Will > Books: american-history‎ (139)

The story of Yellowstone began with a singular geography that gave rise to a landscape filled with fantastical geothermal features and a distinctiv

The story of Yellowstone began with a singular geography that gave rise to a landscape filled with fantastical geothermal features and a distinctive array of wildlife. For at least 11,000 years Indigenous peoples knew it as a homeland filled with essential mineral resources, opportunities for hunting and gathering, and sites with medicinal and spiritual value. In the nineteenth century, the high altitude and long winters kept Euro-American settlers and explorers at bay and, in doing so, provided a refuge for wildlife hunted to extinction elsewhere. In time, these unique qualities, combined with their perceived economic and political value, would help usher something new into the world, the first ever national park.

Deafening noise. Blinding, incinerating heat. A release of power beyond any scale of human experience. The eruption remade the continent: Erasing all life in its immediate path. Pulverizing, clogging, and burying the old topography. Blotting out the sun. Altering the climate…swallowing entire mountains…. The “hot spot” it left allows magma to continue to accumulate below the surface, pushing the Yellowstone Plateau up almost 2,000 feet.

For more than 11,000 years, Native Americans treated Yellowstone as a homeland, a place treasured for its abundant high-quality obsidian, seasonal hunting and gathering, and the spiritual and medicinal value of its geothermal features.

The dream of a Greater Yellowstone—the vision shared by Horace Albright, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Struthers Burt, Maud Noble, and countless others stretching back to George Grinnell and General Sheridan—has today been realized, not as a single expanded Yellowstone National Park but as a mosaic of different federal, state, and private lands comprising the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. With Yellowstone at its core, the area includes Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge, seven different national forests, and an assortment of other conservation areas.

RANDALL K. WILSON, PhD, is a professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College, where he teaches courses on environmental policy, natural resource management, sustainable communities, and the geography of the American West. He has served on the USDA Forest Service’s National Science Panel and on the board of directors for the Rural Geography Specialty Group within the Association of American Geographers. He earned a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Vienna. His book America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond was named an Outstanding Academic Title from Choice Reviews and won John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers.

Among the 32 members of the survey was guest artist Thomas Moran. The 40-day expedition allowed Moran, along with photographer William Henry Jackson, to visually document over 30 different sites, including present-day Old Faithful, Hayden Valley, and Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. This unique partnership with Moran and Jackson was critical to Hayden, who included their art in a comprehensive report to Congress. Jackson’s black and white photos documented Yellowstone’s unique geological formations while Moran’s paintings and watercolors captured its diverse and extravagant colors.

Saxe, a popular poet in the mid-19th century, is mostly remembered today for setting the ancient parable from India about the blind men and the elephant to verse, and making the story popular in the United States. (I have put the full poem in the blog on our website.)
The law and sausages idea was attributed to Saxe as early as 1869, and that’s the first appearance of that phrase. What he said was, “laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he handed them back.
“And just where was it you wanted to go,” he asked.
She had been rehearsing her response ever since her credentials first arrived in the mail.
“As far forward as you’ll let me,” she replied.
“Be here at 0600, tomorrow,” he said.

…good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.

She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.

I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power.
—Dickey Chapelle

Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.
Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications…When not writing she can be found photographing the natural world impinging upon the urban landscape or digging in the dirt with her husband and two sons in Santa Barbara, California. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly st

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly stays America and a democracy or if it becomes a fascist dictatorship. If the Democrats lose the House and the Senate, then it is all over. There may never be another free and fair election in America. If the Republicans take control, we may be teetering on the edge of an American dictatorship. - from The Guardian interview

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Twilight Zone." - One of several introductions used for the show

By Election Day 2020, the Trump-dominated Republican Party solidified itself for what it perceived was a battle to change the soul of America permanently. Trump’s financial backers saw endless opportunity for tax cuts and limitless, tax-free profits. The stock market saw a president who would ruin nearly a century of regulation and allow them unimaginable capital gains that they could pass on to their children without paying taxes. The party investors saw a middle and lower class that would pay for virtually everything Republicans wanted and divest from virtually every social program liberals wanted. In their eyes, the average American would see none of the profits of America but literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich. In fact, Trump and his lieutenants managed to do precisely that in his first four years. By the end of his administration, money allocated for education, childcare, and mental health would pay for mega yachts. In Trump’s America, executive jet purchases were tax free.

