Napoleon’s Defeat in Russia – 200 Years

I’m late to this party, but it just occurred to me that it is 200 years since Russia defeated Napoleon. The Battle of Borodino was the turning point of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

But I haven’t totally missed the anniversary. The last of the Grande Armée straggled out of Russia on December 14, according to Wikipedia. The Battle of Borodino was in September.

The Russian commemorations seem to have been little reported elsewhere. Here’s a selection from Google:

Guardian

Telegraph

Russia Beyond the Headlines (says it all)

From Ria Novosti, a re-enactment in September of the Battle of Borodino.

More from Ria Novosti. Short from RT. RT documentary on the preparations for the re-enactment.

I’m wondering why we haven’t heard more from Russia. The ill-fated Tsar Nicholas led the centennial celebrations in 1912, and of course it was an earlier Tsar’s army who beat Napoleon in 1812, so perhaps the desire to minimize that governance in Russia’s history might have been part of it. The Russians are also extremely sensitive about land invasions, precisely because of Napoleon for one, and might not have wanted to play it up.

Although Napoleon and the Grande Armée eventually had to retreat ignominiously from Russia, they had something of a victory at Borodino and went on to burn Moscow. But their supply lines were too long, they had taken many casualties at Borodino, and winter set in. Like many military operations, the victories were ambiguous.

Tchaikowsky wrote the 1812 Overture to commemorate the event. Here’s the London Symphony, with appropriate works of art.

For those who like the ending with cannons, just the ending, from where the Russian national anthem overcomes the French.


Cross-posted at The Agonist and Nuclear Diner.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today’s Thanksgiving is an American holiday. But other countries have their Thanksgivings and harvest festivals. I think there’s something we all can give thanks for: that we humans seem to be improving ourselves.

Yes, I’ve been following the news of Israel and Gaza and the probably cynical calculations behind the deaths. We’re improving, and we’ve still got some way to go.

But I think that Steven Pinker is right in The Better Angels of Our Nature: deaths by violence are many fewer than they were, or than we expected them to be, even a century ago. And I’m thankful for that.

I’ve seen big changes in my lifetime. Just yesterday I received a copy of the March 29, 1954, Life Magazine. It has a story about the Japanese fishermen caught up in the fallout of a US H-bomb test. The headline reads “First Casualties of the H-Bomb.” First. We expected that there would be more casualties.

The photo up top is a house I lived in, a long time ago. There were fewer houses around it, more trees and a creek. It’s good to recall where we came from.

If you haven’t read Pinker’s book, here’s a nice short (half-hour) summary, with some of the questions I had after reading it.

In a more American vein, Stephen Walt offers up ten reasons to give thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers – wherever you may be!

Cheryl

Greetings also posted at Nuclear Diner and The Agonist.

Bits and Pieces - November 21, 2012

It seems to me that there are some deep psychological roots to survivalism. We all live with a variety of uncertainties, ranging from death to whether our car will start to finding we're out of cereal. And that's just on the personal side. Outside factors include storms and wars. Focusing on survival from whatever externalizes the anxiety on all these fronts and, perhaps, makes it easier to manage. It's a recurring theme in religion, from the Bible's Revelations to the anticipation of the supposedly Maya-predicted end next month. But those ends take matters out of our hands; again, it can be easier to prepare for - well, what? If society really does break down, or an asteroid hits, will this really keep you safe?

And, speaking of uncertainty, tomorrow, in addition to being Thanksgiving, is also the 49th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Your password won't protect you, either.

Nor the Washington foreign policy establishment.

But here's some good news: the US and Mexico are going to sign an agreement on Colorado River water. And it looks like it's both realistic and fair.

And some wonderful color photos of America in the early 1940s.

Added later: Culture shock on returning to the US from Estonia.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Bits and Pieces - November 19, 2012

If you read only one thing on the situation between Israel and Gaza, read Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate.

Something easier - using computer translation algorithms to crack an 18th century secret society code.

Steven Pinker summarizes nicely his argument from The Better Angels of Our Nature, and commenters ask some of the questions I had about the book.

