[Update: Please read this next.]
Mark A. Graber, a University of Maryland law professor, says Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office, based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In an article for The Conversation, he wrote :
Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.’”Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose. Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government. What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.
To which, Tony Winkrent, writing on Ian Welsh’s excellent blog, added:
There are a number of “liberals” and anti-Trumpers who profess themselves appalled by the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court. Their opinions are a study in the philosophical inability of liberalism to oppose conservatism, and the authoritarianism conservatism leads to. One prominent line of argument is that Trump has not been convicted of insurrection, so the Article 3 prohibition does not apply.
To which I respond: Jefferson Davis was never convicted of treason. Are you willing to argue that therefore Davis did not commit treason?
To which I respond: Yes, Jefferson Davis was plainly guilty of treason. But there is a fundamental distinction between being guilty of a crime and being convicted of a crime.
No matter how guilty you may seem to be, the government only has a right to punish you if it proves your guilt after a fair trial. The only insurrectionists mentioned by Prof. Graber who were punished by law were John Brown and his followers, and this was done only after they were tried and convicted in a court of law.
The federal government would have been legally justified in putting Jefferson Davis on trial for treason, and it would have been legally justified in putting him to death if convicted, but for reasons of state it chose not to do so. There the matter rested.
If Donald Trump were to be tried with, and proven guilty of, violating the Insurrection Act of 1807, then he would disqualified from office under the Fourteenth Amendment. But Trump has not even been charged with insurrection.
This is a bedrock legal principle. The government only has a right to punish you if you are convicted of a crime by due process of law.
The following is a copy of an email I received a few days ago.
Dear All,
Take It – It’s Yours
“There is nothing I can give you which you have not already; but there is much, very much, which, though I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven: No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious little instant. Take peace:
“The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see it; and to see, we have only to look. Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their coverings, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, and wisdom, and power. Welcome it, greet it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it.
“Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence. Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it, that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims wending through unknown country our way home.
“And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greeting, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day will break, and the shadow will flee away.”
—Giovanni da Fielsole (Fra Angelico) 1387-1455
[12/26/2023.] I wrote this seven months ago. If I were writing this today, I would include the part of George Orwell’s essay in which he includes Zionism and anti-semitism on his list of the kinds of nationalism he condemned.
The world is torn by conflict between nationalist religion and universalist religion.
By universalist religion, I mean a religion that worships something greater than anything created by human hands or the human mind, a religion that believes in love and justice for all human beings, regardless of race, nationality, sex, gender or religious or political creed.
I mean something broader than just the Universalist and Unitarian-Universalist movements in the USA, although these movements at their best have embodied the broader universalism I describe.
By nationalist religion, I don’t only mean a religion that identifies itself with the interests of a particular nation or nation-state. I mean a religion that means loyalty to a specific human collective or organization above all else.
I mean a religion that is nationalistic in the sense that George Orwell wrote about in his 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism.
∞∞∞
… there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation – that is, a single race or a geographical area.
It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.
By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. [snip]
It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit.
When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.
A strong majority of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas. But a new poll indicates that 51 percent of Americans age 18-24 think Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.
That could be long-range bad news for a future Israel, which depends for its survival on continuing economic and military aid from the United States.
I myself condemn the government of Israel for its murderous tactics in the Gaza war and for its oppression of the Palestinians.
But that does not mean I wish for the tables to be turned, and Hamas to do to the Israelis what the government of Israel is now doing to the Palestinians. I hope for a peace agreement between the two nations, impossible as that seems at the moment.
John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is a leading scholar of international relations. The following is the best article I’ve read on the Gaza situation so far.
Click on the title to read the article in its original form. Click on the byline to read Mearsheimer’s Substack.
Like him, I would be ashamed to be silent when I am in a position to speak the truth as I see it without fear of blacklisting or other forms of retaliation.
I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.
What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important organization in the Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”[1]
Let me elaborate.
John Mearsheimer
First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70 percent of whom are children and women. The claim that Israel is going to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties is belied by statements from high level Israeli officials. For example, the IDF spokesman said on 10 October 2023 that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.”[2]
Moreover, it is clear from the results of the bombing campaign that Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians. Two detailed studies of the IDF’s bombing campaign – both published in Israeli outlets – explain in detail how Israel is murdering huge numbers of civilians. It is worth quoting the titles of the two pieces, which succinctly capture what each has to say:
“‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza”[3]
“The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing.”[4]
Similarly, the New York Times published an article in late November 2023 titled: “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace.”[5] Thus, it is hardly surprising that the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said that “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since” his appointment in January 2017.[6]
Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that can be brought into Gaza. Moreover, medical care is extremely hard to come by for a population that now includes approximately 50,000 wounded civilians. Not only has Israel greatly limited the supply of fuel into Gaza, which hospitals need to function, but it has targeted hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations.