TITUS is a pre-rebellion political-paramilitary alliance that intends to use politics, instability, and violence to meet its goals. The number one goal is reestablishing the Trump dynasty as the primary operating system for America. Then they will use the power of the government to punish their enemies. The political wing of TITUS, the Trump-dominated Republican Party, has already initiated a dangerous plan to embrace the launch of protracted political warfare in America.

Discussing the impeachment of President Trump on Meet the Press, Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, said most members of the GOP are “paralyzed with fear.” He continued: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. . . . A couple of them broke down in tears . . . saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.

Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps.

…several Republican legislatures including in Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri have made the murder of protesters by running them over in a vehicle legal.

In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on th

In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court, asked a series of questions that pressed the government’s lawyers about the true extent of the Border Patrol’s authority on American highways deep inside the United States. Unsatisfied with the response, Marshall finally asked if the Border Patrol could legally stop and search the vehicle of the president of the United States without any evidence or suspicion whatsoever. When the lawyer said “Yes,” Marshall concluded, “Nobody is protected.”

The Border Patrol in their green uniforms, patrols between crossing points. Customs was renamed the Office of Field Operations, its agents, in blue uniforms, work at crossing points and in airports. Agents of a third unit of CBP, Air and Marine Operations (AMO), wear brown uniforms and manage the agency’s aircraft and ships. AMO’s authorization in the U.S. code differs from the Border Patrol in that it does not include any geographical limits, so they are able to operate anywhere in the country.

Willard Kelly, the Border Patrol chief at the time, told a Presidential Commission in 1950 that “Service officers were instructed to defer apprehensions of Mexicans employed on Texas farms where to remove them would likely result in the loss of crops.” Instead, they would focus on the period after the harvest in order to send the workers back to Mexico. Similarly, during economic downturns, the Border Patrol would step up enforcement to ensure the state did not have to provide for the unemployed laborers. These roundups would often happen just before payday, so agribusinesses got the labor and the agents got their apprehension quotas, but the Mexican workers were not paid.

In addition to failing to properly search for missing people in the border zone, the Border Patrol also actively disrupts efforts by humanitarian agencies. Beyond the destruction of water drops and aid stations, they often refuse to provide location information to other rescuers, deny access to interview people in Border Patrol custody who were with the missing person, and harass search teams in the border zone.

As No More Deaths volunteer Max Granger, explained, “The agency itself is causing the deaths and disappearances. Any response, even if it is a more robust response, is going to be inadequate. Their entire overarching prevention through deterrence policy paradigm requires death and suffering to work. They are not invested in saving people’s lives.

Despite the transformation of the border in the public imagination, the people arriving there are largely the same as they always were. The majority are still migrant farm and factory workers from Mexico. In the past few years, they have been joined by entire families fleeing violence in Central America. These families with small children, who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol as soon as they step foot in the United States, in order to apply for asylum, pose no threat and deserve humane treatment. However, that is not what they have received. As journalist Garrett Graf memorably put it, “CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”

I had a hand in breaking all of this. I had to have a hand in fixing it.

I had a hand in breaking all of this. I had to have a hand in fixing it.

Civil learns how hard it is to go up against authority
She is complicated. She does not always do the right thing. She stumbles in her zeal. - from the Politics and Prose interview

Our research reveals that over the past few years, nearly one hundred fifty thousand low-income women from all over the nation have been sterilized under federally funded programs.

“So the idea was what . . . to stop us from having children because we were inferior?” I whispered.
“Well, the ideas were often aimed at specific populations that included Black people, yes. But also the poor, the mentally retarded, the disabled, the insane…” Mrs. Seager probably put the girls in three of these misguided categories: poor, Black, and mentally unfit. Had I done the same? I had initially deemed the girls unfit to be mothers, too. Because they were poor and Black. Because they were young. Because they were illiterate. My head spun with shame.
“Did they target poor white folks, too?” Ty asked.
Lou nodded. “Back in 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that compulsory sterilization of people deemed unfit was constitutional. People in asylums all over this country were sterilized.”

