January 15: Climate Change, Civil War, Jimmy Carter

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The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6 For many officers, their bodies, minds and lives will never be the same after the attack.
The Boy King of YouTube Ten-year-old Ryan Kaji and his family have turned videos of him playing with toys into a multimillion-dollar empire. Why do so many other kids want to watch?
This Isn’t the California I Married The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?

An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong

Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War? interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.” .......... to some of those, like Walter, who study civil war, an American crackup has come to seem, if not obvious, then far from unlikely, especially since Jan. 6. ..........

this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand

......... “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.” ....... “The United States is coming to an end,” Marche writes. “The question is how.” ........ “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” ......... “Serious people now invoke ‘Civil War’ not as metaphor but as literal precedent.” ......... he knows many civil war scholars, and “very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war.” Yet even some who push back on civil war talk tend to acknowledge what a perilous place America is in. .........

The fact that speculation about civil war has moved from the crankish fringes into the mainstream is itself a sign of civic crisis, an indication of how broken our country is.

............ an academic definition of “major armed conflict” as one that causes at least 1,000 deaths per year. A “minor armed conflict” is one that kills at least 25 people a year. By this definition, as Marche argues, “America is already in a state of civil strife.” ......... extremists, most of them right-wing, killed 54 people in 2018 and 45 people in 2019. ........ most common in what she and other scholars call “anocracies,” countries that are “neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.” Warning signs include the rise of intense political polarization based on identity rather than ideology, especially polarization between two factions of roughly equal size, each of which fears being crushed by the other. ........... Instigators of civil violence, she writes, tend to be previously dominant groups who see their status slipping away. “The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country ‘is or ought to be theirs’” .......... “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.” ..........

many on the right are both fantasizing about and planning civil war

.............. Some of those who swarmed the Capitol a year ago wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with

“MAGA Civil War.”

............... The Boogaloo Bois, a surreal, violent, meme-obsessed anti-government movement, get their name from a joke about a Civil War sequel. Republicans increasingly throw around the idea of armed conflict. ........... In August, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed,” and suggested he was willing, though reluctant, to take up arms. ........... Citing the men who plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Walter writes that modern civil wars “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.” ....... the threat of America calcifying into a Hungarian-style right-wing autocracy under a Republican president seems more imminent than mass civil violence ............ increasingly, the right is rigging our sclerotic system so that it can maintain power whether the voters want it to or not. ........... most of Marche’s narratives seem more imaginable than a future in which Jan. 6 turns out to be the peak of right-wing insurrection, and America ends up basically OK.

Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy. However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. ........... 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” .......... 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified. ......... Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home. .......... I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples. .......... while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence. ............... we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country ..........

We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.

............. we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events .......... and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice. .........

Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.

January 15: Sidney Poitier, Kazakhstan

Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94 The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.” ...... he Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. ........ His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle. ........ Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s. ..........

racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks

. ......... Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. ........ The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. ........... In 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. .......... Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes. .......... Mr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so

the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”

.......... In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg.

He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.

............ Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors. .............. Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay. ................. his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote. ............ The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers. ........... His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.” ........ In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk. .............. In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture.

(At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”)

He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. ............... “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.”

Sidney Poitier Was the Star We Desperately Needed Him to Be Without the obstacles put in his way, he could’ve been even bigger than he was. But Mr. Poitier still managed to be a giant, which, in itself, is astonishing. .......... In civil rights-era Hollywood, Mr. Poitier was summoned to symbolize Black America, single-handedly .............. Race shouldn’t matter here. But it must, since Hollywood made his race the matter. Movie after movie insisted he be the Black man for white America, which he was fine with, of course. He was Black. But the radical shock of Sidney Poitier was the stress his stardom placed on “man.” Human. .............. Mr. Poitier achieved his greatness partially as a matter of “despite.” He achieved all he did despite knowing what he couldn’t do. I mean, he could’ve done it — could’ve played Cool Hand Luke, could’ve been the Graduate, could’ve done “Bullitt,” could have been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There are maybe a dozen roles, capstones, that nobody would have offered to Mr. Poitier because he Wouldn’t Have Been Right for the Part. ............

His projected image begot what is now a galaxy of other Black actors, doing acting as diverse and tiered as a shopping mall.

............ In the movies, Black characters were jolly statuary — hoisting luggage, serving food, tending children — meant to decorate a white American’s dream. ........... Mr. Poitier was accused of being all kinds of Uncle Tom, because the task of undoing has tended to require collaboration with white people. ........... Mr. Poitier’s gallery of highly educated, gleamingly polished, seductively agreeable characters had to be fit for entrance into white people’s homes but also attractive to Black people worried that he might think himself too good for dinner at theirs. That was as much a conundrum in 1958 as it was, say, half a century later when the country conducted an experiment to discover the measurement of Blackness appropriate for a president. Like Barack Obama, Mr. Poitier was punctual, culturally. He became the star he did because he was the star we desperately needed him to be. And even then he couldn’t please us all. .......

Mr. Poitier was denied opportunities we’ll never be able to prove he was denied.

.......... Mr. Poitier’s legacy really has been reduced to his firstness. ....... Mr. Poitier’s was a self he forged, sculpted and refined, a self that, though it bore only the perfume of an island upbringing, carried a note of exotic mystery. Even when they dressed him like an outer-space pimp in “The Long Ships,” he was no mere persona of a movie Negro, like the ancestral caricatures who made him necessary and the carload of badasses who thrived in his wake — the Sweetbacks, Shafts and Priests, the Hammers and Dolemites. Nobody had experienced anybody like him before. Just listen to the meter of his lilt, the melody of it. When he spoke, you heard a symphony. His placelessness gave him the same advantageous allure of other placeless stars. ............ all of his characters proceed with grace and poise. Some of that is training; he was our most famous Black Method actor. The rest is simply him. The clenched fists and mid-promenade pivots, the column-hugging and thrown-open arms — it was all his own ballet. These were signature moves, a star making exclamatory punctuation of his being, carrying himself in cursive. The signature of what this country has always sworn it aspires to be.

