th century there was another factor eating away at Japanese modernity, and that was the lost tradition of the samurai. Japan’s was a conservative culture that romanticized the old days of samurai military rule. The men who were the top officers of the military were the sons and grandsons of samurai, and these officers had not received the inheritance their forefathers had received. And so it was that Japan drifted down a rabbit hole of right-wing authoritarianism. By the 1930s, Japan had effectively become a military dictatorship once again. More than one historian has pointed out the parallels between the 1930s Japanese military top brass and the exiled imperial sons of earlier centuries who came back to power through military conquest of the Emishi.

And this brings me to Russia and Ukraine. I keep running into people who are still clnging to the notion that Putin has some legitimate grievance regarding NATO that explains the invasion. And I have also run into the notion that the invasion is really about oil deposits in the Black Sea that Russia wants. People will argue and argue this point.

But I think the truer reasons for Russia’s wars of aggression are more sociopsychological and sociocultural than geopolitical or economic. Truly, if you look closely, more often than not this explains most modern wars. Nations choose to engage in war for reasons that are mostly intangible, possibly even imaginary. That was certainly true for Germany in World War II. It was true of the U.S. in Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq. I could go on. And in the interest of world peace, this needs to be acknowledged. Maybe we’ll stop making the same mistake if this is better understood.

Please see Russia believed the West was weak and decadent. So it invaded. by Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner at the Washington Post.

Ukraine plays an important role in this story. It is depicted as part of the “Russian world,” the cradle of Russian civilization, which for many centuries was centered not around Moscow but around Kyiv, capital of today’s Ukraine. Ukraine’s choice to orient itself toward the West and reconcile a Slavic Orthodox identity with liberal democratic values is thus dangerous to this Russian vision of itself.

I believe this. It’s not really about oil and it’s not really about NATO. It’s about how Russia understands itself (or, at least, how Putin understands it) in light of its history and national mythology.

The article goes on to say that mixed into the Russian vision of itself is a whole lot of Christian conservatism imported from the U.S. that also saw the West as hopelessly corrupt and failing.

I hadn’t heard about the new stunt Greg Abbott was pulling on the southern border until yesterday. Wow, what a maroon.

In case you hadn’t heard yet — Abbott has ordered that all commercial trucks crossing the border into Texas have to be inspected by Texas authorities to be sure they aren’t carrying drugs or undocumented people. Aren’t the trucks already being inspected by federal Customs and Border Protection people? Why yes, they are! And after they get the federal inspection trucks must go through another inspection by the state of Texas. According to the El Paso Times, this is causing delays of ten hours to two days at some checkpoints.

I’m seeing no indication that the Texas inspections have caught anything the feds missed.

So trucks full of avocados and auto parts are unable to get through, and this is likely to result in food shortages and drive up prices. Thanks loads, governor. Josh Marshall wrote,

The chaos has been so immediate and extreme that Abbott has garnered substantial pushback even from state Republicans. State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller on Tuesday attacked Abbott’s new policy as “political theater” and “economy killing action.” “Your inspection protocol is not stopping illegal immigration. It is stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks — many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies. … The people of Texas deserve better!”

I question what the people of Texas “deserve,” since collectively they hava managed to be mostly a thorn in all our sides for some time, but let’s go on … the other little stunt Abbott is pulling is to send busloads of migrants seeking asylum to Washington, DC, to be unloaded in front of the Fox News station there. The migrants have all been processed by CBP and are free to travel. Apparently righties think it’s wonderfully fun and clever to dump the “illegals” so near the Capitol building. Paul Waldman points out that this is not causing any problems in DC, and no one there seems to care. Several of the migrants were happy to get a free ride to Washington.

Yesterday when news of the Brooklyn subway shooting spread through the Web, righties were practically gleeful blaming “defund the police” Democrats for violent crime in big cities.

But here’s the thing — homicide rates are actually higher in places Republicans are in charge. Behold:

The homicide rate in New York City was 5.5 killings per 100,000 people last year, according to several sources. That’s an increase from what it was in recent years, but way lower than what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

Jonathan Capehart:

The report further points out that the homicide rate averaged across all states that went for Trump was 40 percent higher in 2020 than the homicide rate in all states Joe Biden won. And six out of the 10 states with the greatest increase in homicide rates over 2019 levels voted for Trump, including McConnell’s Kentucky — which saw a 58 percent spike.

I haven’t seen any analyses of why this is true, but I postulate a correlation between rates of gun ownership and homicide. Also, the story about murder rates tends to get buried under the number of murders, which of course will be higher in big cities than in small cities and rural areas.

