The fifth element

 

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (4): Skewing the voting system, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

The Republican strategists have known for decades that demographics are against them. As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. This is the case in most places, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and the like.

On one hand, the policies of the party are primarily protective of wealthier white males and on the other, the New Deal and Great Society structures such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are very popular, so strategies to attract GOP voters have to be a little different.

For Nixon, it was the 'Southern Strategy', where carefully-coded terms such as 'urban', rather than racial epithets, were used to bring the racist Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) into the GOP fold.

For Reagan, it was the embrace of the Moral Majority, who were formed to maintain segregation in the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches, and pivoted to get attention focused on things such as abortion and gay rights.

For George W. Bush, the tactic was purging the voter rolls, especially in Florida, where a quarter-million voters were thrown off shortly before the election of 2000. Most were minorities, and many were actually eligible. It is arguable that this move alone won that election for the GOP.

Another idea has been to claim voter fraud, which has not been detected in any appreciable amount in half a century, and use that as a reason to restrict voting. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2020 that Republicans would never win another election unless they 'do something' about mail-in voting. It is worth noting that at least four states use this system exclusively, with no problems.

'I don’t want everybody to vote,' the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. 'As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'

In places such as Ohio, the congressional and legislative maps are so gerrymandered that, despite the actual voting numbers being about 54% GOP and 46% Democrat, the former hold about 80% of the relevant offices. While the people changed the state constitution to make the districts more fair, the GOP-dominated election committee has presented three sets of maps giving them an 80% advantage. Each set has been thrown out by the GOP-led Ohio Supreme Court. Their answer this week was to present yet another, similar, one.

So, with that in mind, GOP-led legislatures in at least 11 states have taken massive steps to ensure their victories, requiring voter IDs that target minority voters, putting fewer voting machines in minority districts, forbidding people from giving food or water to those in line, restricting hours for early voting, restricting mail ballots, dissolving the autonomous election boards and replacing them by ones controlled by the GOP and many other measures, all in the name of  'preventing fraud'. In states with Democratic governors but GOP legislatures, such as Wisconsin and Virginia, they have stripped the governors of much of their power.

Yesterday, Judge Mark E. Walker, of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down most of the new election law passed in that state.

We will see what happens at the appeals level.

WEEKENDER: The Winds of Change, by Wiggia

My first love was bike riding, it was a sport I enjoyed for many reasons yet fell into it by accident.

As with most kids I wanted a bike and my paper round gave me the means to buy a Raleigh Lenton with Sturmey Archer gears. I was very pleased and started to get out and about on it, and then one day I wanted new drop handlebars and was told there was a very good bike shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham called Hetchins, so I went there.

Little did I know this was to be a start of a short but fairly successful bike riding part of my young life.

Hetchins were if not the best the equal of any frame makers in the country, beautiful hand-crafted frames with ornamental lugs that were a work of art. I had to have one and I saved and purchased a frame and bit by bit the bits that made it into a decent road racing bike.

By chance the shop manager was an old bike rider who also ran a local, small, club and encouraged youngsters to take up the sport, but his world was not road racing but track riding and after visiting the old, now defunct Paddington track in west London and hearing that magic to me of the hum of high pressure tubular tires on concrete, yes you can hear them or the sound that emanates from them, I was hooked and immediately started to save again for a track bike; for those that don’t know, they are single speed fixed gear machines with no brakes other than the fixed gear.

I took on a Saturday job to supplement my paper round and my track bike purchase. After a season learning the ropes as a fourteen year old I started racing as a junior, up to eighteen years old; in those days that was the only category there was,  and only two national titles, the track sprint and the road race. today few would believe so little was available to aim at, though all the other events were included in meeting schedules.

To start with I mostly raced at Paddington at their weekly track league meetings but also on a grass track at Enfield who also had regular meetings run by the same shop manager. 