In Kazakhstan’s Street Battles, Signs of Elites Fighting Each Other The reasons for the bloody crisis in Central Asia remain murky, but experts say popular discontent could mask an old-fashioned power struggle within the ruling faction. ........... The violence this week in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital and still its business and cultural hub, shocked just about everyone — not only its leader, who, fortified by Russian troops, on Friday ordered security forces to “fire without warning” to restore order, but also government critics who have long bridled at repression and rampant corruption in the oil-rich nation. ........... President Tokayev, in an address to the nation on Friday, alluded to that, claiming that the violence was the work of some 20,000 “bandits” who he said were organized from “a single command post.” Calls for negotiations with such people, he added, were “nonsense” because “they need to be destroyed and this will be done.” .......... the chaos was the result of “a desperate struggle for power” between feuding political clans, namely people loyal to President Tokayev, 68, and those beholden to his 81-year-old predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev. ............. Mr. Nazarbayev’s ousted nephew seems to have played a major role in organizing the unrest. ........ Among those who urged the crowd on was Arman Dzhumageldiev, known as “Arman the Wild,” by reputation one of the country’s most powerful gangsters, who witnesses said provoked much of the violence. ............ “One lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave” .........

That a possible power struggle could have morphed so quickly into mayhem on the streets is a measure of how brittle Kazakhstan is beneath the shiny surface of wealthy, cosmopolitan cities like Almaty.

Behind Kazakhstan Unrest, the ‘Strongman’s Dilemma’ Since the Cold War’s end, most dictatorial governments have collapsed after their ruler’s departure. ............ Kazakhstan’s explosion into unrest this week presents a stark warning to the strongman autocrats of the world: Leaving office is perilous. Since the Cold War’s end, a staggering 70 percent of governments headed by strongmen collapsed after the ruler departed .......... The trend holds whether the leader leaves voluntarily or involuntarily, dies in office or retires to a country home. .......... the divided, disoriented bureaucracies that often falter after a strongman’s departure ........... The lesson, experts stress, is hardly that strongmen bring stability. Quite the opposite: Their style of rule erodes the foundations of governance, making themselves indispensable at the cost of leaving behind a political system barely capable of governing but primed for infighting. .................. strongmen-led dictatorships tend to be more repressive and more corrupt. And their leaders frequently obsess over potential rivals, whether a regional leader who grows too popular or a security agency with too much autonomy. ........... stifling rising stars, hollowing out power centers and stuffing institutions with loyalists (often chosen because they are too weak to pose a threat) leaves the government barely able to stand on its own. ........ the strongman’s dilemma: how to set up a successor without creating a rival, and how to leave a government able to outlast the leader without making themselves redundant and vulnerable. ........... North Korea is the only modern non-monarchy to have reached a third generation of family autocratic rule. ........ This is why despots tend to hide from public view when they have health problems, to avoid any appearance of frailty that might set off a race to replace them. It’s also why the disappearance of a dictator, even a reviled one, tends to produce panicked rumors as citizens fear the consequences of a power vacuum. .......... When strongman rule works, the leader is the keystone holding it all together. But any keystone is also the point of greatest weakness. If it falls away, the whole thing collapses. Which is precisely what often happens. .......... many post-Soviet leaders extending term limits. Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recently pushed his to 2036, when he will be 83.

Sinema And The Filibuster

Senator Sinema says she is for the bill that is for the protection of voting rights, but she is against ending the filibuster, even temporarily in the service of those voting rights. Do the math. One plus one is two. Her stand on the filibuster is a stand against voting rights. She is refusing the face the bedrock reality that unless the filibuster is pushed out of the way, voting rights can not be protected in this country, and America is already half way to being South Africa, a country of white minority rule where 10% lords over the other 90%. The filibuster is nothing but white minority rule. Senator Sinema is Karen in Central Park.

Hear why Sinema is concerned about eliminating filibuster Key moderate Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) says she continues to back her party's election legislation, but that she does not support eliminating the filibuster.



How Biden swung for filibuster reform — and missed with Manchin and Sinema Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber would postpone a previously scheduled recess and return Tuesday to begin debating the election and voting legislation. ......... Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday evening that the chamber would postpone a previously scheduled recess and return Tuesday to begin debating the election and voting legislation. He also reiterated his pledge that the Senate will vote on rules changes if Republicans block moving to final passage, as they're expected to do. Despite Biden's visit and next week's floor showdown, Manchin and Sinema are only digging in. ............ Biden had prepared remarks for the meeting but instead opted to speak off-the-cuff, recalling that he got the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) to support the Voting Rights Act while they were both in Congress and arguing that a majority of today's Republicans today wouldn’t support that landmark bill. Biden told senators he couldn’t remember a time in U.S. history where a party had been so enthralled to one person as the GOP is to former President Donald Trump. ............. Unlike Manchin, Sinema did not ask Biden a question during his roughly 90-minute visit with the caucus. There might not have been much to say:

Sinema made crystal-clear during her speech that while she supports voting and election reform bills, she “will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”

.......... Even with Sinema and Manchin’s latest statements, Schumer is giving no indication he's backing down from his push for a floor vote on rules changes, even if it means dividing his 50-member caucus. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the White House would keep fighting. But Psaki added that it's up to Schumer to decide what the next steps are for a bill the party has portrayed, in stark terms, as essential to save American democracy. ........ Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) argued that the upper chamber already empowers the minority, given that states like Wyoming have as many senators as California. And Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the party's most senior senator, asked why the caucus couldn’t unite around weakening the filibuster.

Sinema says no to filibuster reform to scuttle Democrats’ voting rights hopes Arizona senator says she will not support filibuster changes in floor speech condemned by voting rights activists .......... Even before the US president arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday afternoon to join Democratic senators for their regular lunch gathering, in a diplomatic public offensive, Sinema of Arizona bluntly reiterated that she would not support any change to filibuster rules to get voting rights passed...... Her surprise last-minute move with a speech effectively killed her party’s hope of passing the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation. .......... Sinema had taken to the Senate floor around noon opposing any changes to the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation, while Democrats currently hold a bare majority in the 100-seat chamber and two voting rights bills are stalled. “While I continue to support these [voting rights] bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” she said. She added: “We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy, and it cannot be achieved by one party alone. It cannot be achieved solely by the federal government. The response requires something greater and, yes, more difficult than what the Senate is discussing today.” .......

Sinema’s speech came at an extremely perilous moment for US democracy. Republican lawmakers in 19 states have enacted 34 new laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, that impose new voting restrictions.

