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My 90 Days With An Incredible Man

 

From July to September of 1972, I was honored to have had an internship with James A. Baker III. At that time, he was Harris County campaign manager for Richard M. Nixon's reelection campaign. I just finished reading his 693-page biography-The Man Who Ran Washington. After my time with Mr. Baker, he went on to do incredible things in life as follows:

1976: Campaign manager for President Gerald Ford's reelection campaign.

1980: Campaign manager for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign.

1981-1984: White House Chief of Staff under President Ronald Reagan.

1984: Campaign manager for President Reagan's reelection campaign. The president carried 48 of the 50 US states.

1985-1988: Secretary of the Treasury.

1988: Campaign manager for George Bush's presidential campaign.

1989-1991: Secretary of State. During his time in office the old Soviet Union collapsed. German was reunified. We had the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We had the invasion of Panama and the arrest of General Manuel Noriega.

1992: Campaign manager for President Bush's reelection campaign.

2000: Campaign strategist for President Bush II's election campaign.

     A most-amazing fact came out at the end of the book. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Mr. Baker cultivated a friendship with a rising Russian politician named Vladimir Putin. To this day, Mr. Baker and Putin have a close friendship. Mr. Baker said that if we had given Russia aid at the time of the break-up of the old Soviet Union, we would not have the problems with them now.

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Pre-Code--The Unmentionables

The Hitlers that Stalin Caught

Hitler's Secret Girlfriend

 

Good morning. We look at Texas’ big economic strengths — and a threat to its future.

Oil drilling rigs in West Odessa, Texas, last month.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

‘Texas can be the future’

You can make a case that the U.S. state with the brightest long-term economic future is Texas.

It’s a more affordable place to live than much of the Northeast or West Coast and still has powerful ways to draw new residents, including a thriving cultural scene, a diverse population and top research universities. Its elementary schools and middle schools perform well above average in reading and math (and notably ahead of California’s), according to the Urban Institute.

These strengths have helped the population of Texas to surge by more than 15 percent, or about four million people, over the past decade. In the past few months, two high-profile technology companies — Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise — have announced they are moving their headquarters to the state, and Tesla may soon follow. As California was in the 20th century, Texas today looks like a state that can embody and shape the country’s future.

But Texas also has a big problem, as the world has just witnessed. A useful way to think of it is the fossil fuel problem.

‘This’ll happen again’

Even with its growing tech and health care industries, the Texas economy revolves around oil and gas. And those fossil fuels have created two threats to the state’s economic future.

The first is climate change, which is making Texas a less pleasant place to live. The number of 95-degree days has spiked, and severe hurricanes have become more common, including Harvey, which brutalized Houston and the Gulf Coast in 2017. Paradoxically, climate change may also be weakening the jet stream, making bouts of frigid weather more common.

On the national level, Texas politicians have played a central role in preventing action to slow climate change. On the local level, leaders have failed to prepare for the new era of extreme weather — including leaving the electricity grid vulnerable to last week’s cold spell, which in turn left millions of Texans without power and water.

Many residents feel abandoned. In Copperas Cove, a city in central Texas, Daniel Peterson told my colleague Jack Healy on Saturday that he was utterly exasperated with the officials who had failed to restore power six days after it went out. He is planning to install a wood-burning stove, because, as he said, “This’ll happen again.”

In Dallas, Tumaini Criss spent the weekend worried that she would not be able to afford a new home for her and her three sons after a leaky pipe caved in her ceiling and destroyed appliances and furniture. “I don’t know where that leaves me,” she said.

In San Antonio, Juan Flores, a 73-year-old Navy veteran, told my colleague Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio that he was frustrated by the lack of communication from local officials. When Giulia interviewed Flores, he had not showered in days (and graciously warned her to stand back while interviewing him, saying, “I stink”). To get enough water to flush his toilet, he had walked to a bar. To heat his apartment, he was boiling water on his stove.

A couple trying to stay warm under sleeping bags after losing power this week in Austin.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The next energy industry

The second threat is related to climate change but different. It comes from the possibility that alternative energy sources like wind and solar power are becoming cheap enough to shrink Texas’ oil and gas industry.

