John Brown's Notes and Essays

Richard J Evans’s book demolishes the myth of Hitler’s postwar life in South America and other Nazi theories  image  (not from article) from Tony Barbe   Financial Times ; see also (a more recent review) October 1 2020  Modern societies are awash in conspiracy theories. This year a tidal wave of pseudoscientific and paranoid nonsense about the coronavirus pandemic has swept the world. Some of it has merged with the disturbingly bizarre QAnon fantasy, according to which President Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against a caste of devil-worshipping paedophiles.  For more than 70 years, various tenacious myths have swirled around the Third Reich — in particular, the groundless theory that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in Berlin in 1945 but made his way to South America. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, more book-length arguments for the survival of Hitler in Argentina have appeared in the 21st century than in the whole of the 55 previous year...

We got through 2020 with pictures of normality in our heads. In a few months they’ll start to come true.  By Peggy Noonan The Wall Street Journal Dec. 31, 2020 7:21 pm ET [ Original article contains links ]  Image from article  PHOTO: CHAD CROWE  You have to go into this year with dreams, there’s no other way to do it. We’re still in an epic struggle, and it will be a while before things settle down into some approximation of normal. Dreams are how we got through 2020, or maybe not dreams precisely but a picture you kept in your head that helped you keep going, that captured what you missed and will have again. It was a picture of When the Pandemic is Over and we carried it in our psychic wallets. My friend John’s picture: He’s in Fenway Park, the seats are full and close together, and he orders a Fenway Frank and chowder, and the other people in the row pass them down without fear or masks. Someone gets a hit and no one’s afraid to cheer. He is certain this will co...

The coronavirus has forced the kind of work experimentation that would have taken a decade otherwise. image from article By Kara Swisher  Contributing Opinion Writer  The New York Times  Dec. 31, 2020, 4:46 p.m. ET  Excerpt:  "The coronavirus has forced the kind of work experimentation that would have taken a decade to eventually happen: limiting business travel, cutting in-person office time, questioning every cost associated with the analog workplace. Technology is making doing business cheaper and more efficient and, as it has turned out, more productive.   These changes have proved nearly useless and even dangerous when it comes to education, where physical presence is much more of an asset than we thought. More consideration will be put into how to make technology and schooling mesh better and how to provide students with the kind of experience that they are not getting, as well as a bigger focus on universal connectivity for those who are without it....

By Arun Kumar The American Bazaar December 28, 2020 12:03 pm  Image from article: Martin Luther King, Jr. (left) and Mahatma Gandhi. Photo credit: White House (King) and Library of Congress  Exchange programs to focus on the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. President Donald Trump has signed into law a bill for cooperation between US and India on the Gandhi-King Scholarly Exchange Initiative providing for educational, scholarly, and professional exchange programs.   Written by late civil rights icon John Lewis and co-sponsored by Indian American Congressman Ami Bera, it provides among other things for an annual public diplomacy forum for scholars from the United States and India that focuses on the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.   Another component is a professional development training initiative for government employees to develop international conflict solutions based on the principles of nonviolence developed in consul...

Today’s challenge is different. Beijing has economic power Moscow could only dream of. By Joseph S. Nye Jr. The Wall Street Journal Dec. 30, 2020 12:00 pm [ Original article contains links. ] A message from Chinese President Xi Jinping plays during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, Nov. 23. PHOTO: ALEX PLAVEVSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK American relations with China are at their lowest point in 50 years. Some say Donald Trump has bequeathed Joe Biden a new cold war, which they define as intense competition without shooting. But it is not yet a cold war, and Mr. Trump isn’t the sole source of the problem. In the past decade, Chinese leaders abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s moderate policy of biding their time. They became more assertive, building artificial islands in the South China Sea and coercing Australia economically. On trade, China tilted the playing field with subsidies to state-owned enterprises and forced intellectual-property transfer. Mr. Trump was clumsy in responding with ta...

A statue that depicts a formerly enslaved man kneeling at President Abraham Lincoln's feet rests on a pedestal in Boston in June. On Dec. 29, the statue was removed. (Steven Senne/AP )   By Gillian Brockell The Washington Post  Dec. 29, 2020 at 4:18 p.m. EST; see also [Original article contains more links and illustrations.] A replica of a controversial statue of Abraham Lincoln standing over a newly emancipated Black man has been removed from a public park in Boston. Crews were seen early Tuesday morning wrapping and lifting the statue, according to footage from Boston 25 News. Over the summer, the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to remove it by year’s end, after more than 12,000 people signed a public petition calling for it to be replaced. The statue by Thomas Ball depicts a Black man, shirtless and on his knees, in front of a clothed and standing Abraham Lincoln. In one hand, Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, while the other is stretched out ...