The first thing that hit me was the odor. Urine. Body funk. Dog. All mixed with the stench of something salty stewing in a pot. A one-room house encased in rotted boards. A single window with a piece of sheet hanging over it. It was dark except for the sun streaming through the screen door and peeking through the holes in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were clothes piled on the bed, as if somebody had stopped by and dumped them. Pots, pans, and shoes lay strewn about on the dirt floor. Flies buzzed and circled the air. Four people lived in one room, and there wasn’t enough space. A lot of people in Montgomery didn’t have running water, but this went beyond that. I had to fight back vomit.

Mary Alice was 14 and Minnie was 12 when they became victims of the abusive practice of sterilizing poor, black women in the South. Their mother, who had very little education and was illiterate, signed an "X" on a piece of paper, expecting her daughters, who were both mentally disabled, would be given birth control shots. Instead, the young women were surgically sterilized and robbed of their right to ever bear children of their own. - from the SPLC

I had never known that good intentions could be just as destructive as bad ones.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Wench. In 2011, she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was also awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Dr. Perkins-Valdez taught in the Stonecoast (Maine) MFA program and lives in Washington, DC, with her family. She is currently Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University.

there was something about the Relf sisters she kept coming back to. “The thing that struck me about it was that, even though they’re only really mentioned in passing whenever we talk about this, it was a big deal at the time,” she says. The sisters’ ordeal was heavily covered in the press, and they appeared before a Senate subcommittee led by Sen. Ted Kennedy. “There were so many parts of it, to me, that felt absolutely remarkable. I think some people had heard a little bit about it, but they didn’t know enough. I wanted people to know enough.”

Depo-Provera is a well-known brand name for medroxyprogesterone acetate, a contraceptive injection that contains the hormone progestin. Depo-Provera is given as an injection every three months. Depo-Provera typically suppresses ovulation, keeping your ovaries from releasing an egg. It also thickens cervical mucus to keep sperm from reaching the egg.

Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the govern

Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.

Milley summarized and scribbled. “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.”
Some were the new Brown Shirts, a U.S. version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.

Former Republican and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt issued a statement about Graham…saying that many people have tried to understand Graham over the years. He encouraged people not to look at it "through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things he used to believe and what he's doing now."
Instead, Schmidt said, "The way to understand him is to look at what's consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers around a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That's Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump is the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he's found it unattainable on his own merits." - from Salon article

In 2020, after trillions of dollars in military expenditures and multiple wars, a virus originating in a Chinese “wet market” would inflict even mo

In 2020, after trillions of dollars in military expenditures and multiple wars, a virus originating in a Chinese “wet market” would inflict even more economic and human damage. Overcoming the most lethal threats of the twenty-first century—at least those threats that pose the greatest risk to the health and well-being of the average citizen—will require staying the itchy trigger finger of militarized statecraft. Ultimately, achieving true security will require embracing a broader “whole of government” and “whole of nation” set of tools that reflect the full strength of America.

My work in the defense and intelligence space spans more than three decades, and I am vexed by the fact that policies designed to protect America are actually making us less safe. I call this “insanity defense”: doing the same thing again and again and expecting it to enhance our security.

As far as Addington was concerned, when Article II said that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President,” well, that was the end of it—all power, not some power or whatever power Congress provided or allowed. The concept of the “unitary executive,” once an obscure theory at the right fringe of legal thinking, would become the operating manual for the Bush presidency when it came to security policy. I called this a “bloodless coup”—a dramatic power shift in government that occurred almost entirely out of view at the time. Addington was always courtly and polite with me personally. But when it came to any role for Congress, his answer was always a very firm no.

The greater Obama’s frustration with recalcitrant Republican majorities—first the Tea Party–dominated House, then the Mitch McConnell–led Senate—the more he would exercise executive action on a range of issues.

I look at what went wrong—and could go right again—through the lens of my own experience: how political moderates became first hunted and then an endangered species, caught in the crossfire between the far left and the far right. The punishment for bipartisanship became harsh and immediate. The business model shifted from working together to solve urgent problems facing the country to blaming the other side for not solving the urgent problems.

One of many mysteries about Cheney is how someone who had risen to House minority whip while a congressman from Wyoming could become so contemptuous of the institution he once helped lead.