“The cost advantage of solar and wind has become decisive, and promises to become vaster still,” Noah Smith, an economist and Texas native, wrote in his Substack newsletter. “I don’t want to see my home state become an economic backwater, shackled to the corpse of a dying fossil fuel age.”

Instead of investing adequately in new energy forms, though, many Texas politicians have tried to protect fossil fuels. Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott went so far as to blame wind and solar energy — falsely — for causing the blackouts. The main culprit was the failure of natural gas, as these charts by my colleague Veronica Penney show.

As Smith explains, the best hope for Texas’ energy industry is probably to embrace wind and solar power, not to scapegoat them. The state, after all, gets plenty of wind and sun. “Texas can be the future, instead of fighting the future,” Smith wrote.

The future isn’t the past

The larger economic story here is a common one. Companies — and places — that have succeeded for decades with one technology rarely welcome change. Kodak didn’t encourage digital photography, and neither The New York Times nor The Wall Street Journal created Craigslist.

Texas’ political and business leaders have made a lot of successful moves in recent decades. They have avoided some of the political sclerosis that has held back parts of the Northeast and California, like zoning restrictions that benefit aging homeowners at the expense of young families.

But Texas’ leaders are sacrificing the future for the present in a different way. They have helped their fossil fuel companies maximize short-term profits at the expense of the state’s long-term well-being. They have resisted regulation and investments that could have made their power grid more resilient to severe weather (as this Times story documents), and have tried to wish away climate change even as it forces Texans to endure more miserable weather.

In those ways, Texas is offering a different — and more worrisome — glimpse into the future.

What’s happening now:

With temperatures back to the 60s and 70s, Texans continued to grapple with a water crisis — and plumbers are swamped. After the storm, Texans needed food and comfort. They found it at the supermarket H-E-B. It’s like “the moral center of Texas,” one Austin resident said.

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In 1983 We Almost Had World War III

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Task Force Baum - Patton's Insane Rescue Mission 1945

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The Day The Soviets Nearly Captured Hitler

Pakistanis Do Not Trust US Vaccines Due To The CIA

 

PAKISTAN

Vaccination Games

Around the world, covid-skepticism has become a thing – leading to millions saying they will shun the vaccine.

In Pakistan that stance has a special twist.

Many Pakistanis are skeptical of vaccinations because of a fake inoculation program that the CIA used to collect DNA evidence to find al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden, whom American forces eventually tracked down in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. As Vox wrote, local leaders, including Pakistani Taliban militants, banned vaccinations in their regions.

In 2014, the White House announced that the CIA would not use a vaccination program again, wrote the Lancet, a top British medical journal.

Today, however, the skepticism lingers, creating challenges for Pakistani leaders looking to protect the world’s fifth-most populous country from COVID-19. They are under intense pressure because, while the pandemic has not hit Pakistan as hard as other countries, its health care system is still overloaded.

“We are full, we have patients waiting, we have families who are suffering, we have patients at home, sick patients at home, patients who are on oxygen, we just don’t have space in hospitals,” Dr. Nashwa Ahmad told CNN.

Pakistani leaders want to vaccinate more than 70 percent of their 220 million citizens against COVID-19 for free in the coming months. But almost half of Pakistanis don’t want to receive a coronavirus vaccine, a Gallup Poll found.

Many Pakistanis are also reluctant to take Western-made vaccinations. Along with the fear of CIA plots are other conspiracy theories that suggest vaccines were designed to sterilize Muslims or that Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is using COVID-19 to insert “chips” into people.

Some don’t want anyone to receive any other vaccines either. A gunman shot and killed a police officer escorting polio vaccinators in northern Pakistan last month, for example, reported Dawn, a Pakistani English-language news outlet.

Elites who want to receive vaccines, meanwhile, have the resources to skip lines and obtain them before everyone else, National Public Radio noted.

The country is importing vaccines from China as well as the British–Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to meet its demand, Reuters wrote. Its regulators plan to approve the Russian vaccine soon, Bloomberg added. It’s not yet clear if Pakistan will order vaccines from India, a regional rival that produces 60 percent of the world’s vaccine supply, the BBC reported.