............ They have also passed a slew of bills that seek to inject more partisan control into election administration and the counting of votes, an unprecedented trend experts are deeply concerned about and call election subversion. Many of those measures have been passed in state legislatures on simple majority, party-line votes. .......... For months, Sinema and Manchin have staunchly defended the filibuster, which stands as the major hurdle to voting rights reform. No Republicans support either the voting rights bills or changing the rules of the filibuster, so Democrats cannot do anything unless both senators are on board. ........... “History will remember Senator Sinema unkindly. While she remains stubborn in her ‘optimism’, Black and brown Americans are losing their right to vote,” said Martin Luther King III, the son of the civil rights leader, who had met with Biden and vice president Kamala Harris on their high-profile joint visit to Georgia. “She’s siding with the legacy of Bull Connor and George Wallace instead of the legacy of my father and all those who fought to make real our democracy,” he said, citing the notorious segregationists. ............. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, praised Sinema’s speech as an act of “political courage” that could “save the Senate as an institution” .......... For months, Democrats have championed two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former measure would overhaul federal election rules to set baseline requirements for voter access. It would require 15 days of early voting, as well as same-day and automatic registration. It also includes provisions that make it harder to remove election officials without justification, and would make it easier for voters to go to court to ensure their votes aren’t thrown out. The latter bill would require states where there is repeated evidence of recent voting discrimination to get changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect. It updates and restores a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that was struck down by the supreme court in 2013. The US House passed a mega-bill on Thursday morning that combined both of those measures into a single bill. It was a procedural move designed to allow the Senate to quickly hear and debate the measure.

Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s comments came after the House approved a set of voting rights measures on a party-line vote of 220 to 203. ......... The announcement by Ms. Sinema, who had long opposed changing Senate rules, left Mr. Biden and Democrats without an avenue for winning enactment of the voting rights measures, which they have characterized as vital to preserve democracy in the face of a Republican-led drive in states around the country to limit access to the ballot box. ............. It came two days after the president had put his reputation on the line to make the case for enacting the legislation by any means necessary — including scrapping the famed filibuster — with a major speech in Atlanta that compared opponents of the voting rights measures to racist figures of the Civil War era and segregationists who thwarted civil rights initiatives in the 1960s. ........ Ms. Sinema said that while she backed the voting rights legislation her party is pushing and was alarmed about voting restrictions being enacted by Republicans in some states, she believed that a partisan change in the filibuster would only fuel already rampant political division.......... Some said her arguments were weak, particularly her insistence that Democrats should have done more to bring Republicans on board, when they have tried but failed to do so for months. And others groused that

Ms. Sinema seemed glued to her phone during much of the meeting with the president.

........... “It was extraordinarily important,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader who was on the floor during Ms. Sinema’s speech, told reporters. He called it a “conspicuous act of political courage” that “saved the Senate as an institution.” ....... He suggested that Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, once a segregationist candidate for president, had been more willing to back voting rights than current Republican senators ......... And he dismissed a question about whether Republicans would ram through conservative proposals if the filibuster were weakened by saying that the party was too divided to do so. .......... Democrats said the legislation was urgently needed to offset efforts taking hold in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after Democratic gains in the 2020 elections and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the vote was stolen. They argued that the flurry of new state laws was clearly intended to reduce voting in minority communities, amounting to a contemporary version of the kinds of restrictions that were prevalent before the enactment of landmark civil rights laws in the 1960s. .............

“Voter suppression has not been consigned to the history books. It is here today, right now.”

.............. The Freedom to Vote Act contains an array of proposals to establish nationwide standards for ballot access, aiming to nullify the wave of new restrictions in states. It would require a minimum of 15 consecutive days of early voting and that all voters are able to request to vote by mail; it would also establish new automatic voter registration programs and make Election Day a national holiday.

Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to filibuster reform rests on a myth Senate rules are fostering obstruction — not bipartisanship. ........ the belief that the filibuster fuels bipartisanship is one of many myths about the rule. The filibuster requires most bills to get 60 votes in order to proceed in the Senate, but it’s often used as a tool to obstruct legislation, not foster it. ......... Since Democrats took control of Congress following the 2020 elections, Republican filibusters have killed many of their bills. ............. we’re finally seeing, I think, a level of frustration, over the misuse of the filibuster, not as an infrequently applied tool by a minority on an issue about which they feel very, very strongly, but as a cynical weapon of mass obstruction. ...........

There’s a belief now that we face an existential threat.

And it’s a belief that is grounded very deeply in the reality of the moment. We had this violent insurrection on January 6. Leading up to it was two months of an effort by a president and his allies — which includes, after all, a very substantial number of elected officials in Congress and in states and some elsewhere — trying to overturn the results of an election. And that it wasn’t a one-off. .................

What we’re seeing with all these laws, now being both enacted and pushed in states, are attempts to make sure that in states, for example, where honest election officials, including Republican election officials, did their duty, that you have the ability to remove them; where you had election workers, both on Election Day and counting the votes afterwards, doing their job, that you can find ways to intimidate them and keep that from happening; that you can have partisan bodies overturn election results that they don’t like. That you can suppress votes you don’t like.

.............. and whether you believe that it’s a slippery slope, and once you change it, it’ll come back to haunt you. That is at the core for both of them, but particularly for Sinema. That if you enact voting reforms now, they will come back and undo them in a few years. So they have their reasons. .........

Joe Manchin labored mightily to come up with a compromise bill so that he could entice 10 Republicans to make it bipartisan. He did not get a single one.

......... 16 Republicans currently in the Senate voted for the 2006 extension of the Voting Rights Act. Not one of them supports the John Lewis Act. Republicans will act in a bipartisan fashion when it suits their interest without regard for the filibuster, not because of it as it is currently crafted. ............. [there is an idea I’ve advocated for] to flip the numbers from 60 required to end debate to 41 required to continue it. ......... You can marry that with elements of the talking filibuster, that whenever there is a motion, [41 dissenting senators] have to be physically on the floor. ........ If you put the burden entirely on the majority, and if you have a minority party that has as its core strategy uniting in opposition to everything of significance to the majority, you have a formula for obstruction. And that’s not the way it was, if you go back to the history of the filibuster, from the major innovation that created the term in 1917. [Back then,] if you were going to filibuster, you got to be there. You got to pay a price, you may have to sleep on lumpy cots for nights on end. ...............

the House passed two bills last year, on universal background checks on guns, an idea that has the support of 90 percent or more of Americans, including across all lines. They move to the Senate. Has there been any debate? No. Will they ever be brought up under the current rules? No.

