Robin's Room

Week beginning February 26 2025

Rebecca Wilson Georgian Feminists Ten 18th Century Women Ahead of their Time Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History, February 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

The introduction to Georgian Feminists is an impressive weaving together of the underlying philosophy and social context which impacted the individual lives of the ten women who feature in this book. Rebecca Wilson has adopted an accessible style without neglecting a scholarly approach to ensuring that the women’s stories are seen as the outcome of the ideological foundations impacting the period. Wilson frames the women’s lives and their rebellion in the society that depicted them as inferior, worthy of little respect or economic independence and the chattels on whom men might rely, but unworthy of credit or even acknowledgement. She returns to this approach throughout the book, making it a worthy intellectual endeavour as well as promoting easily absorbed information.

The ten women, some well-known, others about whom little has been recorded are well chosen. Sarah Pennington is followed by more familiar figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Fry and Ada Lovelace. Dido Elizabeth Belle, Hester Stanhope, Mary Fildes, Ann Lister, and Mary Anning round out the group so that the themes that might be familiar from other authorities and Wilson’s work on familiar characters can be applied readily to new stories and actors. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Following the book review: Cindy Lou; American politics – Bob McMullan – USAID, Joyce Vance- being in community, Heather Cox Richardson – sea change; in American and global history; Kamala Harris, Atlantic Daily – Donald Trump and Elon Musk – free speech; and Australian politics – international, national and ACT local.

Cindy Lou at Courgette

This time I took note of the menu, and the details are worth recording for this wonderful restaurant which is (obviously) one of my favourites in Canberra.

The sourdough bread rolls, warmed and served with smoked cultured butter are always a delightful start to the meal. On this occasion I had my warm roll with the oysters. These are served beautifully plain, accompanied only by lemon and a sweetly sharp vinegar.

Entrees that we often choose are the Meredith goats cheese cloud with tomatoes, avocado ash brioche and micro basil; and the Atlantic salmon tartare with popcorn prawns (on this occasion the chef added many more to the dish which was ordered as a main), baby capers, cukes and a brandy Rose Marie sauce. Favourite main dishes are the White Pyrenees lamb cutlets and rump with hummus, Persian fetta, salt baked carrots, and beetroot vingerette; the market fish (John Dory and a huge prawn on both recent occasions), baby spinach, marinated vegetables, basils pesto and aloili. The desserts are beautifully presented and have been accompanied by candles for the several birthdays we have celebrated. Choices have been white chocolate cheesecake, burnt butter crumb, spring berries, lemon balm and chocolate sorbet; Kensington mango semi-freddo, pistachio biscuit, coconut and raspberry gel, black berries; and Cherry chocolate bon bon, yoghurt sorbet, chocolate soil, meringue and cherry compote. Images of the meals described above appeared in last week’s blog.

American Politics

Bob McMullan

USAID

Too many commentators are looking at the administrative changes Donald trump is making at USAID rather than focusing on the tragic human consequences of the underlying policy changes.

I don’t agree with the decision of the Trump administration to abolish the independent international aid agency, USAID, and fold its remaining activities into the State department.

It undervalues the skills required to administer aid programs efficiently and effectively.

However, Trump’s initiative is a conventional conservative government policy. It was implemented by Stephen Harper in Canada and has subsequently been adopted by New Zealand, the UK and, of course, by Tony Abbott in Australia.

I think it is a stupid conservative triumph of prejudice over good governance.

But it is essentially a bureaucratic fight. It is perfectly possible to run a sound aid program in a combined foreign policy and aid department. If the funding and the will is there, good results can be delivered.

The real crisis with what is happening to USAID relates the drastic changes to its funding and personnel.

Of course, I expected Donald Trump to cut the US aid program. Such an essentially narcissistic man would always find it difficult to understand the humanitarian roots of the aid program which has been supported by every US president since Truman. It is also unlikely that the subtle diplomatic and strategic benefits of a modestly generous aid program such as that of the United States before Trump would appeal to the transactional character of the current US president.

Any new government is entitled to review programs and expenditures to ensure that they are consistent with the governments priorities and values.

But to suspend lifesaving expenditures while the review is conducted is entirely unacceptable and that should be apparent to anyone with a modicum of compassion.

It may make business sense to stop everything and rebuild from the ground up, but to do so in government in this indiscriminate manner will inevitably mean that the poorest and neediest will suffer while the review is undertaken.

It is the casual cruelty of this approach which I find difficult to stomach.

It is far too early to gain a comprehensive assessment of the damage to lives, health and economic opportunities which will flow from the disastrous cuts already outlined.

But even the early signs are sufficient to justify genuine alarm at the damage which the changes have already made and will continue to make.

The Washington Post reports that” …in the besieged capital (of Sudan) more than two thirds of soup kitchens have closed in the last week.” And further that “It means that over eight million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation.”

And this is only one of the dozens of countries which will be losing life-saving assistance.

In Mali, a school that served 500 students was told to suspend classes.

Clean water, food, health, education, employment are all in jeopardy.

It is difficult to credit that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, can take actions which will have such a devastating impact on the world’s poorest people.

The cuts will have consequences for Australia’s region as well.

There are already reports of a halt to mine clearance in Laos, a legacy of US carpet-bombing of the country as an ancillary to their war in Vietnam. I have seen the consequences of such bombs and mines on people form the elderly to babies. How anyone could think it is good policy to stop funding the removal of unexploded ordinance for which your country is directly responsible is beyond my comprehension.

The reported death of a woman from Myanmar who was in the border camp and died when her essential oxygen supply was unavailable is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

While the USA is not a major aid provider in the Pacific its contribution is important in such an aid dependent region.

It is too early to assess the consequences of the budget cuts for the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank which are so important to countries in our wider region, from India and Pakistan to Samoa and Kiribati. What we know is, it can’t be good for the funding of either institution or the other multilateral institutions which play such an important role in our region.

We may never know the total human cost of this inhuman approach to governance.

But we can be sure is that the poorest and neediest will suffer the most.

As noted earlier there are profound strategic and foreign policy implications of this abandonment of US responsibility in international development issues. These are important but we need to focus also on the profound human consequences of the proposed cuts to USAID.

This would have been a terrific event.

On Being in Community Joyce Vance

Feb 20, 2025

Sunday night, I mentioned that Stacey Abrams and I would be speaking together at a Fair Fight event today. We just finished up, and for those of you who weren’t there—the audience was 1500 strong and from all across the country, including Alaska—it was exhilarating. We were honest about the challenges the country faces and our fears, but it was also a night to discuss the reasons for us to have hope and optimism. Most of all, it’s a reminder to me that all across the country, there are people who care deeply about what is happening to our democracy and want to make sure we hold onto it. We have no intention of going quietly.

For those of you who weren’t able to join us, our chat will be on Fair Fight’s YouTube channel in the next day or two. I’ll post a link when it’s ready.

Stacey and I share the belief that the way we get through Trump 2.0 is together. We don’t get through it by pretending it isn’t happening or hoping it will go away. It’s time. Time for us to get up and be loud about our opposition to Trump’s view of America. In Stacey’s words, “resist, persist, and insist.”

What can you do? Show up at school board meetings, work on a community garden, read to school kids, protest at your state capitol, let your elected representatives hear your voice, work on a campaign, volunteer as a poll worker, and run for office. Whatever it is that matters to you the most, do your research about how to have an impact and get to work. Nothing beats back fear and anxiety over our future like exercising the muscle of democracy.

Today, Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social. Apparently, it’s no longer enough to be a dictator on day one. Now, he wants to be king. It’s no surprise.

Donald Trump’s success at forever changing our democracy is not inevitable. He wants you to think it is, but it’s not. Already, he is starting to sink in the polls. Reuters reports that Trump’s “approval rating has ticked slightly lower in recent days as more Americans worried about the direction of the U.S. economy.” It’s a small, measured decline from an approval rating of 47% in January to 44% today, but it’s a start.

The hard reality is that we are not going to get a quick fix. We will not wake up one morning this month and find that Trumpism is over. And we can’t throw our hands up in the air in disgust and walk away in the absence of instant success. The fight for democracy is going to be long and hard and slow, and there are going to be setbacks along the way. Our job is to commit to the fight, even and especially when things look bleak. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

As a community, we can work all the angles of democracy. Some of us will focus on our city councils and school boards, others on state government, and some on the White House, Congress, and the courts. Some of us will work to support the free press and other democratic institutions. We will keep up the fight for fairness and justice at federal, state, and local levels of government. We will continue to demand that our civil rights be protected. Democracy occupies a lot of space, not all of it on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Make some of it yours. Build a community around you that supports democracy.

It’s been a long and serious few weeks, so I’ll leave you with this picture of the friends who greet me every morning when I walk outside. Don’t forget to surround yourself with a supportive community.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> Unsubscribe

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.” Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.“

And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.—Notes:https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4064113/opening-remarks-by-secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-at-ukraine-defense-contact/https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4066734/secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-press-conference-following-nato-ministers-of/https://rationalpolicy.com/2025/02/13/on-the-russian-navy/https://apnews.com/article/us-russia-rubio-lavrov-ukraine-saudi-arabia-94bc4de5ecc86922d6ea4376e38f1cfd https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/preambleMatt Apuzzo, Maggie Haberman, and Matthew Rosenberg, “Trump Told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation,” The New York Times, May 19, 2017.https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html https://www.axios.com/2025/01/13/biden-foreign-policy-speech

Thursday, February 20, 2025

David A. Graham, Staff Writer *

Donald Trump and Elon Musk never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own…

It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t.

They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own. * Slightly edited.

Australian Politics -international, national and ACT stories

Australia joins world leaders in backing Ukraine after Trump blast

The New Daily
Feb 20, 2025, updated Feb 20, 2025

Australia has joined other Western leaders in standing by Ukraine after US President Donald Trump’s astonishing attack on the war-torn nation’s leader.

Trump slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator without elections” and falsely claimed Kyiv had “started” the Russian war.

He also incorrectly stated Zelensky had approval ratings of only 4 per cent.

Asked on Thursday if Zelensky was a dictator, Defence Minister Richard Marles said “no”.

From the Sydney Morning Herald

All Australians to get bulk-billing boost under Labor’s $8.5b plans for health reform

By Natassia Chrysanthos

Updated February 23, 2025 — 9.46 am first published February 22, 2025 — 10.30pm

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will make it cheaper for Australians to see a doctor by paying GPs more if they bulk-bill all adult patients, in an $8.5 billion Medicare boost aimed at middle Australia that will be a key plank of Labor’s re-election campaign.

Albanese will on Sunday unveil Labor’s plan for major health reform, which will extend bulk-billing bonuses to all adults – not just children and concession cardholders – while giving clinics that bulk-bill all patients extra funding and boosting the GP workforce. It will be the largest single investment in Medicare since it was created more than 40 years ago.

Health Minister Mark Butler and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will unveil Labor’s health plans on Sunday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

As the average out-of-pocket cost for a standard GP visit surpasses $46, and a rising number of Australians delay doctors’ appointments due to cost, Labor’s plan to reduce the fees for working adults will raise the stakes in an election contest over healthcare and the cost of living.

It gives Albanese a clear pitch to voters struggling with living costs in marginal seats that will decide the election and will force Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to match his offer or cede ground on a crucial issue while the Coalition fights Labor’s renewed “Mediscare” attack ahead of the federal poll to be held by May.

“Labor built Medicare. We will protect it and improve it for all Australians. I want every Australian to know they only need their Medicare card, not their credit card, to receive the healthcare they need,” Albanese said.

“No Australian should have to check their bank balance to see if they can afford to see a doctor. That is not who we are. That is not the future we want for Australia. This is a policy that lifts up our entire nation and ensures no one is held back, and no one is left behind.”

Bulk-billing rates for Australians have been declining since 2021 as Medicare rebates have failed to keep up with health inflation, Australians’ health needs have become more complex, and doctors stopped performing bulk-billed pandemic services such as vaccinations.

While 89 per cent of all GP services were bulk-billed in 2021 – meaning Medicare covered the full cost of a patient’s visit, and they did not pay any out-of-pocket costs – this had dropped to 77 per cent by 2023.

Labor’s injection of $3.5 billion to triple the bonus GPs are paid for bulk-billing children, pensioners, and concession cardholders lifted this to 78 per cent in 2024. For children, the bulk-billing rate lifted from 88 per cent to 90 per cent in a year, while for over 65s, it lifted from 86 per cent to 87 per cent.

General adult patients, however, have fared worse, with bulk-billing rates declining from 70 per cent to 69 per cent in a year.

But Sunday’s election commitment aims to turn things around for the millions of Australians who have historically not been eligible for bulk-billing incentives.

How the new payments will work

From November this year, if Labor is re-elected, doctors will get bonuses for bulk-billing all adult Australians – not just children and concession cardholders – while clinics that sign up to bulk-bill every patient will get even larger payments from the government.

The bonuses involve an extra $21.50 payment for each appointment that a GP bulk-bills in metropolitan areas. This lifts to $32.50 in regional centres and keeps increasing until it hits $41.10 per appointment in the most remote communities.

Labor’s free fee TAFE helping thousands in the ACT

Release Date: Thursday 13 February 2025, Media release

The Albanese Labor Government is building Australia’s future by investing in training, with new data showing there have been more than 3,700 enrolments across the ACT since the Free TAFE program began in January 2023.

We are continuing to deliver cost of living relief while encouraging more Australians into construction courses.

That’s why we’re making Free TAFE permanent.

It’s also why we’ve announced a $10,000 incentive payment for Australians in construction apprenticeships.

The Liberals voted to oppose making Free TAFE permanent and have confirmed their plans to cut funding for Free TAFE.

The most popular sectors across the ACT are:

Care sector (more than 880 enrolments)
Technology and Digital sector (more than 790 enrolments)
Early Childhood Education and Care sector (more than 380 enrolments)
Hospitality and Tourism sector (more than 200 enrolments)

Examples of student fee savings in the Australian Capital Territory include:

A student studying a Certificate IV in Cyber Security can save up to $3,467
A student studying a Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care can save up to $2,519
A student studying a Certificate III in Business can save up to $1,375
A student studying a Certificate IV in Community Services can save up to $2,438
A student studying a Certificate IV in Mental Health can save up to $2,282

The Albanese Government has also provided $1.5 million in extra funding to the ACT to deliver an additional 340 new Free TAFE places in housing and construction from January 2025. This includes up to 80 pre-apprenticeship places to make it easier for Canberrans to train to get jobs in industries essential to the housing and construction sectors.

Week beginning February 19, 2025.

Sara Lodge The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective Yale University Press, November 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

The combination of a history of the female detective as a working part of the police force during the Victorian era, and her depiction in fictional accounts of the time makes for a fascinating read. Questions that immediately come to mind, and are answered include – how active were the real women detectives? What were their roles? Did they capture criminals or leave that to the male detectives? Were they courageous and killed on duty? What was the attitude in the police force and wider society towards these women active on behalf of law enforcement? And then, moving on to consider how these women detectives and the cases they worked on in the real world were depicted in fiction, there are more questions. Did fiction portray women’s contributions in an exaggerated form or were they always seen as secondary to those of men? Were any fictional characters based on real women and their activities? What did fiction say about women detectives and how did this impact the audience for these novels?

Sara Lodge answers these questions in this stimulating read which blends so much information about the police force and women’s role in it, the depiction of women detectives in fiction and the social conditions which were so vividly described in print – fictional and factual. At the same time as being an academic work, with copious citations, an amazing bibliography and index, Lodge has produced a great read. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

After the review; Crime on Her Mind; A Modern Television Female Detective; The Conversation – Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter; Literature Cambridge; and Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance.