Defense Minister Gallant’s comment on 9 October captures Israeli policy: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”[7] Israel has been forced to allow minimal supplies into Gaza, but the amounts are so small that a senior UN official reports that “half of Gaza’s population is starving.” He goes on to report that, “Nine out of 10 families in some areas are spending ‘a full day and night without any food at all’.”[8]
Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent.”[9] Other scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies have offered a similar warning.[10]
To be more specific, it is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to Palestinians as “human animals, ”human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman animals.”[11] And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”[12] Unsurprisingly, as the New York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.”[13] One retired IDF general, who proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”[14] Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.[15] These statements are not being made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.
Of course, there is also much talk of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and the West Bank), in effect, producing another Nakba.[16] To quote Israel’s Agriculture Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”[17]Perhaps the most shocking evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”[18]
Bertrand Russell was 72 when he wrote this essay in 1945, and he lived to be 97. As for myself, today is my 87th birthday..
In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully.
Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty.
Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off. A great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived to the age of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all her descendants.
My maternal grandmother, after having nine children who survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages, as soon as she became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher education. She was one of the founders of Girton College, and worked hard at opening the medical profession to women.
She used to tell of how she met in Italy an elderly gentleman who was looking very sad. She asked him why he was so melancholy and he said that he had just parted from his two grandchildren. ‘Good gracious,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have seventy-two grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted from one of them, I should have a miserable existence!’ ‘Madre snaturale!,’ he replied.
But speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer her recipe. After the age of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. in reading popular science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was growing old.
This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young. If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.
As regards health, I have nothing useful to say as I have little experience of illness. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake. I never do anything whatever on the ground that it is good for health, though in actual fact the things I like doing are mostly wholesome.
Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead.
One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done. This is not always easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight.
Hamas is the face of the Palestinian war with Zionism. The eyes of the world are on that war, in which tens of thousands, mainly on the Palestinian side, have already been killed, with no end in sight.
Israel’s government says it will continue the war until Hamas is totally destroyed, while the U.S. government defines Hamas as a terrorist organization. In the U.S., you can be criminally prosecuted for contributing to a Hamas-related charity.
But just what is Hamas? Where did it come from? How did it come to rule Gaza? Why did it launch the Oct. 7 attack on Israel? What are its ultimate aims?
What follows is my effort to answer these questions as accurately and as impartially as I can. In order to be impartial, I refer to territory of the former Palestine Mandate, the land “between the river and the sea,” as the Holy Land rather than as Israel or Palestine.
Hamas was founded in 1987 in a refugee camp in Gaza. It arose in opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s willingness to negotiate a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
That was a concession on the part of the PLO. The PLO’s original demand was a “right of return” of all Palestinians to land from which they’s been driven off, followed by creation of a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for all.
Such a “one-state” solution was unacceptable to Israel. It would have meant Palestinians would be in the majority and Israel would not longer be a Jewish state.
Commentators said Israel was offering “land for peace,” but the reality was that this was what the PLO was doing. The PLO was offering to allow 7 million Palestinians to be restricted to 22 percent of the Holy Land and leave 78 percent to 7 million Israelis, in return for self-government in that 22 percent.
Hamas said this was equivalent to surrender. Its 1988 manifesto called for the Holy Land to be an Arab Muslim land, with its capital in Jerusalem, under Islamic law (although with tolerance for all religions).
The PLO had defined the conflict as ethnic Arabs (including Arab Christians) vs. ethnic Jews. The 1988 Hamas manifesto defined the conflict as Muslims fighting infidels and unbelievers. Hamas’s manifesto expressed respect for the PLO, but rejected its secularism.
The Israeli government actually looked with favor on Hamas in the early stages. It was seen a fringe movement that undermined Palestinian unity and weakened the PLO’s negotiating position.
All this was taking place during what Palestinians call the First Intifada, or Uprising. It was sparked when an Israeli driver in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp crashed his vehicle, causing the death of four Palestinians. Rioting broke out and spread.
Palestinians took nonviolent actions like mass boycotts and refusing to work jobs in Israel, but also attacked Israelis with rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms. Police struck back and Palestinian fatalities dramatically outpaced Israeli ones.
