“If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again” Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives who testified that President Donald Trump tried to get him to send fake electors to Washington on January 6, 2021.  

“We had at least 18,000. That’s on tape. We had them counted very painstakingly, 18,000 voters having to do with the Ruby Freeman. That’s — she’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler.” President Donald Trump while trying to fraudulently change the 2020 election results.

Michele and I have been watching the House Select Committee hearings on the January 6th tourist visit? riot? insurrection? Now, after seeing the first five hearings, I think insurrection is the best descriptor. Incompetent insurrection would be even more accurate. Watching these hearings, my impression is that Trump sort of believes he won, or should have won, which is the same thing in his mind, and reacted accordingly. But he couldn’t get anybody with the power to do anything about his imagined grievances to go along. Perhaps counterintuitively, what stopped the attempted coup were a handful of other, more principled Republicans. Really, that was all that stopped a coup.

In typical Trump fashion, when he knew he lost – and, by the way he reacted, he must have known he lost at some level – he just started throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. He tried the Justice Department with his handpicked political rulers and he ran into a wall, he tried individual state Secretary’s of State and all of them said the results were real. He even tried to attack the Capitol and take over by brute force. Watching the hearings on TV – and now available on YouTube, which I highly recommend – is a little like watching a drowning child flailing around, begging for votes, trying to grab an invisible life ring. It’s pathetic except that, at the time, President Donald Trump was the most powerful person in the world with the keys to nuclear codes.

One of the things that made these hearings so powerful is that most of the witnesses are Republicans. Republicans, I want to add, who voted for Trump, all of them, I think, twice. Republicans who obviously wanted Trump to win but were not willing to perjure themselves. Listening to testimony about Trump hounding Brad Raffensperger, the then Georgia Secretary of State, for over an hour, whining, over and over again was very convincing. Convincing to me, at least, who had seen the insurrection live and was already convinced. Listening to the President of the United States whining, “People have been saying that it was the highest vote ever. A lot of the political people said that there’s no way they beat me.” and “I think I probably did win it by half a million. You know, one of the things that happened, Brad, is we have other people coming in now from Alabama and from South Carolina and from other states, and they’re saying it’s impossible for you to have lost Georgia. We won.” over and over, for over an hour, was like listening to a spoiled child. A young spoiled child.  

What bothers me most about Trump’s almost six-month insurrection attempt – and Trump started saying he would only lose if there was a fraud as early as May 2020 – is Trump’s attack on Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, two election workers in Fulton County Georgia. Two Black election workers who are about as far down the power scale as it is possible to get and Trump reached down to attack them. For what? To salve his fragile ego in some sort of perverted way, I guess. I know that Trump is a punch-down, suck-up kind of guy, like most bullies, and it is easy to say something like “Oh, come on, it’s just Trump being Trump.” and it is Trump being Trump but his disregard for the truth, his disregard for the pain and hardship he causes to others, is staggeringly ugly. And scary.

Listening to those two women talk about their helplessness to do anything about the attack, except quit their jobs and hide inside while people outside threaten to kill them, enrages me at a level deep in my psyche. That feeling of helplessness they testified about resonates all the way down to my core. All the way to my reptile brain. I want to say that everybody resonates with that feeling of helplessness at some time and it does seem close to universal watching the reactions of the members of the Committee, but maybe not. Maybe not with everyone, but it does with me and it remains the most memorable part of a hearing chucked full of memorable moments.

Now, today, the day after the Supreme Court ruleing on Roe and Thomas’ threatening, concurring opinion, I imagine a lot of people have that feeling of helplessness. When I first heard the ruling, even though I knew it was coming, my first reaction was That’s bullshit, sue those bastards. But it was just a blind reaction and immediately followed by Oh, we can’t sue, they are the final judge. There is nothing that can be done. But that’s wrong too, there are things we can do. Lots.

We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein

I’ve been watching this guy on TikTok gradually build an eel pit (exactly what it sounds like) under his house for months now, and tomorrow he is FINALLY going to add the eels. gonna be a huge day for me Julia Glum @SuperJulia news editor @Money, fangirl at heart. my tweets are like 80% pop stars and 20% personal finance.

This started out as “Today is my birthday”, then “Yesterday…”, then ” The day before yesterday”, now I’m just going to say “The last June 15th, was officially my eighty-second birthday.” Although that convention always seems slightly wrong to me because the day before June 15th was actually the last day I was eighty-two. Today I am eighty-two years plus four days. Eighty-two plus four days and, I’m pretty sure, I’m no wiser than I was at eighty-one plus three days. More jaded perhaps but that is not wisdom.

These are not good times, most of us have been driven into some sort of isolation by a plague that doesn’t seem to want to go away. We sit at home watching people trying to destroy our democracy and then blatantly lie about that destruction. It is discouraging. Seeing the evidence pointing towards Trump knowing he lost the election and not really caring about that inconvenience in his quest for power and money and then seeing almost the entire Republican political establishment lie about it has been discouraging in the extreme.

In Europe, seventy-five years after close to fifty million people were killed in World War II, we have another unthinkable European War, in Ukraine again (in World War II, an estimated four million Ukrainians were killed). This war is more localized than WWII was but also much more locally destructive. Maripol is rubble and Severodonetsk is on its way to the same state while the Ukrainians impatiently await the arrival of more deadly equipment so they can kill more Russians. It is barbaric but Ukraine is fighting for its life just like The USSR was seventy-five years ago.

In the background is the existential problem of Global Climate Change. It seems that the only people even willing to admit the problem are those people that don’t have the power to do anything about it. That, for me, is even more discouraging.