An earlier publication that concentrated on the fictional women detectives is written by Michelle B. Slung. Crime on Her Mind, Fifteen stories of female sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, published by Penguin in 1984 has a valuable introduction which introduces the theme, women detectives in fiction from the Victorian era through the Golden Age of detective fiction (1918 to 1930) to the 1940s in some detail. Further brief references are made to ‘hard boiled’ woman detective, coinciding with Golden Age writers, and the dearth of women detectives in the 1950s and 60s fiction.

The fifteen writers whose work appear in this collection are: C.L. Pirkis, George R. Simms, Clarence Rook, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Emmuska, Baroness Orczy, Hugh C. Weir, Anna katherine Greens, Arthur B. Reeve, Hulbert Footner, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mignon G. Eberhart, William Irish, G.D.H. Cole and M. Cole, Gladys Mitchell and Stuart Plamer. it is noticeable that many male writers depicted female detectives in this period.

Each story is introduced with a short description of the writer and their work. There is a chronological survey which Michelle B. Slung refers to as ‘idiosyncratic and informal’ rather than scholarly. Nevertheless, it is a useful addition to this volume.

Michelle B. Slung wrote 17 books, the most recent of which was published in 2017. Women’s Wiles is described as : NOTHING’S WHAT IT SEEMS IN THIS SLYLY SINISTER COLLECTION OF DAMES DONE WRONG…AND DOING THE SAME! Shocking surprises, chilling comeuppances, and mercies that are anything but tender are just part of what to expect from these memorable stories of women.

A newer edition than mine is available on Amazon.

A Modern Television Female Detective

An article about a current detective – female, based on the 1960s Columbo styled detective series, and a familiar character from legal dramas of the 2000s – caught my attention. Elspeth Tascioni was a wonderful character in the legal dramas referred to below, and it seems a positive response to the breadth of depictions acceptable to a television audience for a female detective when eccentricity is adopted as a feature.

This quirky Good Wife spinoff is a joyful antidote to all the slick legal thrillers – from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Story by Ben Pobjie

ELSBETH ★★★½

Carrie Preston plays the eccentric detective Elsbeth Tascioni in the eponymous series created by Good Wife and Good Fight producers Robert and Michelle King.© Supplied

This opinion, one surmises, is one shared by the creators of Elsbeth, a modern crime series that follows the Columbo template closely enough that it verges on remake territory – perhaps just different enough be called a homage instead.

As in Columbo, we begin each episode with the murderer shown committing the crime. As in Columbo, it’s not about whodunnit, it’s about how they’ll be caught. And as in Columbo, the answer lies in the quicksilver mind of a criminological genius who presents as singularly unthreatening, even as they dig remorselessly for the truth.

Here, that genius is Elsbeth Tascioni, a character who may already be familiar to viewers of The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Elsbeth appeared in both those shows, with actor Carrie Preston winning an Emmy for her portrayal in the former. This is a different proposition to those slick, classy legal dramas, though: it’s a full-blooded quirky detective romp the way they used to make them, with murder as intellectual exercise, crime as fun and investigation as semi-comedic joyride.

Republished under Creative Commons license

A new public statue of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter shows a bright future for Australian monuments

Story by Bronwyn Carlson, Macquarie University and Terri Farrelly, Macquarie University

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

As authors of the book Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal people and colonial commemorations in so-called Australia, we are often contacted by media to respond to whether colonial statues have a place in modern Australia.

Such statues create controversy because they often honour people who have dubious histories. Journalist Paul Daley has described such statues as “assorted bastards” who have profited from the dispossession and exploitation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The problem with many statues is they do not represent a shared history. They either represent colonial figures who have harmed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, or they represent a one-sided perspective that erases the other.

This year we were asked to respond to a different kind of monument: a statue of music legends Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, newly erected in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in November 2024.

An inspirational, unifying force

Archie Roach, a Gunditjmara (Kirrae Whurrong/Djab Wurrung), Bundjalung senior Elder, songwriter and storyteller sadly died in 2022 aged only 66. Anthony Albanese described him as a “brilliant talent, a powerful and prolific national truth teller”.

His partner Ruby Hunter was a Ngarrindjeri woman and pioneering singer-songwriter. She was the first Indigenous woman to be signed to a major record label, and sadly died in 2010.

Both were members of the Stolen Generations – Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families by Australian government authorities as part of the assimilation policy. They met on the street as homeless teenagers.

Their award-winning music took them around the world together. They performed alongside musical greats such as Tracy Chapman, Paul Kelly and Bob Dylan.

They have been described as an inspiration to many, and a unifying force who altered the way white Australia saw itself.

A statue that sits in conversation with community

The statue of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter was commissioned by the Yarra City Council in partnership with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation and Victorian government.

The statue was made by local artist Darien Pullen. The surrounding park space was designed by Melbourne-based architect Jefa Greenaway (Wailwan/Kamilaroi) and landscape architect Paul Herzich (Kaurna/Ngarrindjeri).

Fitzroy’s Atherton Gardens is a culturally significant site that once served as a traditional meeting place. It later became a hub of political activism and resistance for Victoria’s Aboriginal community.

This monument stands in a place rich with history. It is where Archie and Ruby spent meaningful time with their family, and where Archie was reunited with his biological family.

Their son, Amos Roach, emphasised the deep cultural significance of the location: “it’s a place of cultural significance because it was a meeting place, it’s an old camp”.

He also reflected on his personal connection to the park, saying, “I was a parkie baby when I was born … and I still come here”.

The statue stands at street level, embodying an ongoing presence. They are casual, approachable and engaged, as if in conversation with the community.

Positioned to invite interaction, the statue forms a dynamic relationship with both the people who pass by and the place it inhabits.

It is embraced rather than imposed, welcomed and wanted.

The statue stands at street level, in conversation with the community.© The Conversation

While these figures are Aboriginal icons, they are also remarkable individuals who made significant contributions to Australia. Their commemoration carries meaning and connection for all.

Compare it to the Cook statue in Hyde Park on Gadigal Country (Sydney). He is perched high above the observer, arm raised to the heavens in a theatrical “ta-daa”.

Positioned in a location where the man himself never set foot, the text at the base of the statue? make the historically incorrect allegation that he “DISCOVERED THIS TERRITORY, 1770” – something Cook never personally claimed.

A shared future

Rather than erecting monuments to colonial figures who oppressed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, reinforcing a history of injustice and loss, we should instead celebrate a shared vision for the future.

This vision should be built on recognition, respect and the commemoration of those who have made meaningful contributions to Australia.

This statue of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter honours two individuals who, despite being shaped by the very colonial histories commemorated by other monuments, have profoundly enriched contemporary Australia through their resilience, talent and contributions.

Until recently, commemorations of Aboriginal people were largely confined to the realm of prehistory — portraying them as nameless “Natives” in conflict with settlers, as loyal guides and servants, or as tragic figures labelled “the last of their tribe”.

Like recent statues commemorating Aboriginal figures such as Pastor Sir Doug and Lady Gladys Nicholls, William Cooper, and William “Bill” Ferguson, this statue brings Aboriginal peoples into the present.

It is a powerful recognition of their enduring impact in shaping this nation – one that calls for acknowledgement, respect and inclusion from us all.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Dear Friends,
We have made a wonderful start to the year, with superb lectures on Tragedy, Irish poetry, Virginia Woolf, Frankenstein, and more.

Women Writers Season
Our new Women Writers Season continues with great works of the 19th and early 20th centuries:

• Alison Hennegan on Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), 22 February 2025 – just a few places left.

• Corinna Russell on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1857), 22 March 2025.

• Clare Walker Gore on George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), 26 April 2025.• Trudi Tate on Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (1932), 24 May 2025.

• Lisa Mullen on Inez Holden, Night Shift (1941), 28 June 2025.

• Alison Hennegan on Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer will Show (1936), 20 September 2025. … and more.

Bloomsbury Course 2025

Karina Jakubowicz’s popular course on Bloomsbury: Art and Politics starts soon. We study Vanessa Bell, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and Leonard Woolf. Live online weekly on Fridays, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British time, 21 February to 28 March 2025.

Oscar Wilde Course 2025

Join us for a new live online course with Alison Hennegan on Oscar Wilde: Man of Many Parts. We study Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the fairy tales. Fortnightly on Tuesdays, 25 March to 6 May 2025.

Looking ahead:•

Comedy and Irony in the Young Jane Austen. Live online with Fred Parker, 4–25 May 2025.
• Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death. Live online course with Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison, Trudi Tate and Karina Jakubowicz, May-June 2025.
• Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny. Live online course with Ann-Laure Brevet, September-October 2025
• Women and Power in 20thC Novels: 1950s-1980. Live online course with Miles Leeson, September-November 2025.
• London in Literature I. Live online course with Angela Harris, September-December 2025.

See you soon.

Best wishes,Trudi
Dr Trudi TateDirector, Literature Cambridge Ltd
www.literaturecambridge.co.uk

Virginia Woolf Summer Course 2025
Our summer theme in 2025 is Virginia Woolf: Writing Life.

The course will run twice: first, live online, Thursday 10 July to Monday 14 July 2025, including the weekend.

The course will run again from Sunday 20 July to Friday 25 July 2025, in person in Cambridge.

There will be lectures, tutorials, talks, visits and more.
Five days of intensive study and discussion on Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and Flush; plus talks on the life writing of Leonard Woolf, Leslie Stephen, Jane Harrison, and a group reading of Freshwater. Brilliant.

Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com> Unsubscribe

The Courts Aren’t The Cavalry; We Are

So, what are WE going to do?

Joyce Vance

Lots of people are talking about early wins in court. I wanted to take a moment to clarify exactly what we are looking at.

If you’re one of the stalwarts who makes it through the newsletter every day, you probably already know what I’m going to say. Yes, pro-democracy forces are winning in just about every case that has been filed so far. But these cases are in an early, preliminary, procedural stage. Courts aren’t yet ruling on the substantive merits of the cases; they aren’t ruling on whether any of the challenges to how Trump and Musk are conducting affairs of government will ultimately succeed.

Federal judges across the country have entered a flurry of temporary restraining orders (TROs) designed to freeze the status quo in place while the litigation gets started. To get a temporary restraining order, the plaintiffs who are challenging actions by the new administration have to convince the judge that there’s a strong chance irreparable injury to their rights will take place without the freeze.

That’s why the judge in the impoundment case ordered the Trump administration to restore congressionally allocated spending they had frozen. It’s why multiple judges in the birthright citizenship cases told the administration it can’t deny newborns their rights for now. It’s not clear any of that will survive once we get to the point where courts consider longer preliminary restraining orders, which require a greater quantum of proof and more formal proceedings. Those proceedings will also undoubtedly be followed by appeals to higher courts by the Trump administration if it loses.

There are limits to how much the courts can or will do, even at the TRO stage. We saw judges reject requests because the parties in front of the court didn’t have standing, the necessary connection to a case to file suit (explained in the context of the mifepristone medication abortion case here). There are legal limits on these cases. And in the case that is (oh, the irony) pending before Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., the Judge declined to shut down all DOGE operations in a hearing Friday. She acknowledged the states’ concerns about the “unpredictability” of Musk’s operation but indicated that entering a TRO against everything he is doing seemed too broad, exceeding the level of irreparable injury the plaintiffs’ evidence demonstrated. Even at this early stage, the courts can’t provide a complete and total remedy for every disturbing act Trump commits or enables.

That’s not to say I don’t have confidence in the courts, because I do, and I think some progress will be made there, although as we know far too well, it may be very slow. But the courts aren’t the calvary. We are. We have to be in this fight for ourselves. We can’t get complacent. These early victories are important, but they are not ballgame. Just because it doesn’t feel like we’re in the middle of a constitutional crisis—Trump isn’t dramatically crossing out broad swaths of the Constitution with his sharpie marker in a made-for-television moment—doesn’t mean we aren’t there.

The courts can impose some restrictions when Trump exceeds the bounds of law. But if it’s “just politics”—or, problematically, if five justices on the Supreme Court believes it is—then it’s up to us, the voters, the citizens of the United States. There is a midterm election coming, and if your elected representatives aren’t working for you, now is the time to start doing something about it. No one thought, when they got into the race, that Senators Ossoff and Warnock could win in Georgia. But they did.

Ultimately, we’re the check on power run amuck. That means awakening slumbering moderate Republicans in Congress, stirring up the voters for the midterms, and keeping a public spotlight on the excesses of this administration, which has helped to rein them in as much as anything else right now.

If you need some ideas for getting started, the good folks at Choose Democracy have some advice. They suggest getting started with a local group and figuring out where there are weak links in MAGA support you can pressure. They suggest devoting yourself to a longterm project you can support. Other groups are organizing a variety of public protests and blackouts. Different ways of speaking up will work for different people. Pick yours. Make sure your voice counts. Start exercising your democracy muscles!

Taking your kids to vote, even, perhaps especially, in local races or primaries is a good way to build the pro-voting culture we want. (That’s my husband with all four of ours in tow, including one who wasn’t old enough to vote yet).

Earlier this week I wrote to one of my senators to ask her to reconsider before voting for Kennedy. She didn’t, but I did get a form letter back. I expect more than that from my senator when she votes for a man who vaccinated his own kids but doesn’t want you to vaccinate yours, particularly in an environment where the administration is gutting public health as we watch bird flu become more transmissible. Fortunately, I’m not alone. There are groups of people like me who are committed to making our senators do more than just send form letters, even if that requires persistence on our parts. Sadly, her response to me came from a “do not reply” email account, which makes it more difficult to ask a senator for follow-up, but I think I’m up to the challenge.

We have to find ways to do this because if all MAGA hears are self-congratulatory voices proclaiming their success, it’s a lot easier for them to kowtow to Trump’s every demand. It becomes more difficult—because these folks are politicians who are dedicated to staying in power whatever the cost—if they’re getting pounded by thousands of voices of sanity about their obligations as elected representatives. Let’s make them understand that we are here, we are engaged, and we are not going away. It would have only taken a few senators getting cold feet about Kennedy to make a difference. It’s worth pulling out all the stops and contacting your senators with the vote on Kash Patel looming ahead this week.

My take on what we need to do right now is this: stay informed about what’s happening nationally, and get engaged locally.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse through all of this. If you aren’t already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which helps me devote more time and resources to this project.

Week beginning February 12 2025

Oh dear – two disappointing reads this week!

S.E. Lynes The Perfect Boyfriend Bookouture, January 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

I found this book a disappointing read, with none of the page turning enthusiasm other reviewers have expressed. However, there were some twists, undermining stereotypes and raising questions about friendship, motivation, and the influence of nurture. For example, Lynes asks whether a difficult family life necessarily promotes the type of evil portrayed in Hughie Reynolds. Importantly, Kirsty’s observations about the way in which both aging and pregnancy influence the respect given to people in these categories is a thoughtful reflection on the way in which people are valued.

Kirsty Shaw is pregnant, partner to Dougie who was a student at the school they both attended. Dougie was not in the same friendship group when Kirsty and her friends met Hughie. Seeing him as a person who needed support they took him into their group, Kirsty’s family also welcomed him to their home and everyday activities. Kirsty and Hughie become boyfriend and girlfriend, until the day he departs, leaving only a harsh note. This impacts on Kirsty’s life to the extent that she has kept it and remains humiliated at Hughie’s treatment of her. When she sees Hughie again, and he refuses to acknowledge her or that he is Hughie, Kirsty determines to find out why. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Wendy Clarke Make Yourself at Home Bookouture, March 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Wendy Clarke’s twists and turns in both the storyline and the main protagonist’s assessment of her own and her colleagues’ and friends’ actions are well developed examples of the genre, keeping the reader guessing until the end. Each character is typical of the genre – the husband whose character has changed, the good friend of husband and wife ready to lend a sympathetic shoulder to either when needed and the attractive interloper.