The following year I started to get serious and joined the Polytechnic CC, the premier track club in the country. The club had a who’s who of riders who had won national and international titles going back to the start almost of bike racing; it also had the facilities of the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, probably the poshest address for a club room there was or will be. In reality apart from running several top bike meets during the year and having all these top riders as members there was little they did for you: these were the days of self progress, no coaches to speak of apart from the national team, no sports psychologists, no training schedules, and therefore your own training programs were trial and error based on what you read about or spoke about with other riders.

I went on to race all over the country, riding with my spare race wheels to many meetings miles away and riding home afterwards as many of us did, and rode abroad a few times. There was no money and no sponsorship, you paid for everything, even at international level many had to pay their travel expenses to represent their country; it was a very different world from today.

I write the above as an intro to something that happened last weekend that was or could be a sea change in bike racing. When I rode there were a few black riders racing on the track, but I was not aware of any racing on the road. When I stopped racing, I gave a rather special racing vest to a black rider we had as a club member who had become a friend.

The success of Major Taylor goes back to a period when professional track riders were indeed professionals: they rode for prize money and were paid appearance fees as well as being sponsored by companies. Match racing was promoted in much the same way as boxing was and still is. True professionals on the track died out during the Seventies apart from in Japan, where one form of racing, keirin, behind a moped is supported by the Japanese equivalent of the Tote. In fact the last truly great professional track sprinter was our own Reg Harris, he and a few contemporaries were indeed the last of the few. Very little remains of Harris' racing but this is a short Pathe News clip of him winning the world title in 1950 and then he became Sportsman of the Year; a few years later the era came to an end.

Today the sport is split between track riders who are mainly, as with athletes, supported by governments and/or lottery schemes or university grants and the like, as a way for a country to earn gravitas for Olympic and World medals. It is in many ways no different from when there was an amateur/professional divide in sport and communist bloc countries got round the professional accusations by employing athletes in public jobs that involved doing nothing other than train for the sport they were involved with. Other countries did the same in various guises of ‘other’ employment or income supplement, e.g. in France a few top riders worked for the Ministry of Sport! The ending of the amateur status should have been a good thing but as seen in many sports it has created a communist bloc look-alike that somehow is regarded as being ‘different’.

But one black track rider stands out in sporting history on his own merits. The BBC have made a small article about him that does not do him justice or tell the story. His biography in the book Major Taylor by Andrew Ritchie gives the whole rags to riches and back again tale, and the genuine battle with racism he had in the USA.

Bicycle track racing between 1890 and 1910 was a pinnacle the sport has never achieved again apart from road racing  and Major Taylor was a very big part of it. I am not going to relay his tale here but just want to show that a black world champion is not a new thing in cycle racing though they have been very few and far between; he was also only the second black man to win a world title in any sport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Taylor

Road racing until recently has never had black champions, in fact hardly any black riders in the top flight, but in 2015 there was a breakthrough when Daniel Teklehaimanot, an Eritrean, became the first black African rider to earn the polka dot best climber’s jersey which he held for a period during that year's Tour de France; he also won the climber's jersey in the prelude race to the TDF, the Critérium du Dauphiné.

The fact he comes from Eritrea is interesting. Much is made of cycling being an expensive sport and that prevents poor blacks in African countries and elsewhere from even thinking about taking up the sport. Recent efforts by a South African team to promote black riders in the European races were made by MTM – Qhubeka; the team has had a mixed start in pro cycling and its original aim to have an all black squad had to be watered down as there simply were not enough high quality black riders to fill all the places. Chris Froome has been running a foundation in Kenya, his birthplace, to promote local riders but so far without any results.

Fast forward to this year and the big breakthrough has occurred; last week the first of a series of one day races held in Belgian and northern France known as the Spring Classics and including three of the world's most prestigious road races was kicked off with the minor classic, the Gent-Wevelgem.

What is significant about this is not just that he is black but that he comes from a cycling-mad country. Eritrea may seem an unlikely source of professional road racers but not so: the country has many problems outside of cycling, but has a rich cycling history though few would have known, and the mixed terrain and areas of high altitude make it a mini Columbia.