.................. And the minority prevails, even though they’re fighting against 90 percent of the country that wants something that’s got common sense. ............. So if you don’t make a change in the rules, the chance of getting any meaningful reform of the voting and election system out of the federal government is zero. If you pass a reform that doesn’t end the filibuster, but that puts the burden more on the minority, then you have, I’d say, a better than even chance of getting something important done. Not just important, really, I would say, it really is existential. ............... you really do need to have a sharp public focus on the threat that this poses to the country and to its fundamentals. And we haven’t had that as much. And you know, you get stories, but then they pass. It’s certainly not been a core component of daily news coverage and mainstream media. It’s not what dominates the front pages. ...............

there’s only one way to ameliorate that threat. And that one way has to involve a change in the rules.

............ Anybody who believes that Mitch McConnell would be restrained from changing the rules because Democrats didn’t change the rules has been asleep for the last 15 years.

Russia And The US: Modi Should Mediate

When China and India were blowing hot and blowing cold up in the Himalayas, Russia, a friend to both, stepped in and mediated a winding down. India is a friend both to Russia and the United States. It should reciprocate. Modi should mediate. Several major European powers as well the US seem to think we are on the brink of war. Russia might invade Ukraine. That would be a bad development for Russia, the US, Europe, and the world. It was not just the USA but also Russia that defeated the Soviet Union. Russia hit the final, decisive blow. It was Russia's victory. The US was a spectator. 

Ukraine's sovereignty is sacrosanct, but Russia is one of the major powers alongside China and the US. Its economy might be minor, in no small measure due to the mismanagement and large-scale giveaways to today's oligarchs after the Soviet Union fell like a house of cards after Yeltsin's decisive blow and courageous stand. 

I am aware the West would like to see a Western-style democracy in Russia when no two western powers have identical political systems. But opening up Russia or reforming Russia need not go by way of a war in Ukraine. Russia's domestic political processes have their own idiosyncrasies. Stalin had his extreme left fire to burn. Putin seems to turn up the extreme right fire far and wide. 

There is no need to convince Russia of the US position, or the US of Russia's position. That is not what peace is about. There just is an urgent need to wind down the tension that can be facilitated by another power that is considered a friend by both. 

India dreams of becoming a permanent member of the Security Council. It has to be willing to play a role here to get there. This is a necessity as well as an opportunity. This is not a war either Russia or the US want. But sometimes you just need to be able to save face. You need help climbing down the pole. 

Russia And The US: Modi Should Mediate https://t.co/qTI9CS7NRA @narendramodi @BJP4India @whitehouse @VP @KamalaHarris @StateDept #Ukraine #Russian

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 14, 2022

December 30: Afghanistan, China, TikTok, Omicron, India, Michigan

Ultra-leftist voices are making themselves heard in China, but at what cost? Bloggers and commentators are riding a wave of nationalism by attacking intellectuals and corporate targets in China as well as emblems of the West ...... Observer predicts the radicals are convenient while Xi Jinping seeks a successful 20th party congress but their usefulness will expire once he consolidates power .......... First, China’s ultra-left opinion leaders battled outspoken media, liberal intellectuals and NGOs, then foreign governments, corporations and moderate liberals. But lately they have found new ideological opponents to take on. Leftist bloggers are targeting private tech firms, entrepreneurs and capital markets, as well as misbehaving celebrities, in combative essays pushing a socialist agenda in the name of patriotism. Ultra-leftist sentiment riding on the rising tide of nationalism is gaining popularity on the Chinese internet. However, analysts warn that

leftist tendencies that build on irrational and misguided policy interpretation could threaten China’s progress of reform and opening up if left unchecked

ASTRONAUT BARBER MEANS WELL, GIVES TERRIBLE HAIRCUT IN SPACE HE WAS DOING HIS BEST. ...... the thought of being surrounded by a floating cloud of hair clippings is horrid.

Step into the space salon where barber @astro_raja is a man of many talents 🚀💈💇‍♂️ Because none of us want hair in our eyes, or – even worse – the @Space_Station systems, our hair clippers come with a vacuum attached. Five stars for this space stylist's service ⭐️😉 #CosmicKiss pic.twitter.com/dDsXHaSgG5

— Matthias Maurer (@astro_matthias) December 19, 2021

@Astro_Raja Heard you give good haircuts! ;)

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) December 25, 2021

China warns of grave terror risks from Afghan chaos Isis, al-Qaeda and Xinjiang-related militant outfits are regrouping and also targeting cyberspace, Chinese minister tells counterterrorism seminar ...... Solidarity and cooperation are the most powerful anti-terror weapons, Wu Jianghao says as he seeks international support against ETIM ..... The resurgence of international militant groups emboldened by the chaos in post-war Afghanistan is posing serious threats to anti-terror work, China has warned. ........ Terrorist groups including Islamic State (Isis), al-Qaeda and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) are taking advantage of the drastically changed situation in Afghanistan this year to expand their presence and stir up trouble ..........

Emerging new technologies are being abused by terrorist forces. The use of cyberspace has made terrorist activities more covert and unchecked, and pushed terrorism closer to organised crime

.......... heightened alert against potential terror attacks amid risks of the instability in Afghanistan spilling over into Xinjiang in western China .......... Beijing has previously blamed the ETIM for separatist attacks in its Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. ......... Western troop withdrawals from Afghanistan have been followed by a fast-escalating wave of terrorist attacks by the regional chapter of Isis, including in neighbouring Pakistan. ....... a bus blast in July, which killed 13 people including nine Chinese workers in northern Pakistan, was carried out by the Pakistani Taliban or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella movement of militant groups linked to al-Qaeda and Isis .......... Representatives from both Afghanistan and Pakistan attended the seminar via video link, as did those from Russia and the United Arab Emirates. China and Russia, along with several neighbouring Central Asian nations, have stepped up cooperation in view of the Afghan crisis and the risk of terror spillovers. .......... “Counterterrorism should not become a tool of major-country rivalry or a leverage in geopolitics, still less an excuse to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.” ........ “We need to support the counterterrorism and deradicalisation efforts of all countries and build a global united front against terrorism” ........... Nabeel Munir, additional secretary at the Pakistani foreign ministry, said “immediate attention” is required in the face of new and emerging forms of terrorism, as

“no country has made more sacrifices in this fight than Pakistan”

. ........... a different kind of risk for Afghanistan’s neighbours – a new wave of Afghan refugees fleeing humanitarian and economic crisis in the middle of a pandemic and resurgent terror activities.