Still, thousands of Pakistanis have volunteered to participate in vaccine trials that are preceding a vaccine rollout slated for March. “I was aware of people talking about conspiracies, about some chip being inserted into the body, about birth control,” an unnamed Pakistani told the Washington Post. “Some in my family told me not to do it, but I didn’t care.”

His courage might save the lives of others someday.

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The Capitol Building Rioters Could Have Captured The Black Bag Witht The Codes To Launch All US Nuclear weapons!!??

 Last night I watched a video of Mike Pence fleeing the Capitol Building rioters. He was followed by an entourage including one man carrying the black bag with all the codes to launch nuclear weapons. Imagine what could have happened if the rioters had captured this black bag!!!??

I Got My First Vaccine For Covid-19 Yesterday

 

I got my first Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19  yesterday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I felt a little queasy afterwards. I had weird urges for food when I got home. Now my arm is sore. I go back on 5 March for my second shot. By the end of March, I will return to an almost human life.

Lawsuit Saves Trump White House Records

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Poland And The Holocaust

 

POLAND

Historicity’s Folly

A Polish court ruled against two renowned Holocaust researchers Tuesday in a case that could set an important precedent regarding independent research of the Holocaust in Poland, the Associated Press reported.

Judges ordered scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski to formally apologize to 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, who said her deceased uncle had been slandered in a historical work.

Leszczynska’s uncle, Edward Malinowski, was a Polish hero who had saved Jews, the family said. The researchers briefly mentioned Malinowski in their work, writing that had robbed a Jewish woman during World War II and was complicit in the death of 18 Jews in 1943, when Poland was under German occupation. He was acquitted by a court in Poland in 1950 of involvement in the deaths.

The case has been monitored closely internationally as it comes amid a broader attempt by Poland’s conservative government to whitewash Polish involvement in the Holocaust, say critics: In 2018, the ruling Law and Justice Party tried to criminalize falsely blaming Poland for Holocaust crimes but squashed the law after it sparked a diplomatic dispute with Israel.

Engelking and Grabowski criticized the ruling as an attempt to discredit their overall findings and discourage other researchers investigating Polish involvement in the Holocaust. Engelking said she plans to appeal the ruling.

Following Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939, Poland’s population was subjected to mass murder and slave labor. About three million Jews and more than two million Christian Poles were murdered.

Poland’s conservative authorities don’t deny that some Poles harmed Jews but they believe the focus on Polish wrongdoing obscures the fact that most of these killings occurred under German orders and terror even as some pogroms continued after Nazi Germany’s defeat, historians say.

The Partridge Family Pilot w/ Original Commercials

Mira Furlin-The Sad Loss Of A Great Actor

 

You have loving memories of your time in Croatia. It is a beautiful country that I would like to see one day. A bright Croatian lady moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to escape the civil war associated with the break-up of Yugoslavia. Her name was Mira Furlin. Here is her story:

 

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001245/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

         I lived in L.A. in the late 1980s. I got to know a lot of people in the entertainment business. To get hired as an actor is tough business. You first have to qualify for a Screen Actor's Guild card (the union for the entertainment industry). Then one must face the harsh reality that only 5% of the actors find some kind of work. Only 2% of the actors really make a living at acting.

        Mira "hit the ground running" when she arrived here. In 1993, she landed a recurring role in the series Babylon-5. It ran for five years. To this day, it is a cult classic for science fiction fans like me. She went on to have a long and full career as an actor. She never was a super-star. But, she earned a good living. She was loved by her fans.

    I got the sad news that Mira died at the end of 2020 at age 65. It was not a Covid-19 death. It was a freak happening. She and her husband live in the Hollywood Hills. It can get hot there. Mosquitos come out. A mosquito bit her. She got infected with the West Nile Virus. Most of us would have a strong immune system that would carry us through this illness. Elena's medical opinion was that she did not have a strong immune system. Life is always unfair. She survived a violent and deadly civil war only to die due to a mosquito.