President Obama's speech at University of Yangon.

My analysis of evidence that some have concluded means that Myanmar has been working toward nuclear weapons.

Beautiful photos from Turkmenistan. 

Added later: Is it Myanmar or Burma?

Bits and Pieces - November 17, 2012

How Mean Girls explains the Petraeus scandal. Read past the first two paragraphs. Intelligent and ambitious women still have to get ahead by sleeping with men. People without power are always petty toward one another.

And yeah, if you have responsibility at some level for the nuclear codes, you're not supposed to mess around.

Combine not enough funding to the State Department with the penchant for contract muscle and you've got the potential for trouble beyond Benghazi.

Has Petraeus been a stumbling block in moving toward an agreement with Iran?

The speech JFK would have given if he had ordered an airstrike on Cuba.

Does Senator Tom Coburn sound incoherent in this interview? Now that most of the Teabaggers have been voted out of Congress, is it time to look at some of the other loonies?

Genetic blending between Asia and Europe in the Altai Mountains.

Finnish underwater ice fishing. Watch the video before you read the explanation.

Election Mindsets

Beloit College publishes, every year, a sketch of the mindset the newest college students bring to their colleges. Abby, who became famous when she expressed some impatience with the presidential election but now is fine, and her class of 2030 will know that American presidents can be African-American and, very likely, women. That will appear in the 2026 Mindset List, or possibly before.

The Obama girls were lovely on election night. Their mindset lists will will be different from Abby’s. And they will be voting in the next presidential election, or the one after that. So will a lot of other young people for whom segregated water fountains have never existed and the Soviet Union has always been in the past; for whom gay marriage is a possibility and women, some of whom are veterans, are taking a larger place in Congress.

The world keeps changing. It shocked me when the Mindset List said that Elvis has always been dead, he who was so alive for my adolescence. Dial phones, tape recorders, cameras that produce photos you can’t see immediately – all long gone! And not just gone, but are no part whatsoever of many citizens’ existence.

John Cassidy gives a partial accounting from the election:

For now, let’s take the measure of what has happened, which is historic enough. For the fifth time in the past six Presidential elections, the Democrats have won the popular vote. For the second time in succession, Americans have elected a black man as President. Throughout the country, Republican extremists like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock have been repudiated. Residents of Maryland and Maine (and probably Washington state, too) have voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage.

More women in Congress. An openly gay Senator. A Buddhist Representative. The acceptance of sexualities different from missionary-position white men.

Cassidy again:

The exit polls largely told the story. In the nineteen-to-twenty-nine age group, Obama won sixty per cent of the vote. He got ninety-three per cent of the black vote, seventy per cent of the Hispanic vote, and seventy-five per cent of the Asian vote. Fifty-six per cent of women voted for him, as did sixty-three per cent of unmarried people, two-thirds of secular voters, and about four-fifths of gays and lesbians. Romney carried fifty-nine per cent of white voters (male and female), a majority of all Americans aged forty-five or over, and fifty-seven per cent of married people. In ideological terms, Obama forged a liberal-moderate course to victory. Despite his post-Convention lurch to the center, Romney couldn’t win over enough self-identified moderates. In that group, Obama took fifty-seven per cent of the vote.

So this Congress will be more diverse, which will make that diversity seem more normal to children growing up, and as they become voters, they are likely to vote for that kind of diversity and more. They won’t even see it as diversity, just the way things are.

I keep wondering how it is to have grown up in a world so different from the one I grew up in. The Soviet Union was a big part of my childhood, but some of the social things were normalized for me early. Lud and Bill, living in the big old Victorian house on the corner, were our neighbors – and everyone was fine with that. In Sunday School, we sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and this picture was up on the wall (source – autoplay music). I really believed that when I sang. Yes, the words and picture are a bit stereotyped. But Google also gives us this.

So I think I can share a little of the younger mindsets, although Elvis will be alive forever for me.

