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GELFAND’S WORLD - The Labor Day weekend offers a complexity of competing wants and needs: A lazy backyard barbeque, marching for worker solidarity, the traditional start of the political season, and college football. In keeping with the lazy part, I'm going to avoid narrowing down the focus and take note of several trends. And only some of them are ominous. One is positively positive.
The Arlington story has legs
Who'd have thought it? The Trumpies pulled off their stunt, even going so far as to criticize Biden and Harris for failing to show up and responding to legitimate criticism with the traditional mix of lies and doubling down -- You know, the claim that a US Army representative, by getting in the way of an illegal political stunt in the graveyard, was suffering some sort of mental problem.
But then the story got passed around and claim-tested and miracle of miracles, the Army stood up for its principles (more or less) and talked back to the Trump representatives.
The overall result was that serious media attention has been focused on what actually happened. We now know that it was a partisan political stunt whose full intent was to lie about some fancied failure on the part of Biden and Harris -- rather than the Pravda version originally perpetrated by the Trump campaign.
If anyone wants a summary of the facts, including Trump's role in creating the problem, you can read them here.
And finally, and enough to extend this tiny story to 5 paragraphs, we have the most recent explanation by Donald Trump himself for the act of desecration of military graves. Guess what? Trump denies any personal responsibility. He suggests that the blame may lie with the family of the dead soldier, and that he himself doesn't know the actual rules, and so forth. You know, he wasn't there that day, and even if he was, he didn't pull the trigger, and even if he did pull the trigger, it was in self-defense, and even if it wasn't in self-defense the guy had it coming. The interesting part of this story is like Sherlock Holmes' interest in the dog which did not bark: The traditional defenders of Trump have been pretty quiet. J.D. Vance took a little trial shot where he told Harris to Go to Hell, but it doesn't seem to have elevated him in the esteem of the Trump universe.
Is Russian military might really might-not? Ukraine continues to survive
Just over two and a half years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The western world, grown up on the threat of a Soviet invasion of West Germany, wondered whether Ukraine would hold out for even a month, considering that the Russian intent was to roll into a defenseless country without a president (who was expected either to flee to Switzerland or be killed by one of the Russian hit squads). The Ukrainian president, in one of the better lines of our recent history, told the press and western governments that he needed "ammunition, not a ride." It was a bit of political genius that Zelensky manages to pull routinely.
The western world, and a substantial part of the American people, seem to forget that Ukraine is the cutting edge of the defense of freedom and national independence in today's civilized world. Luckily, there are more who have not forgotten, and continue to push for support and armaments going there.
But there is a different lesson that is increasingly being drawn from the current situation. Back when there was a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the armed forces of the USSR were considered to be either the best or the second best in the world. Even in the recent days of the Russian Federation going back to 2022, there was a lot of talk that the Russian army was probably the second best. There were a few observers and critics who pointed out that corruption would have a detrimental effect on Russia's ability to engage in warfare, but even those who took these remarks seriously would never have seen Russia as a paper tiger.
But the current view, if I can abstract it from the varied voices at the Lawyers Guns & Money blog and at DailyKos, is that any of the big time NATO countries -- France, Poland, the UK -- would wipe the floor with the Russian army. It is true that the Russians can put a lot of soldiers into the field, but against a smaller country without the industrial might of France or the UK, the Russians have been flailing.
And this leads to this quiet little question: Has the NATO alliance been overbuilding, at least since the dissolution of the USSR, in the attempt to defend against an invasion that will never be feasible? Put it this way: I have a small collection of books that were written in the 1970s and '80s by authors such as Edward Luttwak and Jerry Pournelle, back when there was a battle-hardened USSR, the threat of nuclear war continued to exist, and leaders prepared for a communist attack through East Germany or North Korea, with armies of hundreds of thousands of well-trained troops. Not only that, but American, English, and Russian submarines played tag throughout the North Atlantic and Western Pacific oceans. The books, and the essays within them, seem to come from a different world when you leaf through them nowadays.
So we have the slightly contradictory thoughts that Russia is an economically poor, thinly stretched paper tiger, but at the same time, the Ukrainian battle for freedom and independence is not yet a sure thing. They continue to need our help.
And that leads to the last and strangest observation. The once-red-baiting Republican Party has become the party of appeasement to Russian aggression. Of course, this is due to their cult-like obsession with obedience to Donald Trump, who has this weird obsession with being subservient to Vladimir Putin, and who can explain how that came about other than Donald himself? A Harris victory two months from now will be the clearest signal to Ukraine and the NATO alliance that the U.S. will continue to be their leader.
Historical mistakes to undo
In a previous column, I suggested that we not only need to replace the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, we should also consider the bad decisions that should be undone (Citizens United, Dobbs, write your own list). That conclusion holds true for things other than court decisions, such as historically bad legislation.
Right near the top of that list is the labor legislation that makes it harder than necessary to form a union and get government recognition of your bargaining rights. We might think carefully about allowing secondary boycotts.
The obligate conclusion is that there should be a complete rewrite of labor law, and in particular the bad stuff that came out in the late 1940s (and in the face of a Truman veto). We can hope that Harris will carry on the pro-labor and pro-union philosophy shown by President Biden.
Global warming effects continue to expand and extend
The Portuguese Bend section of the Palos Verdes coast continues to move, and a whole lot of expensive houses continue to break under the stress of land movement and cracks in the ground. The television news runs a PV story nearly every night now. The latest development is that the electric company has cut off electricity. Previously, the gas company had shut off the gas.
The authorities attribute the ever-increasing land movement to the effects of last season's rainfall. It's not illogical to point out that global warming has played a role in that increase, although purists will of course point out that no one event can be positively attributed to climate change. But when there is an unprecedented amount of rain which is correlated with oceanic conditions, all of us naive observers can begin to add things up. Perhaps the landslide was just something that would have happened anyway, but maybe not.
For the residents of the area, this is a disaster. Many or most are not covered by insurance, so banks are going to be stuck with unpaid mortgages and people who have lived there for decades will lose the equity they had built up. The local government has suddenly lost a substantial part of its tax base, and it is also stuck with cleanup costs and road repairs.
It's as if the area had suffered a total loss due to a brush fire, and nobody had fire insurance.
And what has happened locally doesn't compare with the recurring losses in Florida and the Gulf Coast due to increasing hurricane violence.
A not-so-whimsical thought about something called liquid metal batteries
The problem with solar power has always been that you can't just turn the sunlight on and off. There are defined hours of sunlight, and even then, you sometimes suffer the effects of clouds and rain. So, the issue has been to develop some method of storing energy in a way that you can make use of it when you need it.
Coal, oil, and natural gas can be used to liberate energy by burning. The oxygen is always available from the air, and the fossil fuels are available in high quantities at any time of the day or night. The fact that our use of such fuels is damaging the planetary climate has come to our attention, and we need to do something about it.
A few years ago, at a college reunion, I heard a talk (by Professor Sadoway) about a developing technology called liquid metal batteries. You can see an early article about it here. The idea is that inexpensive, abundant metals and salts can be used to make large storage batteries. You mix a couple of metals and a salt, heat briefly, and you have an operating storage battery. The technology continues to develop and should be commercially successful soon enough.
Note: I do not own any stock in any of the companies currently trying to take this technology to the market. I suspect that the City of Los Angeles, as part of its Clean Olympics approach, might try installing a solar electric farm which uses the new battery technology. Just one thought on a day when we mix our frustrating labor history with hopeful thoughts for the future.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