Beijing defends ‘democracy with Hong Kong characteristics’ model as white paper released a day after Legco election cites end goal of universal suffrage Within hours of Legco election closing, central government publishes strategy on developing Hong Kong-style democracy ....... White paper is only the second covering Hong Kong political reforms to be released by Beijing in seven years ......... Beijing has renewed its pledge to pursue the

ultimate goal of electing Hong Kong’s leader and legislature by universal suffrage

, releasing a white paper on Monday to mount a robust defence of its strategy of developing democracy for the city “in line with its realities” and putting “patriots” in charge.

TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular site in 2021 Video-sharing platform TikTok rose to massive popularity in 2021. Surpassing mammoths like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix in web traffic shows the speed and power of the ascent. TikTok rose from No. 7 to spot No. 1 on Cloudflare's ranking of top domains in 2021, and also beat out Facebook this year in social media domains, taking its No. 1 spot.

A new coronavirus vaccine heading to India was developed by a small team in Texas. It expects nothing in return. For some vaccine developers, the coronavirus pandemic has had a silver lining in billions of dollars in profits. But a new vaccine rolling out soon in India is taking the opposite approach: Its developers are getting zilch. ......... Unlike big-name vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the Texas Children’s Hospital vaccine, which is called Corbevax, is being shared patent-free. ....... The ambition is to create a low-cost, open-source alternative to expensive and limited supply mRNA vaccines for developing and under-vaccinated countries. And it wouldn’t stop at India: Hotez and Bottazzi are talking to other manufacturers around the world and have consulted with the World Health Organization to see how they can share the vaccine globally. ........... “Texas Children’s Hospital’s commitment to sharing technology is a challenge to the pharma giants and the false narrative that vaccine production and medical innovation thrive through secrecy and exclusivity,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of the advocacy group Public Citizen.

“If Texas Children’s Hospital can do it, why can’t Pfizer and Moderna?”

.............. Operation Warp Speed invested $4.1 billion in Moderna alone. Instead, the Texas Children’s Hospital vaccine was developed with $7 million from mostly private investors. ............

“If we had even a fraction of the support that Moderna had, who knows, maybe the world would be vaccinated by now. We wouldn’t be having a discussion about omicron”

........... The aim is to quickly scale up to manufacturing over 100 million doses a month — a potentially significant amount even in India, a giant country where only 40 percent of its 1.38 billion population is reported to be fully vaccinated. ......... Corbevax doses may be as low as $2.50 — which would make it not only the cheapest coronavirus vaccine in India but one of the cheapest in the world. Doses from Pfizer and Moderna sometimes cost almost 10 times that ......... In terms of unvaccinated people, he continued, “you’ve got a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, almost 2 billion in Latin America and the Caribbean, another billion in the smaller, low-income countries of Southeast Asia. That’s 3 billion people.” ........ “You’re going to need 6 to 9 billion doses of vaccine. So you know, when the president stands up a couple of weeks ago and says the U.S. government is the largest donor of vaccines, 275 million doses,” Hotez said. “I’m looking at that and saying: That’s not something to boast about.”

India reckons with the possibility of a third wave of the virus. At least 61 percent of Indians have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, and 43 percent have received two ......... Voting is scheduled to begin next month in five states including Uttar Pradesh, the most populous in the country, and massive crowds attended rallies held by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and opposition parties on Thursday. .......... The police in Mumbai, the country’s financial nerve center, banned gatherings of four or more people until Jan. 7 after new infections there nearly tripled in recent days. ......... Satyendar Jain, Delhi’s health minister, said on Thursday that genome sequencing suggests that

nearly half of the city’s new infections were of Omicron

, adding that the variant was spreading fast and infecting people regardless of their travel history.

A.O.C. and Manchin Are in the Same Party. No Wonder Democrats Are Struggling. After the latest twist by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in the Build Back Better drama, Democrats are weathering a storm of accusations of being plain bad at politics. ........ the disconnect between the party’s ability to assemble a broad coalition at the ballot box and the struggles it faces in legislating ........ several structural problems at once: the counter-majoritarian institutions in American government; the fuzzy balance of power among different forces within the party; and the difficulty of energizing a diverse set of interests around common goals. ....... Roosevelt had to deal with several conservative Southern Democrats. Today, Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are actually in line with many recent Democratic proposals, but they can still extract concessions that don’t necessarily reflect the bulk of the party’s priorities. ........... the emergence of a strong and cohesive left wing within the Democratic Party. ............ The so-called Squad and the rest of the Progressive Caucus bring both a more economically left perspective and a different vision on issues like race and criminal-justice reform. ........ Democrats might be doomed to more cycles of lengthy negotiations and under-delivering on progressive promises ............. One route is to strengthen social movements, which could both keep progressive issues like green energy and student debt on the public agenda and possibly help to elect more progressive Democrats. Such movements could also help to mobilize different groups of voters around shared priorities like health care and economic insecurity. ...........

institutional reform

........ reforming the rules of governance to allow a party that already regularly wins national elections to wield proportionate influence in governing .......... filibuster reform and making Congress more proportional. ........ these changes would ease the veto power that less populated and more conservative areas of the country hold over the majority. .........

The persistent inability of a majority party to enact policies that reflect the opinions of its constituents means that we ought to look at the forces at work.

......... Mr. Manchin is an especially good example of this dynamic — powerful voices in West Virginia have come out in support of Build Back Better, but the senator has serious ties to the fossil-fuel industry. Ms. Sinema’s hesitance to support party priorities has also been linked to her ties to powerful industries rather than any ideology or what Arizona voters want............... These problems also require structural solutions — tightening regulations over conflicts of interest for members of Congress and enacting lobbying reform. The party’s survival may depend on its ability to represent its own voters and not the corporate interests that still have a powerful veto in the legislative process. ........ Democratic leaders will need to think differently about how power flows through their coalition if they want to see their successes in electoral politics turn into policy achievements.