So Malia and Sasha and Abby will pocket many things that seemed unachievable to us in the fifties and sixties. That will give them room to think about what else could be better. Some of those things are already obvious: income equity, infrastructure to suit an advanced country, normalizing relations with a number of countries, ending Guantanamo and some of the other mistakes from overreaction to 9/11. And they will see others. There is the tiniest bit of beginning to think that war isn’t worth it.

All that, of course, could be derailed by any number of things, but the record of the last half-century and the last decade is pretty good. One of the things we’ll have to do is to make sure we bring along those who are having a hard time adapting to this pace of change.

And I’m sure that Malia and Sasha and Abby, and their brothers and friends and cousins, will be up to it.

Cross-posted at The Agonist.

Bits and Pieces - Post-Election Edition

Many ways to map the election. Here are two more that might not be included; the second appears to be of changes from the 2008 election to the 2012 election; that was not clear to me from the text.

I am intrigued by the swath of blue across the Deep South that nobody seems to have said much about. Cities? Concentrations of African-Americans?

Lots of rightwing ideas are now being debunked. Ronald Reagan was maybe not such a nice guy.

One of the better things I've read on what the Republican Party now needs to do, from Zenpundit.

At the Polls Today

via @BuzzFeedAndrew

Whatever Happens Today

It's looking like we can expect an Obama victory.

But even if Romney wins, we've had a good four years, and the campaign has brought out some good things.

Bloggers, as usual, were ahead of the curve, but the New York Times and the Washington Post excoriated Romney's lies and refusal to release his income tax returns. Our two newspapers of record only brought themselves to a principled editorial stand during this last week of the campaign, but we can hope that something of that sticks.

News coverage in general has slowly moved away from "both sides do it" to a recognition that one of our political parties has gone off the rails and has been willing to damage the United States if its leaders think that will help their party's electoral prospects. That party has also been willing to back the most misogynistic and science-misinformed of its members in the hopes of getting an "R" on one more House or Senate seat. Again, the news profession has moved only slightly toward reporting the real world, but we applaud them and hope they will continue.

That political party is in the throes of belief that it can order the universe to its preferences, back to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when men were men, America was tops, and, well, we won't point out that the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s, under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was 94%. Politics does not have the same capability as science for jerking out the illusion rug from under one's feet, but we can hope that a ringing defeat today will supply another incremental change.

I've said before that President Obama has been using community organizing techniques to move the country toward the realization that we all are responsible for how we're governed, and there have been gains there too. It's subjective, but I think I'm seeing a change in people's willingness to take responsibility in those areas.

Yes, I hope that Nate Silver and the other quantitative predictors are right. But if they're wrong, I hope that movement continues in these directions.

Cross-posted at The Agonist.

Bits and Pieces - November 2, 2012

Pretty much all political today.

Matt Romney, Mitt's son, goes to Russia to make money and to deliver a message to President Putin that his father would be more flexible after the election, if he's elected.

Was voting for Romney rigged in the primaries? If these analyses are correct, something funny was going on.

Two big, and rather good, articles from CNN. They do suffer from the compulsive journalistic need to cite both sides.
Parallels to country's racist past haunt age of Obama
The Gospel according to Obama

The second of those has problems going beyond the headline. It's entirely possible that reporters born in or after the sixties have no knowledge of the theological ferment of that time. Liberal and liberation theology, Pope John XXIII, biblical criticism. The intellectual and philosophical arguments of that age seem to have been swept aside by megachurches and born-againness, the latter quoted in the article as if they had some standing in those areas. Note to religion reporters: Barack Obama's references to Reinhold Neibuhr mean something. Read up on that person and some of those who extended his work. The fifties and sixties are the time to look at. Other keywords for search are in this paragraph.

What God has to say about it.

The long con: Mail-order conservatism.

Another of those free-market things that hasn't worked out so well: The Valles Caldera National Preserve.

And Now a Political Announcement

So the election is now just a week away. Some of us have voted already. New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire don't have early voting. Perhaps they'll reconsider that in their next legislative sessions. County clerks' offices are going to be scrambling, but if they're like the organization in Santa Fe County, they'll do fine.