With all its stress and uncertainty, this year hasn’t exactly been a banner year for intimacy. But that can change.   Image from article; Credit...Rose Wong  By Meaghan O’Connell , The New York Times , Dec. 26, 2020 [ Original article contains links. ] Melissa Petro is a 40-year-old writer who lives in New York with her husband of four years and two children. She and her husband switch off between working and kid duty. According to Ms. Petro, the always-on nature of parenting a 12-month-old and a 3-year old in a pandemic has been “relentless, exhausting and not sexy.” Recently her husband has been sleeping on the family room couch.   “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “It’s just that there’s so many things to do besides have sex with my partner, who I do hypothetically find attractive and theoretically want to have sex with. It feels pretty — at times — hopeless, our sex life.” Ms. Petro is not alone. A Kinsey Institute study on the impact of Covid-19 on mar...

image from From NY Post? Yes, MAGA NY Post ...

  image (not from article) from “I just love infectious diseases,” John Brooks, the chief medical officer of the covid response team at the C.D.C., admitted to me. “I know diseases are terrible—they kill people. But something about them just grabs me.”  --"A Reporter at Large January 4 & 11, 2021 Issue: The Plague Year  -- The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy." By Lawrence Wright  The New Yorker December 28, 2020 [ jb note: Even if you don't have a subscription -- I don't -- you may be able to read a number of New Yorker articles free online, including this one (as I did). ]

A Massachusetts school has banned ‘The Odyssey.’   Homer Simpson image (not from article) from By Meghan Cox Gurdon   The Wall Street Journal Updated Dec. 27, 2020 4:01 pm ET; via WNB   [ Original article contains links and a illustration. ] A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts , critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.  Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular— especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time wh...

The arrival of Oracle, Apple, Tesla deal new challenges to city’s struggle to stay affordable—and ‘weird’ U.S. ‘Startup City’ Image from article:   The site of a Tesla factory to be built in Austin. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he expects that Tesla’s presence in the region will ultimately be far larger. PHOTO: BRONTE WITTPENN/BLOOMBERG NEWS By Elizabeth Findell and Konrad Putzier , The Wall Street Journal , Dec. 27, 2020 1:16 pm; [Original article contains links, charts, and additional illustrations];  see  also [ jb - much worth reading. ] AUSTIN, Texas—A few years ago, some blocks of Austin’s South Congress Avenue featured a castle-themed wax museum and comic book shop, a neighborhood bar with $1 taco deals, an auto shop and, in season, a Santa Claus on horseback.  Then, as at so many other places in Austin, the construction cranes came. Those blocks recently reopened with a strip of modern urban buildings with shops offering national brands from Lululemon to Le La...

Landmark bill passed in Nation’s Capit o l  to decriminalize drug paraphernalia. -- from

Where I am fortunate enough to live, in Cleveland in NW [Northwest]  Washington, District of Columbia, USA (hoping it still stays u nited), I have noticed -- this is by no means a scientific survey -- while picking up thrash in this, my neighborhood, with the help of grabber (during a daily one-hour stroll) an interesting sociological phenomenon characterizing (?) our social distancing times : The number of single, I repeat single,  persons  walking their dogs seems to have increased immensely. BTW, God bless 'em (the humans, if not the dogs); it seems that most of these canine lovers, who find virus-free company without humans, pick up their pets' poop with a plastic wrapper and dispose of it in DC public garbage receptacles (BTW, give the DC gov credit -- at least for now -- that these municipal garbage cans are emptied according to a quite regular/professional schedule).

  Dzodin image (not from article) from Harvey Dzodin, CGTN U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press briefing at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., the U.S., October 3, 2018. /AFP Editor's note:  Harvey Dzodin is a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN. Mike Pompeo recently continued his anti-China campaign by unilaterally canceling five valuable Sino-U.S. cultural exchange programs. It's no surprise that one of the most ethically-challenged members of the U.S. administration continues to resort to falsehoods and half-truths in attempting to demonize China until his last day in office. Pompeo's press release, replete with grammatical and factual errors, refers to the programs as merely masquerading as "cultural exchanges" when, in his view, they are "fully funded and operated by the PRC government as soft power propaganda too...

Opinion by Jamie Fly , The Washington Post ,  Dec. 24, 2020 at 11:09 a.m. EST  [ Original article contains links ] Fly image (not from article)  from Jamie Fly, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, is a former president and chief executive of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty .  Authoritarians have long practiced the cynical art of manipulating information to stifle dissent and shape international perceptions of their regimes. But in the digital age, they are armed as never before, reaching into other countries to influence political discourse and spread conspiracy theories. How should the United States counter these unrelenting, damaging campaigns by Russia, China, Iran and others? How should we reach out to global audiences inundated with disinformation and slick lies? To some, such as Michael Pack, the Trump administration’s chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the apparent answer is more government control of federally f...