One of the least known yet most consequential documents filed immediately after 9/11 was a memorandum of notification to Congress, commonly referred to as a “finding,” which announced that the CIA would be conducting operations that would not be acknowledged. At the time, this notification, submitted on September 17, 2001, seemed pro forma; we all took it as a given that aggressive covert activity would—indeed, must—be part of our response to the horrific attacks. Yet this same finding would cover the CIA black sites, enhanced interrogations, and targeted killings abroad for nearly two decades.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I have spent my entire career with presidents and there is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the Civil War.

Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley told them. “Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of [Acting DNI Joseph] Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.“

Esper, Milley, and Barr—were tracking intelligence and social media chatter for any signs of unrest on Election Day. They and their deputies at the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI were monitoring the possibility of protests breaking out among supporters on both sides. The trio also were on guard for the possibility that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in some way to quell protests or to perpetuate his power by somehow intervening in the election. This scenario weighed heavily on Esper and Milley because they controlled the military and had sworn an oath to the Constitution. Their duty was to protect a free and fair election and to prevent the military from being used for political purposes of any kind.

“A student of history, Milley saw Trump as the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having this stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of twentieth-century fascism in Germany were replaying in twenty-first-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”

The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-p

The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-pound, 115-kilovolt braided aluminum wire—known as a jumper cable—fell through the air. A piece of the rusted hook fell with it. The energized line produced a huge bolt of electricity, reaching temperatures up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and zapping the steel tower like lightning as it charred the pillar black. Droplets of molten metal sprayed into the dry grass. That’s all it took.

…this was how the fire spread so quickly: It wasn’t a single unbroken front but a hail of embers.

…this book is the product of more than five hundred interviews and nearly five years of full-time wildfire coverage. I even enrolled in a professional firefighting academy to better understand fire…It’s the product of coming to love a community that I embedded in: spending hours strolling across Paradise on my evening walks, buying ice cream sandwiches from the Holiday Market, eating more containers of green curry from Sophia’s Thai than I can count. The people whose lives I’ve chronicled in this book offered me unfettered access to their day-to-day lives without any expectations. They were not compensated for their time. - from Acknowledgments

Early in her fire reporting, Johnson noticed that many fire stories—hers included—sounded similar; they often relied on the same beats, the same kinds of quotes, the same tropes. (A woman who left her wedding ring at home, for example, only for it to burn.) Johnson began to wonder if disaster fatigue happened when stories felt predictable. So she changed her approach to make the fire secondary, a “supporting character” in a more surprising and nuanced human story—and readers paid attention. Too often, she said, coverage tries to hit people over the head with a “climate change caused this” moral. “I’m now thinking more like, What does climate change feel like? If we changed the model, maybe people will listen more, and we can do more work with our storytelling. - from the Columbia Journalism Review interview

Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. He maintained that dealing with

Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. He maintained that dealing with belligerent Native Americans, whether via combat or negotiation, was for the most part a matter of luck and instinct. His rescue by Simon Kenton was evidence of the former, his quick thinking on the Licking River, the latter. He was vastly more proud of his ability to endure the burdens of a huntsman’s life with a seemingly preternatural stoicism. Now, it was as if the patience he had honed over a lifetime of stalking game through the deep woods was in anticipation of this moment. He would need that gift in the coming months.

Like the Cherokee, the tribes north of the Ohio River strongly suspected that America’s War for Independence was being fought over Indian land despite high-minded slogans about taxation without representation. It was the Shawnee who recognized the earliest that this internecine conflict among the whites could only end badly for the tribe should the rapacious colonists prevail. Native American support of the Crown, in essence, was the lesser of two evils. It was not the British, after all, who had begun desecrating Kanta-ke with cabins and cornfields.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weav

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlement

I think what I’ve done is to get obscure figures from history and tell the stories like I’ve told you about Mister Penck and his maps, Mister Struve and his survey, Mister Radcliffe and his line, and turn them into what they truly are, which is heroic, forgotten figures from history….I just become fascinated by these characters. - from the Kinukinaya interview

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. -- Desmond Tutu

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1948)

I’m here because, for the past ten years. I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of col

I’m here because, for the past ten years. I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of college like a ghost story: a young woman, a Harvard graduate student of archaeology, was bludgeoned to death in her off-campus apartment in January 1969. Her body was covered with fur blankets and the killer threw red ochre on her body, a perfect recreation of a burial ritual. No one heard any screams; nothing was stolen. Decades passed, and her case remained unsolved. Unsolved, that is, until yesterday.

