Notes and Essays -- John Brown

video   Note: The Putin image that appeared on LinkedIn when I posted it there was not part of my original submission. The above was the original image in the submission, which did not appear on LinkedIn (which evidently had replaced it with an image of V. Putin). Russian appears to be the lingua franca of this Behind  Bars institution, so far as I could tell, despite the Ukrainian national colors on its walls. jb: Comments to the video are quite informative. 

"The battlefield remains what it was," retired Col. Steve Ganyard said.  By Meredith Deliso, abc NEWS , June 30, 2023, 6:34 AM Excerpt: Weeks into Ukraine's counteroffensive,  political turmoil in Russia  has raised new questions in the war and what it means for Vladimir Putin's invasion. In a fleeting but shocking show of rebellion against Russia's top military brass, forces with the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group left the front line in Ukraine and  claimed control  of military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian city near the Ukrainian border, late last week. They then  marched toward Moscow  before the mercenary leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ordered them to halt on Saturday and return to their field camps in Ukraine, saying he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood. Members of the Wagner Group military company sit atop of a tank on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area at the headquarters of t...

The U.S. government’s taxation power funded its Western Indian wars. The Monroe Doctrine discouraged Spanish and British aid to Native Americans.  image from article:  ‘La Salle Meets a War Party of Cenis Indians on a Texas Prairie. April 25, 1686’ (1848) by George Catlin.   PHOTO:  HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES By Kathleen DuVal, The Wall Street Journal , June 30, 2023 11:29 am ET For more than a generation, historians have been researching and writing American Indian history and showing how to incorporate it into U.S. history. The title of a 2015 collection of academic essays explains “Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians.” And yet most U.S. history teachers do teach their subject without much American Indian history. Most states’ social-studies curricula include American Indians only in the pre-1900 period—and then mostly as generalized objects of U.S. colonization and westward migration. New visions of U.S. history, such as the 1619 P...

The ‘Grand Union’ flag raised in Cambridge, Mass., in 1776.   PHOTO:  GRANGER   The Declaration of Independence marked America’s rejection of England’s hegemony, even while the new nation claimed ideals that were born in London. By Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal , June 30, 2023 11:41 am ET The youth of the American republic is one of its oldest traditions. Its unique origins will always make it younger than any other nation. Yet the United States is also the world’s oldest democracy. Britain in the time of George III was a liberal monarchy, but Britain democratized only by degrees in the 19th century. France was neither liberal nor democratic before the revolution of 1789, and the French are now on their fifth republic. The American ideal of democratic self-governance looks ever more exceptional as it creaks toward its 250th birthday. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream By Peter Moore Farrar, Straus and Giroux 592 pages...

Washington asked Kyiv not to do anything that would either try to influence the outcome of events or take immediate advantage of the chaos, according to American officials. image from article:  The Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin leaving the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don last week.  Credit...  Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters By Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and Anton Troianovski Reporting from Washington and Berlin, The New York Times , June 29, 2023 Updated 4:17 p.m. ET The Biden administration asked Ukrainian officials not to conduct covert attacks inside Russia as the Wagner group rebellion was underway and advised them not to do anything that would influence the outcome of events or take advantage of the chaos, according to American officials.  At the time of the American outreach to Ukraine, U.S. officials did not know precisely what Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, had planned, according to U.S. officials brie...

By the Editorial Board, The Washington Post , June 29, 2023 at 2:51 p.m. EDT  image (not from article) from The Supreme Court on Thursday all but banned affirmative action at universities that accept federal funding, abandoning a half-century experiment in promoting campus diversity. The decision gutted 45 years of precedent without acknowledging that it was doing so. The ruling will not — and should not — end universities’ efforts to build student bodies that reflect the country, nor will it conclude the legal wrangling over such efforts. Rather, it is an invitation for potentially endless further litigation about whether admissions offices are following the rules the court has set down. Facing this prospect, universities will seek alternative admissions strategies. They have some options. Thursday’s decision leaves little hope that any race-conscious admissions policy could survive court scrutiny. Invoking Brown v. Board of Education , Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared ...

By the Editorial Board, The Washington Post , June 28, 2023 at 5:52 p.m. EDT   image from article: Yevgeniy Prigozhin near St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 9, 2016. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP) For 18 months, Russia has been sliding deeper into totalitarian rule, including  draconian laws  pushed by President Vladimir Putin that make it criminal to question  the war against Ukraine  — or even call it a “war,” rather than his preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” Last weekend, the mercenary kingpin Yevgeniy Prigozhin did something far more serious than that. He led  an armed mutiny  against the Russian state. His fighters shot down helicopters and a plane, killing the airmen aboard, steered armor toward Moscow, and Mr. Prigozhin declared that Mr. Putin’s war aims are false. Those actions would seem to easily fit the crime of “inciting an armed uprising,” which under Russian law is  punishable by 12 to 20 years in prison . So what h...