@julia_azari What are the chances of that structural reform happening? How to go about it? How to make it happen? https://t.co/9OjdnkK0fG

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) December 30, 2021

Thank you friends for all your kind messages, I have been released on bail and have returned home safely.♥️🙏🏿

— Denise Ho (@hoccgoomusic) December 30, 2021

किसान आन्दोलन: बाँके जिल्लाबाट ९ जना आन्दोलनकारी गिरफ्तार, आन्दोलन जारी
किसान एकता जिन्दाबाद pic.twitter.com/Aq4qLQ85uX

— Dr. CK Raut (@drckraut) December 30, 2021

New Variants Could Be ‘Fully Resistant’ Against Current Vaccines Or Previous Infection, WHO Director Says concern about the spread of omicron and delta variants causing a “tsunami” of new Covid cases. ........ His comments came as 4.99 million new virus cases were reported globally between December 20-26, up 11% from the previous week, according to the WHO. ........ As of Wednesday morning, the U.S. shattered its seven-day average of new infections, which totaled around 282,000, surpassing the previous record set in January ......... The WHO chief said nearly half of its member nations missed the target due to a “combination of limited supply going to low-income countries” and “vaccines arriving close to expiry and without key parts” such as syringes. ........

and last week Israel became the first country to greenlight a fourth dose

......... the WHO chief called on governments to make it their “new year’s resolution” to support the agency’s campaign to vaccinate 70% of the population in every country by the beginning of July 2022.

Ungerrymandered: Michigan’s Maps, Independently Drawn, Set Up Fair Fight A citizen ballot initiative took redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators. The result:

competitive political districts — and an example of how to push back against hyperpartisanship

. .......... One of the country’s most gerrymandered political maps has suddenly been replaced by one of the fairest. ............ districts so competitive that Democrats have a fighting chance of recapturing the State Senate for the first time since 1984. ......... The work of the new commission, which includes Democrats, Republicans and independents and was established through a citizen ballot initiative, stands in sharp contrast to the type of hyperpartisan extreme gerrymandering that has swept much of the country, exacerbating political polarization — and it may highlight a potential path to undoing such gerrymandering. ........ The commission’s three new maps — for Congress, the State House and the State Senate — restore a degree of fairness ........ All of the maps still have a slight Republican advantage, in part because Democratic voters in the state are mostly concentrated in densely populated areas. ........ Detroit’s State Senate delegation will jump to nine members from five, and its State House delegation to 15 representatives from nine. ....... a lawsuit in 2018 unearthed emails in which Republicans boasted about packing “Dem garbage” into fewer districts and ensuring Republican advantages “in 2012 and beyond.” ..........

The path to an independent redistricting commission in Michigan began with a Facebook post days after the 2016 election from a woman with no political experience.

........... That post started a movement. Soon, a 5,000-member volunteer organization, Voters Not Politicians, was coordinating online through Facebook messages and Google documents, organizing a ballot initiative campaign and crisscrossing the state to gin up support. Members wrote folk songs and dressed up in costumes as gerrymandered districts to draw attention to the effort. ........... Republicans sued to block the ballot initiative but were denied by the state Supreme Court in August 2018. That November, the measure passed overwhelmingly, with more than 61 percent of Michigan voters approving the creation of an independent redistricting commission. ........... In Virginia, a commission deadlocked and failed to produce maps, punting the process to the state Supreme Court, which approved new maps this week. In Ohio, the Republican-led legislature ignored the state’s redistricting commission and drew an aggressively gerrymandered map all but certain to cement G.O.P. control for a decade.

December 25: Putin, India, China, Prashant Kishor

Texas Is Winnable. Beto’s the Candidate to Do It. A Beto gubernatorial win isn’t only very possible—it could permanently reshape the national political landscape. ........ As Texas trends blue in coming years, it can flip its Senate seats and create a Texas-sized hole in the electoral college math necessary for any Republican seeking the White House. .......

The notion that Texas is a “red state” is incorrect.

.......... Latinos and African Americans are now the majority of the state’s population, and the popular perception of Texas as a place filled primarily with Stetson-wearing white men is fundamentally anachronistic. When you think Texas, you should now think of Selena, Beyoncé, and Megan Thee Stallion. Those Texas-born and raised cultural icons came from the communities that increasingly define the state. ........... four years ago when Beto first ran statewide and came within 214,921 votes of winning ....... Nearly 300,000 people of color in Texas turn 18 every year ........ By the time ballots are cast in November 2022, 1.2 million more young Texans of color will be eligible to vote than was the case four years ago. .......... In 2018, 5.4 million people of color didn’t vote. What we learned in Georgia is that victory depends on massive turnout, and massive turnout requires strong organizational infrastructure working to find and mobilize every possible supporter. ........... He drove to all 254 counties in the state in 2017 and ’18, and was probably the only candidate to do so. ......... If 2021 has proved anything, it’s that mobilizing voters of color in the South and Southwest is the progressive revolution we need

China and Russia pledge to step up efforts to build independent trade network to reduce reliance on US-led financial system Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin agree to accelerate attempts to create a system that cannot be influenced by ‘third parties’ ....... The two leaders also want to increase the number of deals settled in their own currencies as sanctions threaten to limit US dollar transactions .......... China and Russia have pledged to speed up their efforts to set up an independent trade network to reduce their reliance on the US-led international financial system.

India, Russia have more than weapons to celebrate after Putin’s state visit Despite India’s steady drift into the US orbit, Russia remains a vital relationship for New Delhi as it seeks arms sales and strategic balance ....... Agreements on trade, investment and security cooperation in addition to arms deals show the relationship still has room for growth ...... the first “two-plus-two” dialogue involving the defence and foreign ministers of the two states. ......... India has sought to diversify its sources of weapons acquisitions in the past two decades. To that end, it has purchased a range of military equipment from the United States and France. ......... the two sides completed another weapons deal involving the manufacture of 600,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles for the Indian Army. ......... many in Delhi fear the US cannot always be counted on to provide India with high technology military hardware without preconditions. Moscow, on the other hand, has few such qualms and stands ready to transfer almost any military equipment India seeks – for a price. .......... they remain loath to wholly dispense with what they deem to be a tried-and-true strategic relationship with Russia, the principal successor state to the Soviet Union. All four factors, in tandem, ensure Delhi continues to hold a candle for Moscow. ........... it ensures Russia has a reliable and substantial market for its weapons industries. This is far from a trivial consideration because unlike during the Cold War, when the arms transfer relationship was based upon barter or rupee-rouble transactions, today it is based on hard currency sales. .......... Putin is also keen on reassuring his Indian counterpart, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the Indo-Russian relationship is not about to atrophy despite Russia’s growing closeness to China, India’s principal long-term adversary. .... the two sides agreed to boost annual trade to US$30 billion by 2025, signed some 28 investment pacts and agreed they could not allow Afghanistan to once again emerge as a safe haven for terrorists.