Mitt Romney has finally figured out that silence can be his friend, and we haven't heard from him...yet. I'm sure that his campaign will be able to find something they can blame President Obama for. Maybe something happened in one of the communities from which those convoys of utility trucks headed toward the northeast. Or perhaps he will see nothing really awry, since Goldman Sachs seems to have come through with generator and sandbags intact, and those rumors that the trading floor of the stock exchange was flooded turned out not to be true.

But, of course, he did say something earlier, the usual endorsement of states and private action. I really am looking forward to Florida's and Nevada's launch of weather satellites, or maybe it'll be Bain itself, when the satellites that tracked Sandy go down.

The New York Times recognizes that a storm like Sandy requires a coordinated national effort by an organization that isn't interested in its own profit. Mitt Romney is playing to that testosterone/adrenaline-fueled fantasy that accompanies the rising music of a superhero flick. Yes, it's fun. But when you come out of the theater, there still are meals to be cooked, trees to be removed from the road, power plants to be maintained, cars to be built, and families to be raised.

The greatest generation speaks. (I couldn't figure out how to embed the video.)

Update: Looks like Romney will too.

The Day After

We were all adrenalined up waiting for the storm yesterday, but today it's just a deep sadness and the heavy feeling of much to be done.

Here in Santa Fe, it's been nonstop sun for a very long time. That's been broken a little by smoke from controlled burns in the Jemez Mountains, where the Forest Service is hoping to head off the burning of everything that's left after the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires. But I once lived in New Jersey and experienced many hurricanes, with trees down and power out. Sandy was worse.

I've had my own little upset - broken hot water heater - to share some inconvenience. But my heart goes out to everyone who is waking up to flood and fire damage, injuries, and the death of loved ones.

The New York Times is putting storm coverage outside its subscription wall, and The Record (Bergen Evening Record when I lived there) is also making its electronic edition available. I see that there was some flooding in Rochelle Park; I'll bet it was where my family lived through a flood once.

Today the assessment will begin: the subways in New York City, the bridges to and from, the trees and power lines down everywhere, coming back to evacuated homes, some of which won't be there.

America's Crazy Uncle in the Attic

Something has been bothering me about the presidential polls. Well, a lot of things. But one in particular has stirred up my mathematical senses.

President Obama has been ahead in a enough states to give him a wide electoral vote victory, but the popular vote across the country has been close. For these reasons, the punditocracy has been concern trolling about a possible disparity in the election between an electoral vote victory for Obama and a popular vote victory for Romney. Here’s one example.

The margins by which Obama has been ahead have ranged from small, say 51-49, to as much as ten points. My mathematics says that, in order for the popular vote to be close, there have to be some big margins for Romney in a few states. But where? The media , for the most part, haven’t said.

Last week, Kevin Drum provided the answer. He was talking about the white working class vote in particular, but I’ll bet the overall margins reflect these numbers.

It was much the same in 2008: Democrats are going extinct as national elected officals in the South, white as well as black; it’s not just Obama’s race, but that hardly can be a positive in that region.

There is very little about this enormous regional disparity in the national press. You can find it if you search hard enough*, but the preferred media narrative is of the possible electoral-popular split. That’s a both-sides kind of story: Bush and now Obama. Nothing to see here.

But when so much of that popular vote margin is concentrated in so few states, the electoral college begins to make a bit more sense. It’s too bad that the South still has not come to terms with the outcome of the Civil War. It’s too bad that one section of the country is so badly out of step with the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. This is where much of the anti-science, the refusal to support public schools, the fear of immigrants is centered as well.

It’s too bad that the media won’t recognize this disparity. They’re acting as though the South is our electoral equivalent of the crazy uncle in the attic. But most of us don’t treat our crazy uncles that way any more, either.

*Thanks to Steve Hynd at The Agonist for help with this on a busy day.


Cross-posted at The Agonist. 