“Every nation-state wants an important past,” Karl said. So, often the ruling parties will commission archaeologists. But sometimes the past the archaeologists find is not what the powers want them to find.

The tenure decision-making process “is an invitation to abuse,” Howard Georgi, a Harvard physicist who has served on tenure committees told Science magazine in 1999. “There’s no question this has affected women.”

As I thought more about [medical anthropologist] Mel [Konner]’s assertion that the rumors were a form of punishment, I found myself reading scholarly work on the social functions of gossip. I eventually worked my way to Chris Boehm, a former classmate of Jane’s who’s studied how gossip works in small-scale societies. He had, in fact, used Jane’s murder as an example in his paper about gossip as a form of social control.

According to Boehm, social groups necessarily have a certain amount of “leakiness“ built in. These are the whisper networks; these are the stories that get swapped in the field and passed quietly between graduate students. Their job is to limit outlier behavior and to keep members of the community safe when what can be said out loud is constrained. Gossip, in other words, is punishment for people who move outside the norms.

…the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller. I have been burned enough times to know. There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.

As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact

As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.

Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interview

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.

For his heroic service, Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre with palm. He was returned to the United States and died at Fort Monmouth, N.J

For his heroic service, Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre with palm. He was returned to the United States and died at Fort Monmouth, N.J. on June 13, 1919, as a result of his wounds. Cher Ami was later inducted into the Racing Pigeon Hall of Fame in 1931, and received a gold medal from the Organized Bodies of American Pigeon Fanciers in recognition of his extraordinary service during World War I. - from the Smithsonian

…in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.

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Even the few who had come through the incident largely unhurt looked like shades; greeting the new arrivals with yellowed grins and vacant eyes.

Each man was the miserable monarch of a kingdom that squirmed with vermin, one that consisted of the dirt and a bit of sky each one could see from the dirt, of their feet in their boots in the mud—a kingdom indistinguishable from a grave.

Battle was said to harden a man—during my youth I’d heard this stated in the same offhand tones used to discuss first Communions and debutante balls—but in my case there had been no hardening, only a constant effort to hold together despite proliferating cracks.

In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold o

In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold on a trade route linking Egypt and the Middle East. An apocalypse is a revelation—literally an uncovering—about the future that is meant to provide hope in a time of uncertainty and fear.

The title is The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age. To be clear, apocalypse refers to the threat of nuclear war, not to the site itself.

I’ve been getting ready to write this book pretty much my whole life. I grew up in the 1960s in Othello, Washington, a small town in the south-central part of the state just over a ridgeline from a mysterious government facility called Hanford. We knew that Hanford was involved in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Some people in town knew that it manufactured a substance called plutonium. But it was the Cold War. It was best not to ask too many questions. In 1984 I visited Hanford to write a story for Science 84 magazine, and by the end of the trip, I had decided to write a book about the place. Thirty-six years later, the book is done. - from the NASW interview

”I knew that the effort would be expensive, that it might seriously interfere with other war work. But the overriding consideration was this: I had great respect for German science. If a bomb were possible, if it turned out to have enormous power, the result in the hands of Hitler might enable him to enslave the world. It was essential to get there first, if an all-out American effort could accomplish the difficult task.”

December 16, 1942 found Col. Franklin T. Matthias…and two DuPont engineers headed for the Pacific Northwest and southern California to investigate possible production sites. Of the possible sites available, none had a better combination of isolation, long construction season, and abundant water for hydroelectric power than those found along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. After viewing six locations in Washington, Oregon and California, the group agreed that the area around Hanford, Washington, best met the criteria established by the Met Lab scientists and DuPont engineers. - from The Atomic Heritage Foundation

The most recent studies indicate that a nuclear exchange of even 50 Nagasaki-type bombs would produce climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history and threaten the global food supply. A large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons would so reduce temperatures that most of the humans who survived the initial bombing would starve. Many people are concerned today that climate change poses a threat to human civilization but the most certain and immediate threat still resides in the nuclear weapons sitting in missile silos, bombers, and submarines around the world.