Those are points I made in old posts about Chicago, a place beloved among righties for allegedly being the murder capital of America. See The Truth About Chicago (2017) and Kill the Chicago Myth (2018). Rates of gun violence in Chicago are too high, but are way lower than several other cities.

And you know who is Number One right now? St. Louis. According to this source, the current rate of “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter” in St. Louis is 66.07 per 100,000 residents. Chicago is 24.13. New York City? 3.39.

It’s true that St. Louis has a Democratic mayor, but Missouri has among the most lenient gun laws in the nation. Truly, I can’t imagine what else the legislature could do to make carrying any damnfool firearm you want any easier. (Well, there was the right-to-murder law, but it died in committee, I understand.) And it seems to me that every time the legislature passes more “pro gun” legislation, the murder rate goes up. Which state (not counting the District of Columbia) is worst for gun carriers, according to gun activists? New York.

Last year St. Louis city and county sued the state over the nutty “Second Amendment Preservation Act” that nullfies any federal law that the right-wing wackjobs in the state legislature decide violates the 2nd Amendment. The U.S. Justice Department also sued. There’s been no resolution yet.

Righties also were quick to blame “defund the police” on rising violent crime, kind of ignoring that there’s been little actual defunding. In fact, several of the “top ten” homicide cities had recently increased police funding. There appears to be no correlation between decreases or increases in police funding and rising crime rates.

(I see television ads for political campaigns in Illinois, and a mess of Republicans are running to replace the Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. I like J.B. He’s sensible and has done a pretty good job of cleaning up the messes left by the last governor, a Republican. But all the people running against him are “tough on crime” types. They all brag about how conservative they are and how much they love cops. One wants us to know he loves Jesus, too. Nothing about schools or health care or fixing infrastructure. Let’s hope J.B. gets another term.)

There’s probably no easier way to make money than to be a close relative of a high elected official. We don’t have to dig back that far for examples. Before he went into politics, George W. Bush dabbled in the oil business, and failed, but he kept failing upward because his daddy was President of the United States. The name “George Bush” was worth something on a letterhead, even if Bush himself wasn’t much to brag about. So the boy stumbled and failed upward into cushier positions and bigger money. “Whenever he’s struck a dry hole, someone has always been willing to fill it with money for him,” it says here. He’s remembered by one executive who gave him a high-level position that he added “no value” to the company but was good for telling dirty jokes at board meetings.

I wrote about Hunter Biden and his Ukraine job back in 2019, before the infamous “I would like you to do us a favor” phone call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. And before Hunter Biden’s laptop became the Great White Whale of right-wing politics. Like George W. Bush before him, Hunter Biden was paid outrageous amounts of money so that the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma could put the name “Biden” on its letterhead. What Hunter actually did in the job, I do not know.

At one point, you might remember, the job of Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s Burisma gig came within a degree of separation. The European Union and the United States came to the conclusion that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was corrupt and needed to go. Vice President Biden was sent to Ukraine to deliver the message “that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired,” it says here.

“But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent,” the Vox article continues. “So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.” Whether firing Shokin made any difference to Burisma isn’t clear; stories conflict. But this is how Hunter Biden got on Trump’s radar, and how the name “Hunter Biden” became fixed in right-wing mythology, right up there with “Hillary Clinton” and “George Soros.” Merely to say a name is to evoke unspeakable evil; no evidence or even a coherent story of what the evil is need be given.

But now we get to Jared Kushner and the $2 billion payment from Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman that I mentioned in the last post.

Kushner is a guy so good at failing up he makes George W. Bush look like an amateur. I have looked at Kushner’s career and have yet to find an example of him not screwing up, even when he made money. He turned the once-hip New York Observer into an advertising circular for the Upper East Side, for example. (See also I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.) He nearly destroyed the family real estate business by sinking $1.8 billion into the purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Titanic of white elephants, right before the 2008 financial sector meltdown. There is copious evidence that U.S. foreign policy was manipulated to put pressure on Qatar investors to bail out Kushner and take the building off his hands.

In the Trump Administration, he was given a huge portfolio of tasks, of which he accomplished nothing measurable that I can see. The Middle East peace plan? Seriously? The archive of articles about how Jared screwed up the covid response could fill libraries. See, for example, How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air” in Vanity Fair. Jared’s efforts to obtain ventilators and other covid medical supplies in 2020 were a master class in incompetence, if not worse. See, for example, How Kushner’s Volunteer Force Led a Fumbling Hunt for Medical Supplies. I still think Jared and other Trumps were engaged in profiteering when people’s lives were on the line.

So Jared is, basically, a walking screw-up who has never had to face the consequences of his own incompetence. In that, he’s a lot like his father in law.