Bits and Pieces - October 18, 2012

The empty chair that keeps me awake at night  - by Christopher Benfey

More speech is better - by David Cole. This is the best statement I have seen about freedom of speech and provocateurs like the makers of that anti-Islam video.

How emphasizing religious freedom divides people.

Some rich moron pours fertilizer into the sea in contravention of the law and good science.

My next vacation.

Increasing numbers of Americans think global warming is real, and that we are causing it.

Walter Pincus has some questions for the next debate.

The Second Presidential Debate

There's plenty of commentary out there now that I don't need to repeat. Obama won. Romney looked like death warmed over by the end, and his family Were Not Amused.

So I'll go with a few comments I haven't seen in other places yet. It seems strange to me that some commentators are only now seeing Romney's bullying. It seemed quite clear to me in the first debate. Perhaps it's that he was bullying a female moderator, or maybe it's easier to see through when it doesn't work. 

The big loser so far of the debate series has been Jim Lehrer. Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley had very different styles, perhaps the result of the different formats, but they both took their jobs seriously. Bob Schieffer has a lot to live up to in the last debate.

It's hard to tell what effect the "binders full of women" meme will have on the election. It's not a good thing to have people laughing at you. The phrase was part of Romney's disarray in a question he didn't answer directly. More here on what he did wrong. The put-downs of women - full employment will force employers to hire the undesirables, and single mothers cause gun violence - may have accounted for part of the realization that he really is a bully. Here's the Binders Full of Women Tumblr.

I didn't say it, but I was worried that there would not be room between responding to Romney's lies and actions that would provoke the media's Angry Black Man reaction. OTOH, I was contemplating the possibility that we, collectively, might be ready for a little Presidential anger from the current occupant of that office. It looks like that was the case, and I haven't seen any commentary that tips over into the ABM category. I don't read rightwing blogs.

Like a number of others, I would like to see more discussion of climate change and anthropogenic global warming. But the politics just won't support it. Republican obstruction has made Obama's job so difficult that I can see why it hasn't made it to the top of the agenda. It will be necessary to prepare the ground for action in that direction, and that hasn't been possible. I like to think that we will see more of it in Obama's second term.

I'm fairly baffled at the indications in polls that women are moving toward Romney, although I haven't taken much time with the polls. We should start seeing reaction to the debate in polls soon.

The Shape-Shifters

Like Jared Bernstein, I think that part of what flummoxed President Obama in the first debate was the sheer chutzpah of Mitt Romney's claim that he never called for a $5 billion tax cut or $2 billion more for defense. You could see it in Obama's face the first time Romney did that.

Bernstein calls it shape-shifting and notes that Biden managed to stop some of Ryan's doing it, although the only way to do it seems to be to grab the shape-shifter in the act, which in these debate formats means interrupting.

Which somehow reminded me of a song from long ago. Its intent was quite different, but most of the lyrics could be the property of R&R:



Lyrics here.


Cross-posted to The Agonist.

Just Blurt It Out

Dana Milbank catches Republican House members blurting out classified information.

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

One of the first rules about classified information is "neither confirm nor deny." Either provides information. Depending on the setting, "I can't say anything about that" can also provide information. Better to stay away from certain topics altogether or change the subject when they arise.

So, when a publicly-available overhead photo was shown in yesterday's Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) should have just kept his mouth shut. Instead,

“Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Department security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, described the chaotic night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

Another rule: don't identify classified material as such in public.

Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) helpfully added

“In this hearing room, we’re not going to point out details of what may still in fact be a facility of the United States government or more facilities.”

Um, you just did. And there was more, which Milbank documents.

The hearing probably should have been held behind closed doors, but the Republicans wanted to make an example of the administration's handling of the Benghazi situation. And then they didn't have sense enough to deal properly with what they knew. They should also have known that the State Department witnesses would have known how to handle classified information, but they may have wanted to score points by pointing out what they thought was classified.