Teachers all over the US are burnt out, but parents’ compassion has gone

December 11: Nagaland, Putin, China, Hydrogen, Afghanistan

China-Japan tension: Abe’s comments on Taiwan prompt Beijing threat to ‘reconsider’ bilateral relations Relationship challenged by former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s remarks that neither Japan nor the US could stand by if island was attacked by mainland ...... Japan’s chief cabinet secretary says ‘there is a need for China to understand that there are such thoughts within Japan’

What is green hydrogen and can it help China meet its carbon goals? Most of the element used in industry is produced using fossil fuels ..... The country’s western regions are shaping up to be hubs of an industrial transformation ....... Hydrogen is the lightest and most common element in the universe. When used as fuel, it produces no direct emissions of greenhouse gases or pollutants. ........ Grey hydrogen is the most common form and is generated from fossil fuels. About 96 per cent of the hydrogen produced around the world falls into this category. ....... Green hydrogen is generated entirely by renewable energy such as solar and wind power and accounts for just 4 per cent of the total. ........ Green hydrogen has the potential to be used as a replacement fuel for coal in smelting and steelmaking, or as a raw material for petrochemical products in the decarbonisation of the industry. .......

hydrogen’s contribution to China’s energy mix is expected to increase from about 3 per cent in 2018 to 20 per cent in 2060

. ....... China is aiming to reach peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 ........... by 2050, green hydrogen could be the cheapest production method for steel ....... Chinese iron and steel manufacturing conglomerate HBIS Group said last year that it would operate the world’s first direct reduced iron production plant powered by hydrogen-enriched gas. .......... hydrogen from renewables would fall as low as US$1.3 per kg by 2030 in regions with high-quality renewable resources, making it comparable with the cost of hydrogen from natural gas with carbon capture and storage ...... to be used in sectors where electrification is difficult to implement, including long-haul transport, shipping, aviation and buildings. ........... Ningxia Baofeng Energy Group says its overall cost of producing green hydrogen is about 0.7 yuan (11 US cents) per standard cubic metre. It is comparable with hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China, which cost about 0.6 yuan per standard cubic metre.

As the U.S. withdrawal approached, analysts thought it would be months before the Taliban brought the fight to Kabul. Over the years, the capital’s elite had retreated deeper behind concrete walls topped with concertina wire; sometimes they even added a layer of Hesco barriers on the sidewalk, forcing me into the street as I passed. .......... Should we stay or should we go? Afghans had endured the agony of displacement and exile for 40 years ......... She majored in women’s studies and religion at the University of Virginia and considered herself a proud feminist; that was also when she chose to start wearing the hijab, which strengthened her connection to her faith. ........ her father became Kandahar’s mayor as the streets filled with American soldiers and the war intensified. In 2011, he was assassinated by a suicide bomber. ........ After a couple of years, the school’s success had attracted the capital’s elite. That, she believed, was why she received a call last year from the president. She thought Ghani wanted to know about Mezan’s online learning programs for the pandemic; instead, he asked her to become his minister of education. ......... Until then, Rangina had resisted joining the Afghan government; it was dominated by warlords who, she believed, were responsible for killing her father, more so than the Taliban. ........... Those who took part became corrupt themselves, or else were hounded into leaving. ........ she became Afghanistan’s first female education minister since the Communists, who brought radical new opportunities for women to go to school and work in the cities, gains that were wiped out after they were overthrown by American-backed Islamists in 1992. ............. He proposed a caretaker government and new elections overseen by himself, a nonstarter for the Taliban. ...... the Islamists were simply running out the clock until the U.S. forces left. .......

In the West, Ghani was hailed by many as an educated reformer, co-author of the book “Fixing Failed States.”

.......... “Young, educated, well-spoken, corrupt” ...... a 40-year civil war fueled by foreign superpowers, malignant corruption and the Pakistani military’s covert support for the Taliban. ......... the U.S. occupation had created a state dependent on American troops and foreign money. .......... Another initiative was the creation of thousands of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter dedicated to promoting the government and attacking its critics, work known by the Pashto term Facebookchalawonky. ......... Afghanistan’s vibrant cyberspace must have been attractive to officials cloistered within blast walls and armored cars, but it failed to capture the reality of the countryside, where only a fraction of the population had access to the internet. ..........

many working for the council clung to the belief that the United States would never leave Afghanistan

........

The U.S. military had spent billions to train and equip a force in its own image, heavily dependent on foreign contractors and air support.

........ But the Afghan Army’s notoriously corrupt generals stole their men’s ammunition, food and wages .......... while security forces were supposed to total 300,000, the real number was likely less than a third of that ........ “Latest Report: 98% of Government Officials’ Families Live Outside Afghanistan.” ........... the president — whose children grew up in the United States ......... Out of 27 cabinet ministers, it claimed, only two had families who resided in Afghanistan full time. ...... Torture had long been common in the republic’s prisons, as documented since 2011 by the United Nations. ........ included waterboarding and sexual assault, much of it carried out by the N.D.S., which was advised by the C.I.A. and British intelligence (both agencies have denied any involvement with torture). ..........

But as much as Kabul’s journalists feared violence at the hands of the government, some worried that if the republic fell, worse would follow.

........ Criticism, like objectivity, made sense only within a shared set of values. “If we’re talking political philosophy, and the question of a republic versus an emirate, well, that’s different,” he told me. “We’re liberals. We believe in freedom and democracy.” ......... Zaki feared that freedom of the press and women’s rights would be the first areas of compromise. ......... “I said that things are falling apart, the chain of command is broken and people are not telling the truth to you,” Nadery told me. “He answered, ‘Yes, it will take another six months for us to turn it around.’” Stunned, Nadery left the palace wondering what kind of information the president was getting. ............. There were increasingly strident assertions about what a Taliban takeover would mean: stories about the forced marriage of young girls and widows to their fighters, even sex slavery. .............. It would mean a return to the brutal days when men without beards were flogged in the streets, when women were not allowed to leave the home without a guardian, of public executions in soccer stadiums, of stoning and amputations, a massacre for everyone who had worked for the foreigners, a genocide for Afghanistan’s Hazara minority. .......... Even after the last troops left on Aug. 31, a 650-strong security force was supposed to remain behind to protect the massive embassy complex. ............. But now the rebels were advancing as fast as their motorcycles could carry them. ......... On Thursday, Biden ordered the embassy to shut down, and diplomats began destroying classified materials and shifting operations to the airport, where 3,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines were being flown in to evacuate American citizens and their allies. ..........

