#U.S. Civil Service Commission

[deadpresidents]

"Damn the President! He is a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old-psalm singing Indianapolis politician."

-- Theodore Roosevelt, after an uncomfortable meeting with President Benjamin Harrison, who had appointed him to the United States Civil Service Commission, but who Roosevelt felt was no longer supportive of the Commission's reform work when it began to investigate certain officials close to President Harrison, letter to Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, October 4, 1890.

[batboyblog]

What Joe Biden has Done for LGBTQ+ People

I wanted to list out everything The Biden Administration has done for Queer people in the last 3 and a half years, but according to GLAAD it'd been 337 moves (and I noticed they missed a few things...) there was just no way to list every ground breaking first Queer person ever nominated to fill this or that job, every ally with a historic LGBT rights record nominated for a top job, every beautiful statement of support, every time he tried to get Congress to pass the Equality Act (support it!) So I've gone through and done my best to pick the ones I think were the most important, but everyone should check out the full list!

Day 1: Signs executive orders banning discrimination and ordering a full review of all federal agencies policies to better include and support LGBT people

Pete Buttigieg becomes the first openly gay person nominated and confirmed for a cabinet level post as Secretary of Transportation

Revokes Trump’s 2018 ban on transgender military personnel

Department of Housing and Urban Development implements LGBTQ protections in housing, becoming first federal agency to implement Pres. Biden’s executive order

First President to recognize and proclaim Trans Day of Visibility

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division issues an official memo that the Supreme Court's Bostock decision against LGBT workplace discrimination also applies to education through Title IX

HUD withdraws a Trump Administration proposed rule change, and reaffirms trans people's rights to seek shelters matching their gender identity

HHS announces the withdrawal of Trump Administration rules that allowed discrimination by healthcare organizations against LGBT people.

The State Department and later Homeland Security announce babies born to Queer couples overseas will be American citizens if one parent is American, in the past the child only qualified if they were genetically related to the American citizen parent.

The Justice Department files against a West Virginia law banning trans students from school athletics

Department of Veterans Affairs announces it will offer gender confirming surgery for transgender veterans. There are an estimated 134,000 transgender veterans in the U.S. and another 15,000 transgender people serving in the armed forces.

President Biden Signs a law making the Pulse Night Club a national memorial

The State Department creates an X gender marker for passports and other documents, allowing gender affirming identification for non-binary and intersex people for the first time.

The Census Bureau for the first time issues a Survey with questions about sexual orientation and gender identity

On the 10th anniversary of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Veterans Administration announces that soldiers discharged for homosexual conduct, gender identity or HIV status qualify for veterans' benefits

Dr. Rachel Levine becomes the first trans person confirmed by the US Senate when she was nominated to be Assistant Secretary for Health, she also became the first trans flag rank officer when she was sworn in as a 4 star Admiral for her job as head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, his makes her the highest ranked trans person in government

Holds the first ever vigil in the White House for Transgender Day of Remembrance

HHS announces rule change to reinstate and expand protections against discrimination in the Affordable Care Act, including denying coverage for gender-affirming care.

Social Security Administration reverses a Trump Administration policy and allows benefits claims by surviving partners in same-sex relationships, whose partner died before marriage equality was legal

President Biden signs the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (a bill he helped originally craft in the Senate) which for the first time has grant programs dedicated to expanding and developing initiatives specifically for LGBTQ survivors of domestic violence

The TSA announces new technology and policy shifts to improve the customer experience of transgender travelers who have previously been required to undergo additional screening due to alarms in sensitive areas.

The Social Security Administration allows people to edit their gender and name on records for the first time without legal and medical documentation

The US Air Force announces it'll offer medical and legal aid to any personnel families affected by state level anti-trans youth bills.

Karine Jean-Pierre becomes the first Lesbian to serve as White House Press Secretary

on 50th anniversary of Title IX The Department of Ed strengthens protections for Students against sexual harassment and discrimination

Veterans Affairs announces survivor benefits now extended to partners from relationships before marriage equality was legalized in 2015

President Biden signs the Respect for Marriage Act into law enshrining protections for marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples

The Department of Ed announces new rules around athletic eligibility under Title IX, declaring blanket bans on trans students violate the law and setting up strike standards for schools

The White House announced a suit of new protections for LGBTQ people, including a new job at the Department of Ed to combat book bans, a joint DoJ Homeland Security effort to combat violence and threats and HHS evidence-based guidance to mental health providers for care of transgender kids

President Biden signs an Executive Order directing HHS to protect LGBTQI+ youth in the foster care system, a rule they later passed requiring Queer foster children to be placed in affirming homes

The Biden administration joins families of transgender youth in Tennessee and Kentucky in petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse a circuit court ruling allowing a ban on mainstream health care to be enforced

President Biden Signs a EO expanding on past EO on equality and helping underserved communities

The Department of Education's Civil Rights office opens an investigation into the death of Nex Benedict. President Biden in his statement said: "Every young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are, and feel safe and supported at school and in their communities. Nex Benedict, a kid who just wanted to be accepted, should still be here with us today. Nonbinary and transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know. But nobody should have to be brave just to be themselves. In memory of Nex, we must all recommit to our work to end discrimination and address the suicide crisis impacting too many nonbinary and transgender children.”

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“WANT ADDITIONAL CUSTOMS OFFICERS,” Bertie Township Herald (Fort Erie). November 6, 1930. Page 2. ----- Applications now being received by Department of National Revenue Applications are being received by the Department of National Revenue for additional positions on the customs staffs at the ports of Bridgeburg and Niagara Falls.

