The calming influence of history

It's impossible to not draw a powerful and historically rich parallel between Trump's use of the National Guard in LA and Kennedy's and Johnson's use of federal forces in the sixties when I was in high school.  The deployment of force—especially military force—on U.S. soil in response to civil unrest has a long and fraught history, and comparisons between different eras can bring deeper clarity or, at the very least, help us question the narratives behind such decisions. 

The south was in an uproar about civil rights and rioting. 

Governors like George Wallace of Alabama framed federal intervention (especially the use of National Guard troops or federal marshals to enforce desegregation) as federal overreach and an infringement on "states' rights." But from another perspective, those federal actions were necessary to uphold constitutional rights that were being denied by state governments.

Fast forward to recent years—if Trump or any president deploys the National Guard in response to protests, especially immigrant-rights demonstrations, it raises serious questions:

• What's the motivation? Is it truly to preserve public safety, or to suppress dissent? Wallace argued the feds were suppressing constitutional rights. Wallace framed federal intervention as an overreach, emphasizing states' rights and portraying the federal government as an oppressive force. His rhetoric galvanized segregationist sentiments and set the stage for confrontations between state and federal authorities. (1)

• Who's being labeled the threat? Civil rights protesters in the '60s were often painted as agitators or "outside troublemakers"—a tactic still used today.

• What rights are at stake? Then it was voting and desegregation; now it's immigration policy, police accountability, and freedom of assembly.

Remembering the sixties offers not just context, but a caution. Sometimes the same playbook is used with different actors, and historical memory becomes essential to resisting cycles of repression.

N.B. The Insurrection Act of 1807 grants the President the authority to deploy federal troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, and rebellion. This act has been invoked during significant civil rights confrontations, such as the Little Rock Nine crisis in 1957 and the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. The act underscores the tension between federal authority and states' rights, a theme that persists in contemporary debates over the use of the National Guard in civil unrest situations. It has been invoked over 30 times. See https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/guide-invocations-insurrection-act

Note that the National Guard is used because  the Posse Comitatus Act (1878) is a federal law that limits the use of the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement. The law was enacted after the Reconstruction era, when federal troops had been used extensively in the South to enforce civil rights laws and maintain order. Southern states pushed for the act to limit federal control and reassert state power.  The National Guard is supposed to be invoked by state governors, not the federal government, but can be federalized.

President's are authorized to call up the troops under Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15-16  

Congress shall have the power:

• “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

• “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia...”  and

 Article II, section 2 

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...” 

Of course these sections were added because they were terrified of slave revolts. 

None of this of this is to justify Trump's actions which I find abhorrent, but to simply provide some historical context so we don't all over-react;  oppose but not go nuts. And also to remember that actions we approve of when in support of our causes, may come back to bite us in the ass.

 

 

A Security Thought Experiment: Protecting Your Stuff at the Border.

 I've been reading about the concerns folks have regarding computer and phone searches when crossing into the U.S. (or other equally despotic regimes.) Here's what I would do should I have sensitive material (i.e. anti-Trump documents) that I needed to have available. I would love to hear your thoughts.  Perhaps I have overlooked something.

1. Create folders on a cloud service located outside the U.S., such as Proton. Encrypt one of the folders for storing sensitive documents.

2. I use only Linux on all my machines with Windows installed in a VM, both 10 and 11. Better yet, install a Linux distro as a VM and use that. I could use those VMs to access the cloud service to create documents and do business using an online office suite like OnlyOffice or Zoho (I have both.)

3. Reinstall Windows in the VM before coming back into the US so there is a clean install with no evidence of access to anything else. Or just delete the VM.

4. Use the regular Linux installation for non-sensitive work, reading the news, maps, travel docs. etc. and access to a new Protonmail account to be used for travel, etc.

5. Use a more arcane Linux distro, Archbang, for example.  No point making things easy. You could also, just for fun, create a hidden, encrypted partition.  Unlikely, it would be found without extensive forensic work, but don't use it for anything sensitive.  BSD or Gentoo might drive them nuts, assuming they haven't driven you nuts first. 

6. Another option is to install a Linux distro on a fast flash drive (I do this all the time) and use that to communicate with the hidden cloud service and then wipe before coming back, copy all your travel photos on to it, or, mail it home.  

7. One fun little exercise -- which, of course, I would never do -- is to create a folder called "important financial passwords" and create a little malware file entitled "passwords" that when clicked on, would run umount /dev/sda && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M on their computer. 

8. Phone calls would be made using locally purchase SIM card that would be trashed before entering the U.S.  Of course, all phone calls are monitored by the NSA anyway, so don't use the phone.