People from neighboring districts were pouring into the capital, fleeing ahead of the Taliban, who the U.S. Embassy had warned were committing war crimes.

.......... he knew how vicious the Taliban had been with their opponents in the 1990s. He was ready to give his life to protect his wife and daughter; he also knew that might not be enough. ......... Many of the foreign nationals based in Kabul left the country during the pandemic to work remotely, but the few who remained had been

as surprised as everyone by the sudden collapse of the government

. ............ The decision of the U.S. Embassy to pull out meant that most other Western organizations were evacuating, too, although the embassies of Iran, Russia and China — America’s rivals — were going to remain. .......... “They’re rational. They have advisers from Pakistan, from China, from Russia. You think these guys with the long beards are making decisions?” ......... Jim and I stockpiled everything from canned goods to buckshot. ........ The former president, Hamid Karzai, sat in a semicircle with leaders of the mujahedeen, former Communists, contracting barons — men who were handed power by the Americans in 2001, when their enemies, the Taliban, seemed utterly defeated.

They had presided over two decades of plenty, when a rain of billions from abroad had enriched a minority, even as poverty among the people had grown.

Now they faced the ruin of the republic. ............ The republic’s forces, utterly demoralized, were simply laying down their arms, allowing the rebels, after their long, lean years in the mountains, to take possession of billions of dollars worth of vehicles and weapons bought by the United States and its allies. ......... By now, cities were falling without a fight, surrendering after a mere phone call. ............ Saleh, the vice president who had run security meetings for the capital, had secretly escaped to his home province of Panjshir, which helped throw the chain of command in Kabul into disarray. Local criminal gangs — many of them connected to the police — were waiting for their chance to start looting. ........... Shortly before 10 o’clock that morning, the president sat in the shade of a courtyard at the palace, reading a book. ...........

Ghani’s frequent reading breaks had become a joke between him and his friends.

............ but they’d still been waiting for years to go to America under the Special Immigrant Visa program for local employees. There was a backlog of some 20,000 applications. ..........

The Taliban were as surprised as everyone else by their lightning success

; they weren’t prepared to take control of the capital and feared a confrontation with the Americans at the airport. ......... I had a sudden sense of the fragility of the social contract that bound us; our shared reality was melting into air. I was as worried about being robbed or shot by them as I was about the Taliban. .......... “Remember, this is not Saigon,” the secretary of state would say on television later that day. .......... Earlier that day, the guards at the main prison in the city had fled, and the prisoners had broken loose — the same thing happened at the detention center in Bagram, north of the capital. ........... Jim and I had looped the whole Green Zone: the ugly concrete maws of its compounds stood open, the barriers upraised. Across the city, soldiers and police officers took off their uniforms, laid down their weapons and walked off into the evening light. ..........

by lunchtime many of Kabul’s police stations had been abandoned, becoming targets of large, organized groups of looters.

............ Khalilzad and the Taliban had been getting messages from Afghan politicians in Kabul, begging for someone to take charge of security before the looting and violence got worse. Everyone feared what might happen come nightfall............. The police had the giddiness of condemned men granted a reprieve; they crowded shyly around the Talib, who seemed annoyed by his duty but not in the least concerned about being surrounded by armed men who would have shot him a day ago. ............ After flying for more than an hour, the three presidential helicopters arrived at the Uzbekistan border and landed; confusion ensued at the Termez airport as they were surrounded by soldiers —

the Uzbek government had apparently not been informed of their arrival.

Eventually, the president, his wife, Mohib and several aides were taken to the governor’s guesthouse, but the rest of the 50 or so people on board spent a miserable night out in the open by the helicopters, relieving themselves on the tarmac. The next day, a charter flight arrived and took them all to Abu Dhabi. .................. The U.A.E., which had deep business ties with Kabul’s elite, was a close ally of Ghani’s; according to three sources within the administration, Abu Dhabi had secretly helped fund his election campaigns. ......... … Mujahedeen are not allowed to enter anyone’s home, or harass anyone.” .......... The sudden fall of the city had caught the Taliban leadership without adequate forces on hand. ........ In all, according to one senior Taliban commander’s estimate, the rebels took command of Kabul with well under a thousand men — less than the number of Marines at the airport, let alone the tens of thousands of Afghan security forces who had deserted their posts. ...............

There was a widespread belief that if you could only get inside the airport, you’d make it to Germany or Canada

, and in fact, many had gotten out in the chaos of the first night, when, in order to clear the runway, people were bundled onto planes indiscriminately and flown to Doha. ............... some of the jeans reappeared, while the Taliban donned a patchwork of uniforms that had belonged to the republic. ........ Ghani was in Abu Dhabi writing a book, a follow-up to “Fixing Failed States,” perhaps. ....... Ramin and his wife were given an artist’s residency in a French farmhouse, where he was writing of his longing for his city, a Kabul that now lived on in the imagination of a new diaspora. .......... The farther we traveled from Kabul, the less nostalgia people seemed to have for the republic. In Panjwai, outside Kandahar City, the farmers had dug up the I.E.D.s and were planting crops. Everywhere, white flags fluttered above the graves of young men. ......... For ordinary people in the countryside, the fall of the republic had at least brought an end to the fighting. ......... In Kandahar, I was told about a quiet campaign of kidnappings and assassinations of former police and intelligence officers by Taliban fighters — which their leaders denied — some driven by local disputes, others by revenge. ....... The economy was in free fall, the banks were out of cash; it had been a drought year,

and everyone feared the hunger that winter would bring

. .......... I thought about my visits there, when the runway was crowded with jets, and tried to remember the brash generals who’d explained, year after year, how they were winning — they just needed more troops, more money, more time. .......... We kept driving to Nimruz and reached the Iranian border. Here the desert began. A great exodus was underway. We watched as the migrants crowded onto trucks, heading west.