November 12 is the last date on which applications will be received. Applicants between the ages of 22 and 35 years will receive the preference except in the case of returned soldiers. 

The additional officers are needed to fill posts created by the adoption of the eight hour day for customs officers. As yet neither the whole staff of the port of Bridgeburg or of Niagara Falls is on the shortened schedule.

[simply-ivanka]

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades long executive power grab.

By Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Wall Street Journal

November 20, 2024

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.

Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.

Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.

With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.

[jaispeaksandlistens]

they depend on our protection yet they take away the rights of the people fighting the wars? taking away certain rights of disabled people? but the veterans are disable due to saving your ass. taking away women's rights? women soldiers getting raped happens more than talked about. taking poc rights? 20.3 percent of soldiers are poc. immigrants make 5 percent of the military, 4.5 percent of veterans are immigrants. 17.5 percent of soldiers are women.

Air Force: 23.4% of commissioned officers are women Navy: 20.9% of commissioned officers are women Army: 18.8% of commissioned officers are women Marine Corps: 9.8% of commissioned officers are women

As of February 2024, more than 40,000 foreign nationals were serving in the active and reserve components of the U.S. military, which is about 5% of the total on active duty. 

As of 2022, 4.5% of the country's 16.2 million veterans were born outside the United States.

Immigrants have fought in every major conflict in American history, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, and conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Military service has also provided a path to American citizenship for more than 760,000 immigrant service members over the last century. yet its STILL not enough.

[yourreddancer]

Trump Won. Now What?

The United States is about to become a different kind of country.By David Frum

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls have showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J. D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies.

This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.

There are many things a reelected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs—and intensify a global trade war not only against China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume that Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled.

A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

My generation was raised on the belief that America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people, without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history in which America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies :: Shirk. http://Newsday.com/matt

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 24, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 25, 2024

Since the night of the November 5, election, Trump and his allies have insisted that he won what Trump called “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But as the numbers have continued to come in, it’s clear that such a declaration is both an attempt to encourage donations— fundraising emails refer to Trump’s “LANDSLIDE VICTORY”—and an attempt to create the illusion of power to push his agenda. 

The reality is that Trump’s margin over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris will likely end up around 1.5 points. According to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, it is the fifth smallest since 1900, which covers 32 presidential races. Exit polls showed that Trump’s favorability rating was just 48% and that more voters chose someone other than Trump. And, as Lindsay points out, Trump fell 4 million votes short of President Joe Biden in 2020. 

Political science professor Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Peter Baker of the New York Times: “If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition” On the other hand, she added, “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”

Trump’s allies are indeed setting out to do big things, and they are big things that are unpopular. 

Trump ran away from Project 2025 during the campaign because it was so unpopular. He denied he knew anything about it, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal,” and on September 16 the leader of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, said there were “Absolutely zero. No connection. Zero” ties between the team and Project 2025. Now, though, Trump has done an about-face and has said he will nominate at least five people associated with Project 2025 to his administration. 

Those nominees include Russell Vought, one of the project's key authors, who calls for dramatically increasing the powers of the president; Tom Homan, who as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversaw the separation of children from their parents; John Ratcliffe, whom the Senate refused in 2019 to confirm as Director of National Intelligence because he had no experience in intelligence; Brendan Carr, whom Trump wants to put at the head of the Federal Communications Commission and who is already trying to silence critics by warning he will punish broadcasters who Trump feels have been unfair to him; and Stephen Miller, the fervently anti-immigrant ideologue.

Project 2025 calls for the creation of an extraordinarily strong president who will gut the civil service and replace its nonpartisan officials with those who are loyal to the president. It calls for filling the military and the Department of Justice with those loyal to the president. And then, the project plans that with his new power, the president will impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America, ending immigration, and curtailing rights for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as women and racial and ethnic minorities.

Project 2025 was unpopular when people learned about it. 

And then there is the threat of dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, suggested by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, headed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are calling for cuts of $2 trillion to the items in the national budget that provide a safety net for ordinary Americans at the same time that Trump is promising additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Musk, meanwhile, is posturing as if he is the actual president, threatening on Saturday, for example: “Those who break the law will be arrested and that includes mayors.”  

On Meet the Press today, current representative and senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) reacted to the “dictator talk,” with which Trump is threatening his political opponents, pointing out that "[t]he American people…voted on the basis of the economy—they wanted change to the economy—they weren’t voting for dictatorship. So I think he is going to misread his mandate if that’s what he thinks voters chose him for.”

That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work. 

For all Trump’s claims of power, he is a 78-year-old man who is declining mentally and who neither commands a majority of voters nor has shown signs of being able to transfer his voters to a leader in waiting. 

Trump’s team deployed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance to the Senate to drum up votes for the confirmation of Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. But Vance has only been in the Senate since 2022 and is not noticeably popular. He—and therefore Trump—was unable to find the votes the wildly unqualified Gaetz needed for confirmation, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration. 

The next day, Gaetz began to advertise on Cameo, an app that allows patrons to commission a personalized video for fans, asking a minimum of $550.00 for a recording. Gaetz went from United States representative to Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general to making videos for Cameo in a little over a week. 

It is a truism in studying politics that it’s far more important to follow power than it is to follow people. Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C. 

Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning. And now he has proposed filling his administration with a number of highly unqualified figures who, knowing the only reason they have been elevated is that they are loyal to Trump, will go along with his worst instincts. With that baggage, it is not clear he will be able to cement enough power to bring his plans to life.

If power remains loose, it could get scooped up by cabinet officials, as it was during a similarly chaotic period in the 1920s. In that era, voters elected to the presidency former newspaperman and Republican backbencher Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised to return the country to “normalcy” after eight years of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the nation’s engagement in World War I. That election really was a landslide, with Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, winning more than 60% of the popular vote in 1920.

But Harding was badly out of his depth in the presidency and spent his time with cronies playing bridge and drinking upstairs at the White House—despite Prohibition—while corrupt members of his administration grabbed all they could. 

With such a void in the executive branch, power could have flowed to Congress. But after twenty years of opposing first Theodore Roosevelt, and then William Howard Taft, and then Woodrow Wilson, Congress had become adept at opposing presidents but had split into factions that made it unable to transition to using power, rather than opposing its use.

And so power in that era flowed to members of Harding’s Cabinet, primarily to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who put into place a fervently pro-business government that continued after Harding’s untimely death into the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, who made little effort to recover the power Harding had abandoned. After Hoover became president and their system fell to ruin in the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took their lost power and used it to create a new type of government. 

In this moment, Trump’s people are working hard to convince Americans that they have gathered up all the power in Washington, D.C., but that power is actually still sloshing around. Trump is trying to force through the Senate a number of unqualified and dangerous nominees for high-level positions, threatening Republican senators that if they don’t bow to him, Elon Musk will fund primary challengers, or suggesting he will push them into recess so he can appoint his nominees without their constitutionally-mandated advice and consent. 

But Trump and his people do not, in fact, have a mandate. Trump is old and weak, and power is up for grabs. It is possible that MAGA Republicans will, in the end, force Republican senators into their camp, permitting Trump and his cronies to do whatever they wish. 

It is also possible that Republican senators will themselves take back for Congress the power that has lately concentrated in presidents, check the most dangerous and unpopular of Trump’s plans, and begin the process of restoring the balance of the three branches of government.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mydaddywiki]

C. Everett Koop

Physique: Average Build Height: 6’ 1" (1.85 m)

Charles Everett Koop (October 14, 1916 – February 25, 2013) was an American pediatric surgeon and public health administrator who served as the 13th surgeon general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. According to the Associated Press, "Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name" due to his frequent public presence around the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Koop died on February 25, 2013, at the age of 96.

With his mustacheless beard, deep voice and grim expression, he looked like a Civil War admiral when in his epauleted and ribboned blue or white uniform denoting his leadership of the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. I had a thing for the guy back in the day as a kid watching his show called C. Everett Koop, M.D. for some reason. Looking back now, I realize why I love watching him as much as I did.

Koop was married nearly 70 years to his first wife until her death, having 4 children together. Koop is survived by his second wife, three children and eight grandchildren. Koop, called “Chick” (as in “Chicken Koop”) by his friends was by far the best known and most influential person to carry that title.

[itsawritblr]

The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care.

(WOW, the New York Times -- which a couple years ago had an ad about a qu**r girl who wished for a world in which J.K. Rowling wasn't the author of Harry Potter -- has published yet another opinion piece about trans, this one about the Cass Review. Personally, I think he's too lenient, but at least he's bringing attention to the review to Americans. )

(For those who can't read the NYT page, here's the text.)

Opinion, David Brooks, April 18, 2024.

Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.

Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”

This issue begins with a mystery. For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years, though the overall number remains very small. For reasons that are also not clear, adolescents who were assigned female at birth are driving this trend, whereas before the late 2000s, it was mostly adolescents who were assigned male at birth who sought these treatments.

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria. In her report, Cass is skeptical of broad generalizations in the absence of clear evidence; these are individual children and adolescents who take their own routes to who they are.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities. Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being. But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Unfortunately, some researchers who questioned the Dutch approach were viciously attacked. This year, Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London, published a review of studies looking at the impact of puberty blockers on brain development and concluded that “critical questions” about the therapy remain unanswered. She was immediately attacked. She recently told The Guardian, “I’ve been accused of being an anti-trans activist, and that now comes up on Google and is never going to go away.”

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.

The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.

Cass showed enormous courage in walking into this maelstrom. She did it in the face of practitioners who refused to cooperate and thus denied her information that could have helped inform her report. As an editorial in The BMJ puts it, “Despite encouragement from N.H.S. England,” the “necessary cooperation” was not forthcoming. “Professionals withholding data from a national inquiry seems hard to imagine, but it is what happened.”

Cass’s report does not contain even a hint of rancor, just a generous open-mindedness and empathy for all involved. Time and again in her report, she returns to the young people and the parents directly involved, on all sides of the issue. She clearly spent a lot of time meeting with them. She writes, “One of the great pleasures of the review has been getting to meet and talk to so many interesting people.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

She notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.” She does not issue a blanket, one-size-fits-all recommendation, but her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

You can agree or disagree with this or that part of the report, and maybe the evidence will look different in 10 years, but I ask you to examine the integrity with which Cass did her work in such a treacherous environment.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

Recently it’s been encouraging to see cases in which the evidence has won out. Many universities have acknowledged that the SAT is a better predictor of college success than high school grades and have reinstated it. Some corporations have come to understand that while diversity, equity and inclusion are essential goals, the current programs often empirically fail to serve those goals and need to be reformed. I’m hoping that Hilary Cass is modeling a kind of behavior that will be replicated across academia, in the other professions and across the body politic more generally and thus save us from spiraling into an epistemological doom loop.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris Geidner at Law Dork:

A federal judge in North Dakota issued an injunction on Monday blocking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from protecting any employees of any members of a nationwide Catholic association who are seeking time off or other accommodations under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act for an abortion or in vitro fertilization treatment.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor, a Trump appointee to the federal court in North Dakota, issued the religion-infused preliminary injunction to partially block enforcement of an EEOC rule implementing the 2022 law, along with related implementation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as to the Catholic Benefits Association and its members — current or future — nationwide. The order covers more than 8,000 employers — including thousands of churches — across the country. The PWFA was passed in December 2022 and is supposed to protect covered workers from discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” by, in part, requiring employers to provide employees with reasonable accommodations. The EEOC proposed its implementing rule for the PWFA in August 2023, stating in part that abortion and fertility treatment, including IVF, are covered by the law’s protections. That rule, which does not relate to insurance coverage, went into effect in June.

“It is a precarious time for people of religious faith in America,” Traynor declared in the introduction to his 21-page opinion, criticizing “the repeated illegal and unconstitutional administrative actions against one of the founding principles of our country, the free exercise of religion.” Ultimately, Traynor concluded that happened again here, finding that the CBA is likely to succeed in its challenge to the rule and related Title VII enforcement guidance under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Any appeal would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which only has one Democratic appointee among its 11 judges.

[...] Traynor sided with the Catholic employees — rejecting the EEOC’s arguments — on virtually all points, from standing to the underlying religious freedom claims to the scope of his eventual injunction. (Notably, Traynor gave little credit to the EEOC’s argument that “the Final Rule and Guidance acknowledge that employers may have RFRA defenses and commit to a fact-sensitive, case-by-case analysis.” Instead, he found that such an approach is not likely sufficient because the “burden of investigation and possible litigation” would remain.) The injunction is extremely broad, barring the EEOC from enforcing accommodations required under the PWFA rule relating to “abortion or infertility treatments,” along with guidance relating to “abortion, fertility treatments, or gender transition“ under Title VII, including recent workplace harassment guidance.

Trump-appointed judicial activist Daniel Traynor issued a nationwide injunction in Catholic Benefits Association v. Burrows that blocks the EEOC from protecting any employees of any Catholic Benefits Association members who are seeking time off or accommodations for abortion or IVF services.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against ASIA

Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.

In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin’s democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.

In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.

In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.

In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.

In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war, 2. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.

Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover.

In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India.

In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.

In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment.

US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange.

US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen.

In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.

In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.

Between 1964 and 1973, American pilots flew 580,000 attack sorties over Laos, an average of one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for almost a decade. By the time the last US bombs fell in April 1973, a total of 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance had rained down on this neutral country. To this day, Laos, a country of just 7 million people, retains the dubious accolade of being the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita.

From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos’s rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino.

Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed.

From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 source to 3.8 million.source Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians,source23 20,000–62,000 Laotians,4 and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward.

In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre.

In 1984, documents were released showing that Eisenhower authorized the use of atomic weapons on North Korea, should the communists renew the war in 1953. The 2,000 pages released show the high level of planning and the detail of discussion on possible use of these weapons, and Mr. Eisenhower’s interest in overcoming reluctance to use them.

In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued.

The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed. Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People’s republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day.

From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island’s population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans.

In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas. American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT. Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.

The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, “What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident.” Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and “jellyfish babies” (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll’s military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016). 

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.

In 1945 during the month-long Battle of Manila, the US in deciding whether to attack Manila (then under Japanese occupation) with ground troops, decided instead to use indiscriminate carpet-bombing, howitzers, and naval bombardment, killing an estimated 100,000 people. The casualty figures show the US’s regard for filipino civilian life: 1,010 Americans, 16,665 Japanese and 100,000 to 240,000 civilians were killed. Manila became, alongside Berlin, and Warsaw, one of the most devastated cities of WW2.

US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.

From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia.

In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces. 

In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising. 

In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, “kill everyone over the age of ten” and make the island “a howling wilderness.”

Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii’s native monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen’s desire “to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life” for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned.

[ausetkmt]

Ga. islanders vow to keep fighting change favoring rich buyers

DARIEN, Ga. - Descendants of enslaved people living on a Georgia island vowed to keep fighting after county commissioners voted to double the maximum size of homes allowed in their tiny enclave.

Residents fear the move will accelerate the decline of one of the South’s few surviving Gullah-Geechee communities.

An aspect of the ordinance that residents take issue with is the fact that it erases a clause about protecting the island’s indigenous history.

During public meetings leading up to the vote, the zoning board proposed changes to the ordinance of lowering the newly allowed home size and removing talk of golf courses being added to the island.

Black residents of the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island and their supporters packed a meeting of McIntosh County’s elected commissioners to oppose zoning changes that residents say favor wealthy buyers and will lead to tax increases that could pressure them to sell their land.

ISLAND’S HERITAGE

Gullah-Geechee communities like Hogg Hummock are scattered along the Southeast coast from North Carolina to Florida, where they have endured since their enslaved ancestors were freed by the Civil War. Scholars say these people long separated from the mainland retained much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.