The link below gives the full story and history of cycling in Eritrea:

http://www.radiosandwell.co.uk/sport/tour-de-france-daniel-teklehaimanot-wears-king-of-the-mountains-jersey

Road cycling by its historic nature has been the preserve of European riders since the first races were held. That started to change post-war, though a few ‘incursions’ did happen previously, when riders from more remote European nations or ones not noted for producing top riders plus an antipodean influx started to make their presence felt. That was followed by American riders and almost the whole world managed to appear at one stage or another, yet still no black riders and the few who made it over here did not make a mark in the sport.

Is it about to change? Some sports for a variety of reasons have not succumbed to the large numbers of black athletes who have literally taken over many sports as a way to escape poverty, and up to now cycling has been one of them. Of course the attraction of the money in say football is a reason to take that route, and reality says that is the obvious way, as making money in cycling is extremely hard and for the few not the many, as in football.

The similarity between Eritrea and Columbia may well be the difference. Both are cycling-mad countries and Columbian riders have shown the way. Will Eritrea follow suit? It seems that it could. Will other African nations follow up? Not so sure about that; a few maybe, but nothing obvious at this time.

The Winds of Change are indeed sweeping through sport, or the women's versions of sport, something I thought I would never see: the totally gutless politically correct British Cycling are allowing a man to compete in women’s events. The argument over trans rights in sport should never have got off the ground; the fear as I said before is that while so far the trans people who are racing as women have not been very good - hence the switch - inevitably you will get better men who decide winning is easier in the women’s versions and make the switch and this one is a small step up in quality. I have no idea what is going to happen but women competitors are going to have to make a stand by refusing to compete with people like this.

As before the switch is only one way: men to women; that says it all about the mind set of these charlatans. Suddenly sport is being infiltrated by trans competitors; where have they all come from? In time there will be events that women, real women, will simply not be able to compete in any more on a level playing field. It is a farce being foisted on women's sport by gutless governing bodies using selective science to make changes they will surely regret. Who the hell apart from voyeurs wants to watch pretend women competing like this?

What is going on in the western world with this being seen as progress and politicians pushing the agenda, frightened in case they upset a minority by speaking and acting on the truth, that they are not women:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/60911823

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/03/theres-got-to-be-a-better-way-to-include-transgender-women-in-sport

And Sharron Davies' almost lone crusade on the matter:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10667459/Sharron-Davies-likens-trans-athletes-drug-cheats-Emily-Bridges-prepares-race-Laura-Kenny.html

So this week we have good news in the sport, and very bad news. It is time for competitors in all sports to speak out or boycott these events, or for those same sporting bodies to set up a separate class for trans athletes - why that is considered a problem is strange as every other type of competitor by sex, by weight and endless para classifications already exist, so add trans categories.

As I finish this piece news arrives that the UCI, cycling's international governing body, have overruled British Cycling and stopped ‘Emily’ competing, but here is this from the BBC website -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/60934099

- does not exactly give the impression this is all over. BC'smealy mouthed response and the fact that the UCI's own rule book on all this is open to interpretation almost certainly means the trans activists and human rights hand-wringers are gearing up for intervention; plus further delving into the UCI statement does give the impression this is just a temporary injunction, which frankly is not good enough by any standard

The UCI along with all the other sporting bodies, and for once Lord Coe has put his head above the parapet and said the right thing, have to make a unified stand and sort this freak show expanding, for that is what it will become if nothing is done, for good. Get on with it and stop all this self-loathing.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Max Richter, by JD

A time for quiet reflection; music by Max Richter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Richter

Max Richter - Never Goodbye

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.” - Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

...... for Anne, 27/3/08:

Max Richter - Meeting Again

The new MULTIPOLAR world order, by Sackerson

The US/NATO hegemon is coming to an end, if conservative historian David Starkey is correct. Here he discusses the new doctrine according to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, whom he compares in terms of diplomatic stature to Kissinger and Bismarck.