No reasonable person expects Jared’s new private equity firm to be a roaring success. MBS’s financial advisers thought Kushner’s firm to be a joke. Some of the $2 billion is being held until Kushner hires a “qualified investment team,” which apparently Kushner hadn’t thought of before asking for investments. And by all accounts the Saudi investment is about all the money Jared’s start-up can boast. But MBS must think the money is a good investment. Especially when there’s a chance Donald will be elected to another term. See:

Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone, Gee, Wonder Why Mohammed Bin Salman Personally Intervened to Give Jared Kushner $2 Billion

Steve Benen, MSNBC, Why Jared Kushner’s Saudi Arabian money is impossible to defend

Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer, Did Jared Kushner just get a $2 billion bribe?

Philip Bump, Washington Post, You say a president’s relative is part of iffy international deals?

As unfair as it might be, there is nothing illegal about a company giving a big job to the unqualified child of a president or vice president, just so a name will be associated with the company. On its face there’s nothing illegal about Mohammed bin Salman giving Jared Kushner’s firm $2 billion. But I really don’t want to hear another word about the damn laptop. The Right won’t shut up about it, of course. They are certain that, somehow, some terrible thing will be found on it that will snag President Biden as well. It hasn’t been found yet, even though the contents of the laptop have been meddled with by many right-wing hands already. But it must be there. Meanwhile, MSB’s $2 billion are not a problem. Right.

See: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate

By his own account, the Chancellor of Austria, Karl Nehammer, had a “tough” conversation with Vladimir Putin today. The Guardian:

Austria’s chancellor, Karl Nehammer, has said he told Vladimir Putin that “all those responsible” for war crimes must be brought to justice and warned that western sanctions would intensify as long as people kept dying in Ukraine.

After becoming the first western leader to hold face-to-face talks with the Russian president since the invasion of Ukraine, Nehammer said his trip to Moscow was not “a visit of friendship” and that the two had had a “direct, open and hard” conversation.

Austria is not a member of NATO and is militarily neutral, but Nehammer said his country would not be “morally neutral” as Bucha and other atrocities come to light.

I had hoped Nehammer would have told Putin that Russia is losing the war Putin started. We keep hearing that Putin’s people don’t tell him how badly his military is fumbling in Ukraine, even as it engages in war crimes. It’s less of an army than a mob with long-range artillery cover.

How is Putin losing? We learned today that Sweden and Finland could be joining NATO soon, so if one of Putin’s goals was to weaken the influence of NATO, he’s botched that one rather badly. NATO is suddenly relevant again. Russia has warned Sweden and Finland against joining NATO, but did not specify what consequences might be in store for those who draw Russia’s wrath. It’s possible Sweden and Finland are not terribly worried.

The one person who has soured on NATO is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is kind of done waiting for “diplomacy” to have any results. 

Meanwhile, CNN Business reports that Russia has defaulted on foreign debt.

Worth reading: ‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’: “Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.” Mostly Fiona Hill, though.

In other news —

I can’t bring myself to read this because it might drive my blood pressure up again against doctor’s advice. Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone, How Joe Manchin Knifed the Democrats — and Bailed on Saving Democracy.

Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz for U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania has Trumpworld in an uproar. Do read this; it’s hysterical, in its way.

Today we also learned that, six months after the Trump Administration (mercifully) ended, Jared Kushner’s brand new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This was after all of MBS’s financial advisers told him it was a bad idea. The New York Times:

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”;the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

Jared has a long-established record of screwing up, so MBS may be throwing away his $2 billion. Like I care.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers. …

… In Washington, Mr. Kushner had also helped broker $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia over 10 years. He helped protect those and other weapons deals from congressional outrage over the murder of Mr. Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe created by the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen.

The Times also says that Jared has “signed up few other major investors.” Probably because other major investors would rather not lose their money.

Josh Marshall:

This is possibly the largest and most brazen instance of public corruption I’ve seen in twenty five years covering American politics as a journalist. And this is saying something since, as you know, public corruption has always been one of my greatest interests and consistent beats. We knew a relationship like this was building through the Trump administration. Trump’s son-in-law, callow and hungry, had taken over administration Middle East policy, in the expectations of the big money pay offs the Saudis especially but not only them could provide to the Trump-Kushner family. And here we are with what is certainly just one example of the pay off. We knew it was coming but the sheer scale of it, the sheer openness of it, is bracing to see.

You would think that Jamal Khashoggi deserves at least a plaque somewhere at Affinity Partners since he is probably more personally responsible for securing this $2 billion than anyone.