Regardless, commissioners voted 3-2 to weaken zoning restrictions the county adopted nearly three decades ago with the stated intent to help Hogg Hummock’s 30 to 50 residents hold on to their land.

Yolanda Grovner, 54, of Atlanta said she has long planned to retire on land her father, an island native, owns in Hogg Hummock. She left the county courthouse Tuesday night wondering if that will ever happen.

“It’s going to be very, very difficult,” Grovner said. She added: “I think this is their way of pushing residents off the island.”

Hogg Hummock is one of just a few surviving communities in the South of people known as Gullah, or Geechee, in Georgia, whose ancestors worked island slave plantations.

MORE | Mom in Grovetown calls cops on U.S. energy secretary’s staff

Fights with the local government are nothing new to residents and landowners. Dozens successfully appealed staggering property tax hikes in 2012, and residents spent years fighting the county in federal court for basic services such as firefighting equipment and trash collection before county officials settled last year.

“We’re still fighting all the time,” said Maurice Bailey, a Hogg Hummock native whose mother, Cornelia Bailey, was a celebrated storyteller and one of Sapelo Island’s most prominent voices before her death in 2017. “They’re not going to stop. The people moving in don’t respect us as people. They love our food, they love our culture. But they don’t love us.”

Merden Hall, who asked not to be on camera, has lived on Sapelo his whole life. He says he’s worried about the sizes of homes now allowed on the island.

“I’m not comfortable with this. They approved the 3,000 square feet, that’s the only thing I disapprove of, because that’s going to raise property taxes,” he said.

Hogg Hummock’s population has been shrinking in recent decades, and some families have sold their land to outsiders who built vacation homes. New construction has caused tension over how large those homes can be.

Commissioners on Tuesday raised the maximum size of a home in Hogg Hummock to 3,000 square feet of total enclosed space. The previous limit was 1,400 square feet of heated and air-conditioned space.

Commissioner Davis Poole, who supported loosening the size restriction, said it would allow “a modest home enabling a whole family to stay under one roof.”

“The commissioners are not out to destroy the Gullah-Geechee culture or erase the history of Sapelo,” Poole said. “We’re not out to make more money for the county.”

Commission Chairman David Stevens, who said he’s been visiting Sapelo Island since the 1980s, blamed Hogg Hummock’s changing landscape on native owners who sold their land.

“I don’t need anybody to lecture me on the culture of Sapelo Island,” Stevens said, adding: “If you don’t want these outsiders, if you don’t want these new homes being built ... don’t sell your land.”

County officials have argued that size restrictions based on heated and cooled spaced proved impossible to enforce. County attorney Adam Poppell said more than a dozen homes in Hogg Hummock appeared to violate the limits, and in some cases homeowners refused to open their doors to inspectors.

Hogg Hummock landowner Richard Banks equated that to the county letting lawbreakers make the rules.

“If everybody wants to exceed the speed limit, should we increase the speed limits for all the speeders?” Banks said.

Hogg Hummock residents said they were blindsided when the county unveiled its proposed zoning changes on Aug. 16. Commissioners in July had approved sweeping zoning changes throughout McIntosh County, but had left Hogg Hummock alone.

Commissioner Roger Lotson, the only Black member of the county commission, voted against the changes and warned his colleagues that he fears they will end up back in court for rushing them.

Two attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center sat in the front row. Attorney Anjana Joshi said they had “due process and equal protection concerns” about the way the zoning ordinance was amended.

“In our view, this was not done correctly,” said Joshi, who added: “We’re just getting started.”

Located about 60 miles south of Savannah, Sapelo Island remains separated from the mainland and reachable only by boat. Since 1976, the state of Georgia has owned most of its 30 square miles of largely unspoiled wilderness. Hogg Hummock, also known as Hog Hammock, sits on less than a square mile.

Hogg Hummock earned a place in 1996 on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of the United States’ treasured historic sites. But for protections to preserve the community, residents depend on the local government in McIntosh County, where 65% of the 11,100 residents are white.

[walkingthroughthisworld]

Larry Taylor was born in 1942 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He grew up in a family and community that emphasized the importance of military service. His great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, his great-uncle in World War I and his father and uncles in World War II. 

Larry Taylor joined the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Upon graduation in June 1966, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, then joined the regular Army in August, volunteering as an armor officer. 

He joined the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Upon graduation in June 1966, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, then joined the regular Army in August, volunteering as an armor officer. After graduating from the U.S. Army Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Taylor quickly realized he was better suited to be a pilot than an armor officer. He had already obtained a fixed-wing pilot's license before joining the Army and thought that experience would make it easier to learn rotary-wing flying. 

After receiving permission to train as a helicopter pilot, he attended the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School at Fort Wolters, Texas, and then advanced helicopter training at Fort Rucker (renamed Fort Novosel in 2023), Alabama, where he qualified as an Army aviator in June 1967.

Taylor served in Vietnam from August 1967 to August 1968, flying some of the first Bell AH1-G Cobra attack helicopters in combat. Serving with D Troop (Air), 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division, Taylor flew over 2,000 combat missions in UH-1 and Cobra helicopters. He was engaged by enemy fire 340 times and was forced down five times. The U.S. Army awarded him at least 50 combat decorations, including the Silver Star, 43 Air Medals, a Bronze Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. He also received the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Bronze Star.

 Among his many harrowing operations, the most dangerous and frightening took place on June 18, 1968, when he rescued a four-man long range patrol team at significant risk to his own life. For his heroic actions that night, the Army awarded him the Silver Star, which President Joe Biden upgraded to the Medal of Honor in 2023. Taylor concluded his military service as a captain with the 2nd Armored Cavalry in West Germany. 