Catherine, a high school teacher with ambition and a past, is the main character. It is through her eyes that we see her behaviour and that of those surrounding her. Her past controls her present – the loss of her beloved but flawed brother in a school fire, her breakdown and resort to alcohol, and her gratitude, love and dependence on Gary and her compatibility with Ross, a fellow teacher and Gary’s friend. She has admirably surmounted the lure of alcohol but is confronted by memories of her brother. Into this amalgam of ambition, a marriage with flaws, a school of challenging students and admiring colleagues, Catherine welcomes Lisa, her husband’s hitherto unknown stepsister. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Following: Cindy Lou eats at Courgette and Kopiku; American Politics – fighting back; Secret London; NGA – Ethel Carrick.

Cindy Lou dines at Courgette – again!

Courgette has changed its menu, and although I miss some of my favourites, there are many more options to ensure my return over the next few months.

Five of us went this time so, although there were some duplicated choices, there were plenty of different ones, and we had a grand array on the table – including, of course, the hot bread rolls and ash butter, and a delicious serving of chips – both a wonderful standby. Entrees were excellent – Seared Hervey Bay Scallops, Berkshire Pork Belly, Black Garlic, Cauliflower, Boudin Noir, Nashi Pear; a goats cheese ‘cloud’ with accompaniments; salmon tartare with prawn balls, lettuce cooked with something delicious, cucumber and sauces. Another entree, a medley of duck breast, chicken and made an excellent main course as well – so as to leave room for dessert. The main courses were lamb chops – succulent; fish with a huge prawn – magnificent; and courgette blossoms stuffed with pumpkin – different and delicious. The favourite dessert featured chocolate, the Cherry Chocolate Bon Bon, Yoghurt Sorbet, Chocolate soil, Meringue and Cherry Compote; and the others were white chocolate cheesecake with autumn berries, lemon balm, chocolate sorbet and burnt butter crumbs; and a mango filled mango souffle – two photos as it looked so appealing inside and out.

Cindy Lou breakfasts at Kopiku – again!

Kopiku is a favourite breakfast or just coffee stop, a lovely walk, summer or winter. Dogs are welcomed with a bowl of water, or in Leah’s case, a coffee made with huge amounts of froth so she can indulge. This is perfect for me, as I don’t want a huge coffee. I miss Leah’s contribution to the diet when she is not with me – what to do with all that froth? The eggs and toast are delicious – well cooked, buttered toast, and interesting embellishments. On this occasion it was a basil sauce and ginger onion slices.

American Politics – fighting back

Hakeem Jeffries Goes Off On The House Floor And Rips The Mask Off Republicans

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called out Republicans for pulling a bait and switch on the American people, and called out the GOP’s real agenda.

Jason Easley Feb 10 *

House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been pushing back against the Trump/GOP agenda since day one, but on Monday, Jeffries went to a new level.

Rep. Jeffries said on the House floor: Last year, all we heard from my Republican colleagues was the need to do something about the high cost of living while at the same time they ran away from Project 2025 as if it didn’t exist. This year, Republicans have spent all of their time implementing the most extreme parts of Project 2025 and have done nothing to lower the high cost of living, not a single thing, not a single bill, not a single idea, not a single proposal from my House Republican colleagues to do anything about the high cost of living in the United States of America.

It’s a Republican bait-and-switch. Part two of the Republican bait and switch is that their true objective is to enact massive tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy corporations, just like they did in 2017, when the GOP tax scam was passed, where they set in motion legislation where 83 percent of the benefits would go to the wealthiest 1%.

And now my House Republicans are, colleagues are back at it. There they go again. Same plan. Nothing to drive down the high cost of living. Everything is about massive tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy corporations. Who in many cases aren’t even asking for it. And they certainly don’t need the relief that everyday Americans need.

That working-class Americans need. That middle-class Americans need. That all those people who aspire to be part of the middle-class need. It’s a Republican bait-and-switch.

What’s the final element of the Republican bait and switch?Enact these massive tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy corporations and stick working class Americans with the bill.

The nerve of this group of people who spent all last year lecturing the country about how they were going to do something to drive down the high cost of living, do nothing about it, House Republicans are planning to enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire buddies, and then, as the final element of the Republican bait and switch, stick working-class Americans with the bill.

House Republicans have no plan to love and cherish Medicaid. Let’s be very clear about that. No plan to love and cherish Medicaid. Their plan is to destroy Social Security, destroy Medicare, and destroy Medicaid as we know it. And now with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, it’s their intention to try and do it.

Just watch what happens at the Republican budget hearing that is upcoming. In terms of what’s proposed, the cuts to Medicaid, that will be devastating. Hospitals will close, including in rural America and urban America and in the heartland of America. Nursing homes will be shut down and everyday Americans, children, seniors.

Those who are suffering with disabilities will be hurt as part of the Republican effort to target, earn benefits like Social Security and Medicare and to destroy Medicaid as we know it. It’s the Republican bait and switch. We will continue to expose it to the American people. House Democrats want nothing to do with it.

And we’re going to do everything in our power to stop it.

Democrats need to pound this message day after day.

Some of the American people were conned. Republicans aren’t going to do anything about costs and inflation. Instead, they are going to take healthcare away from millions of people or make healthcare much more expensive.

House Democrats are fighting back, and they are going to make Republicans own their bait and switch.

*Jason Eastly at PoliticusUSA is always a good read. Sometimes too optimistic – but sometimes we need that, and this time making sure that Hakeem Jeffries is heard.

D.E.I. goals – some businesses are refusing to comply with the discriminatory demand that they dispense with D.E.I. policies.

How companies are navigating the D.E.I. backlash By Emma Goldberg

New York Times nytimes.com February 10, 2025.

For nearly every American company right now, navigating the approach to diversity, equity and inclusion is a little like this: They’re perched on chairs, and the floor is lava, and the lava is the froth of lawsuits, investigations and social media backlash that could arise with any next step.

And they are not all responding the same way.

There’s a multilayered pressure campaign facing private sector D.E.I. programs. First, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the federal government to investigate “illegal D.E.I.,” although it is not entirely clear what that term means. (The best guess lawyers have is that it means all programs, whether internships or mentoring workshops, that exclude people on the basis of race.) The Justice Department, in a memo last week, suggested that it would be involved in enforcing the D.E.I. executive order.

Then, there are changes Trump has made at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the independent agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws. This agency used to focus heavily on complaints of discrimination against people from minority groups and women. In an about-face, it is now likely to focus on investigating claims of discrimination against white workers and majority groups, in the form of D.E.I.

“Employers should be proactive and intentional about evaluating the way that they are carrying out these initiatives,” said Jocelyn Samuels, a Democrat whom Trump removed from the commission. “But at the end of the day, I think they are critical.”

The war on D.E.I. has left executives scratching their heads about what posture to adopt — and what they choose depends on a whole smattering of factors, including the politics of their consumer base and their appetite for a fight. Today, I’ll lay out the three main responses emerging in corporate America: retreating, quietly sticking with it and standing up for it.

Retreat

For companies like Target, the retreat from D.E.I. goals and strategies has been sweeping. The suite of diversity goals, mentorship programs and racial justice initiatives announced with fanfare in 2020 has been tossed away as companies scramble to avoid legal scrutiny or a social media backlash.

This retreat began before Trump took office. Anti-D.E.I. writing was already on the wall: The Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, and social media provocateurs like Robby Starbuck had begun targeting specific companies over their D.E.I. programs. Walmart, in November, said it would stop using the term D.E.I. in corporate communications and wouldn’t renew its Center for Racial Equity, a philanthropic initiative begun in 2020. Starbuck claimed this as a victory, saying he had reached out to the company to say he was planning a story on “wokeness” there.

In the days surrounding Trump’s inauguration, the D.E.I. retreat camp ballooned. Meta, just before Trump took office, eliminated its chief diversity role and ended diversity hiring goals. Google abandoned its employee diversity targets, explaining that as a federal contractor it has to comply with the Trump administration’s D.E.I. orders. Target said it would conclude its D.E.I. goals, rattling some of the small-business owners who have been helped by its supplier diversity program.

Target finds itself being pulled from both directions. The company is facing calls for a boycott from some consumers who support D.E.I. and are angry about the rollback. At the same time, it has been hit with a lawsuit from shareholders who say Target didn’t disclose all the risks it was assuming in having its D.E.I. efforts in the first place.

Holding steady

Some companies say they’re not making major changes to their D.E.I. strategies, not necessarily because they’re loud and proud about supporting D.E.I., but because they feel the programs they have in place are legal and good for business.

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have said they do not intend to retreat on their diversity efforts. For JPMorgan, that means trying to recruit and serve people of all backgrounds, as the bank has always done.

“There is nothing wrong with acknowledging and trying to bridge social and economic gaps, whether they be around wealth or health,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, wrote to shareholders in 2024.

D.E.I. stalwarts

The constellation of companies dropping D.E.I. has its exceptions, notably including Costco. Before Costco’s annual meeting in January, a conservative think tank brought forward a proposal requiring the company to report the potential risks of keeping a D.E.I. program. The board responded by delivering a defense of its diversity programs, which it said “enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed.”

Apple faced a similar anti-D.E.I. proposal, which the company’s board called “unnecessary,” and described as an attempt at micromanagement.

But being a company that is proudly keeping up its D.E.I. programming can feel lonely right now. Kyle Monson, partner in a small advertising agency called Codeword, said the agency had no plans to change its D.E.I. programming, which includes working with recruiters to identify diverse job candidates, offering unconscious bias training for staff and also holding events and parties during Black History Month.

Monson said the agency was committed to the social value of D.E.I. — but it’s about his company’s bottom line, too. He has spent years following research suggesting that increasing diversity in the work force is good for business, he said.

And on top of all that, he’s ready for a fight: “We’re willing to eat the risk,” he said, “in a way that a lot of other companies might not be.”

London’s Oldest Street Used To Be Over 200 Miles Long But Is Now Less Than 200 Metres

Tucked away in the City of London is a stretch of road that sports a rather fascinating history. But it used to be a whole lot longer.

Katie Forge – Staff Writer • 31 January, 2025

A street in London with a view of St Paul's Cathedral at the end of it — Credit: JJFarq, Shutterstock

Conversations around the topic of which spots in London are the oldest are always going to be a little bit hazy. Fundamentally because none of us were actually there when the very first pubs, parks, stations, and streets were being built. So, whilst there’s no definitive answer to the question of which street in London is the oldest, we do know that there’s a whole lot of history beneath our feet. And just like plenty of other things that I have next to no factual knowledge about; I’m still going to put my two cents in on the matter. You’re most welcome.

London is bursting at the seams with history. Being one of the oldest cities in the country, many of the capital’s streets do exactly what they say on the tin. Old Street, for example, is an incredibly old street. Old Kent Road is an old road that heads in the direction of Kent. But there’s another ancient street in London that’s also in the running for the title of the oldest – its name just isn’t quite so obvious about it.

Watling Street can be found in the City of London, connecting Queen Victoria Street to St Paul’s Cathedral (and offering a pretty gorgeous view in doing so). But there is, in fact, a whole lot more history to Watling Street than first meets the eye, because it is one of the only remaining sections of a cross-country road that – in its entirety – used to span from the English Channel in Dover to a Roman Fort near Wales.

A pub named 'Ye Olde Watling' on the corner of Watling Street in London — Credit: Andrew the Kerr, Shutterstock

The history of Watling Street

The original Watling Street stretched for 276 miles, and parts of it are over 2000 years old. It roughly followed the route of the modern day A2, that runs from Dover to London via Old Kent Road, and the A5 that connects London to Shropshire. The only London section of this long, ancient track that has kept its original name is the Watling Street we know today, which now covers a distance of less than 200 metres.

City archeologists are fairly sure that the part of Watling Street that we can still walk down in London to this day was built upon the original Roman road. Other sections of the original Watling Street can supposedly be seen around New Change, Newgate Street, and Old Kent Road. A well-preserved section of the 2000 year-old original Watling Street was recently discovered below Old Kent Road, marking the first piece of physical proof that sections of the road still exist below the current streets of London…

Britain’s Prettiest Town Has Been Revealed – And It’s Less Than 90 Minutes From London

The prettiest towns in the country have just been revealed, and the town taking first prize in the beauty contest is not too far from London.

Katie Forge – Staff Writer • 5 February, 2025

Scenic old street with a streetlamp in the foreground and a church in the background winding downhill in the town of Lewes — Credit: eyematter, Shutterstock

Admittedly, the list of things in which Britain truly excels isn’t particularly extensive. But (credit where credit is due), alongside making decent cups of tea and exceptionally orderly queues, our country has also produced some pretty gorgeous towns in its time.

From quaint towns and quiet towns to market towns and medieval towns; Britain boasts a rather impressive 1250 towns in total. And the travel-aficionados over at The Telegraph decided to put them all under a microscope to uncover which of them is the prettiest town of all. And which of them is the ugliest. But we’ll lead with the good news first. And the good news is that the prettiest town in the entire country is just 90 minutes from the capital city. So you can go and check it out for yourself if you so wish.

The Telegraph’s travel experts ranked each of Britain’s towns based on factors including shopfronts, historic architecture, amount of traffic and litter, number of viewpoints, and the amount of greenery. Each town was then given a score out of 50 to decipher which are as pretty as a picture, and which are, well… not quite so picture-perfect.

The prettiest town in Britain

The cobbled stone entrance and walkway outside of the Lewes Castle & Gardens — Credit: ShutterStockStudio, Shutterstock

Taking home first prize in this beauty pageant is Lewes in East Sussex. The historic and picturesque market town has been named the prettiest in the country, scoring a mighty 46 out of 50. Lewes was praised for its medieval streets and alleyways, its plethora of pubs, the gorgeous independent shops and eateries lining its streets, and its easy access to the South Downs. Lewes boasts a rich history, dating all the way back to the Saxon times, an

These Are The Narrowest Streets In London – And (Spoiler Alert) One Of Them Is Just 5cm Wide

Katie Forge – Staff Writer • 25 July, 2024

Listen up, Londoners: we’re about to let you in on some of the city’s biggest (and… well – smallest) secrets. Tucked away in our loveable labyrinth of commuters, cabs, and coffee shops are some streets so slim, that you couldn’t even swing a cat in them if you wanted to (which hopefully you don’t).

Now, look – I know that some of these are alleyways and therefore not technically streets, but just humour me a moment, okay?

There are many contenders in the battle to be named the narrowest street of all, and it’s a debate that still hasn’t been firmly settled. So, if anybody fancies grabbing their tape measure and making their way through this list; we’d be very grateful.

1. Brydges Place, West End

An image of a narrow London alley next to the London Coliseum and Notes coffee shop — Credit: Matt Brown via Flikr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

This heart-racingly narrow alleyway connects two of London’s busiest streets, and certainly isn’t for the faint-hearted. With a width of just 15 inches at its narrowest point, Brydges Places is considered by many to be the narrowest alleyway in the city – but there’s some other history-packed passageways on this list that may well give it a run for its money.

2. Crawford Passage, Clerkenwell

Crawford Passage is just round the corner from Farringdon station, and it pretty notorious for these – quite frankly – laughable yellow lines. The distance between the two lines at this particular part of the road is just 5cm. I think we might have a winner, folks. A street with a level of thinness that is only rivalled by my patience, to be honest.

3. Lazenby Court, Covent Garden

Lazemby Court, a thin alleyway in London — Credit: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Next up on our list of the narrowest streets in London is Lazenby Court; a passageway that you’ll certainly need to squeeze yourself down in single file. Standing at just 36 inches at its slimmest point, it’s not one for the claustrophobic – that’s for sure.

4. Emerald Court, Holborn

Emerald Court, one of London narrowest street — Credit: It’s No Game via Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Another mildly panic-inducing passageway on the list; Emerald Court is Brydges Place’s biggest rival for the narrow street crown. This Holborn haunt is barely wide enough to fit a bike down, so cyclists – beware. Emerald Court was once called Green Street but was renamed in the 18th century to avoid any muddle up with other surrounding green-named streets. There’s a little fun fact for ya.