Against the West's ambition to impose its values on the world - democracy, human rights - stand Lavrov's realpolitik principles: non-interference in the internal affairs of nations; each nation to develop in its own way according to its own national, cultural and religious traditions; the world to be not 'unipolar' (US supreme), not bi-polar as in the days of US vs USSR, but multipolar - America, Russia, China and a handful of other major States.

Starkey points out that only 20% of the world's population lives in a full democracy. Many other countries have different ways of doing things, so only 11 of the G20 nations have joined in sanctions against Russia. The US hasn't yet woken up to the real world as it is now.

This notion of a watershed in the world order is echoed in the thoughts of Sergey Glazyev, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Putin's former special adviser. He takes a long-historic view, saying that advances in technology, economic changes and the introduction of more flexible, market-based systems of management are ushering in a new, ideologically socialist world economic order in which, as in the example of India, the State seeks to maximize growth rates in order to combat poverty.

http://thesaker.is/events-like-this-happen-once-a-century-sergey-glazyev-on-the-breakdown-of-epochs-and-changing-ways-of-life/

In the 2008 financial crisis America and Europe, says Glazyev, wasted their monetary stimulus on financial bubbles and inflated budget deficits, whereas in China the money was 'completely directed to the growth of production and the development of new technologies.' Failing to defeat China in a trade war, the US turned to using Ukraine 'as a weapon of war to destroy Russia, and then to seize control of [Russian] resources in order, I repeat, to strengthen their position and weaken the position of China.' 

Following WWII, says Glazyev, the British Empire 'collapsed like a house of cards, because the other two winners — the USSR and the United States — did not need this empire and considered it an anachronism. Similarly, the world will not need American multinational corporations, the US dollar, US currency and financial technologies and financial pyramids. All this will soon be a thing of the past. Southeast Asia will become an obvious leader in global economic development, and a new world economic order will be formed before our eyes.'

Glazyev may understimate the degree to which China still depends on its trade with the US and the West, but it's clear which way Eurasia and the Far East think the wind is blowing.

Ukraine: the big picture, by Sackerson

PM Johnson said a month ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38005282 that President Putin had committed a war crime by bombing innocent civilians. Why would Putin put himself so clearly in the wrong with his aggression towards Ukraine?

He has rightly earned our condemnation but securing a legal judgment against him is a different matter. Following the International Criminal Court’s ruling that the annexation of Crimea counted as an armed conflict with Ukraine, Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38005282 ; but then, the US itself rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction in May 2002, ahead of Congress’ October vote giving President Bush the discretion to attack Iraq. Peace is of no account when sovereign nations adopt an à la carte approach to the rules-based international order.

What could Putin’s motives for the invasion have been?

An appeal to Russian nationalism? One of the reasons for Putin’s continuing domestic support is that he cultivates the mythos of protector of his people, and according to Article 69 (3) of his revised Constitution of 2020, that includes ‘compatriots living abroad… exercising their rights, ensuring protection of their interests and preserving all-Russian cultural identity.’ https://rm.coe.int/constitution-of-the-russian-federation-en/1680a1a237 In Article 79, the statement ‘Decisions of international bodies, taken on the basis of provisions of international treaties of the Russian Federation in their interpretation that contradicts the Constitution of the Russian Federation shall not be executed in the Russian Federation’ means, says Russian political analyst Elena Galkina https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/11/the-true-goals-of-putins-new-constitutional-amendments/ , that ’The Kremlin wants to show that regardless of the decisions of any international authorities and courts, it will consider the [Crimean] peninsula a part of Russia.’

Defence? Putin has been referencing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis since 2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-idUSKCN1QA1A3 , when Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty#US_withdrawal_and_termination . The US nuclear missiles at Izmir, Turkey (removed in 1963) were 1,500 miles from Moscow; Kyiv is a thousand miles closer. President Zelenskyy is now, at last, talking about accepting Ukrainian neutrality and non-nuclear status https://www.ft.com/content/c5aa8066-715d-43dd-8a3c-b6907d839a36 ; this could potentially save us all from the horrors of nuclear war; yet surely no major nation would be so lunatic as to provoke Russia into using its weapons of last resort?