After his Army service, he operated a successful roofing and sheet metal company in Chattanooga and was involved with several veterans' organizations. He has also been a generous donor to charitable nonprofit organizations in the Chattanooga area. Taylor and his wife, Toni, reside in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.

(via Captain Larry L. Taylor | Medal of Honor Recipient | U.S. Army)

[mariacallous]

For almost 15 years, the sight of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban strutting into leaders’ summits in Brussels has been a constant of European Union politics. Leveraging his authoritarian grip on power in Hungary, Orban has pressured the EU into providing subsidies to patronage networks controlled by his Fidesz Party, while leading a populist onslaught against liberalism and the left. But even as Orban attracts fawning admiration from other anti-liberal populists in Europe and the United States, cracks are beginning to show in his own power base in Hungary.

The recent surge of infighting within Fidesz’s political machine has taken many observers in and outside Hungary by surprise. After the party’s initial massive election victory in 2010, the collapse of rival parties that had mismanaged the economy and become engulfed in scandal when in government provided Orban’s inner circle with the opportunity to seize control of state media, the central bank and appointments to all levels of the judiciary. Having secured complete control of the state, Orban and his Fidesz cronies used repressive tactics by the security services as well as aggressive disinformation to divide the opposition and intimidate business leaders and civil society networks.

The regime’s near-complete dominance of Hungarian-language media has enabled Orban as well as the party’s regional bosses to use a blend of anti-migrant xenophobia and hostility to LGBTQ rights to sustain a strong base of support in small towns and rural communities. Orban has been more careful in recent years when it comes to fueling irredentist hostility against Romania, Ukraine and Slovakia over territory lost to neighboring states after Hungary’s defeat in World War I. But the Fidesz machine still tries to present Orban as a protector of Hungarian minorities abroad to its right-wing domestic audience.

In part because of the divide and rule tactics used by Fidesz since the early 2010s, but also because they lack deep historical traditions and resilient structures, the Hungarian opposition has been paralyzed by squabbling among parties and movements as hostile to one another as they are to Fidesz. More recent efforts to construct a united front in the face of Orban’s authoritarianism have struggled to sustain the cohesion needed to keep supporters mobilized in the face of mounting state pressure.

Yet state capture, disinformation and virulent nationalism alone would not have been enough to enable the Fidesz machine to secure Orban’s lasting dominance. With Hungary’s accession to the EU in 2004, whoever was in power in the late 2000s was going to be able to take credit for the impact that huge flows of funding from Brussels had on infrastructure development and economic growth in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. For all the fierce populist rhetoric Orban directs against Brussels to court Trumpian nationalists in the U.S. and the far right in Europe, the extent to which Fidesz relies on the distribution of EU funds to sustain its dominance within Hungary has kept Orban from being too disruptive when it comes to European integration.

Though the European Commission’s concerns over the erosion of rule of law in Hungary remain a severe point of friction, Orban’s willingness to avoid escalation over other contentious issues—such as aid for Ukraine or environmental regulation—has made it difficult for the Hungarian opposition to take advantage of the tensions he has stoked with Brussels. The fact that Orban’s patronage network now reaches deep into the Hungarian banking sector and national oil company has also provided Fidesz with options beyond EU subsidies with which to shape economic conditions ahead of elections. In the face of Fidesz’s overwhelming strength and willingness to use security services to intimidate opponents, the inability of opposition parties to make any significant gains during the 2022 parliamentary elections seemed to bury any hopes of change in Hungary for the foreseeable future.

Yet even as Orban successfully cultivated enthusiasm for his project among the populist right in the U.S. and EU, tensions were building up within his own power structure that could prove a much greater threat to the survival of the Fidesz political machine than a cowed Hungarian opposition. After such a long record of dominance, many senior figures loyal to Orban had become complacent over the impact a wave of political scandals might have on the Hungarian public at a time when inflation and other economic pressures were generating frustration even among Fidesz’s core supporters.

With the shock resignation in early February of President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga over efforts within the government to cover up a child abuse scandal, tensions within Orban’s power structure have now burst into the open. In response, Peter Magyar—a senior figure within the Orban regime as well as Varga’s ex-husband—resigned from his positions at state-owned enterprises and founded a new political movement with the aim of dismantling a corrupt status quo. By early April, Magyar’s new opposition Tizsa Party was leading mass protests in Budapest and rapidly preparing a nationwide network designed to peel off elected officials and voters among Orban’s political base in smalltown Hungary.

The sudden defection of a figure like Magyar, who had long worked at the heart of the Fidesz political machine, is not just the result of a sudden discovery of moral scruples. As with many similar semi- or fully authoritarian regimes, the longer Orban has remained in office, the more entrenched various figures within his inner circle have become at the highest levels of power. For ambitious mid-40s careerists like Magyar, the grim prospect of waiting another decade for Orban’s inner circle—all 60-70 years old—to finally leave the scene was already fueling impatient frustration even before the current wave of scandals engulfed Fidesz.

Orban’s channeling of tens of millions of euros into populist think tanks and conferences designed to impress self-declared national conservatives in the U.S. and U.K. also generated the image of a leader so engaged in the Anglosphere’s culture wars that he had become detached from the everyday concerns of Hungarian politics. For an insider like Magyar, fed up with both waiting for a turn at the top and Orban’s obsession with his world historical role, the time seemed ripe to break away and establish a new political machine.

