Salon: Inside Donald Trump’s “America last” presidency

In its own inside-out, upside-down way, it’s almost wondrous to behold. As befits our president’s wildest dreams, it may even prove to be a record for the ages, one for the history books. He was, after all, the candidate who sensed it first.  When those he was running against, like the rest of Washington’s politicians, were still insisting that the United States remained at the top of its game, not an— but the — “indispensable nation,” the only truly “exceptional” one on the face of the Earth, he said nothing of the sort.  He campaigned on America’s decline, on this country’s increasing lack of exceptionality, its potential dispensability.  He ran on the single word “again”— as in “make America great again” — because (the implication was) it just isn’t anymore.  And he swore that he and he alone was the best shot Americans, or at least non-immigrant white Americans, had at ever seeing the best of days again. [...]

Despite the mainstream pieties of the moment about the nature of the system Donald Trump appears to be dismantling in Europe and elsewhere, it was anything but either terribly “liberal” or particularly peaceable.  Wars, invasions, occupations, the undermining or overthrow of governments, brutal acts and conflicts of every sort succeeded one another in the years of American glory.  Past administrations in Washington had a notorious weakness for autocrats, just as Donald Trump does today.  They regularly had less than no respect for democracy if, from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, the will of the people seemed to stand in Washington’s way.  (It is, as Vladimir Putin has been only too happy to point out of late, an irony of our moment that the country that has undermined or overthrown or meddled in more electoral systems than any other is in a total snit over the possibility that one of its own elections was meddled with.)  To enforce their global system, Americans never shied away from torture, black sites, death squads, assassinations, and other grim practices.  In those years, the U.S. planted its military on close to 1,000 overseas military bases, garrisoning the planet as no other country ever had. [...]

If a Trump presidency achieves a record for the ages when it comes to the precipitous decline of the American global system, little as The Donald ever cares to share credit for anything, he will undoubtedly have to share it for such an achievement.  It’s true that kings, emperors, and autocrats, the top dogs of any moment, prefer to take all the credit for the “records” set in their time.  When we look back, however, it’s likely that President Trump will be seen as having given a tottering system that necessary push.  It will undoubtedly be clear enough by then that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism.

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The Guardian: Britain is leaving the EU – just as Europe is on the up

Today’s European leaders are, by contrast, confronted with an especially adverse set of circumstances. Trump, Putin, Erdoğan, terrorism, unprecedented flows of migration, unemployment, the rise of populism and, of course, Brexit. But, just as Kohl and his French contemporary François Mitterrand relaunched the European project in the early 1990s, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are, as Britain prepares to leave, readying their ambitions and vision for the continent.

At stake is no less than Europe’s role in defending liberal democratic values and a rules-based international order at a time when – as one former Obama administration official put it to me recently – Trump’s America is “missing in action and the UK is disappearing into oblivion”. The words may be harsh, but they underscore that Britain’s central weakness lies not only in its internal political confusion – but also with a dangerous ignorance of what its European neighbours are setting their sights on.

The Franco-German engine is not focusing on Brexit but rather on consolidating the 60-year-old European project through further integration and cooperation. At the heart of this stands an emerging Macron-Merkel deal, intended to act as Europe’s new powerhouse. On 15 May, the French and German leaders met and spoke of a new “roadmap” for the EU. The thinking goes like this: in the next two to three years, as France carries out structural economic reforms to boost its credibility, Germany will step up much-needed European financial solidarity and investment mechanisms, and embrace a new role on foreign policy, security and defence. [...]

Across the continent, citizens’ support for the EU is on the rise, according to Eurobarometer surveys. Polls show Europeans are increasingly in favour of a “multiple speed” or “flexible” EU, in which ad hoc groups of member states would forge ahead with new projects. For all the headlines about a populist movement eating away at the EU’s foundations, it seems all the shockwaves the continent has felt in recent years have brought a renewed sense of belonging, and an appetite for better, if not more, integration.

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Haaretz: Secret Room in Buenos Aires Home Hid a Trove of Suspected Nazi Artifacts

In a hidden room in a house near Argentina's capital, police believe they have found the biggest collection of Nazi artifacts in the country's history, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas and even a macabre medical device used to measure head size.[...]

The investigation that culminated in the discovery of the collection began when authorities found artworks of illicit origin in a gallery in north Buenos Aires.

Agents with the international police force Interpol began following the collector and with a judicial order raided the house on June 8. A large bookshelf caught their attention and behind it agents found a hidden passageway to a room filled with Nazi imagery. [...]

The main hypothesis among investigators and member of Argentina's Jewish community is that they were brought to Argentina by a high-ranking Nazi or Nazis after World War II, when the South American country became a refuge for fleeing war criminals, including some of the best known.

As leading members of Hitler's Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Josef Mengele fled to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires for a decade. He moved to Paraguay after Israeli Mossad agents captured Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was also living in Buenos Aires. Mengele later died in Brazil in 1979 while swimming in a beach in the town of Bertioga.