9. And, no, I haven't forgotten about Tor.  Use it.

10. They would be welcome to my login password.

 

Personally, I worry about the ethics (or lack thereof) of the border patrol and suspect many of them are looking for financial data and other types of information they can use to enrich themselves. 

We are completely missing the Trump strategy on tariffs.

 It has nothing to do with punishing other countries, although that just may be a side benefit. There's money to be made in uncertainty. Remember the suddent rise in the stock market following the rumor that originated on X:

"The false posts may have originated from a real Fox News interview with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett at around 8:30 a.m. ET. Hassett was asked whether President Donald Trump would “consider a 90-day pause in tariffs,” and he replied in part: “The president is (going to) decide what the president is (going to) decide.” (https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/media/fake-news-x-post-caused-market-whiplash/index.html)

That, I suspect was a mere test -- albeit profitable for anyone who knew about the rumor ahead of time -- to see what the effect of a change in tariff policy --or even a pretend one -- would have on the market. 

Anyone (like the Trump family and other insiders) who knew what the president was going to announce stood to make billions thanks to the volitility and over-reaction of the market to anything related to tariffs. 

Hedge funds short and then buy and the huge swings in the market afford literally billions in profits.  Trump's flip-flops are bad for business because it inhibits planning, but it's wonderful for insiders, especially the  Trump family who will know the timing of the flips and flops. In the meantime Trump can grandstand that tariffs are in the best interest of the country.  Whether they are or not is completely irrelevant to his get-rich-quick strategy by manipulating the market. 

Expect more flips and flops and for the billionaires and Trump friends to become trillionaires while the rest of us poor schmucks just sit back and wonder what the hell happened.

Follow the money.

Reading, death of

I like to read.  And I like to read long stuff. I remember devouring Eliot Morison’s 14 volume History of U.S. Naval Operations in WW II in high school. I like New Yorker and Atlantic articles’ I also like information and facts and mysteries. I even subscribe to Longform, a site that delivers long articles of interest. I love the Internet with its access to original documents and instant access to things to read more of. Want to read the original Supreme Court opinion on something?  No problem. Twenty seconds to get a copy off the SCOTUS website. Can’t find an article you are sure you read years ago? Maybe 30 seconds of searching and you’ll find a reference and location.

 

I also recognize the “book reading” as the greatest anti-social device ever invented. Waiting for a bus, a doctor, on an airplane, anywhere, and don’t want to talk to anyone, whip out your Kindle, magazine, or book and everyone will recognize and honor the invisible barrier you have erected around yourself. 

 

My liberal friends (oops, almost typed the adjective “luddite) constantly decry the current generation’s inability to pay attention and to read long books, not to mention their overly social obsession with Tik-Tok and narcissistic blogs. So I was really interested to read an essay by Daniel Immerwahr in the latest New Yorker (January 27, 2025.)

 

Immerwahr – I love the name: translates from the German as “always true” – quotes the theologian Adam Kotsko, ““I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch  “Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from

readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” I remember reading not too long ago about a professor at Columbia where they have a “Great Books” required reading course being approached by a struggling student who remarked she was unable to get through a book having never been assigned one in high school.

 Several technology writers have raised concerns about the Internet and its distractive quality.  For example Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil from 1995 and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and other fearful prognostications by Johann Hari, Jenny Odell, and Nyir Eyal all warn of our lack of attention. 

 

It seems every generation fears the deleterious effects of each new technology.  I remember reading a piece concerned that the telephone would drive us apart by eliminating the neighborly front porch conversations when all we had to do was pick up the phone. And a book by a pilot (you become an expert by simply belonging to a profession) who was sure the advent of swept wing aircraft like the 707 would have planes falling from the skies. Immerwahr cites lots of historical examples of the fear.

• Hawthorne in 1843 “warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates, and “all mortal intercourse” will be “chilled with a fatal frost.” Hawthorne’s worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.”

• “ a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories.”

• Remember the panic about comic books?  My mother made my brother and me throw out a box of comics found in the attic of a house we had just moved into.

• Although today’s critics rue our inability to get through long novels, such books were once widely regarded as the intellectual equivalent of junk food. “They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study,” the Anglican priest Vicesimus Knox complained. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—“this mass of trash”—they would lose patience for “wholesome reading.” They’d suffer from “bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”

• “As far as the distractions caused by the Internet, Samuel Johnson in two essays, “The Rambler” (1750-52) and “The Idler” (1758-60), two essays  exulted in such mental wandering. Johnson was constantly picking up books and just as constantly putting them down. When a friend asked whether Johnson had actually finished a book he claimed to have “looked into,” he replied, “No, Sir, do you read books through?” 