On the plus side, there is a guy on Tic Tok who has built an eel pit in an unused cistern. I can think of a half a dozen reasons why putting any energy into building an eel pit is a bad idea but the world is in a better place for it and for people like him.

Happy Birthday to me and Happy Summer to all.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I’m not sure exactly when but surely before the seventh grade, I had one of the most memorable and traumatic thirty seconds of my life. It was at a summer camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains up the hill from Los Gatos. The camp was at a school named the Montezuma Mountain School for Boys and the only reason I know the name is because I went to a photography weekend retreat at the same location but with a different name about forty to fifty years later. During the photography school, it started to dawn on me that I had been at the same location years before.

I don’t remember anything about that summer or the summer camp except for a thirty-second burst of violence. There were four of us sitting on the ground in a sort of circle, in the shade of a building. I have no idea why, maybe we were waiting for the cafeteria to open, maybe they were giving out free balloons, all I remember is that we were sitting in the shade with one guy leaning up against the stucco wall, I’m going to call the wall-leaner Ben. Ben may have been younger or he may have been lower on the cool-guy scale, either way, he was sitting with his back to the wall.

An older camper, way higher on the cool-guy scale than us, joined us and started asserting his dominance. Then, Mister Cool punched Ben in the face. For no observable reason. Just leaned into the circle and punched the poor guy in the face. Hard enough to draw blood (and tears).

I’m reminded of that senseless attack by Putin’s senseless attack on Ukraine. What a prick! Putin is a narcissistic sociopath with no regard for the carnage he is creating other than how it might help him. When Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv, they left behind a devastated landscape littered with dead bodies, a population traumatized by rape and murder, and destroyed houses and schools, the result of an army that was more of a mob than an effective military force. When the units got back to Moscow, Putin rewarded them with medals. Even now, the Russians will occasionally lop a missile into some city far from the battle lines – aiming at an apartment house or a maternity hospital to kill civilians – for no reason other than he is trying to terrorize the population. Other people’s pain means nothing to Putin so powerful is his imagined self-importance.

Now Putin’s army is cutting off the export of Ukrainian grain and cooking oil, trying to use the starvation of uninvolved people as a lever. It is hard to imagine that level of inhumanity but some people are evil, irredeemably so.

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04:00 #Donetsk (occupied): “The oil depot in Kirovskyi district is on fire. `Have the orcs smoked again in an undesignated area?” via @hochu_dodomu A Tweet by English Luhansk @loogunda Occasional reporting and translations about Ukraine. (formerly “English Lugansk”)

Our Congressional Delegation traveled to Kyiv and met with @ZelenskyyUa to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine. A Tweet by Nancy Pelosi @SpeakerPelosi Speaker of the House, focused on strengthening America’s middle class and creating jobs; mother, grandmother, dark chocolate connoisseur.

The West is a series of institutions and values, Russia is European but not Western. Japan is Western but not European. Western means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion…historian Steve Kotkin quoted in the New Yorker.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ― Margaret Mead

Ukraine is a poor country, much poorer than it looks on TV. U.S. News – the same U. S. News that ranks colleges and universities and that I pick up at newsstands to see if my alma mater’s ranking has changed – ranks Ukraine #71 out of the top 78 countries, with a GDP per capita of $13,350 (for comparison, the GDP per capita of the US is $65,280 and Luxumbourg is highest at $124,590).

These numbers, however, although commonly used are deceptive, thrown off by the number of very rich in each country; if one billionaire gets richer but no one else does, the GDP per capita still goes up. A better number is probably the median income which is $4,434 in Ukraine, the USA is at $19,306, and Luxumbourg is at $26,321. Ukraine’s median income is about a third of the median income of South Korea or half that of Poland and twice that of nearby Georgia. Counterintuitively, I believe that is one of the reasons they are doing so well. These are not people who are used to having somebody else fix their problems.

In this case, however, somebody else is, at least, helping; NATO, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and now, Isreal. Ukraine’s military budget is $5.94 B but, so far, NATO, alone, has given and pledged $6.4B worth of equipment to them and it is arriving fast.

Over the years, as we bollixed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve been very critical of the US Military and even more critical of our Intelligence Community which seemed incapable of predicting world-changing events like the fall of the USSR. But, what our Military Establishment is great at is logistics and our Intelligence Community has been training for picking Soviet or Russian targets – mostly by satellite – for eighty-two years. Getting equipment to people who are willing to use it and giving them the location of high-value targets is exactly what is needed right now. We have been moving equipment into Ukraine at astounding speed, about 60% of the large artillery pieces Biden released were sent in 72 hours and they are killing generals at an unprecedented rate.

As an aside, I think a lot of this high regard for and expertise in logistics is because of the great Ulysses S. Grant. Much to his dismay, Grant was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps after he graduated from West Point but the training he got served him well during the Civil War. For example, the North built 22,000 miles of railroad track during the Civil War compared to only 9,5000 miles for the South. Moving soldiers and equipment fast was in Grant’s DNA, during the Mexican-American War War, Grant even dragged a canon up into a bell tower to give it better range. The Army he built during the Civil War was based on better equipment and faster movement and it still is in the United States Army’s DNA. End aside.

While Ukraine is a European country, it is not what I think of as European because, when I think of Europe, I’m really thinking of Western Europe. I’m really thinking of France or Germany, Spain or Italy. The Ukrainian character is closer to Russian than French, just like their language. Obviously, now, they want to change that and a large part of the population is willing to die for it. As the Ukrainians say, “Glory to Ukraine!”