See also Dan Primack at Axios, Trump Alums Cash In on Saudi Ties. Steve Mnuchin also is starting a new private equity fund and received $1 billion from MSB. At least Mnuchin does have a record of making money, in part by kicking old folks out of their homes.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:16, KJV)

I recommend The Russian Military Has Descended Into Inhumanity by Andrew Exum at The Atlantic. Exum is a former U.S. Army officer and scholar of the Middle East who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East in the Obama Administration. Exum notes that the Russian military has a long history of war crimes, but explains this is not because of Russian culture but Russian military culture. “Russia’s military, as we have seen these past five weeks, is a mess: Seemingly leaderless in Ukraine, it cannot even effectively maneuver against its opponent, much less carry out a coherent terror campaign against Ukrainian civilians,” Exum writes.

The U.S. military certainly has committed war crimes, he continues, but in two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan “the incidence of tactical units committing heinous crimes was lower, despite the duration of those wars, than that among Russian troops in a few weeks in Ukraine.”

There are several reasons for that disparity. First, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are mostly led, at the tactical level, by a professional noncommissioned-officer corps—something Russia’s army largely lacks. I asked a friend who led a brigade in Baghdad during the surge of 2007 why we did not see more war crimes then, despite the intensity of the combat. “That’s all down to the junior officers and noncommissioned officers who led the infantry platoons and squads,” he replied. “Those young men didn’t allow it.”

Second, the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan was—often to the detriment of its war aims—quite isolated from the populations themselves. U.S. troops lived in remote outposts, which hamstrung their efforts to defend the populations from insurgents but also reduced the kind of contact between occupying soldiers and civilians that has led to crimes of intimacy in Ukraine: looting on one end of the spectrum, rape and murder on the other.

And third, the U.S. military prosecuted its own war criminals, or at least the ones who got caught. “Convicted war criminals such as Clint Lorance and Eddie Gallagher were turned in by their own men before being tried and convicted in the military justice system,” Exum said “The military moved, before others could move it, to enforce discipline within its own ranks.”

This last factor is the most important, according to Exum, because it reveals a military culture with a lower tolerance of criminal behavior toward civilian populations.

The issue of war crimes raises the question of how war came to have laws. It appears there have been broadly agreed-upon rules about conduct in warfare for some time. We see this in a scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V, which features an invasion of France by England. When the soldier Bardolph was caught robbing a church in France and sentenced to be executed, King Henry says,

We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we
give express charge, that in our marches through the
country, there be nothing compelled from the
villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the
French upbraided or abused in disdainful language;
for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the
gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

The gentler gamester is the soonest winner. Henry’s aim was to rule France, not just destroy it, so it made sense to not piss off the locals. The real-world Henry was perhaps not so gentle. It’s recorded that during the seige of Rouen (1418-1419) he refused to let 1,200 civilians — elderly, women, children — evacuate so they could find food and survive. He instead forced them into a ditch between the lines, without food and exposed to the elements, until they died.

Still, if you intend to govern a people, good public relations doesn’t hurt. I have learned that our current international “laws of war” are loosely based on the Lieber Code, orders issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 that were drawn up by a Columbia College professor named Francis Lieber. The Lieber Code was designed to allow war to be both more humane and more terrible. It came about after discussions between Lincoln and Gen. George McClellan.

McClellan was determined to wage a textbook Napoleonic-style war of battles between armies on open ground that left civilians out of danger and the social fabric intact. Lincoln grasped what McClellan did not, that the war they had to fight could not be so limited. In the Civil War the lines between “soldier” and “civilian” had blurred. There was ongoing guerilla warfare among civilians and “irregulars” being carried out by the likes of William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson. And Lincoln saw that the war would not end until it was brought home to the southern plantation class that had pushed for it to protect their “property.”

So, as the Union army took over former Confederate territories and engaged with civilian populations, the Lieber Code gave them parameters to work within.  See John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Rules of War:

The code reduced the international laws of war into a simple pamphlet for wide distribution to the amateur soldiers of the Union army. It prohibited torture, poisons, wanton destruction, and cruelty. It protected prisoners and forbade assassinations. It announced a sharp distinction between soldiers and noncombatants. And it forbade attacks motivated by revenge and the infliction of suffering for its own sake. Most significantly, the code sought to protect channels of communication between warring armies. And it elevated the truce flag to a level of sacred honor.

If the ultimate goal is to reunite the country, the defeated secessionists had to be willing to peacefully reunite instead of engaging in endless rounds of revenge and retribution. Cruelty and atrocities are not good strategy of war.

Which is why, to my mind, Putin has already lost. It may be that he will succeed in destroying enough of Ukraine and killing enough Ukrainians that it could be occupied by Russian church ladies and Boy Scouts. But good luck keeping it, Vlad.