 But perhaps attentiveness is not healthy. “ Maybe the mind required a little leaping around to do its work.” “the loudest calls to attention have been directed toward subordinates, schoolchildren, and women. “Atten-TION!” military commanders shout at their men to get them to stand straight. The arts of attention are a form of self-discipline, but they’re also ways to discipline others.”  Industrial life demands attention as does school work. Being part of a machine requires attentiveness to prevent accidents and poor quality of work.  Not being fully attentive during a class lecture is considered rude and is demanded by professors who take it as an insult to their hard preparation, even if their work may be stultifying in delivery. Revolutionary consciousness meant asserting “the right to be lazy,” Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son

Insisted.” Attention was a mechanism of subjugation.

 

Of course, to hammer away at the insidiousness of the new technologies, they are labeled as “addictive.” Surely anything as addictive as the Internet can’t be good for you.  I don’t know how much attention  they have given to ice cream, my personal addiction. The “sound bites” everyone decries may be simply a way to capture the attention of the audience in order to sell them something. But short doesn’t necessarily mean devoid of content. There are many cogent short essays and videos, not to mention poems,  that convey much in the way of emotion and content.  Do you really need a 45 minute lecture on the value and meaning of the 1st amendment?  For lawyers, perhaps, but would the average student not be better off with a short summary of the important points?

 Immerwahr is skeptical of many of the “sky is falling claims.”  The apparent decline of reading is also not so straightforward. Print book sales are holding steady, and audiobook sales are rising. The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked a recent drop in U.S. children’s reading abilities, yet that mostly coincides with the pandemic, and scores are still as good as or better than when the center started measuring, in 1971. If reading assignments at top colleges are shorter, it might be because today’s hypercompetitive students are busier, rather than because they’re less capable (and how many were actually doing all the reading in the old days?). What about Nicholas Carr’s insistence in 2010 that a Rhodes Scholar who didn’t read books heralded a post-literate future? “Of course I read books!” that Rhodes Scholar protested to another writer. Today, he holds a Ph.D. from Oxford and has written two books of his own.

But enough, back to reading while listening to some downloaded Bach organ.

 

History Repeats Itself in Different Guises

 "This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It traveled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye."

Czeslaw Milosz re the genocide of the Warsaw Ghetto

Living in Berkeley, California, while the U.S. military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity [Milosz] compared to the crimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. “If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,” he wrote, “then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.”

And now we come to Gaza where thousands of civilians have been bombed and killed in the same of what?  Cynically so Netanyahu can retain the seat of power?  To gain more land? In revenge for the Hamas attack.  What do we consider proportional response? 

History is littered with disproportionate responses to perceived injustice, real or perceptual.  We humans do love our revenge.

 

 

Review: Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

The book follows the construction of the John F Kennedy aircraft carrier at Newport News beginning in 2011. At the time of the book’s release in 2021, the ship remained to be completed (the completion date has been announced as 2024 – it was christened in 2019 - and now is scheduled to be delivered in 2025). The Kennedy is the 2nd in the Ford class which had suffered spectacular cost overruns and delays as they tried to initiate new technologies for launching aircraft (EMALS) and to operate the ship with fewer sailors. At the same time, new techniques were being tried to speed up construction ordered by Robert Gates as a way to reduce costs and to complete the proposed 10 ship class as a replacement for the current Nimitz class of carriers. 

 

These ships are extraordinarily expensive, the Ford costing north of $12 billion. The Navy hoped to recover some of these costs with reduced manpower through the use of new technologies. The assumptions behind these predictions have been challenged by numerous officials. But it was also the first to be designed digitally, a system that was supposed to bring new efficiencies to the process. No more did workers have to carry around heavy rolls of blueprints. The simply looked at their tablets, scanned the wire bundle bar codes and it was revealed exactly where the cables should go and what they should be connected to. The amount of wiring was staggering. There was four million feet of fiber-optic cabling alone since the ship was to have all the communications interconnected. No more eyeballing or guessing where things went.  The tablets laid out everything instantly and corrected, saving dreaded and expensive rework.

At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, but sometimes, because those driving the computers didn’t have the historical knowledge and experience of building ships, they might not allow enough room to weld some pipes together, for example.  The idea was to create a “system” one that could be duplicated and save money and time building these dinosaurs.

I question whether the current trend to build extremely complex weapons systems like the F-35, the new class of carriers, and other systems, making them far more expensive thus reducing the number that can be built and requiring far more maintenance, is an intelligent use of taxpayer money, not to mention reducing the effectiveness of the smaller forces. The scandals of the Seventh Fleet revealed after the collisions showed poor training and deferred maintenance because of cost that can only hurt the country’s defense.  In a changing environment where drones do battle and are really cheap and expendable, I wonder whether carriers will not pass the way of the battleships.   I recommend any of a number of recent books on drone warfare.

A really interesting book.