John Brown's Notes and Essays

From Here’s what we know: After suspending its participation in a grain deal brokered by Turkey and the U.N., Moscow said it won’t guarantee security for any cargo vessels crossing the Black Sea. Grain ships set sail despite Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the deal. A Russian missile barrage hits infrastructure in Kyiv and other cities. Kyiv loses water, forcing residents to line up at the city’s wells. Oleg Tinkov, former banking tycoon, renounces Russian citizenship. Moldova condemns Russian strikes after missile debris lands in its territory. The Ukraine war is slowing the recovery in global employment, a U.N. agency says. Africa faces immediate pain from the grain deal’s suspension, but the impact on Ukraine could be delayed.

Published 100 years ago, the imaginative, allusive poem portrays modernity’s crises of faith and morality  image from article: PHOTO: DAVID GOTHARD  By Jeffrey Meyers , The Wall Street Journal , Oct. 28, 2022 6:06 pm ET “The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in   T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.   The poem is written in disconnected pieces ( “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” ) and has sudden transitions. Defining his technique, Eliot said with a papal pronouncement in “The Metaphysical Poets,” “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect...

Biden had barely finished telling Zelenskyy he’d just greenlighted another $1 billion in military assistance when the Ukrainian president started listing all the additional help he needed. image (not from article) from Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce, NBC News , Oct. 31, 2022, 6:30 AM EDT Excerpt: Administration officials said Biden and Zelenskyy’s relationship has only improved since the June phone call, after which Zelenskyy made a statement praising the U.S. for its generous assistance. But the clash reflects Biden’s early awareness that  both congressional and public support for sending billions of dollars to Ukraine could begin to fade . That moment has arrived just as the president prepares to ask Congress to greenlight even money for Ukraine. ... The proportion of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about Ukraine’s losing the war has dropped by 17 percentage points since May, from 55% to 38%,  according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted las...

image from article, with caption: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times By Pamela Paul , Opinion Columnist, The New York Times , Oct. 30, 2022, 6:00 a.m. ET  Excerpt:  [T]he very real world of academia feels a little too dark and unhappy of late. The towering, all-powerful professors of yore are now often adjunct or contract instructors, with lower pay and tenuous job security. In 2004, 17 percent of four-year institutions said that they had replaced tenured positions with contingent appointments. In 2022, that figure was 54 percent, according to a study by the American Association of University Professors. As of 2020, about 62 percent of faculty members who teach were on contingent appointments. Poverty, alas, doesn’t quite capture the romantic ideal of dark academia, but it is a reality for many in higher education. Around a third of adjunct professors earn less than $25,000 a year, according to one 2020 report. Grad students, who have been fighting to unionize...

From: Kyle Peterson , "Affirmative Action Mocks Ethnic Diversity [:] As the Supreme Court takes up preferences at Harvard, legal scholar David Bernstein argues that labels like ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Asian’ are completely arbitrary," The Wall Street Journal , Oct. 28, 2022 4:05 pm ET  image (not from article) from Excerpt : Mr. Bernstein, 55, is the author of a recent book, “Classified,” that traces the haphazard codification of the federal government’s racial labels. “We created these classifications in 1977 in a very different America, right, that was primarily black-white,” he says. “Now we have all these other groups, and we have much more division within the groups, and we’ve barely changed them at all.”  The decisive player in the ’70s was the Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions, set up under the Federal Interagency Committee on Education. A task force with three interested federal workers—Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American—debated a Spanish-lang...

U.S. Department of State [original article contains a video] image of Secretary of State Biden  address Tech Women from REMARKS ANTONY J. BLINKEN,  SECRETARY OF STATE  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ROOM WASHINGTON, D.C.  OCTOBER 24, 2022  SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Thank you.  (Cheers and applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you very, very much.  Please, this is incredible.  I have not seen this room not only this full, but this energized since we’ve been here.  So thank you all for being here today.  It’s just wonderful to see you.  I really just wanted an opportunity to stop by and to say thank yous, thank yous to a number of people for bringing all of you together today, for bringing all of us together today. First, to my colleagues who support the TechWomen program, including Angela Woods, our TechWomen program director, and Liz Allen, our Senior Official for Public Diplomacy.   (Applause.)  Two extraordinary women,...

Bangladesh flag image (not from article) from Foisal Ahmed & Kamran Siddiqui, The Business Standard , 27 October, 2022, 06:40 pm Last modified: 27 October, 2022, 10:54 pm Amid numerous controversies and poor showing of some ambassadors, the Standing Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to review the performance of ambassadors.  The decision was taken at the 31st meeting of the committee in Parliament on Thursday. "An envoy who will be appointed as an ambassador of a country, must perform his duty properly. To evaluate their work progress, we have developed a system," Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told The Business Standard.   Momen, also a member of the committee, said they shared the plan after being asked to do so.  According to the system, an ambassador has to give his work plan and a roadmap with a timeframe to the standing committee, he said.  He said if any ambassadors failed to do their duty properly, they would be held accountable. "...