5. Artillery Passage, Spitalfields

A busy alleyway in London — Credit: stevekeiretsu via Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0

This hustly bustly passageway is packed with restaurants, bars, tourists and locals. A charming pocket of history in the heart of our city, Artillery Passage doesn’t quite rival the likes of some earlier-on-the-list streets in size, but it’s still pretty flippin’ narrow.

6. Bengal Court, City of London

a dimly lit narrow alleyway in London — Credit: It’s No Game via Flickr / CC BY 2.0

One of a few in a maze of narrow alleyways in the city, Bengal Court is a dimly-lit, atmospheric passageway, named after a historic nearby pub, Bengal Arms Tavern. Although I don’t know the exact measurements of this one (hence the need for a tape measuring volunteer), I think it’s surefire contender in the narrowest street in London competition.

7. Cardinal Cap Alley, Bankside

A view down one of Londons narrowest passageways with a view of st Pauls at the end — Credit: stu smith via Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0

Last (but by no means leanest) on our list of the narrowest streets in London is Cardinal Cap Alley. Sandwiched between an industrial building and a terraced house, this alleyway used to be accessible to the public but is unfortunately now gated. However, if you’re in the area, it’s still worth having a little peek down!

So, there you have it – the narrowest streets (and alleyways) in London. Are there any others that you think are worth adding to the list?

National Gallery of Australia

More from Ethel Carrick’s paintings – the Australian examples were a delight to see amongst the European paintings.

Hopefully I shall be able to visit the gallery again before next week, and provide some photos of Anne Dangar’s work, also in this exhibition.

Week beginning 5 February 2025

Kimberly Heckler A Woman of Firsts Margaret Heckler, Political Trailblazer Foreword by Jean Sinzdak, The Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Inc. | Lyons Press, February 2025. *

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This biography not only covers the period in which five presidents, from different parties were elected (Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan) but when Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg made their mark on the Supreme Court. It would have been appealing without this context, but the additional information makes this biography exceptionally engaging. Of course, this context is only relevant to Margaret Heckler’s public life – her private life, including her upbringing with distant parents, her passion to do well and her marriage are also relevant. To have accomplished so much, to have been a loving and successful wife and mother, and to have made such a distinctive career makes for an absorbing read.

Kimberly Heckler’s biography is the very readable story of a woman, as in the title, of firsts. See Books: Reviews for the complete review. * This is a somewhat comforting read about normal Republican political behaviour. Although particularly positive in this instance, it is a reminder that what is happening in American Republican politics today is very different from the past as exemplified by Margaret Heckler and the period in which she flourished. Below are two articles, one by Heather Cox Richardson and the other by Joyce Vance which are enlightening about current American politics.

After the book review: Francoise Sagan – The Four Corners of the Heart and article about her and her first novel; Women’s History Network – conferences, call for papers, events and exhibitions; ‘Bright Circle’ illuminates the role of women in the American intellectual tradition; Bob McMullan, Australian Electoral Prospects; Heather Cox Richardson; Joyce Vance; National Gallery of Australia.

The Four Corners of the Heart An Unfinished Novel, Françoise Sagan, Amazon Crossing, 2023.*

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

How I wish that I had originally known Françoise Sagan’s work through this clever, comic , sensitive and thoughtful novel rather than the one with which I understood her work until now. Bonjour Tristesse was, to me, a self-absorbed work which left me with a feeling of antipathy and distress that I have carried over to my much later reading of Ian McKean’s Atonement. The Four Corners of the Heart, unfinished though it is, is such a satisfying read, with enough information to speculate about if you want a resolution. If this is not your only reason for reading a book, and I acknowledge it is not mine, this novel is something to be savoured, with its complex characters, edifying and unedifying moments, comedy and fully developed writing.

Ludovic Cresson survives a car accident, and begins to survive a more serious situation, his family’s belief that he is now mentally incapacitated. He has been ‘cared’ for in institutions, and, with this understanding of his abilities, he returns to his family. The chief mourners of his past capabilities and current fragile state are his glamorous wife, Marie-Laure, and his father, the patriarch, Henri. Henri is unimpressed by the remainder of his family and evinces concern for Ludovic’s seemingly fragile health and mental capacity. However, Ludovic’s fragility is based on his family’s expectations and misunderstanding. They are unable to see past their perceptions to the realities of the accident and its consequences. Their complicity in Ludovic’s treatment since the accident is perhaps innocent, but nevertheless impacts on their current relationships and the new connection made with Marie-Laure’s mother. These become apparent as the novel progresses, although never fully explained.

Ludovic is a party to the misconceptions about his abilities, perhaps because of his treatment since the accident or perhaps because of some event in his past. This is a question that is not answered, but drawing upon the information available is a worthwhile study. For example, it is abundantly clear that Ludovic has married unwisely, that he is prepared to abandon his marriage vows, and is able to enter an alliance that seems bound to result in a dramatic conclusion. We can only speculate what this might be! See Television,Film and Popular Culture: Comments for the complete reveiw, and accompanying article.

*This is the review I wrote in 2003. I thought it worth repeating in conjunction with the article below.

Why We Can’t—and Shouldn’t—Forget Françoise Sagan

Flavien Falantin uplifts the iconic French writer who inspired repressed women worldwide

By Laura MeaderPortrait by Ashley L. Conti January 22, 2025

The French writer Françoise Sagan lived a life of shocking intrigue. Gutsy and reckless, she fascinated readers with her flamboyant lifestyle and forthright novels. Now, 20 years after her death, scholars are revisiting the profound cultural and literary impact of her 1954 debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which took the world by storm.

Banned in several European countries and by the Vatican, the book was often read secretly. In South Africa, readers of Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) faced imprisonment if caught with the book. French readers found it both scandalous and liberating. In America, it reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list a year after its publication. Hollywood turned it into a film in 1958.

Published in 1954, *Bonjour Tristesse* caused excitement and scandal both.

Why all the fuss?

Bonjour Tristesse “heralded the arrival of female emancipation in France during the 1950s and the waning dominance of the patriarchal family structure,” said Flavien Falantin, assistant professor of French studies and one of four Sagan scholars worldwide. See Television,Film and Popular Culture: Comments for the complete article.

Women’s History Network

Upcoming Events and Exhibitions

Bletchley Park Women in Intelligence during World War Two 8 March 2025
A day symposium covering women in intelligence during World War Two, including stories relating to individuals from all over the world. Join Bletchley Park for a day of talks and discussions revealing the often hidden stories of women’s roles in intelligence during World War Two. The day will cover stories from all over the world, individuals from different countries or those based in other parts in the world.Visit Here for further information and to book your place.

British Library
Medieval Women: In Their Own Words25 October 2024 – 2 March 2025; ExhibitionWith over 140 extroardinary items, discover the rich and complex lives of women of medieval Europe, both famous and forgotten, through their own words, visions and experiences. Exhibition tickets here and events programmes here.

The Women’s Library, LSE
Making Modern Women: Women’s Magazines in Interwar Britain
Online exhibitionUnearthing the Women’s Library’s rich collection of interwar women’s magazines, this exhibition demonstrates the vitality and breadth of feminist activism throughout the interwar years. We also mark the centenary of the Six Point Group, Britain’s leading gender equality organisation during this period, and the magazine with which it was closely identified, Time and Tide. Placing this iconic feminist magazine in the context of other serial publications, we show how women’s magazines contributed to the making of ‘modern women’ in British life. Details here.

The Women’s Museum, Barking
An Idea of Life
Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday 11 – 5pm; ExhibitionAn Idea of a Life is the first exhibition at the Women’s Museum Barking. It responds to everyday histories of the women-led community who lived in Barking Abbey from c.666AD through to the early 16th Century. This exhibition tells stories that are both imagined and informed by archaeological finds, records and ongoing research emerging from the site of the former Abbey. Details here.

Upcoming Competitions, Scholarships & Internships

World Anthropological Union (WAU) 2025 Congress Photo ContestFor decades, a limited vision of who “should” be doing fieldwork has erased and made invisible women anthropologists and social scientists. This limited vision has resulted in a lack of recognition for the photographic record of women doing fieldwork, and their image has not become a common symbol in the public understanding of social science disciplines.The WAU 2025 Congress Photo Contest seeks to highlight the importance of women in fieldwork, to reverse decades of invisibility in photographic repositories, and to provide images that show the diversity of scientific work by women social scientists, especially anthropologists.For further details on how to apply, please visit; https://filmfreeway.com/WAU2025CongressPhoto “

Apply now for research internships in women’s history at the University of Oxford UNIQ+.

Research internships are designed to provide students from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds who are ordinarily resident in the UK with the opportunity to experience postgraduate study. Taking place from Monday 7 July – Thursday 21 August 2025, UNIQ+ gives you the chance to experience life as a graduate student at Oxford. You will undertake a research project, attend training and information sessions, and have the opportunity to take part in social events. Projects are available in a wide range of subjects, including archaeology, biology, history, engineering, pathology, sociology and statistics, with three projects this year in women’s history. These are: African women and decolonisation: nationalism, transnational networks and sisterhood 1920s-1960s, supervised by Dr Natalya Benkhaled-Vince; Feminism, democracy and transnational links in the early twentieth century, supervised by Dr Tania Shew, and ‘A word to the wives’: Letters from spouses in twentieth-century British election literature, supervised by Dr Lyndsey Jenkins. During the internship you’ll receive a stipend of at least £3,300, receive free accommodation in Oxford, improve your research skills, work with University of Oxford researchers, receive advice on opportunities for further study and research careers, and enhance your ability to make a competitive application for postgraduate study.For full eligibility criteria, the full list of projects available with more detailed descriptions, and to apply, visit: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/access/uniq-plus/about.Applications close at 12:00 midday UK time on Wednesday 19 February 2025.

Online Documentary: Beyond All Odds – A Story of Hope, Faith and Resilience
All The Unexpected focuses on the experience of parenthood through the lens of its most unexpected moments. The organization has recently shared 2 short documentaries online that highlight the history of black maternal health and history. Find out more here

WHN : Blue Sky Page

WNH are pleased to announce they now have a BlueSky Page for the Women’s History Network.

Please visit; https://bsky.app/profile/womenshistnet.bsky.social

WHN Members: Call for New Book Titles

If you are a member of the Women’s History Network and have a recent or forthcoming book publication, we want to hear from you! We include a shortlist of books available for review in our journal Women’s History Today, and we are looking for new titles to promote. If you are happy to have your book included in this list please email us at bookreviews@womenshistorynetwork.org .

WHN Writing Retreats

To help support Women’s History Network members, the WHN uses zoom to run a series of online, structured writing retreats. The aim of structured writing retreats is to provide dedicated time in which to progress writing projects. The retreats are on Friday mornings — 10 am to 1 pm (UK time) — and they follow the same programme each week.
Interested in finding out more or joining us for the next retreat? Check the WHN website here for more details.

Women’s History Today – Share Your Project/Research

Women’s History Today is the journal of the Women’s History Network. As well as academic articles, which we always welcome, the journal publishes short features on different aspects of doing and researching women’s history. These include Spotlight on Funded Research, which showcases funded research projects; From the Archives, about using archives to explore women’s history and Doing History, which highlights community/public history projects with a focus on women’s and gender history.
We are also always open to ideas for ‘special’ themed issues. If you are interested in contributing to the journal in connection with any of the above, please contact: editor@womenshistorynetwork.org

The University of Kansas KU News

‘Bright Circle’ illuminates role of women in American intellectual tradition

Illustration showing the subjects of Randall Fuller’s book: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Mary Moody Emerson and Lydia Jackson Emerson.

Illustration created from public-domain images of the subjects of Randall Fuller’s book: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, (clockwise from top left) Margaret Fuller, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Mary Moody Emerson and Lydia Jackson Emerson. Credit: Rick Hellman, KU News Service

LAWRENCE — Almost every American high school graduate has been introduced to Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond. But how many have heard of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her Boston bookshop?

View of West Street, home to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's bookshop, circa 1875. General photographic collection, Historic New England. — View of West Street, home to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookshop, circa 1875. General photographic collection, Historic New England.

Hardly any of them, which is why Randall Fuller, Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Kansas, felt the need to write a new book in which he contends that the latter is every bit as important as the former to the creation of the first important American style of literature and philosophy.

Fuller sees “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism” (Oxford University Press) as something of a corrective to the “great man” hagiography that has gone before.

“Thoreau is remembered because of his fantastic writing of that experience,” Fuller said. “But he lived in a household full of women who were involved with all these other women, and he got ideas from them. He could go and live on that pond by himself because he was a guy. The women, on the other hand, were much more socially networked with each other, and that network attracted the attention of all sorts of writers, male and female. So, my argument is that the real birthplace of transcendentalism is in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookstore.”

Not only did the “Bright Circle” women give birth to transcendentalism, which Fuller defined as “a movement interested in the individual transcending the materialism of the moment for a greater connection to the absolute,” but one of them, Margaret Fuller, wrote what has come to be seen as the first work of American feminism with her 1845 book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.”

“Fifty-some years after the Declaration of Independence, when these women lived, there was just this ferment of ideas and a sense that, ‘Now we can create our own intellectual and literary culture,’” Fuller said. “So they’re excited about that. They’re getting ideas from England and Germany, but they’re also mixing them with more American experiences and creating something new.”

Fuller noted that he had “spent most of my professional career studying the men in the field of transcendentalism, especially (Ralph Waldo) Emerson and Thoreau, and … you quickly realize that there was this entire community of women in their lives who were contributing in all sorts of ways to their intellectual development.”

“For a long time I have thought the myth of the lone genius is just that — a myth — and that these really interesting women had largely been relegated to, for instance, the role of quirky aunt for Mary Moody Emerson or the subservient wife in the case of Lydia Emerson. And the more you delve into the archive of those women’s writings, the more you realize that they were actually, in many ways, not only at the forefront, but they were also influencing people like Emerson.”

Fuller said “the big aha moment” leading to “Bright Circle” came when he was interviewing for the position at KU and the Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s special collections curator, Elspeth Healey, told him she had something that might interest him: Ralph Emerson’s first book, “Nature,” inscribed to his aunt Mary, with her marginalia. Those notes, Fuller said, which were previously unknown to scholars of the field, “crystallized their relationship for me. It’s as if she had given intellectual birth to this person who then went beyond where she felt comfortable.”

The transcendentalists were, after all, descendants of the Puritans, Fuller said.

The scholar began tugging on that intellectual thread and ended up focusing on the work of five women who, he said, “contributed the most in a range of ways — some philosophically, some artistically, some culturally.”

The last of the five “Bright Circle” women was artist and writer Sophia Peabody, older sister of salon-keeper Elizabeth. Her sojourn in Cuba became fodder for an acclaimed journal that, in Fuller’s words, “expressed a poetic nature-worship that prefigured the more famous rhapsodies of male transcendentalists.”

Not only does “Bright Circle” provide a window into early American feminism, but Fuller said the intellectual shift from a Puritan view of nature “as a wicked place … to be feared and subdued” to the transcendentalist view of it as a place of self-realization remains attractive to students today.

“There’s at least a thread of that intellectual tradition continuing into our current life,” he said.

Australian Politics

Bob McMullan

Australian electoral prospects

There is a marked immaturity in the reporting of opinion polls and other political developments in Australia at the moment.

I see problems in two main categories.

First is the seemingly endless pursuit of uniquely Australian explanations for what are obviously global trends.

The second is the tendency to ignore the historical reality that polls three months out from an election can be important signposts but do not justify attempts to forecast likely election outcomes with any specificity.