With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, ever

With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, every loan he’d ever received—many of which involved Deutsche. And the facts that Trump’s election was under a cloud because of Russia’s efforts to sway the vote and that his leading lender had for years been engaged in money-laundering activity in Russia—well, it didn’t take a genius to realize that real or imagined dots would soon be connected linking Deutsche to Russia to Donald Trump. This was especially true since the bank a decade earlier had connected Trump with wealthy Russians as he prepared to build resorts in Hawaii and Mexico.

In the final months of the Obama administration, all signs had pointed to charges soon being filed against bank employees and probably the bank itself. At the very least, a multibillion-dollar financial penalty looked all but certain.Something curious, however, had happened as soon as Trump took the oath of office. The investigation had gone silent. Week after week, Deutsch’s lawyers and executives wondered when they would get an update. At first, they worried that the delay spelled trouble. Perhaps, after campaigning as a populist, after vowing that he was “not going to let Wall Street get away with murder,” Trump planned an aggressive crackdown on banking malfeasance. Perhaps, after having his election victory tarnished by Russian interference, Trump would try to dispel those suspicions with a high-profile assault on Russian money laundering. But as the months passed, and nothing happened, executives’ fears faded. One source of relief was the realization that two of the Justice Department’s most powerful prosecutors, Geoffrey Berman and Robert Khuzami, both had previously represented Deutsche…Bank executives soon concluded that Russia was off-limits, too hot to handle, for the Trump administration. So, it seemed, was Deutsche.

Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long

Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
…I no longer use those skills to serve the party I once loved. That party is gone…I’m telling you this because Democrats are going to lose to Donald Trump in 2020 unless they understand what my former team is about to do.

…Think of it this way: When a senior KGB officer who decided he’d had enough of throwing people into the gulag or supporting a corrupt kleptocracy walked into an American embassy during the Cold War, the right response wasn’t “Fuck you.” The correct response was “Hey, we’d LOVE to check out this boatload of intel, plans, strategies, and data you’ve collected while you’ve been kicking our asses.” It was “Oh, so that’s how you did it.”
I’m coming in from the cold, whether you like it or not. I have a low tolerance for stupidity, and by God I will overcome your stubborn resistance to the truth.

Yeah, unfortunately, there was always a dynamic pressure inside the party. The fiscal people and the individual liberty people would keep the social conservatives from getting too out of control. The social conservatives would keep the fiscal people from getting too out of control. The foreign policy people, this tripartite internal, the three-legged stool they used to call it. Well with Trump, that all fell apart. It's all gone. It's all id. It's everything that's in their heads. They're told, "You can have whatever you want, we're going to burn it all down." And that's what they're doing. - from the Salon interview

Q - If you were advising on the economy to these Democrats, what would you recommend?
A - First off, I would talk about the stories of real people in the swing states. "I'm farmer X, I am a soybean farmer in Iowa. Donald Trump said that this trade war was going to help me. My farm is in foreclosure now." And we do have record farm foreclosures in Wisconsin and Iowa right now. "I'm a steelworker in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump promised his trade war was going to help me. Instead, our plant is closed." - from the Salon interview

Rick's theory is not (yet) endorsed by any Gallup poll. But it makes sense. So how would Rick hit Trump? "I'd hit him on his mental instability, because he thinks he's smart and sane and he's not. He thinks he's a remarkable communicator ... he's not, he's a 70-year-old asshole from Queens." Then Rick would go after his "reputation for wealth, which is unfounded in large measure, and that's a soft spot for him ..." A billionaire client of Rick's once said: "I'm a billionaire. Trump is a clown living on credit." So having real billionaires like Mark Cuban attack Trump in an ad would be an effective tactic. - from Cracked interview

@realDonaldTrump: some lying liberal media who are DFAILING BADLY and will soon be bankrupt like the Bezos Washington Post are reporting that Stephen Miller was arrested for making a suit from a woman’s skin and eating her. FAKE NEWS. He did NOT EAT HER! Stephen is doing a GRATE job!

