tingilinde

frances hesselbein

David Epstein featured her in Range as the greatest CEO you've never heard of.  She died this year at 107.  

Here's his remembrance.

 

the mess that is russia

Jim notes an interesting piece on how Russia got to where it is and several possibilities of where it might go.

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The Russian Federation, the inheritor of Moscow's remaining dominions, is a failed state with an incomplete national identity. It has proved unable to transform itself into a nation-state, a civic state, or even an effective imperial state. Russia's numerous weaknesses are exacerbated by a convergence of factors, including dependence on export revenues based predominantly on fossil fuels, a contracting economy with little prospect of growth or global competitiveness, and intensifying regional and ethnic disquiet.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 accelerated the process of state rupture by failing to achieve the Kremlin's stated goals and resulting in substantial military casualties and damaging international economic sanctions.

Although Russia's 1993 Constitution defines the country as a federation, in reality it is a centralized neo-imperial construct integrated on the basis of administrative proclamation and not voluntary agreement. The artificial state is approaching the end of a regime cycle in which the political status quo is becoming increasingly precarious. Not since the fracturing of the Soviet Union have several simultaneous crises become so stark, including the government's inability to ensure sustained economic development, widening disparities between Moscow and the federal regions, deepening distrust of Moscow's governance, the limited efficacy of mass repression, and a looming military defeat or indefinite quagmire in Ukraine.

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the passage of time

In 1954 Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked as the right-wing anti-communist identified those they suspected to have communist sympathies.  

Nearly 70 years later his name was finally cleared -

david blight on the lead up to the civil war and what it may mean for today

Audio and transcript.  He's an American History professor at Yale who specializes the Antebellum Period, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

 

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In the late morning of March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration of James Buchanan as the 15th president of the United States, the Supreme Court’s chief justice, Roger B. Taney, stood among a crowd of reporters and spectators on the ground floor of the United States Capitol and formally read the 55-page majority opinion in Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford. Born during the American Revolution and now just shy of 80, Taney could still take over a room with his sense of conviction, and as he began to address the crowd, the old Supreme Court chamber brimmed with anticipation.

Dred Scott’s name was by that point well known to many Americans. The four days of debate on the case, conducted in December of the previous year, had been covered extensively by newspapers. Scott, an enslaved man, and his wife, Harriet, had sued for their freedom based on Dred’s claim that their late owner had taken them for several years into Illinois, a free state, and to Fort Snelling, in a Northern territory where slavery was banned by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That federal legislation effectively outlawed slavery in the territories above the 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude. It was considered a “sacred pledge” by many antislavery Northerners determined to protect the West as “free soil” for “free labor,” but pro-slavery Southerners became equally determined to incorporate new territories as slaveholding states. In deciding whether enslaved people could gain their freedom by residing on free soil, the Supreme Court might answer a question critical to the growing nation: What would the status of slavery be in the Western territories?

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Authoritarianism is an American historical tradition, newly energized and threatening our republican existence. In coming elections, we shall see whether our 21st-century democracy will live or die honestly, whether we, too, are heading for collapse or renewal through politics, law or civil conflict. How we answer such challenges will determine whether it is 1857 again in America. Even if it is, we need to remember that antislavery advocates did not merely lay down in front of the juggernaut of Dred Scott; they mobilized and fought back — over race, rights and their future.

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things they didn't teach in school

Francis Scott Key and The Star Spangled Banner,

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First, a few things to know about the War of 1812: One of the main issues was the British practice of impressment — the forced conscription of American sailors to fight for the Royal Navy. Plus, the British promised refuge to any enslaved Black people who escaped their enslavers, raising fears among White Americans of a large-scale revolt. The final provocation was that men who escaped their bonds of slavery were welcome to join the British Corps of Colonial Marines in exchange for land after their service. As many as 4,000 people, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, escaped.

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a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

a historian on fascism

Ruth Ben_Ghiat studies authoritarian regimes.  Here's a piece from her on fascism. 

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“Everyone is sure they know what Fascism is,” writes Robert Paxton in his 2004 work The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton gives perhaps the most comprehensive definition I have found, collapsing into one very long sentence many traits of Fascism:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The Jan. 6 coup attempt changed Paxton's mind about whether Donald Trump and Trumpism can be called Fascist. That brought Paxton into line with scholars such as Jason Stanley, who deems Fascism “a political method” that can appear anytime, anywhere, if conditions are right. This line of thought risks emptying the term of its historical specificity but is essential for understanding our new authoritarian age and the risks we face in America today.

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wright brothers day

On December 17, 1903 the  aircraft flew 120 ft in 12 seconds at 10:35 a.m. at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Orville Wright was at the controls of the machine, lying prone on the lower wing with his hips in the cradle which operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright ran alongside to balance the machine, and just released his hold in the photo.  The first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air, powered flight.

the importance of public health to the unification of america

Smallpox vaccinations required public trust and buy-in.

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In The Contagion of Liberty, historian Andrew Wehrman traces the path of the smallpox-inoculation movement, and its generally overlooked impact on politics around the American War of Independence. He argues that smallpox influenced the journey towards independence from British rule, and how Americans conceived of their new, hard-won liberties.

It is a tale of startling contemporary relevance.

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 a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

vintage recipe books

A large number are available on the Internet Archive.

One of the best things about many old recipes is the realization that you're not using them.

 

 

countering the lost cause's impact on the military

Demoting traitors.