With regard to the first category, writers of both right and left have tended to impose their own policy preferences as explanations of the decline in support for the ALP at the federal level. Sky News and other Murdoch outlets have suggested the change is part of a global move to the right in the electorate. This is not totally without foundation, inflation and unplanned immigration tend to play into the political interests of right wing parties. However, it ignores the large change in UK towards the Centre-Left and in France to the NFP, the French left wing alliance at the expense of the Centre parties.

Writers on the Left tend to preach that if only the government took a stronger stand on their particular issue of choice (climate change/ immigration /foreign and defence policy/ taxation for example) the party would be doing better.

However, the reality is, as reflected in research by the Financial Times, every incumbent government lost support in the developed world in 2024. This trend was also evident in African elections where the ANC and the ruling parties in Botswana and Namibia lost considerable ground and also in India where the ruling BJP was returned with a significantly reduced majority.

Not all the ruling parties lost, but they all suffered a swing against them.

So, why is it surprising that there has been a drift in support for the Labor government in 2024?

It is possible to argue that the remarkable thing is that the government is still with in striking distance of retaining office.

Perhaps it would be more useful to look for uniquely Australian explanations for that! I suspect it has more to do with the weakness of the Opposition than the strength of the government.

In the second category, we see reports such as “hung parliament likely” based on the most recent polling from particular outlets.

A hung parliament is definitely one of a number of possible outcomes but to use any poll at this relatively early stage as a predictor of a “likely” outcome is naïve to say the least.

There are ample precedents in recent Australian political history to suggest any of the possible outcomes may eventuate by the time the campaign is finished.

Many people may not recall the 1987 election, but I remember the decision to call the election despite polling saying the ALP was trailing, in the confident belief that we could make up the ground in the campaign. I distinctly remember similar initiatives at a state government level.

At the federal level, historical Newspoll data shows that in 1993, 2001, 2004, 2013, 2019 and even 2022 the government of the day improved their position relative to the polls over the last three months leading up to the election.

The situation in 2025 is more complex. The recent falls in support for the major parties, and the loss of “safe” seats to Independents and Greens has made prediction more challenging.

I can see the possibility of coalition seats going to the Teals and Teal seats reverting to the coalition. It is also easy to see the Labor Party challenging Independent and Green seats and vice versa. As with every election there is also the probability of seats changing hands between Labor and the coalition, possibly in both directions.

This makes prediction difficult.

One thing that can be said with certainty is that the best polling in the world cannot make definitive predictions three months out.

It is all still to play for.

American Politics

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American

<heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began.

“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.”

Howe had written the poem on a visit to Washington, D.C., with her husband. Approaching the city, she had reflected sadly that there was little she could do for the United States. She couldn’t send her menfolk to war: her husband was too old to fight, her sons too young. And with a toddler, she didn’t even have enough time to volunteer to pack stores for the field hospitals. “I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission,” she recalled, and worried there was nothing she could give to the cause.

One day she, her husband, and friends, toured the troop encampments surrounding the city. To amuse themselves on the way back to the hotel, they sang a song popular with the troops as they marched. It ended: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the soldiers’ song.

That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the day before. She recalled: “[A]s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind…. With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen…. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Howe’s hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war, and the soldiers’ camps strung in circles around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. Capitol.

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.”

Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on to define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom:

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.”

The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away.

When the measure had passed the House the day before, the lawmakers and spectators had gone wild. “The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries,” the New York Times reported. “The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c. The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant.” Indiana congressman George Julian later recalled, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”

But the hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, students from Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, set out to bring them back to life. They organized to protest the F.W. Woolworth Company’s willingness to sell products to Black people but refusal to serve them food. On February 1, 1960, their male colleagues from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down on stools at Woolworth’s department store lunch counter in Greensboro. David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil were first-year students who wanted to find a way to combat the segregation under which Black Americans had lived since the 1880s.

So the men forced the issue by sitting down and ordering coffee and doughnuts. They sat quietly as the white waitress refused to serve them and the store manager ignored them. They came back the next day with a larger group. This time, television cameras covered the story. By February 3 there were 60 men and women sitting. By February 5 there were 50 white male counterprotesters.

By March the sit-in movement had spread across the South, to bus routes, museums, art galleries, and swimming pools. In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had begun.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

On February 1, 2023, Tyre Nichols’s family laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee. He was so severely beaten by police officers on January 7, allegedly for a traffic violation, that he died three days later.

In 2025 the U.S. government under President Donald Trump has revoked a 60-year-old executive order that protected equal opportunity in employment and has called for an end to all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. This February 1, neither the Pentagon nor the State Department will recognize Black History Month.

Mine eyes have seen the glory.

—

Notes:

Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899, pp. 273–276, at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=n1g4AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA244&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/01/tyre-nichols-funeral/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/state-department-urged-to-observe-spirit-of-trumps-anti-dei-order-during-black-history-month-12b36a09

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-intelligence-agency-pauses-events-activities-related-mlk/story?id=118244237

Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com> Unsubscribe

Is It Really a Coup?

Feb 05, 2025

Is it really a coup if it doesn’t feel like one? If your day-to-day life hasn’t changed? Can it be a coup if I can still write posts like this?

What we’ve seen over the last two weeks and accelerating over the weekend looks like a coup, a hostile, undemocratic takeover of government. Merriam-Webster says a coup is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” No violence so far because this is a coup fueled by tech bros, not the military. But we’re watching the alteration of government happen before our eyes.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it “a new kind of coup,” writing in Lucid about Elon Musk’s seeming power sharing with Trump: “And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different. The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two.” It is unusual, but it is still an effort to use extra-legal, undemocratic practices to radically alter American democracy, undoing the balance of power the Founding Fathers established between the three branches of government by consolidating power in the hands of the presidency as a complacent, Republican-led Congress looks on.

Monday night, Heather Cox Richardson started her nightly column by explaining that if Republicans wanted to do away with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency the Trump administration suddenly shuttered over the weekend, they could do that legally. Republicans now control the White House and Congress. There is a 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents on the Supreme Court. But instead of doing it lawfully, with Congress passing a bill for Donald Trump to sign, Richardson writes, “They are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.”

Richardson concluded: “The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.”

So, “coup” is the correct way to label the transformation of government we are living through. But with so much continuing normally, it’s easy to doubt what you’re seeing. Even experiencing it from the perspective of historians who understand this moment through the lens of history, it doesn’t seem quite real.

Reporter Garrett Graff wrote a piece titled, “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government,” that he pitched as “Imagining how we’d cover overseas what’s happening to the U.S. right now.” He started out like this: “I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch.” He concludes that “What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.”

Why damage the American experiment as we near the celebration of its 250th anniversary? Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy had some thoughts about that as he joined his colleagues outside of USAID’s closed offices on Monday. Suggesting this was not the time to pull punches, he called it a move to benefit the oligarchs who lined the front rows at Trump’s inauguration. “Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.” Senator Murphy also suggested that by closing agencies and cutting back the federal workforce, conservatives could “create the illusion they’re saving money” while they pass giant tax cuts that would benefit “billionaires and corporations.”

Sunday night, I called it a coup as well, writing in exasperation that “Musk and his crew of men barely out of their teens haven’t taken an oath to serve, and they are not accountable to the public. They are not a ‘Department’ of anything. They’re a private army that has taken over. Presidents can set up private advisory groups, but they have to function according to the rules, which include transparency. That’s not what’s happening here.” Worse still, there is little reason to believe that what starts in USAID, Treasury, and the FBI won’t continue to spread to other agencies that are in disfavor with Trump and Musk.

But long-term success is not a foregone conclusion with coups, especially when citizens are unwilling to accept them. Already, we are seeing signs Americans have no intention of letting it happen here. It’s a slow, still-fragile start, but elected officials and American citizens seem to be figuring it out.

Members of Congress rallying against Musk’s access to government information.

The lawyers are at work, too. So far, they’ve convinced courts to enjoin Trump’s birthright citizenship plans and his effort to stop federal spending that offends his sensibilities. Today, lawyers filed two separate cases designed to prevent the FBI from firing agents who worked on January 6 cases and to keep the Justice Department from making their names public. Placing faith in the courts feels like unsteady ground in light of the Supreme Court’s willingness to give Trump a pass on criminality. Having already given him immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts he commits, perhaps the conservative majority will see the wisdom of declining to consolidate all of the power of government in the hands of the president.

There is still plenty of fight left in our democracy, but it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. This isn’t a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices. It’s a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup. Talk with the people around you about what’s happening and what it means if they’re not aware.

Call it what it is: A coup. Let’s make sure it doesn’t succeed.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

National Gallery of Australia

Some examples from the Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar NGA exhibition of work. Below are several of paintings by Ethel Carrick. There will be more from this splendid exhibition next week.

The Ferry, Kashmir 1937

Week beginning 29 January 2025

Caroline Angus Planning the Murder of Anne Boleyn Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History August 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Caroline Angus has set the stage for acknowledging the reality of Anne Boleyn’s death. She was murdered, and King Henry V111 planned the murder. However, as Angus demonstrates, he was not alone (although he alone could have saved her) and the political machinations that were part of court life leading to the murder are established in this history of the period. Most profoundly, Anne Boleyn is portrayed as not just a vehicle for producing a male child, but a politically active woman. Both factors were to make her remaining alive a threat to the king and his line and those with political power to lose or gain. The last line of Angus’s book makes the point that Anne’s murder took her off the stage at the time, but she is very much central to Tudor history in her own right, as well as the mother of Elizabeth 1.

Rather than remaining with the claustrophobia of the Tudor Court, as relevant and interesting as it may be in the context of the murder of Anne Boleyn, this study goes further afield. It has impressive international political content, drawing in foreign political figures whose impact on Anne’s future is drawn as political as well as personal terms. Investigating Jane Seymour’s role requires a return to the Tudor Court, with the possibility that unknowingly Mary had a role in Jane’s elevation. Her life as a 27-year-old unmarried woman and possible courtly love interest rather than necessarily a serious contender for marriage, at least initially, is another reflective piece of work. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Joseph McBride George Cukor’s People Acting for a Master Directo Columbia University Press, January 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Joseph McBride’s detailed account of George Cukor and his directorial excellence is such a good read. McBride makes the point that Cukor has been derided as a ‘woman’s director’ and establishes him as a director admired by the women he directed – but equally feted with accolades from the male actors who appeared in his films. Cukor’s collaborative spirit stands high amongst the praise he garners and is celebrated by McBride with examples that draw the reader into a director’s world that is rather different from that usually portrayed. In emphasising Cukor’s collaborative directorial nature, McBride has brought so much to this absorbing story. It is a story that not only demonstrates Cukor’s mastery of his craft but draws attention to a style that has great rewards – for the actors, script and eventually, audiences. This biography becomes something more than the narrative of one person under McBride’s own direction. Although it then becomes a complex as well as a detailed story, George Cukor’s People remains engaging.

As McBride explains, the book is arranged around the most successful of Cukor’s films; analysing the relevant theatrical and literary texts; and dedicating time to understanding the way creativity between actor and director brought Cukor’s genius to the audience. These early explanations about how McBride will approach his material are not only informative about this particular work, and its subject, but provide a blueprint for approaching similar biographies. It is McBride’s thoughtful approach, to the topic and his readers, that I found particularly appealing. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Articles after the reviews: Bob McMullan – How the States Vote; Australian of the Year; Cindy Lou eats in Canberra; Tom Nichols, The Atlantic Daily, Night at Camp David; The New Statesman – three comments on American politics; Jess Piper Commentary; Heather Cox Richardson; Vamp by Stephanie Wood.

Australian Politics

Bob McMullan*

How the states vote

The Virginia University’s publication, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, recently published an interesting article about the recent voting performance of the various states relative to the nation as a whole.

The US approach is not directly transferable to Australia. Particularly because we have only 8 states and territories compared to 50 states in the USA. In particular, NSW and Victoria, are a very large proportion of the national vote. As a result, the national figures will be more significantly affected by the vote in those states than is the case with even the largest states in the USA.

However, the patterns of support and the variability of that support from election to election is interesting and may provide some insights into Australian prospects in 2025.

Over the last twenty years the voting performance of voters in the various states has varied in some interesting ways.

It is not surprising that the vote in NSW has tracked the national vote very closely. The proportion of votes cast in NSW of the national vote was 31.6% and therefore some similarity of pattern would be expected. However, over the seven elections since 2004 the average of variation of the NSW vote from the national two party preferred vote for the ALP has been only -0.2%. Over this time there has been relatively little variance in the comparison of state to national vote.

The biggest over performance for Labor compared to the national vote was 1.0% in 2007, the biggest underperformance was -1.3% in 2010 making a variance of 2.3%.

The situation in Victoria is different. Victoria constitutes a smaller but still significant proportion of Australian voters 25.8%. However, Victoria has differed more significantly from the national average. Over the last seven elections since 2004 the average difference in two party preferred vote for the ALP between the national average and Victoria was 3.1% more in Victoria than the national average. The range of results was from +1.7% in 2004 to +5.3% in 2010, a range of 3.6%.

Queensland has been the strongest state for the conservative side of politics. Since 2004 it has registered results on average 4.4% below the national average for the ALP. There has, however been quite a range of results. The biggest variation was -6.9% in 2019 and the smallest was -2.3% in 2007, an election in which Labor’s leader was from Queensland.

Western Australia has had the biggest variation in results relative to the national support for the ALP. The average divergence has been only 3.6%, but this masks a very large variation in relative results. The worst relative result for Labor in WA was in 2010 when the party underperformed the national two party preferred result by 6.6% and the best result was +2.9% in 2022. The 9.5% differential form best to worst is the largest for any state or territory.

South Australian results have varied less wildly than WA and have over recent elections shown a distinct move towards the ALP in relative terms. Apart from NSW, which has essentially mirrored the national figures, South Australia has the smallest average difference between national and state results with an average difference of 1.2% from the national results. In the last five elections the ALP two party preferred vote in South Australia has been above the national average, with the largest difference, 3.0% in 2010, when the Labor leader had strong South Australian connections.

The comparative results in the smaller jurisdictions, Tasmania, ACT and Northern Territory, are likely to be distorted by events in individual electorates such as the retirement of a popular sitting member. Over the last twenty years all these jurisdictions have consistently shown support for the ALP above the national average.

This survey of state voting patterns and history is not predictive. However, when taken with the national polling averages published recently by the Poll Bludger website which showed a decline in the ALP’s lead in Victoria and WA and a small fall from the coalition’s average lead in Queensland these figures may go some way to explain why the Prime Minister commenced his 2025 campaigning in Queensland and Western Australia while the Opposition leader held his first 2025 campaign outing in Victoria.

*See also: 4 Corners 3 February 2025.

From side-eye to show stopper as Grace Tame stuns PM*

Abe Maddison Jan 25, 2025, updated Jan 25, 2025

Grace Tame wore a provocative T-shirt when meeting the PM at an Australian of the Year event. Photo: AAP

A provocative act by former Australian of the Year Grace Tame has stolen the limelight – again – at a morning tea with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for recipients of the 2025 awards.

The 2021 winner wore a “F**k Murdoch” T-shirt when she was greeted by Albanese and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, at The Lodge in Canberra on Saturday.

The PM and Haydon smiled and greeted Tame, but there was no visible reaction to the incendiary statement on her shirt.

“[The T-shirt is] clearly not just about Murdoch, it’s the obscene greed, inhumanity and disconnection that he symbolises, which are destroying our planet,” Tame said after the event.

“For far too long this world and its resources have been undemocratically controlled by a small number of morbidly wealthy oligarchs,” she said.

In 2022, the outspoken advocate for survivors of sexual assault also stirred controversy when she attended the same event as the outgoing Australian of the Year.

When Tame and her fiance Max Heerey arrived, they were greeted by then prime minister Scott Morrison and his wife Jenny, who congratulated them on their recent engagement.

*I don’t think that he looks in the slightest bit stunned!