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Haaretz: Iranian Clerics and ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Agree: Zumba Is Sinful

The banning of Zumba dance exercise by Iranian authorities has grabbed headlines worldwide. Authorities in the Islamic Republic condemned the popular fitness classes for women as “contravening Islamic ideology,” and the head of the country’s sports federation declared that the dangerous Latin movements of the Colombia-originated exercise craze are “not legal in any shape or title.”

But Tehran-based cleric Hossain Ghayyomi was quoted by the LA Times as explaining to the objectors that Zumba fell under the rubric of dancing, not exercise.

He said that under Islam, “any harmonious movement or rhythmic exercise, if it is for pleasure seeking, is haram (forbidden),” and “even jobs related to these rhythmic movements are haram. For instance, since Islam says dancing or music is haram, then renting a place to teach dancing or cutting wood to make musical instruments is haram too.” [...]

Four years ago, the rabbinical court judge of the Ashkenazi community in Betar Ilit issued an edict explicitly forbidding Zumba “after having established that, both in form and manner, the activity is totally at odds with both the ways of the Torah and the holiness of Israel, as are the songs associated to it. I hereby announce that the organization and participation in such classes is forbidden.” [...]

Ultra-Orthodox objections with the Zumba craze haven’t been restricted to the Middle East. In 2013, Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein, founder and director of Ohr Naava – a New York-area Women’s Torah Center – took to the pulpit to preach against it as a slippery slope to sinful behavior. Respectable Jewish women, he said, were not meant to gyrate to “goyish provocative” music and “dance like an animal” or “monkeys in the jungle” to “Latin garbage.”

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Jacobin Magazine: June 19 Should Be a National Holiday

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had finally come to an end in Texas. That day — June 19, 1865 — would come to be celebrated by black Americans all over the country, who remember Juneteenth as the anniversary of their historic triumph over the planter class. [...]

A pro-slavery insurrection against Mexico established the Texas Republic in 1835, and Southern elites seized the opportunity to add a vast new slave territory to the union, pressuring the Federal government into annexing the territory in 1845.

Once Texas became a state, its enslaved population skyrocketed as planters relocated to the region. Just five years after its annexation, the enslaved population had jumped from 11,000 in 1840 to more than 58,000 in 1850. [...]

The mass exodus of freed slaves from Texas and other Southern states would only gain momentum over the next few decades, eventually culminating in the Great Migration of the twentieth century, during which as many as 6 million black Americans relocated to the North and West. [...]

In Texas, the years following General Granger’s announcement were characterized by a violent counterrevolution — between 1865 and 1868, more than four hundred freedmen were murdered by white settlers, and a delegate to the all-white constitutional convention in 1866 characterized “the permanent preservation of the white race” as “the paramount object of the people of Texas.”

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Vox: How 2 academics got the Supreme Court to reexamine gerrymandering

A divided three-judge panel of the US District Court for Wisconsin ruled last year against the Wisconsin map, concluding that the plaintiffs are correct and that the map’s gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Kenneth Ripple, the author of that opinion, wrote, "We conclude … that the evidence establishes that one of the purposes of [the district map] was to secure Republican control of the Assembly under any likely future electoral scenario for the remainder of the decade, in other words to entrench the Republican Party in power." [...]

While the Supreme Court has ruled on many aspects of the districting process — banning state legislative districts with unequal populations and banning districts intended to disenfranchise black voters — it has issued muddled opinions on the question of whether partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional. There’s extensive case law on racial gerrymanders, which has established that racial discrimination in districting is subject to strict scrutiny by courts. [...]

The efficiency gap is key to the plaintiffs’ arguments in Gill v. Whitford. They proposed setting a threshold of 7 percent: If a districting plan produces a larger gap than that, if one party is getting a wasted-vote advantage of more than 7 percent of the total vote, then it’s getting a huge leg up, which will continue for a long time. As Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken noted in a Vox piece following the initial district court decision, a gap above that amount indicates that the disadvantaged party “would have almost no chance of taking control of the legislature during the 10-year districting cycle.”

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Bloomberg: Solar Power Will Kill Coal Faster Than You Think

That’s the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group estimated solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India. 

The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It would mean that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels may decline after 2026, a contrast with the International Energy Agency’s central forecast, which sees emissions rising steadily for decades to come. [...]

BNEF’s conclusions about renewables and their impact on fossil fuels are most dramatic. Electricity from photovoltaic panels costs almost a quarter of what it did in 2009 and is likely to fall another 66 percent by 2040. Onshore wind, which has dropped 30 percent in price in the past eight years, will fall another 47 percent by the end of BNEF’s forecast horizon.

That means even in places like China and India, which are rapidly installing coal plants, solar will start providing cheaper electricity as soon as the early 2020s. [...]

All told, the growth of zero-emission energy technologies means the industry will tackle pollution faster than generally accepted. While that will slow the pace of global warming, another $5.3 trillion of investment would be needed to bring enough generation capacity to keep temperature increases by the end of the century to a manageable 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.

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