After A $1 Trillion US Investment, Iraq Is A Basket Case

 

IRAQ

A Government of Ghosts

Sixteen years ago, after the US had occupied Iraq for more than two years, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian painted a picture of lawlessness in the country’s capital of Baghdad.

“Two and a half years of bloodshed have convinced the outside world that Baghdad is not so much a city as an event, a maelstrom of violence,” it wrote. “The ferocity and frequency of bombings and shootings have turned Iraq’s capital into a maze of military checkpoints, concrete blast walls and razor wire.”

Unfortunately, a lot has not changed.

Women don’t drive saying that since men are kidnapped regularly, what chance then do they have. People who pray going outside because of their fear of bombs find themselves in a constant cycle of prayer. And some people are just thankful when there is only one bomb a week, saying “it’s nice.”

These folks are the lucky ones.

Iraqi party planner Arshad Haibti al-Fakhry was at his Ladies Night event at the Ishtar Hotel in Baghdad on Nov. 20 when unidentified men in Iraqi security force uniforms barged in and abducted him, a friend and 10 others.

As the Washington Post wrote, the men released the 10 partygoers almost immediately. They released al-Fakhry’s friend, the nephew of a government minister. But the party planner has not been seen since. His family and friends still are not sure who is holding him, or where.

Al-Fakhry’s story illustrates the lawlessness that has taken root in Iraq in the almost 18 years since the US invaded the country.

For example, armed groups abducted and sometimes tortured more than 100 people during anti-government protests in 2019, Al Jazeera reported. Authorities have not prosecuted anyone for these crimes.

This summer, kidnappers seized a German curator off the street before she was rescued, Euronews wrote with reporting from the Associated Press. At around the same time, two gunmen shot and killed Hisham al-Hashimi, a security expert who often discussed armed groups in the media, in Baghdad, reported the BBC.

The disappearances don’t only affect dissidents, intellectuals or other prominent figures.

Islamic State militants kidnapped eight people in eastern Iraq recently. The extremists erected a fake checkpoint on a main road, taking whoever was unlucky enough to fall into their trap, Xinhua, China’s state media outlet, wrote. Iraqi forces, with the help of the US and Iran, have largely defeated much of the Islamic State in recent years. Even so, some fighters still roam near the Iranian border.

Even more extreme violence still occurs in Iraq, too, years after widescale fighting has ended.

Suicide bombers killed at least 32 people and injured 100 more at a Baghdad market recently, according to the United Nations. The Islamic State claimed responsibility. But the government may execute hundreds of people now in prison in retaliation.

It’s an endless cycle of violence. And unfortunately, some say rightly that it’s hard to stop such cycles when they’ve taken hold – and become entrenched.

Sarmad Riyadh, a 35-year old antique dealer, saw this firsthand 16 years ago.

“If the Americans left tomorrow, I would close my shop immediately,” he told the Mail & Guardian back then. “No one wants his country to be occupied but in Iraq, we have no security. No one is in charge…We have a government of ghosts.”

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A Vaccination Passport

 

Vaccination passports

Governments and the travel industry are seriously looking into developing vaccine passports, which would securely prove that a person has been inoculated, my colleague Tariro Mzezewa reports.

President Biden recently asked the government to “assess the feasibility” of producing a digital document to confirm vaccination, while the Danish government said yesterday that it would introduce a digital vaccination passport in the next few months. Some airlines are moving even more quickly. Etihad Airways and Emirates said that in a few weeks they would begin using a digital travel pass that would provide documentation that passengers had been vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus.

The challenge is creating a universal document or app that would protect users’ privacy and would be available to all, not just the wealthy or those with smartphones.

IBM has been developing its own “digital health pass,” built on blockchain technology, that can use temperature checks, test results and vaccine status to monitor people seeking access to sports stadiums, airplanes or workplaces. The World Economic Forum and a Swiss nonprofit group have been testing a digital health passport called CommonPass that would generate a QR code to show the authorities.

The concept of a vaccine passport isn’t really new. For decades, travelers to some countries have had to show proof of vaccination against yellow fever, rubella and cholera, among other diseases. And in the U.S. in the 1880s, in response to smallpox outbreaks, some public schools began requiring students and teachers to show vaccination cards.