@PressSec: Correction: Mr Miller did not eat the woman in question raw. Unlike degenerate migrants, Mr. Miller cooks his food.

He will always be with us, to the end of our days, either as a warning or as a boot stomping on our faces, forever.

He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding a

He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport. This was not how it was supposed to be.

In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.

The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder; This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gun-point, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.

“He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own, but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

…Hayek said authoritarian types need to weld the group together by appealing to their basic human weaknesses. “It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of the better off—than on any positive task. The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses.”

an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals, which will also tend to be undereducated

We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he begins scanning the room for note takers. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting…His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience.

We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will abuse any power he is given.

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through.

Rachel Maddow didn't set out to write a book. But a nagging question led her there: Why did Russia interfere in America's 2016 presidential election, and why attack the United States in such a cunning way? Although the MSNBC host regularly devotes ample airtime to the topic of Russia on The Rachel Maddow Show, her digging led her to a thesis she thought was too long for TV.
- from the NPR interview

Russia's shaky economy, hampered by a reliance on oil and gas, helps explain the country's weakness, and "some of Russia's weakness explains why they attacked us in the way they did," Maddow argues. She says Vladimir Putin exploited Russia's lucrative oil industry to support his vision of making Russia a superpower again. "When you've got one resource that's pulling in such a big revenue stream, you tend to end up with very rich elites who will do anything to hold onto power who stopped doing the other things that governments should otherwise be doing to serve the needs of the people," she said in an interview with All Things Considered. - from NPR

That is what I believed: that time nibbles away at the future, and in that moment puts the present behind its back. The past retreats as each prese

That is what I believed: that time nibbles away at the future, and in that moment puts the present behind its back. The past retreats as each present moment joins it, on and on. Yet that is far too simple. Inside us, time sways backwards and forwards from now to then, here to there, and nothing of it is lost or goes away, but it all hangs everywhere, translucent in the air. Some men turn away, and walk on, saying that the past contains only their former selves and ghosts of people and deeds. Others, like myself, live every day with it. One minute I am in Nieuw Amsterdam, the next pulled on a string into the other time that comes with me, so that here on the Heere Gracht, or as I walk across the marketplace, you and I talk.

Looking back is a game for fools and not one that I like to play.

So I see her as I have never seen a woman, her whole nakedness, half in my plain sight, half reflected in the water. And in the same instant, or so it feels, she lifts her head and sees me there. Her furious eyes strip me of everything and make me as naked as herself.

From that day the sun shines on everything in the world. It feels to me as if I have a new knowledge, and that the change that came over me when you first fixed me with your glance was the beginning of it. This knowledge is not from a person or a book. It is a knowledge of what is, neither sacred nor profane, but just the world itself.

Stand still in a full silence and it’s loud with noises. A heron takes flight; he creaks like a ship in sail. Ducks scuffle in the reeds. I hear the beat of wings, the movement of creatures in the grass, water rippling, and the wind that accompanies me everywhere, sighing and roaring. Nature, that seems so quiet, pours out its songs. Even in the darkness there is a velvet purr of sound, of moles underground and field mice above.

In the summer I may paddle on for days. I catch fish and travel as the wildmen do until I reach the far end of the island where it breaks into numerous inlets and beaches. Then I walk down to the open ocean and feel myself to be not a man but a part of nature, as is a star, or a dolphin that leaps for joy out in the bay. Far away round our earth lies the old world, while here I stand on the new. Waves rush up to my feet and then pull back, marbled with sand and foam.

The author said: “Growing up in Norwich I was certainly aware of the fens, and I remember passing Ely often on the way to visit my grandparents in Cambridge. The great skies of East Anglia have always been inside me, and I still love flat landscapes and marshes.
“I am sure that inspired my choice of the fens when I thought about climate change, flooding and the changing use and exploitation of land and people.”
“There are little details in the book that come from my family history in Norwich,” said Tillyard, “Jan, my hero, buys boots from Norwich, where there are fine leather workers who have begun to settle there, fleeing from persecution in France.
“This is what my own Huguenot ancestors did. They were leather workers who by the 18th century had set up in Elm Hill in Norwich. The business eventually became Norvic Shoes, with a large factory in St George’s Plain.