Deploying messaging and mobilization techniques eerily similar to those used by Orban’s team before it took power in 2010, Magyar has tried to knit together an electoral coalition made up of liberal-leaning voters who had always opposed the current government and a large swathe of Fidesz voters tired of the rampant cronyism at the heart of Orban’s patronage networks. But while Fidesz defectors like Magyar may eventually help to restore the rule of law and work more constructively in EU institutions, they are also likely to continue embracing the populist themes that propelled Orban to power. Moreover, in working to entice Fidesz regional bosses to switch allegiance to his new movement, Magyar will likely replicate the clientelist structures Orban has used to secure the loyalty of smalltown elites through the distribution of state and EU funds.

Magyar is also now the target of a full onslaught of attacks from media loyal to Orban, so there is no guarantee he can capitalize on his rise to prominence to make significant electoral gains in upcoming European Parliament and local elections, which his movement needs to survive. To prevent the fracturing of his own power base, Orban may also do his utmost to offer financial incentives and senior positions to bring Magyar and other defectors back into the Fidesz political machine. Though Magyar’s ambitions will remain focused on replacing Orban as prime minister, business networks worried about instability that a clash between the two might bring will also try to broker a negotiated transfer of power that avoids any deeper reforms.

Even if Magyar falters, the speed with which Fidesz’s internal tensions have turned into an external challenge to its political machine is an indication of how brittle Orban’s grip on power has become. Even the most dominant authoritarian leader will always face dilemmas when it comes to rewarding ambitious young talent without alienating older cronies whose loyalty is the glue that holds a clientelist system together. If Orban is eventually toppled, it should surprise no one if the figures who were once closest to him turn out to be the ruthless operators that finally take him down.

[simply-ivanka]

Who’s Afraid of Project 2025?

Democrats run against a think-tank paper that Trump disavows. Why?

Wall Street Journal

July 29, 2024

By The Editorial Board

Americans are learning more about Kamala Harris, as Democrats rush to anoint the Vice President’s candidacy after throwing President Biden overboard. Ms. Harris wasted no time saying she’s going to run hard against a policy paper that Donald Trump has disavowed—the supposedly nefarious agenda known as Project 2025. But who’s afraid of a think-tank white paper?

“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” Ms. Harris tweeted shortly after President Biden dropped out. She’s picking up this ball from Mr. Biden, and her campaign website claims that Project 2025 would “strip away our freedoms” and “abolish checks and balances.”

***

Sounds terrible, but is it? The 922-page document doesn’t lack for modesty, as a wish list of policy reforms that would touch every part of government from the Justice Department to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is led by the Heritage Foundation and melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups. The project is also assembling a Rolodex of those who might work in a Trump Administration.

Most of the Democratic panic-mongering has focused on the project’s aim to rein in the administrative state. That includes civil service reform that would make it easier to remove some government workers, and potentially revisiting the independent status of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission.

The latter isn’t going to happen, but getting firmer presidential control over the bureaucracy would improve accountability. The federal government has become so vast that Presidents have difficulty even knowing what is going on in the executive branch. Americans don’t want to be ruled by a permanent governing class that doesn’t answer to voters.

Some items on this menu are also standard conservative fare. The document calls for an 18% corporate tax rate (now 21%), describing that levy as “the most damaging tax” in the U.S. system that falls heavily on workers. A mountain of economic literature backs that up. The blueprint suggests tying more welfare programs with work; de-regulating health insurance markets; expanding Medicare Advantage plans that seniors like; ending sugar subsidies; revving up U.S. energy production. That all sounds good to us.

Democrats are suggesting the project would gut Social Security, though in fact it bows to Mr. Trump’s preference not to touch the retirement program, which is headed for bankruptcy without reform. No project can profess to care about the rising national debt, as Heritage does, without fixing a program that was 22% of the federal budget in 2023.

At times the paper takes no position. For example: The blueprint features competing essays on trade policy. This is a tacit admission that for all the GOP’s ideological confusion on economics, many conservatives still understand that Mr. Trump’s 10% tariff is a terrible idea.

As for the politics, Mr. Trump recently said online that he knew “nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” That may be true. The chance that Mr. Trump has read any of it is remote to nil, and he doesn’t want to be tied to anyone’s ideas since he prizes maximum ideological flexibility.

The document mentions abortion nearly 200 times, but Mr. Trump wants to neutralize that issue. The project’s chief sponsor, Heritage president Kevin Roberts, also gave opponents a sword when he boasted of “a second American revolution” that would be peaceful “if the left allows it to be.” This won’t help Mr. Trump with the swing voters he needs to win re-election.

By our lights the project’s cultural overtones are also too dark and the agenda gives too little spotlight to the economic freedom and strong national defense that defined the think tank’s influence on Ronald Reagan in 1980.

***

But the left’s campaign against Project 2025 is reaching absurd decibels. You’d think Mr. Trump is a political mastermind hiding the secret plans he’ll implement with an army of shock troops marching in lockstep. If his first term is any guide, and it is the best we have, Mr. Trump will govern as a make-it-up-as-he-goes tactician rather than a strategist with a coherent policy guide. He’ll dodge and weave based on the news cycle and often based on whoever talks to him last.

