John Brown's Notes and Essays

From: Letters to The New York Times , May 27, 2022    image from entry:  Credit...Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images  To the Editor:  Re “ The War in Ukraine Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready ” (editorial, Sunday Review, May 22):  Your editorial is rife with contradictions. It sensibly favors continued military support to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, and it acknowledges that it’s the Ukrainians who must decide what an end to the war might look like. Yet it recommends limiting U.S. assistance to avoid a wider war with Russia.  Giving with one hand and taking away with the other is a losing formula for dealing with a revanchist Russia that seeks nothing less than to erase Ukraine from the map. Ukraine’s military successes have exceeded everyone’s expectations. Now is not the time for ambivalence or hesitation in providing Kyiv what it needs to ensure that Moscow suffers a...

image from article:Russian President Vladimir Putin seen during the Summit of Collective Security Treaty Organisation at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow, on May 16, 2022. Contributor/Getty Images   By Richard Stengel , Time , May 20, 2022 12:17 PM EDT  Stengel is the former Editor of TIME, an MSNBC analyst and the author of Mandela's Way, a book about his work with the South African president, and Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation . Is Vladimir Putin losing the information war with Ukraine ?  Well, it depends on who you ask.  It’s never easy to measure such things, but here are a few numbers. While 141 countries in the UN voted to condemn Russia’s aggression, the number of African, Middle Eastern and South American countries who have imposed sanctions on Russia is 0.  Last week, President Joe Biden hosted a summit with eight nations of the Association of Southeast Asian nations, and pressured them to criticize Russia. The...

By  Selim Algar , New York Post May 30, 2022   8:22pm     Updated   Six people were killed and another 34 injured by gun violence in Chicago during the holiday weekend. ABC7 More than 30 people lost their lives from gun violence around the country over a blood-spattered Memorial Day weekend — just days after the tragic school  shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Dozens of victims — including 13 in Philadelphia alone — lost their lives with violence spiraling across the nation. The City of Brotherly Love was anything but over the holiday weekend, with the staggering body count including a father and his nine-year-old son,  according to local reports. Gerald Parks, 38, and his boy, Jamel, were sprayed with bullets and killed in their car after going to a cookout, CBS 3 reported. In another incident early Monday, two women were killed and a 14-year-old child injured after a shooting at an outdoor hookah smoking party. At least a dozen other Philadelphians were als...

image from article: A portrait of Catherine the Great by Danish painter Vigilius Eriksen circa 1765.   (Pixabay) James Krapfl Associate Professor of History, McGill University,  The Conversation , Published: March 14, 2022 11.52am EDT  [ original article contains numerous links ] In his speech   legitimizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Vladimir Putin invoked 18th-century history. It was, after all, Catherine II (also known as Catherine the Great) who had first acquired the peninsula for Russia at the same time she seized what is now Belarusian territory in the  first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth . In the second partition  21 years later, Catherine acquired extensive lands lying today in both Belarus and Ukraine. She amassed even more two years later, in Poland-Lithuania’s  final partition . The parallels between [jb: "German"-born]   Catherine’s and Putin’s designs  on these territories are remarkable , and ...