Football great Neale Daniher named Australian of the Year

But Tame remained stony faced as they posed for photographs, which famously captured her giving Morrison an ice-cold “side-eye” expression.

She later addressed that moment on Twitter, commenting that the survival of abuse culture “is dependent on submissive smiles, self-defeating surrenders and hypocrisy”.

“What I did wasn’t an act of martyrdom in the gender culture war,” she wrote.

“It’s true that many women are sick of being told to smile, often by men, for the benefit of men. But it’s not just women who are conditioned to smile and conform to the visibly rotting status-quo. It’s all of us.”

Tame had been highly critical of Morrison and his government’s response to allegations of sexual assault and toxic workplace culture in federal parliament.

Former football star and coach Neil Daniher was later named Australian of the Year for 2025, recognising his inspiring fight against motor neurone disease and his campaign that has raised millions of dollars in research for a long-awaited cure.

Scientist, industrial chemist and proud Mabuigilaig and Goemulgal woman Doctor Katrina Wruck was named the Young Australian of the Year.

Brother Thomas Oliver (Olly) Pickett AM was been named Senior Australian of the Year.

-AAP

Cindy Lou eats at Bamiyan, Canberra City.

We had a wonderful meal, at a comfortable outside table. Arrangements had been made to reserve one for us inside if it began to rain – just one of the really pleasant things about the friendly and efficient staff. They also provide good advice about the portions of food that will suit the group. We had the mantu-e to begin – vegetarian, and lamb dumplings. The garlic butter prawns were delicious, and the chicken dishes – skewers (one thigh and one spicy breast on a large naan an accompanied by salad and a yoghurt dressing) and chicken sabzi were excellent. The eggplant dish was another favourite, and the Kabuli Pallow rice a great accompaniment. I was so busy serving myself prawns that I didn’t take a photo – suffice to say, there is a generous portion of prawns in an even more generous serve of delicious sauce. Next time I shall take a plastic container to take the remains of the sauce home, although on this occasion it was delicious on the rice and chicken from the skewers.

American Politics

Tom NicholsStaff writer

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May,a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

Edited excerpts from –

Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books and ideas. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.

Below there are ten [three of which are re-published here] of our favourite pieces from across the magazine and website this week. …

Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel discuss how the left paved the way for right populism. NH

The taxpayer bailout of Wall Street cast a shadow over Obama’s presidency. It dashed the hopes for a revival of progressive or social democratic politics that his candidacy had inspired. And it generated two currents of protest: on the left, the Occupy movement, followed by the surprisingly successful candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016 against Hillary Clinton; on the right, the Tea Party movement, and the election of Donald Trump. Both of these strands grew from the anger and outrage and sense of injustice at the bailout and the building back up of Wall Street, without holding anyone to account. So in a way, the progressive, mainstream centre-left politicians who governed in the aftermath of Reagan and Thatcher laid the groundwork for the right-wing version of populism

Unusually aggressive weather patterns caused Los Angeles to burn for days in the middle of winter. But it was a long-fomenting combination of climate change, budget-slashing and general urban neglect that turned the region into a tinderbox, Richard Seymour writes. FMcR

Also at stake here is a defunct model of fire management. Lately, the right-wing press has credited Trump with having warned Governor Newsom about the wildfire danger. He claimed in 2019 that he told Newsom “from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him”. He also issued an executive order to increase logging on the grounds that this would curb wildfires in overgrown and fuel-dense forests. In fact, logging and “cleaning” the forest floors removes a source of moisture that retards flames. The evidence is that protected forests experience much less severe fires. As fire management expert Stephen J Pyne has been arguing for decades, suppression is bad management. It derives from an inappropriate importation by colonists of European fire practices, and it makes wildfires worse. California’s chapparal biome is adapted for fire: it burns, because it is meant to burn. It is human action, above all climate change, logging, real estate sprawl and dysfunctional public infrastructure that makes it more deadly than it need be.

To the question of the week – whether Musk intended that gesture – Ross Barkan has a controversial answer: it doesn’t matter. America is too big, wild and differentiated for fascism ever to take hold. GM

Those who speak of American fascism tend to do so from the airy citadels of media and academia. They barely seem to understand how the US functions. Consider public education. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned – all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the US, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On New York’s Long Island, among just two counties, there are 125 public school districts. There is no such thing as a centralised educational system in America. The US’s educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long.

Let’s See Who is Stronger

A short post…Jess Piper Jan 26

I didn’t want to tell you what I did in the days after the Presidential election because I am ashamed of it. Not because it was unreasonable, but because I am an activist living in a red state, and I know better.

I drove North into the woods with my checkbook a few days after Trump won.

I was going to buy some land in a blue state and have a place to run and hide. I wanted to be close to the Boundary Waters so I could canoe my way to safety if I needed to.I am not on a national radar, but you can bet your next paycheck that every elected Republican in this state knows my name. And under the “anything goes” administration we are now facing, I know I could face backlash. I could face physical or financial consequences.I was scared.

I talked to a few real estate agents and drove about nine hours wondering what I was doing. Nothing was right and everything was wrong — I drove in circles. I went to places I knew and places I didn’t know.I drove back home without using my checkbook.While in this blue state, I passed Trump flags and FJB signs. I listened to local radio cheer the election results. I bought gas at filling stations with MAGA hats for sale. I saw a huge barn with TRUMP written across the loft.What is the point of running? It is a blue state with more protections, but the rural areas are very similar to Missouri rural spaces and how am I helping anyone by running? What about my grown kids and my grandkids in Missouri?

I am a straight, middle-aged white woman and MAGA passing at that. Wouldn’t I be better suited using my privilege to stay and fight in Missouri?

Yes.

I haven’t told my older kids what I did after the election. Don’t worry. They don’t read my Substack, so they still won’t know.

My youngest knows I go into nature for a few days when things go wrong or I am overwhelmed by the work. My husband often tells me to go when he sees things are weighing on me. The trip provided clarity.

The fascists want me to give up my home state. They want me to run to places and people that agree with me. They want us cornered in spaces, packed into populated areas, just like they want us to cede the less populated areas.How much easier would it be to win when all of the liberals are contained to a few urban areas in a few states. The Electoral College would be a slam dunk and corporations could run amok in rural spaces — you get a CAFO and you get a CAFO.

I will not run. I will not compromise. I will not collaborate. I will be the opposition.

I know this is a lot for all of us, but I have decided I will do one thing a day to stop the fascism creeping in. I know that all things no good and terrible will go through the states, so I will start in my own backyard.

Yesterday, my State Senator sent his monthly newsletter expressing his opposition to the abortion amendment Missourians just passed. He said he would actively fight to overturn the will of Missouri voters. I spent about two minutes sending an email in response: It was short and to the point, and I shared it on social media to encourage others to do the same.

Jess Piper to Rusty Black
We voted on Amendment 3 and it passed. If I can deal with a lazy, no good, lying, cheating, traitor felon being my president, you can deal with the will of Missourians on abortion.
It passed. Move on.
Jess

We can’t do everything, but we can do one thing. One thing. Every day. I can’t run away, but I can stand up.

There is nowhere to run anyway, and I have spent the better part of a decade doing the work. I can teach others to do the same.Let’s do this. Let’s see who is the last one standing. Let’s see who is stronger.

Let’s f’king go.~Jess

Heather Cox Richardson Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

We have all earned a break for this week, but as some of you have heard me say, I write these letters with an eye to what a graduate student will need to know in 150 years. Two things from last night belong in the record of this time, not least because they illustrate President Donald Trump’s deliberate demonstration of dominance over Republican lawmakers.

Last night the Senate confirmed former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary of the United States of America. As Tom Bowman of NPR notes, since Congress created the position in 1947, in the wake of World War II, every person who has held it has come from a senior position in elected office, industry, or the military. Hegseth has been accused of financial mismanagement at the small nonprofits he directed, has demonstrated alcohol abuse, and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement. He has experience primarily on the Fox News Channel, where his attacks on “woke” caught Trump’s eye.

The secretary of defense oversees an organization of almost 3 million people and a budget of more than $800 billion, as well as advising the president and working with both allies and rivals around the globe to prevent war. It should go without saying that a candidate like Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president. But Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people’s safety.

The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS), tried to spin Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience as a plus: “We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense. Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”

Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50–50 tie to confirm Hegseth, as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined all the Democrats and Independents in voting no. Hegseth was sworn in early this morning.

That timing mattered. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.

Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.

Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.

Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.

In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.

During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”

The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.

This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday.

The framers of the Constitution designed impeachment to enable Congress to remove a chief executive who deliberately breaks the law, believing that the determination of senators to hold onto their own power would keep them from allowing a president to seize more than the Constitution had assigned him.

In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton tried to reassure those nervous about the centralization of power in the new Constitution that no man could ever become a dictator because unlike a king, “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

But the framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Partisanship would push politicians to put party over country and eventually would induce even senators to bow to a rogue president. MAGA Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told the Fox News Channel today that he is unconcerned about Trump’s breaking the law written just two years ago. “Well, sometimes inspector generals don’t do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired, and the president is gonna make wise decisions on those.”

There is one more story you’ll be hearing more about from me going forward, but it is important enough to call out tonight because it indicates an important shift in American politics. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released yesterday, only 12% of those polled thought the president relying on billionaires for policy advice is a good thing. Even among Republicans, only 20% think it’s a good thing.

Since the very earliest days of the United States, class was a central lens through which Americans interpreted politics. And yet, in the 1960s, politicians began to focus on race and gender, and we talked very little about class. Now, with Trump embracing the world’s richest man, who invested more than $250 million in his election, and with Trump making it clear through the arrangement of the seating at his inauguration that he is elevating the interests of billionaires to the top of his agenda, class appears to be back on the table.

The notes are available at the end of the article at Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

—Vamp with Stephanie Wood <vampbystephaniewood@substack.com>

Welcome to Vamp, my modern mini-magazine.

Stephanie Wood’s newsletter is a fascinating amalgam which she describes as ‘… my personal writing and reflections on life, alongside a carefully curated collection of links exploring everything from relationships and food to current affairs and travel. Vamp is driven by my core belief in the transformative power of curiosity, creativity, audacity, and authenticity.‘

I loved this example, putting to rest the fear that overseas visitors appear to have of our spiders:

Spiders

There will be spiders in a Sydney summer. I am happy to see them. It means that all the sprays and chemicals we use around our homes haven’t completely wiped out the arthropods and insects. There has been a handspan-sized huntsman in my bedroom for some nights now. There one minute, gone the next, then back again. They are welcome … they stay clear of me, I stay clear of them and know that if I went near they’d run a mile. An explosion of newly hatched daddy long legs covers my bathroom ceiling. I gently removed what I think was a St Andrew’s Cross spider from my lounge room this morning. Up a ladder in my courtyard yesterday pruning back a tangle of star jasmine, I was diverted by a web seething with babies of some description (see video below). Meanwhile, I have nightly chats with an industrious neighbour, as yet unidentified (above … suggestions welcome; someone suggested a golden orb spider but my spider is determinedly brown). He/she (or his/her descendants) appears every year and spins their dreams, their food-traps, their gorgeous, glorious, great architectural creations from my kitchen window to my magnolia tree. I am happy to encourage their work, the work of all the rest of them, and, perhaps, hopefully, their appetite for the ever-present swarms of mosquitos which love me with a passion. (OK, I might need to remove, somehow, the daddy long legs – they make such a stonking great mess everywhere.)

This is a ‘mini-magazine well worth subscribing to – fun, informative and thoughtful.

Week beginning 22 January 2025

Jane A. Adams Cold Bones Severn House, December 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This is book 10 of the Jane A. Adams series that features former Detective Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone. Set in the 1930s, it is described as a mystery. It is also a challenging social commentary. The gentle resolution of two brutal murders and a miscarriage of justice, is a departure from the usual thriller, until the juxtaposition of this style with the grisly realities of the punishment that the murderer will suffer, and details of the murders becomes apparent. A wealth of other attributes, make this novel satisfying in a rather different way from the page turner thriller. These attributes include the portrayal of a man finding his way from a demanding career to life at a different pace; a main character battling prejudice, which is reflected in the depiction of other female characters, depiction of the backgrounds to the various perpetrators and the very pleasing writing style. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Sue Wilkes Young Workers of the Industrial Age Child Labour in the 18th and 19th Centuries Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History, September 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This is a harrowing account of child workers, and their occupations, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I found it impossible to read at one sitting, not because of the style (as usual in these publications it is eminently readable) but because of the inhumanity it brought so graphically to life. Equally, Wilkes’ attention to the philosophy behind the treatment of children in that period is distressing – after all, are the ideas behind punishment for poverty so removed from current circumstances? Then profits rather than people were considered of utmost importance. Wilkes leaves us with the question – and now? It is Sue Wilkes’ empathy with the workers and her enlightening discussion that makes this book powerful, and I reiterate, harrowing. However, this does not mean it should not be read. Although aware of the circumstances under which children laboured from other sources, Wilkes’ research is commendable, bringing as it does such detailed accounts of the occupations and conditions that endured in this period.

That children’s labour provided to those who could afford them, clothing items such as cotton, buttons, pins, lace, and straw hats is graphically described. Further, the point is made that children also produced household items such as glass, carpets, cutlery candles and pottery and swept the chimneys of these houses – again, for those who could afford them. That the houses warmed with these soot laden structures, above fires with matches that child labour produced, were cleaned by young people, for many hours a day becomes real under Wilkes’ hand. Reading this book, it is now less difficult to picture the well clad people that we see in film and on television in period dramas taking advantage of the philosophy around children and childhood in the period. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

After the reviews: Ghosts to be made in Western Australia; the British version of Ghosts; Cindy Lou at 86 North and Cafe Cultura; Civil Discourse – Joyce Vance; An encore performance for ‘Miss Pym’; The Reality behind Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women The Troublesome Woman Revealed, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023 – excerpt re comedy in Pym; ICYMI: Martin Luther King III Says His Father Would Be ‘Quite Disappointed’ With The Current World; On the third Monday of each January, Americans honor the memory of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, who advocated for social change through non-violent means; Kamala Harris and Joe Biden quotes on MLK Day; Civil Discourse, short excerpts; Michelle Obama on MLK Day.

BBC Studios Productions’ ‘Ghosts’ to haunt Western Australia

Staff Writer· News Production TV & Streaming ·January 17, 2025

From left are Screenwest CEO Rikki Lea Bestall, ‘Ghosts’ executive producer Sophia Zachariou, WA Culture and Arts Minister David Templeman, ‘Ghosts’ producer Bree-Anne Sykes, and director Christiaan van Vuuren at the ABC Studios in East Perth (Image: Liang Xu).

BBC Studios Productions Australia has partnered with Screenwest to bring the production of supernatural comedy Ghosts to Western Australia.

Announced as part of Paramount ANZ’s 2025 upfronts, the eight-part series follows lovebirds Kate and Sean, a couple about to jump into the hellscape that is the inner-city rental market until Kate inherits a huge mansion in the country.

Moving in together for the first time the young couple are attempting domestic bliss, but unbeknown to them, the house is haunted by a collection of needy spirits who carked it in Ramshead Manor over the past 200 years.

The original series, produced by Monumental Television in association with Them There, first aired on BBC One in 2019, with the fifth and final season becoming the UK’s most-watched comedy of 2023. There has since been a US version – currently in its fourth season – and a newly announced German adaptation.

The Australian version will be filmed in Perth in the coming months with support from the Western Australian Production Attraction Incentive.

Christiaan Van Vuuren and Madeleine Dyer will direct the episodes, which are being produced by Bree-Anne Sykes and executive-produced by Sophia Zachariou.

Josh Mapleston leads a writing team that includes script editor Libby Butler, along with Shontell Ketchell (Gold Diggers), Philip Tarl Denson (Zero-Point), and Steph Tisdell. The cast is yet to be announced.