Not much of the Project 2025 agenda is likely to happen, even if Republicans take the House and Senate. Democrats will block legislation with a filibuster. The bureaucracy will leak with abandon and oppose even the most minor reforms to the civil service. The press will revert to full resistance mode, and Mr. Trump’s staff will trip over their own ambitions.

Democrats know this, which is why they fear Trump II less than they claim. They’re targeting Project 2025 to distract from their own failed and unpopular policies.

[usafphantom2]

China warns 'military spotters' who may go to prison for posting photos online

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 01/21/2024 - 22:32 in Military

In the era of open source intelligence, one of the main ways for Western experts to maintain control over China's armed forces is through the analysis of photos of new People's Liberation Army equipment published online by enthusiasts and amateur photographers.

The publication of photos of military ships or aircraft captured outside the ELP facilities or of commercial flights near sensitive areas has become a common vision in recent years, as China quickly modernized its forces. And "military fans" spread the word to the general population on social networking sites such as Weibo, with hundreds of millions of active users.

But not anymore.

The new Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian, with the model of a J-35 jet on the flight deck.

In a WeChat post in December titled: "This is a legal hobby, but you must be very careful," the Ministry of State Security of China said: "Some individual military enthusiasts seriously endanger national military security by illegally obtaining information about national defense and disclosing it on the Internet."

"Focusing on military airports, ports, national defense and military industrial units, they drove or picked up ferries or planes that pass through designated routes and photographed clandestinely with telezoom lenses or drones," said the post of the highly secret civil espionage agency.

Repeat offenders can be arrested for up to seven years, although "primary or occasional offenders" can only receive a warning, according to the agency, which oversees intelligence and counter-espionage both in China and abroad.

Commercial aircraft that took off from Pudong airport, flies over the Jiangnan shipyard.

The alert comes at a time when Chinese leaders are increasingly focusing on ensuring national security in a number of sectors, especially as tensions with the United States increase.

For example, the agency only launched its social media account at the beginning of this year - dedicated to warning citizens about the risks of exposing China's secrets to the outside world and calling on them to join their fight against espionage.

The case of the new aircraft carrier

According to the spy agency's post, the images posted online can show the progress of the construction of warships or aircraft, while revealing operational and technical details of Chinese military equipment. The post specifically mentioned the new aircraft carrier as an area where safety could be compromised.

China's newest aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has been a frequent target of amateur observers while being prepared at a shipyard in Shanghai. The Jiangnan shipyard, where the works are being carried out, is close to the flight routes of Pudong International Airport, Shanghai.

In November 2023, the Paris-based defense news site Naval News reported that Fujian had begun testing its advanced electromagnetic catapult system, based on videos published on Weibo, apparently taken from a Pudong passenger plane.

“Related images taken from passenger planes have become a common source to track the progress of several important programs (of the ELP Navy),” Naval News reported.

Fujian is certainly a remarkable program for the ELP Navy. The 80,000-ton warship, the largest military ship ever manufactured in China, is considered a rival of the newest U.S. Navy aircraft carriers of the Gerald R Ford class, one of the few other aircraft carriers to use electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft.

The photos of the alleged catapult test gave Western analysts an idea of how the ELP Navy is progressing in preparing the aircraft carrier for commissioning and active service.

Image of the Fujian catapult tests.

And these images are not the first of Fujian to appear online.

In April 2023, the state broadcaster CCTV announced in a report that in November 2021, Mr. Luo, a "quite renowned" military enthusiast, was sentenced to one year in prison after his arrest by the Shanghai National Security Department for photographing the Fujian aircraft carrier.

Luo used a drone capable of shooting long-range and high-resolution photos, the report said.

Recently, new images on Chinese social networks began to appear with means of censorship.

How the US deals with images

It is not only China that is suspicious of what amateur military observers can do to reveal confidential information.

U.S. law says that the President may designate certain military facilities and equipment as prohibited to image makers.

"It will be illegal to make any photograph, sketch, image, drawing, map or graphic representation of such vital military and naval facilities or equipment," unless due permission is obtained before, states the U.S. Code. Offenders can be arrested for up to one year in prison.

Near the famous Area 51 in Nevada it is possible to see signs that do not authorize photos and the use of drones.

Of course, the military can sometimes use open source intelligence to their advantage, said Carl Schuster, former director of operations of the Joint Intelligence Center of the U.S. Pacific Command.

After photos of a supposed model of China's next-generation stealth fighter appeared online in September, Schuster told CNN that “given the location of the aircraft carrier and the likelihood of operations on the deck being photographed or filmed, the PLA [Navy] can see value in inciting speculation about Fujian's future air wing,” just to give opponents something to think about.

Source: CNN

Tags: ChinaPLAN - People's Liberation Army Navy / People's Liberation Army Navyaircraft carrierspotters

Sharing

tweet

Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

Related news

HELICOPTERS

IMAGES: Updated Chinese AC313A helicopter is tested in adverse weather conditions

19/01/2024 - 21:18

MILITARY

China offered its Y-20 transport plane to Nigeria

13/01/2024 - 19:00

MILITARY

Russia wants to build new aircraft carrier as the Russian Navy expands capabilities

10/01/2024 - 20:16

TECHNOLOGY

China reveals wing technology that turns into flight for future aircraft

01/10/2024 - 10:00

COMMERCIAL

AVIC accelerates certification of the AG600M firefighting aircraft

09/01/2024 - 20:00

MILITARY

China releases new images of its next-generation aircraft carrier

04/01/2024 - 11:00