Resource wars? Ukraine, whose citizens are the poorest in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita , is rich in agriculture and minerals. That said, Ukraine is a vast country and much harder to hold than to invade, as the Russians are discovering; and Russia is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and boasts huge mineral reserves of its own. That is not to say that the West is not tempted, and finance plays its part: Professor Prabhat Patnaik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhat_Patnaik argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now used to enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2022/0306_pd/imf-connection-ukraine-crisis ; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to its consumers. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more than Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the economy will be smashed as masses emigrate for better pay abroad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDkkGvKtlVg .

There is, perhaps, an even bigger picture, in which geography is key.

Locally, assuming negotiated peace is possible, Lt Gen Riley has sketched out a possible end position here https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/if-ukraine-rejects-a-deal-there-could-be-much-worse-to-come/ : Russia to control the Donbas (including the western coast of the Azov Sea), Crimea (plus its water supply from the Dnieper) and a land corridor linking the two. It would be a partition akin, say, to the creation of South Sudan in 2011.

However – and this is not to defend Russia’s actions - foreign minister Lavrov sees his country as embroiled in the implications of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. He refers to ‘the United States’ desire – which has been much more manifested by the Biden administration – to come back to a unipolar world’ http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrovs-interview-with-rt-moscow-march-18-2022/ and says ‘the West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent and autonomous development of Russia.’ http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov-leaders-of-russia-management-competition-moscow-march-19-2022/

The development he mentions has a maritime dimension. Until the Soviet Union collapsed, the Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except for the shores of north-eastern Greece and northern Turkey. Since then, EU/NATO has gradually encroached and if we look at the map and visualise both Ukraine and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is certainly crowding what is left of (what was once) Red.

Russia has long been working on strengthening its facilities in the Black Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014 America’s The Nation magazine https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-did-sochi-get-51-billion-highways-railroads-and-lot-white-elephants/ scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there, at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping https://tass.com/economy/718145 ) and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge , Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that the Black Sea is a hugely important trade nexus for Russia.

The Sea of Azov is also a keystone in Russia’s plans for growth and it is likely no coincidence that Ukraine’s hardest-line regiment is named after it. Until 2014 the Sea was jointly controlled by Russia and the Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is connected to the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal, which strains to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a vast  Eurasia Canal linking the Caspian to the Azov and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev enthused that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and benefit many other Central Asian nations as well’  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia_Canal#Recent_developments ; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal. Either way, a hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term plans for a Eurasian trading bloc such as Damir Ryskulov’s 2008 dream of a Trans-Asian Corridor of Development https://en.paperblog.com/trans-asian-corridor-of-development-russia-s-super-canal-to-unite-eurasia-734226/ .

It could be argued that Russia has been provoked into a hot-headed, deeply wrongful act, one that any empowered independent tribunal would condemn, by an outdated geopolitical policy originally aimed at containing the spread of Communism.  The mystery is why the US continued to foster China’s ascendancy after the Soviet collapse; Professor John Mearsheimer https://www.mearsheimer.com/ , who in 2015 blamed America for the Ukraine crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 , sees this as a ‘colossal strategic blunder’ https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer , saying we should settle with Putin and ‘pivot’ towards Asia.

Is it not time to stop the war, care for and compensate its innocent victims and negotiate a fresh approach to international relations that allows for peaceful global economic growth?

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (3): misinterpreting the Founders and the Bible, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

This week brings the confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. The GOP members in the Senate have vowed to vote against her, even though she is more qualified than most of the more junior members on the Court. At stake is her refusal to embrace 'originalism', a philosophy that we should do EXACTLY as the Founders said, not necessarily what they intended. In support of this onerous and odious idea, the conservatives repeatedly make up quotes by people such as Madison, and simply lie about the rest.

Via Heather Cox Richardson, US historian: A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by 'self-government' the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.