I think some other things were coming into play, too. Congressmen may not have the same training in how to handle classified information that others are required to have, or they may feel that they are important enough to ignore it. They may not have thought about the tactics that can avoid disclosing classified information. I have also seen people talking about their clearances to make them a status symbol. There's some difference in opinion on that, but it would seem to me that having a clearance should be something that isn't generally known. And too much information is classified, which makes it easier to believe that none of it is really truly important. But they're talking about operational details here, people and places, and those are important.

I guess the State Department and "other agencies" are rethinking their Libya operations anyway.


Cross-posted at The Agonist.

Bits and Pieces - October 11, 2012

On the theme of trying to get outside our own heads:
The blindness of privilege
How Jim Crow worked
Voter registration, Mississippi 1960
The last two are particularly excellent in evoking a time and place that must be utterly alien to today's college students.

Continuing that theme, one of the distinguishing characteristics of libertarianism seems to be an inability to understand that other people have interests that may not align with one's own. So a group of libertarians can't get together on forming one of their isolated paradises where they can enjoy only the company of the, er, like-minded. Via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice.

Sunnis in Iran

This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lots of material coming out that refutes some of the common wisdom about that incident. Kennedy didn't back Khrushchev down; it was a trade of missiles out of Cuba for missiles out of Turkey, and the Soviet Union kept the bargain over their client's protests. Khrushchev put the missiles in Cuba out of a feeling of the Soviet Union's weakness, not America's. Nice summary by Fred Kaplan. But I suppose Mitt will keep rolling with the chest-pounding his base loves so dearly. 

And, speaking of anniversaries, this is one year for Nuclear Diner, my other enterprise with two partners who have their own areas of expertise in such things. Go on over and check it out!

Bits and Pieces - October 9, 2012

Ignorance about ignorance, or don't believe everything you read.

What if there's real change in the Middle East?  Like different borders, new countries.

I agree with Kevin Drum - Democrats (and Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan in particular) should not share their angst with the world quite so freely. As I noted, initial reactions were fairly neutral until Matthews roiled up the MSNBC commentators. If you need a change from the hysterics, check out Drum. He's been posting on this all day - here's the latest.

Here's one of the origins of the myth of strength in foreign relations that Romney is perpetuating. It didn't happen the way he'd (and others would) like to believe.

My Two Debate Cents

I'm sorry, but I disagree with the cable pundits. I don't watch television much, but this week I'm in a situation where I can. The development of group-think has been interesting to watch. (I've been watching mostly MSNBC and CNN.) The instant reaction to the debate was mostly "Eh." Some good, some bad on both sides. But then the narrative developed: Obama looked like he didn't want to be there. Romney had refound his mojo. And the pundits built on each other.

I thought Obama was dignified, perhaps not as dynamic as he should have been. But I tend to have a similar reaction when the person I'm talking to is winding himself up and getting loudly repetitive. I thought Romney looked like a bully, and that strange little smile that seems to be his idea of a listening expression was still there, although he was also jutting his brow in a way that suggested he was trying to look more like a normal human being.

Romney lied a lot. He's not going to have a $5 trillion tax cut, he's going to provide tax relief. Read that sentence again if you didn't get it. A number of his sentences just didn't track in any way that allows an evaluation of their content. And, as Kevin Drum pointed out, he responded, over and over again, in the same way, with the same few numbers he had managed to memorize, to every single one of President Obama's points.

I also didn't like Romney's bullying, his talking over both Obama and Jim Lehrer. I've been subjected to that kind of treatment far too often; it's what big men who think they've got all the answers do to women and blacks all the time. 

Jim Lehrer really is getting too old for this sort of thing. His voice is no longer strong, and he just looks old. On the other hand, there's little you can do with a bully.

I think that the word debate means different things to different people. The teevee rules have long been disputed in that context. But I think the teevee context has thrown the concept into a realm that is far from my expectations: the verbal equivalent of a knock-down, drag-out brawl, the kind of thing you see on the shows with the opposing sides shouting at each other.

That was the debate Mitt Romney held, Jim Lehrer and Barack Obama be damned. And the pundits liked the alpha-male show. But a president needs a different skill set.

Cross-posted at The Agonist.