But we’ve got something else to worry about. Going back to Andrew Exum at The Atlantic:

Our military’s culture of accountability took a blow when then-President Donald Trump pardoned both Lorance and Gallagher and was then cheered on by a morally loathsome minority of veterans and military fanboys who elected to side with Lorance and Gallagher against the many others in uniform who had testified against each man.

As Americans look at what is taking place in Ukraine, they should condemn Russia but also reflect on the efforts of a reactionary minority to excuse similar behavior in our own ranks. That we kept our military engaged in combat for 20 consecutive years without facing horrors on the scale that we are witnessing in this relatively short conflict in Ukraine is truly remarkable. But ensuring that will remain the case in future conflicts will take hard work and vigilance.

The “morally loathsome minority of veterans and military fanboys” seems a pretty good description of the mob that attacked the Capitol last year. We are dealing with an internal enemy that not only does not disavow cruelty; for them, cruelty is the point. As Adam Serwer famously wrote,

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

They have no real interest in government or progress and especially not democracy. It’s all about the cruelty. Give them free rein, and none of us will be safe.

And here is a list of some of their leaders and “public intellectuals.” See also William Saletan, Who’s Soft on Russia? Meet the Republican Anti-Ukraine Caucus! and The Year in Hate & Extremism Report 2021 from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

There’s one more name I want to call out: Charles Koch. Koch industries is still doing business with Russia. Koch will remain in business in Russia so that it doesn’t have to lay off Russian employees. So big of Charles. Koch’s company has also issued statements calling for the U.S. and EU to end the sanctions and give Putin a partial “victory” as part of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. So, one of the chief obstacles to a sane climate change policy is letting us know that his profits come before lives. Which is another kind of violence. But I think we all knew that about Koch already.

The Seige of Rouen (1418-1419)

The recent, horrific stories of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine are deeply disturbing. See, for example, ‘This Is True Barbarity’: Life and Death Under Russian Occupation in the New York Times; and Has Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine? Here’s what we know. by Claire Parker in the Washington Post.

Of course, U.S. soldiers commit war crimes. We like to forget Fort Pillow, Andersonville, Wounded Knee, My Lai, Abu Ghraib. The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902, was a regular carnival of atrocities, which may be why no one talks about it much today. It’s also true that others have done terrible things — the Rape of Nanking; the Rape of Berlin. And, of course, war isn’t a necessary element of atrocities; the Holocaust is sometimes lumped with war crimes, but it wasn’t part of Germany’s war effort.

One of the reasons I so hate it when politicians so easily push for wars that aren’t really necessary is that there will always be some troops who will commit atrocities. These same individuals might have lived their whole lives without doing any physical harm to anyone. But in the chaos of war, when all the social structures of civilization are gone, and troops endure relentless stress and are witness to barbarities, some of them will sink to commiting barbarities themselves. This seems to always happen.

Of course, when nations are engaged in total warfare it can be hard to sort what actions are legitimate acts of war and which are crimes. The bombing of Dresden in World War II was never officially designated a war crime, for example; nor were the two atomic bomb drops in Japan. Acts of violence against civilians by an occupying army or against surrendered prisoners of war usually qualify. Most of the time which war crimes are prosecuted depends on who wins the war.

Regarding the Russians in Ukraine, Josh Marshall wrote,

These as yet very incomplete reports suggest a combination of two overlapping and reinforcing factors: one, a policy of organized terror aimed at a denationalization of Ukraine (some hint of the ideology here) and then second, poor discipline and the downstream effects of Russian military failure. In this latter case, as Russian troops failed in military terms they increasingly shifted to attacks on civilians.

In a book about the pysychology of war crimes, the authors suggest two common factors. One, the soldiers commiting the crimes are often demoralized and frustrated and looking for scapegoats. Two, leaders suffering from “malignant narcissism” may exploit the tribalism of the troops to “dehumanize” the enemy — including civilians and children.

Dutton, Boyanowsky and Bond quote a famous psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980) who referred to sadism as “the conversion of impotence into the experience of omnipotence”. Fromm contended that sadism produces an emotional high, because absolute control over another, exemplified by inflicting pain or humiliation, provides a unique sense of power. Total dominion over another creates an illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence. It becomes particularly addictive for anyone whose reality is ‘deprived of productivity and joy’.

And then some people are just “freaking evil.” That’s how Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL pardoned of war crimes by Trump, was described by his fellow Iraq War veterans. When the people who fought alongside you report your conduct to military authorities, you must be pretty twisted. So there’s always that.