The rebellion lasted until PLO-Israel negotiations produced the Oslo Accords of 1993. The PLO recognized the government of Israel as legitimate and here to stay, and Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. PLO leader Yassir Arafat was put in charge of a new Palestinian Authority, with the understanding it would transition into an independent Palestinian state.
Scientists at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics are exploring the strange things that happen to common elements when exposed to extreme pressure, such as exists at Jupiter’s core.
Water transforms into ice that conducts electricity. Hydrogen is compressed into a metal. Sodium can turn clear. Weird!
We human beings think of conditions on the surface of our particular planet as the norm for the universe. Not so.
LINKS
Something Weird Happens When You Keep Squeezing by Jason Kottke on kottke.org.
Black Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Matter by Joshua Sokol for Quanta magazine.
Metallic hydrogen finally made in lab at mind-boggling temperatures by Leah Crane for New Scientist.
Metal Discovered to Become Transparent Under High Pressure by ScienceDaily.
JUDENSTAAT: The novel of the Jewish state in Germany by Simone Zelitch (2016)
Palestinians frequently say that they sympathize with victims of the Holocaust and their desire for a Jewish state, but they see no reason why it should be erected in their land, while the Germans, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, enjoyed 75 years of unbroken prosperity.
Judenstaat is an alternate-history novel in which there was no Balfour declaration and a Jewish state was founded not in the Holy Land, but on German soil. It is a literary curiosity, not for everyone, but I found it interesting.
The novel is not a parallel or counterpoint to the history of the actual Israel. Rather it is a meditation on Jewish destiny and European history. It also is a murder mystery.
The founder and first president of Judenstaat is one Leopold Stein, a representative of the Socialist Labor Bund, a real-life revolutionary Jewish organization founded in 1897 and primarily based in Poland, Lithuania and Russia.
Bundists fought persecution of Jews, but they also fought for the rights of all working people and not in a utopian future, but in the here and now. Its motto was, “We are here.”
Stein somehow makes his way to Yalta in 1945 and gets permission from Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to agree to establish a Jewish state on German territory, as retaliation and reparations for the crimes of Nazism.
Stalin sees a nonaligned but friendly Jewish state as a potentially useful window to the West, like the Hong Kong Autonomous Zone in China.
The Judenstaat is not religious and does not claim continuity with ancient Israel. It claims to be the nation of the Ashkenazi, descendants of Jews invited by Charlemagne in the Rhineland.
Judenstaat claims the heritage of the great German-speaking Jews’ contribution to European culture, starting with Moses Mendelssohn and including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and interprets the Holocaust as a repudiation of that liberal culture.
The official language of Judenstaat is German, not Yiddish or Hebrew. The flag of Judenstadt is a yellow star upon a field of blue-and-white stripes, like the uniform of an Auschwitz prisoner.
The protagonist of the novel is Judit Klemmer, a documentary film-maker assigned to make a film commemorating the 40th anniversary of the founding of Judenstaat in 1948.
In the process of gathering information, she learns that the official version of Judenstaat’s history covers up inconvenient facts. She also picks up clues to the unsolved murder of her husband, a member of Judenstaat’s despised Saxon minority.
The Saxons are the previous inhabitants of the land on which Judenstaat is established. Most of them have left, as part of the ethnic cleansing of German populations which, in actual history, took place in East Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland.
There was no life-and-death struggle with the Saxons and no legacy of decades of conflict and threat. So, unlike the real Israel, it is not militaristic. Its people don’t feel under threat.
Air war on Gaza. Source: +972 Magazine.
An investigative journalist in Israel reports that Israel’s air war in Gaza is guided by an artificial intelligence system called Habsora, or The Gospel, that supposedly identifies the locations of Hamas fighters and activists.
Yuval Abraham, writing for the online +972 Magazine, reports that the Israeli army knows, or believes it knows, the location of most Hamas militants, and is bombing their homes and other locations, no matter how many other people may be killed in the process.
His reporting is based on anonymous sources, but backed up by data analysis and on-the-scene reporting. Abraham wrote:
Several of the sources, who spoke … … on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.
Habsora analyzes data from a range of sources, including drone footage, intercepted communications and surveillance data. This is used to determine movements and behavior patterns of individuals and large groups, which then generates targeting recommendations.
I think that what Israel is doing with AI is an alarming new development whose significance is above and beyond the Gaza War alone. Military commanders will soon identify enemy troops by name and target them individually. They will have the option of targeting the enemy troops’ families.
I don’t know which would be the most alarming – that such a method of warfare could be used with pinpoint accuracy, or that it couldn’t be, but would be used anyway.
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