Screenwest CEO Rikki Lea Bestall said the production represented an exciting start to the year for the state’s screen sector, which recently welcomed the third season of Binge courtroom drama The Twelve and the second season of the ABC’s Mystery Road: Origin.

“GHOSTS has entertained audiences all around the world, and we’re so pleased to welcome Network 10, Paramount+ and BBC Studios Productions Australia to Western Australia for the Australian series,” she said.

BBC Studios Productions Australia general manager and creative director Kylie Washington said the state was the “perfect backdrop” for the series’ comedic antics.

“We’re excited to bring Ghosts to life with a unique cast of characters that reflect our very own history and culture,” she said.

The British version on which this Australian production is based

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (edited)

Ghosts is a British sitcom …It follows a group of ghosts from different historical periods haunting a country house while sharing it with its new living occupants…

Premise

Alison Cooper unexpectedly inherits the vast but crumbling Button House from a distant relative. The house is haunted by numerous squabbling ghosts from across the ages who died on its grounds and are invisible and intangible to the living. Ignoring their solicitor’s advice to sell the property, Alison and her husband Mike decide to move in and renovate it, with the idea of turning the house into a luxury hotel.

At first, the ghosts are not happy with the living couple’s plans and conspire to get rid of the newcomers. After various failed attempts to scare them, one of the ghosts pushes Alison from an upstairs window, resulting in her being clinically dead for three minutes. When she awakens …Alison discovers that her husband has arranged a huge mortgage, and that her near-death experience has given her the ability to see and hear the ghosts.

Initially believing the ghosts to be an after-effect of her accident, Alison eventually accepts the truth and confronts them. Because the Coopers cannot leave for financial reasons, and the ghosts are bound to the mansion’s land until they can ascend into the afterlife (which they refer to as being ‘sucked off’, unaware that the phrase is a euphemism in modern times), both sides eventually agree that they have to coexist as best they can. Meanwhile, the house requires a lot of work, and Alison and Mike devise several schemes to assist their perilous finances.

Cindy Lou enjoys meals in Canberra

86 North

86 was great as usual. We sat outside as inside tends to become noisy – not that we are put off by this, the food and service more than make up for it. On this occasion there were four of us, and I was so busy talking (and eating) I forgot to take photos of some of the dishes. Those missing are the delicious spiced cauliflower, the broccolini (charred and with a generous portion of hazelnuts) the pumpkin tortellini with the sage and burnt butter sauce, and the crispy chicken with two sauces. Pictured are the entrees – the charred corn cobs with the most fantastic sauce and parmesan, and the duck bun, and the three desserts we chose. Of these, we found the frozen margherita a bit of a disappointment, but the strawberry cheesecake and the popcorn sundae made up for this. I enjoy the mocktails – the passionfruit is a favourite.

Cafe Cultura

What a find! A great menu with a range of meals for breakfast and lunch the ones we chose from both sections of the menu were delicious. The service was friendly and there is a lovely outdoor setting. Complimentary baklava was a very generous touch. The zucchini fritters were full of zucchini and accompanied by a fabulous salad which cannot be seen in the photo. The Turkish tea looked fun, but water was also provided in carafes.

I keep returning to one core thought: civics education really matters. It’s absence, at least in part, is what makes a Donald Trump and a MAGA movement possible. It’s the casual view among so many people that the form our government takes doesn’t matter. Living in a democracy isn’t something they view as important; politics is a spectator sport and not serious business. Trump is a symptom of that view. Why have serious governance when you can have the distraction of reality TV?

As a voter, the only reason you would let Donald Trump control the levers of power is because you don’t understand what it means and that it’s deadly serious. I’m not talking about politicians or business people here, people who want to ride Trump’s coattails to power and or hope to remain there because of him—there’s a special circle of hell reserved for people like Mitch McConnell, who saw Trump’s behavior on January 6 for what it was and then got right back in bed with him. I’m talking about Trump’s base, our fellow citizens, and, regrettably, sometimes our friends and family.Civics education is important. It doesn’t have to be formal, although it can be wonderful and inspiring when it is. Some people educate themselves. I grew up used to seeing a well-worn copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on my grandfather’s bookshelf. Civics education isn’t about advocating for one political view over another, it’s about understanding our constitutional democracy, the three branches of government, the importance of checks and balances, the rule of law, and the commitment of the Founding Fathers, as imperfect as it was at inception, to protecting the rights of all people, not just people who looked like them or prayed like them. The notion that the promise they created is one we should continue to work to fulfill, that American democracy is aspirational and a living body of work for all of us to take on, is important.When we don’t invest in civics education in our schools and our communities, we lose that awareness. And let’s be frank, it’s been lost in parts of our country, replaced with a Christian nationalism or a MAGA tribalism that would have shocked the Founding Fathers, not because they didn’t believe it could happen, but because they believed they had taken steps to prevent it. In ignorance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and why they’re constructed the way that they are, a focus on what divides us instead of the work we can do if we stay united can become the prevalent view.

This morning, I reread Norm Eisen and Jen Rubin’s answers to Five Questions Friday night, and I was struck again by this:

Joyce: We are living in an era where many people are shocked Trump was reelected or have disengaged out of disgust. But we all understand the time is coming for us to get back in the game. What do you all think is at stake if Americans don’t wake up in time, and what advice do you have for people who are struggling to get back in or trying to figure out the right place to get involved? You both have a lot of experience with this. How do you think we keep the Republic?

Jen and Norm: If we do not win the fight we will go the way of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. A robust, pluralistic democracy will be crushed under the boot of a thuggish regime dedicated to a vision of America based on race and religion, not on the constitutional creed (“All men are created equal…”). We will complete the transition from democracy to oligarchy. Corruption, kleptocracy and the cult of personality will rule the day.And when America ceases to be a force for democracy, international order, and stability, pro-democracy forces will shrivel too. We cannot lose the values that make America good and great – the rule of law, functional government, decency, inclusion. We insist that we continue the struggle to form a “more perfect union.” The alternative is unimaginable.There is no phony equivalence here, no effort to bothsides what happens when we fail to understand the importance of the moment we live in. We are going to need more of that in the months ahead. We need to be willing to call it what it is, to put our knowledge of civics to use.I continue to believe that although we live in the era of the heavy lift to keep democracy, we can do it. Unlike the countries in Eastern Europe that started from a weak position when they clawed out democracy from a non-democratic tradition, we have centuries of democracy to fall back on. Donald Trump won the 2024 election with 49.8% of the popular vote. He received the nod from 77,303,568 voters to Kamala Harris’ 75,019,230 people. That means that there were almost as many people as those who voted for him who didn’t want to reject democracy in favor of Trumpism. The election was not a romp for Trump.

And, 90 million eligible Americans didn’t vote. The difference between Harris and Trump didn’t matter to them, or at least they didn’t feel sufficient urgency to vote. That’s a failure of civics education in America.Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in his farewell speech, said, “American democracy is not a sprint but a relay race. And as we pass the baton, I am very proud of what we’ve achieved over the past four years … Every military defends a country. But the United States military also defends a Constitution.”We’re here for the relay race, to be part of a community that runs together toward the finish line of democracy. The community that finds a way to make sure more people understand what the stakes are and why being engaged matters. I saw a post on social media this week, that said, “In 2016, I was all in. In 2024, I will spend my days ignoring anything politically adjacent. Life’s too short.”We cannot do that. Politics is not some foreign apparatus, separate from our daily lives. Everything is politically adjacent: our families, our livelihoods, our freedoms. Our future world will be the one we are willing to fight for. If we don’t fight for democracy, it seems likely to slip further away during the next Trump administration. Already, we see a nominee to be Attorney General of the United States who is willing to buy the Big Lie and a president-elect who is already monetizing the presidency for personal gain.We need to find a way to infuse civics into daily life so more people will care about and understand what’s happening. Sitting back, doing nothing—not an option at this point. Evil happens when good people do nothing. We need just enough of us to stay awake, eyes open, to make a difference.We have that long tradition of democracy in this country, in our bones, to fall back on. It’s time to start believing in ourselves again and to get to work. Donald Trump does not define who we area. Do you have alternative plans for inauguration day? Are you participating in the tradition of engaging in community service to celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday?

Share your good ideas with the rest of us in the comments. And, a request from my wonderful proofreader (and errors you see in the newsletter find their way in when I can’t resist the urge to edit after she’s finished), who has young children and asked for good books to read with them to fill the gaps in civics education. I suggested Preet Bharara’s Justice Is…: A Guide for Young Truth Seekers.

What are your favorites?

We’re in this together,

Joyce

An encore performance for ‘Miss Pym’

Posted January 17, 2025

Dozens came out to watch ‘An Afternoon with Miss Pym’ on Jan. 12.

Courtesy Dan DiPietro

Members of the Sea Cliff Civic Association presented an encore performance of “An Afternoon with Miss Pym” on Sunday, Jan. 12, at St. Luke’s Parish Hall. The play, an adaptation of a novel by British author Barbara Pym, was staged after enthusiastic feedback from audiences who attended the original show in November.

Barbara Pym wrote humorous and observant novels from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The live performance took place on St. Luke’s stage and served as a fundraiser for the church.

My feminist interpretation of Pym’s comedy

The Reality behind Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women The Troublesome Woman Revealed, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

‘There are also alternative views of Pym’s undoubtedly comic touch. Pym uses her comedy as a feminist device. The most recent publication in which Pym’s humour is the focus, is Naghmeh Varghaiyan’s The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction. This is an excellent addition to the recognition of Pym’s feminist approach but takes only one aspect of her work to make the feminist argument. Earlier commentary is oblivious to the argument that Pym’s humour is a feminist tool. Hazel Holt’s report that readers have laughed aloud in the Bodleian while reading Crampton Hodnet is apt but does not examine the possibility that there are complex reasons for the laughter. Closer to recognising the biting nature of Pym’s comic writing is Mason Cooley, who links Pym’s writing with that of Moliere and Beckett, and Bruce Jacobs who sees her as a satirist. Annette Weld links Pym and Austen as typical of the comedy of manners oeuvre – Austen, Trollope, and Waugh, as well as lesser lights E.F. Benson, Elizabeth Taylor and Kingsley Amis’. Jacobs’ suggestion that there is an ‘anti-intellectual strain in Pym’s satire’, is counteracted by a feminist reading of her fictional accounts of libraries. Pym’s approach to libraries was part of her strategy to conflate the professional workplace to a domestic equivalent. Contemporary writers of women’s fiction have taken this approach to demonstrate that what has traditionally been seen as women’s work and part of a domestic environment often has its counterpart in the professions. As with these writers, conflating the two was a critical part of Pym’s feminist method.

Jane Nardin commends the quality of Pym’s humour. Judy Little recognises that Pym’s irony subverts patriarchal language and Orphia Jane Allen sees Pym’s ‘deflation of feminine myths at the heart of her comedy’. Glynn-Ellen Fisichelli suggests that Pym used comedy to deal with her own experiences as well as those of her fictional characters. Rather than accepting that morbidity, Rhoda Sherwood suggests that Pym’s work not only ‘contemplates the benefits of sisterhood through Some Tame Gazelle’ but also ‘transforms some conventions of romantic comedy in order to make her point that a woman may be happier with her sister than with a man’. Like Fisichelli, she concludes that ‘Pym uses romantic conventions […] Pym’s is a vision of warm, satisfying sisterhood, a vision that acts as an antidote to the treatment of sisterhood by Godwin, Trollope, Drabble, and West’. Both approaches to the romantic nature of Pym’s work contrast with my interpretation of Pym’s use of romantic conventions to challenge them. In keeping with my interpretation is Tsagaris’ suggestion that romance in Pym’s work is the opposite of romantic when she exposes the way in which Pym subverts romance.’

Also see: Robin Joyce, ‘Comic Rapiers: Barbara Pym’s Comedy and its Targets’, Alliance of Literary Societies Journal, (Autumn 2016), 1-3.

ICYMI: Martin Luther King III Says His Father Would Be ‘Quite Disappointed’ With The Current World

Story by Kecia Gayle

In a recent appearance on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Martin Luther King III, the son of the revered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., talked about the current state of the nation and how his father’s legacy resonates today.

When asked about what his father would think of the present-day challenges, King III did not hold back. He honestly said that his father would likely be less than satisfied with the direction in which the world is heading.

“He’d be quite disappointed, quite frankly, that we are where we are,” he stated. While acknowledging that his father might not be surprised by the ongoing issues, he emphasized that the disappointment would still be palpable. “Probably wouldn’t be surprised, but he certainly would be disappointed because he always infused energy that was positive, bringing out the best of who we as Americans are.”

King III continued to address a troubling observation about American unity. He explained, “Unfortunately, in great tragedy, we see the best of who Americans are. But when it’s over, we go back to our corners and live in bubbles and separate.” He urged, “We need to exhibit the behavior that we exhibit in tragedy universally, all the time.”

Additionally, he responded to the controversial timing of Donald Trump’s inauguration, which fell on the same day that commemorates his father’s legacy. King III expressed a hope that Trump would engage in meaningful dialogue with all communities. “If you really want to bring the nation together so that it is the manifestation of what we call ourselves, the United States of America, we’re not reflective of the United States of America right this moment, in my judgment,” he said.

As many are aware, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed on the third Monday of January each year, is a federal holiday in the United States that honors the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent civil rights leader who played a crucial role in the fight for racial equality and social justice during the 1950s and 1960s. Although the day happens to fall on Trump’s inauguration, many family members and supporters have made sure to shine a light on MLK Day.

On the third Monday of each January, Americans honor the memory of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, who advocated for social change through non-violent means.

On the third Monday of each January, Americans honor the memory of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. A Baptist minister from the southern state of Alabama, Dr. King was a leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, advocating social change through non-violent means. On January 15th, he would have turned 96 years old.

The country young Martin was born into was one of racial segregation and discrimination by design. Most southern states were governed by so-called Jim Crow laws, local and state legislation that codified and enforced segregation and behavior of the non-white population. But Dr. King believed in the biblical proposition that all people are created equal in the image of God. In keeping with the motto he chose for his civil rights movement, he set out “to redeem the soul of America.”

Believing that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle,” Dr. King organized and participated in mass-action boycotts, sit-ins, peaceful marches and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience.

Dr. King once stated that “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.” And so, activists sometimes deliberately, but peacefully and respectfully, broke laws aimed at segregating the white citizenry from the non-white, thus hoping to bring attention to the inherent unfairness of such legislation.

Dr. King’s greatest achievements came with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which outlawed employment discrimination and segregation in public places, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These two victories had a major impact not only on the United States, but around the world.

Dr. King once said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” These words guided his life’s work, but ultimately, another’s hatred cost him his life at a young age. He was thirty-nine years old when an assassin’s bullet cut him down on April 4th, 1968. But his legacy lives on. In time, all segregationist laws were repealed, and discrimination is a legally punishable – and punished – offence.

Dr. King’s life is well summed up in his own words: “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”

Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C. | Public Domain

Some excerpts from Joyce Vance’s newsletter:

It’s 2025. It’s 1984. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

It’s not a great day for America, but perhaps a bit of a wake-up among sleepwalkers is coming, at least eventually.

So, have courage. Remember to make time for some fun and some joy. The most important thing you can do right now is reach out to friends and hold them close. Surround yourself with people who understand that the country is trending dangerously so you feel supported. You don’t have to engage with the “if I ignore it, it’s not happening” crowd today. Do everything you can to fight for our country in this perilous moment, but remember to find some happiness for yourself. Laughter and happiness can help to beat back anger and despair, even if we have to work hard right now to muster them.

Mother Nature weighed in:

As Kamala Harris reminded us after the election, “Sometimes the fight takes a while—that doesn’t mean we won’t win.” Don’t even consider giving up. Now, more than ever…

We’re in this together,

Joyce

From The Independent

Michelle Obama posts poignant message…

Michelle Obama posted the quote: “The time is always right to do what is right.” The message was also in support of the non-profit group When We All Vote.

“Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of service always inspires me,” Obama wrote. “This #MLKDay, I hope you’ll join me and @WhenWeAllVote in honoring Dr. King’s life and legacy by getting involved in your community.”

“Whether you’re mentoring students at your local school or volunteering for a cause that matters to you, it all helps make a difference…”.

Kamala Harris

Dr. King taught us the importance of lifting people up. Let us honor his enduring legacy as we march forward in the fight for freedom, opportunity, and equality for all.

Joe Biden

Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we reflect on the fact that the journey of our democracy is difficult and ongoing – and the distance is short between peril and possibility.

But we must keep it going.

Our march toward a more perfect union continues.

May be an image of 2 people and monument

WEEK BEGINNING 15 JANUARY 2025

Nicci French The Last Days of Kira Mullan Simon & Schuster (Australia)|Simon & Schuster UK, January 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

I had just finished rereading Nicci French’s Frieda Klein series, and joy of joys, “The Last Days of Kira Mullan” became available. This book did not disappoint. Like the many Nicci French novels already published, this one also deserves the accolades they have garnered. “The Last days of Kira Mullan” reintroduces Detective Inspector Maud O’Connor from the earlier novel, “Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?” However, before she arrives to investigate the Kira Mullan case anew, Nancy North’s story takes centre stage. This is an excellent device, reflecting a similar experience in the earlier novel where the detective also entered the narrative where the build-up gave Charlotte Salter’s story priority. At the same time, Maud O’Connor’s story moves forward, not only does she investigate but she makes a new friend and deals with old enemies.

Nancy North, would be restaurateur, has had a breakdown. Felix, her partner, is determined to care for her and ensure that there is no recurrence. Economic circumstances force them to move from their familiar flat and environment to a new area and into an inadequate and poorly located flat. The neighbours include a constantly crying baby, her young mother and overworked doctor husband, two male friends, and Kira Mullan. Next door is a similar house, which has remained intact, belonging to a mature married couple. Their superior economic situation creates an unequal power relationship with the flat dwellers despite fraternisation between them. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

After the book review: Brief discussion of two books making a similar point on the way in which accusations of poor mental health can be used to diminish women’s autonomy – The Yellow Wallpaper and The Little House; Ethel Carrick | Anne Dangar at the NGA; American Politics: Joyce Vance, The Atlantic – Trump’s Sentencing Made No One Happy, Andrew Weissman’s podcast, Liz Cheney’s opinion; Lawrence O’Donnell interviews Neal Katyal and Andrew Weissmann; Huffington Post Commentary; London Activities in January.

The treatment of Nora North’s statements and evidence by her neighbors, police and her close friends reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper by Frances Perkins Gilman. * In this story, a woman’s remedy, acknowledging her ability to decide upon her treatment for what is seen as her mentally unstable behaviour, is rejected. With the kindness exhibited by Felix, in The Last Days of Kira Mullan, the woman’s pleas are ignored by her husband. He, and her male doctors, know best. This woman finds her succour in writing, but she must do this in secret – her husband and doctors do not approve. The energy she must use to hide her writing becomes an important theme in the story. Her ennui is the inevitable outcome of the energy she must use to stave off madness in an environment where her word is nullified. The pressure of her male ‘supporters’ that she is incapable of choosing a beneficial lifestyle, makes it impossible for her to make that choice.

*There is a range of interpretations of the story advanced in Wikipedia that make interesting reading.

I found The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Amazon for 99p. Herland features in another book I shall be reviewing in a few weeks’ time, The Book Club for Troublesome Women.

The Little House Philippa Gregory, available on Amazon and secondhand – a great buy.

Philippa Gregory is more well known for her historical fiction. However, her earlier fiction is also well worth reading. The Little House, like The Yellow Wallpaper, and this week’s reviewed book, The Last Days of Kira Mullan, also looks at the impact of seeming kindness to obliterate a woman’s knowledge about herself and her abilities.

The little house is at the end of a road leading to the manor farm of yellow Bath stone. It is Ruth and Patrick’s, and later, Thomas’s house – or is it? Does it really belong to Elizabeth? Do Patrick and Thomas also belong to her? Just where does Ruth feature in the Cleary family? Frederick, Elizabeth’s husband is sometimes shadowy, sometimes benign, at others the friend of powerful people who can control what happens to Ruth.

This story is one of control, the powerful people will only be brought to bear if Ruth does not adhere to the plans the Clearys have for her and Thomas. Central to these are Elizabeth’s friendly dismissal of Ruth’s abilities, thoughts and identity; Frederick and Patrick’s concurrence; and Ruth’s initial gratitude to the Clearys for providing her with a family. As an orphan with unacknowledged overwhelming grief, Ruth is easy fodder. At least until she rebels, accepts that she is in a fight for survival as Thomas’s mother, and acts.

Ruth is committed to psychiatric care, considered a blot on her character and ability, by the Clearys and used to continue their dismissal of her identity as an able, although struggling, new mother. Recognising that only dramatic action can change her situation, Ruth plans.

In this novel Ruth and the control exerted upon her, undermining her mental health, is the focus. This is like the situation in The Yellow Wallpaper. However, the result is dramatically different in Gregory’s hands. And very satisfying.

Ethel Carrick | Anne Dangar

Ethel Carrick, *The quay, Milsons Point* 1908, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1975.

7 Dec 2024 – 27 Apr 2025
Level 1, Gallery 12
Free

This summer, the National Gallery explores the lives and artistic legacies of Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar.

Ethel Carrick was a gifted painter and colourist who was among the first artists to introduce a post-impressionist approach to Australia. An intrepid traveller, Carrick had a fascinating life and this retrospective brings new insights into her remarkable artistic legacy, nationally and internationally.

Anne Dangar places the artist at the forefront of modern art in Australia. Living in France, she worked and exhibited alongside European cubists as their artistic peer, all the while exerting an irrevocable influence on the course of Australian abstraction.

These simultaneous exhibitions are Know My Name projects, the National Gallery’s initiative celebrating the work of all women artists to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.

Listen to the audio tour through exhibitions Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar, narrated by Katy Hessel.

Anne Dangar, Plate 1934 -1935, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Gift of Ruth Ainsworth 1998.

American Politics

Sentenced

Joyce Vance

Jan 11, 2025

And just like that, what was once thought to be impossible happened. Donald Trump was sentenced on the 34 counts of conviction against him in Manhattan.

There were no surprises. Trump did not demonstrate remorse like many defendants do at this point. He didn’t apologize for the harm he’d done or the worry he’d caused his family. But then, we did not expect him to. Instead, he painted himself as a victim of political lawfare.

Judge Juan Merchan imposed the sentence of unconditional discharge he had said he would impose. Trump signed off from the hearing a convicted felon. But, he was also a free man. Trump has no further obligations to the court—no sentence, no fine, no supervision.

The Judge’s decision to forego imprisonment, or even a fine, did not sit well with some people. And after years of watching Trump delay, twist, and outrun the legal system for the most part, it’s easy to understand why.

Trump outran the reach of the criminal justice system, both in the two federal cases against him and the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecution. There will be no jury verdict in a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for January 6. That is an unescapable fact that leaves Americans wondering, rightly, what comes next in our system of justice, where everyday Americans must face a jury and judgment if they commit crimes and are indicted, while Trump avoids that outcome.

Against that backdrop, today’s sentencing hearing, as strange as this may sound, gives me hope more than it gives me pause. It leads me to believe the damage Donald Trump has done and will continue to do to our system can be repaired through individual acts of conscience and courage. Hear me out.

The system is severely stressed at the moment. But the fact that this sentencing took place at all and that Trump now stands as a convicted felon, something that should have happened as a matter of course but was far from certain in this case, is a testament to what we can reclaim. The Judge and prosecutors in court today were American heroes. They put themselves squarely in the sights of a very powerful man. Their sacrifice and willingness to stand up for the rule of law is something we should all honor. They acted with true courage. They refused to obey in advance.

“This defendant has caused enduring damage to the public perception of the criminal justice system,” said prosecutor Joshua Steinglass. “He thinks he is above the law and not responsible for his actions.”

But Steinglass went on to acknowledge reality; that Trump would be the president in a few days and that Americans deserved a president who took office without a tail of obligations resulting from a sentence in a criminal case. What would have been fair to impose of citizen Trump would have harmed a country about to be led by President Trump. It is the ultimate unfairness, but it is also reality. And so, the court did the best it could in a bad situation.

The sentencing might not have happened but for Judge Merchan’s decision to announce in advance that he would proceed with an unconditional discharge. The Supreme Court narrowly signed off on it, in a 5-4 vote where Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett joined Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson to deny Trump the result he wanted.

The five justices in the majority briefly explained Trump wasn’t entitled to postpone sentencing because his arguments could be addressed in the course of the appeal following sentencing (this is the process that applies to every other defendant) and that since Judge Merchan had already said he wouldn’t impose time in prison, any burden on “the President-Elect’s responsibilities” would be “relatively insubstantial.” Sentencing was on, the result a rare one in a Trump case that led to him being treated like other people. Trump got sentenced. He was not entirely above the law.

Now, Trump will take office in 10 days as a convicted felon. We should not gloss over how shocking it is to have a criminal for an American president. But it’s also a start. In the end, in this one case in Manhattan, Donald Trump was held accountable.

To those disappointed by the sentence, I’d encourage you to continue to consider the rationale. Insisting on a longer sentence would have meant there would be no sentencing at all based on what we know of the Supreme Court’s reasoning. First offenders convicted of similar crimes in New York don’t typically face jail time. The explanation for the sentence that Judge Merchan offered makes sense, even if its not the outcome people wanted: Trump got this treatment because of the office that the American people elected him to. It’s the office that merits these protections, not the man. The man was held accountable. The jury verdict that he continues to criticize was enforced.

As Judge Merchan said, “It is the legal protections afforded to the OFFICE of the president of the United States that are extraordinary, not the occupant of the office.” In an imperfect situation, men and women committed to the rule of law found a way to hold Donald Trump accountable when it would have been easier to give up. Ultimately the Judge did the right thing. He stood for the rule of law, and his fidelity will, perhaps, be viewed in the sweep of history as the first small step toward restoring it. Judge Merchan followed the law: He protected the presidency, but he held the man accountable. Donald Trump will walk up on the day of the inauguration and embark upon the presidency as a convicted felon.

Trump should, of course, have faced accountability before a jury for his conduct in regards to January 6 and for mishandling classified documents and lying about it. It’s a travesty that he didn’t. The Supreme Court has much to answer for. Those cases were not before Judge Merchan and he could not do anything about them. But he did do something about the case in front of him.

At a low point like this, it might be tempting to think that the rule of law is dead. That Donald Trump killed it. There is no doubt that the rule of law is battered, but this can still be a starting point; a low moment during which the only place we can permit ourselves to consider going is up. We will have to measure progress in imperfect, small steps. But making the effort is better than the alternative. Giving up is not an option.

If we abandon the rule of law and democracy because their weaknesses have been exposed, where does that lead? Autocracy is not a pretty place. When we look back years down the road, perhaps we’ll be able to see this as the moment that democracy got a jump start and that people began to find ways to solve the problems, even as Trump regained office. Perhaps it will be the case that Americans saw that decent people who act in a forthright manner in the face of corruption can make a difference, even if it’s a small one, and that what happened in a Manhattan courtroom gives people hope. We need that as we enter upon the second Trump presidency.

While we live through these moments, my heart remains with friends and family in Los Angeles. The other night, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, who also has Angeleno roots, said that everyone who is from Los Angeles, no matter where they are now, is living in Los Angeles again. My thoughts are with the people who are living through this tragedy. I know there are many of you among our readers at Civil Discourse, and I hope that as you can, you will let us hear from you and help us understand if there is anything we can do. Until then, we are here.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Trump’s Sentencing Made No One Happy *

But it still mattered for the rule of law. By David A. Graham

Donald Trump, the first convicted felon to be elected president, was sentenced today in his New York hush-money case, pleasing virtually no one.

Justice Juan Merchan sentenced the president-elect to an unconditional discharge, meaning Trump will face no penalties other than the stigma of a conviction. Trump was furious that he was sentenced at all, and had mounted a campaign in the courts of law and public opinion to stop it. His critics won’t be happy with the sentence itself, which is less than a slap on the wrist.

This mutual unhappiness was perhaps the only point of agreement at the hearing in Manhattan. “This defendant has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal-justice system and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way,” the prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said. Trump, meanwhile, said the case had “been a tremendous setback” for the New York courts. “This has been a very terrible experience,” he said.

The fact that someone could commit the crimes that Trump has and still win a presidential election remains galling, but the difficulty of getting to this moment, and the ways the other criminal cases against him stalled out, shows how significant the sentencing is, even considering its leniency. Trump’s criminal trials have demonstrated that there is not equal justice for all, but there is some justice…* This is only the beginning of the article, but the point made already is significant.

Andrew Weissman’s opinion

I was unable to find Andrew Weismann’s opinion before posting this week. However, his podcast with Mary McCord will surely include this in the coming weeks. The podcast can be accessed through the renamed podcast, Main Justice. See below:

Jan. 9, 2025, 6:20 AM GMT+11

‘As the political landscape transforms and Donald Trump’s criminal cases wind down, MSNBC legal analysts Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord shift focus to keep watch on the incoming president and how his Department of Justice will use the law to move his agenda forward. With this realignment comes a new name: Main Justice. In this episode, Andrew and Mary explain what Main Justice is before breaking down the barrage of incoming news, from Trump’s pending New York sentencing to his attempt to stop the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report. They also give a taste of the broader scope they plan to cover, with analysis of Trump’s unusual filing in the Supreme Court, urging a pause in the TikTok ban until he takes office.‘

Lawrence O’Donnell MSNBC 14 January 2025

Neal Katyal and Andrew Weissmann, interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell, gave excellent commentary on Jack Smith’s work, the outcome and the decision. There was also commentary on the response of one elector nominee (related to the fraudulent list of nominees for the Electoral College vote for the President) and that of the proposed Attorney General whose hearing will begin on the 15th of January 2025.

Liz Cheney’s Opinion

Republican former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, on Tuesday cited the Special Counsel’s just-released, 174-page report on Donald Trump’s involvement with the January 6 insurrection, and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to deliver a prescient warning to members of the Senate. Starting today, the Senate begins confirmation hearings on the President-elect’s highly-controversial cabinet nominees. Focusing on Justice Department nominees, she warned Senators that those “compromised by personal loyalty to a tyrant” should not be confirmed.

Jack Smith, who resigned as Special Counsel on Friday ahead of the President-elect’s inauguration next week, emphasized in his report that there was sufficient evidence to warrant prosecuting Donald Trump. He also noted that if those cases had proceeded to a jury trial, the evidence was strong enough to secure convictions.

Smith wrote, “after conducting thorough investigations, I found that, with respect to both Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to unlawfully retain power after losing the 2020 election and his unlawful retention of classified documents after leaving office, the [Principles of Federal Prosecution] compelled prosecution.”

Cheney says that Smith’s report makes clear that Trump’s nominees, specifically, Justice Department nominees, had anything to do with his efforts to overturn the election, they must not be confirmed by the Senate: “if those nominees cooperated with Trump’s deceit to overturn the 2020 election, they cannot now be entrusted with the responsibility to preserve the rule of law and protect our Republic.”

“The Special Counsel’s 1/6 Report,” her statement begins, “made public last night, confirms the unavoidable facts of 1/6 yet again. DOJ’s exhaustive and independent investigation reached the same essential conclusions as the Select Committee. All this DOJ evidence must be preserved.”

“But most important now, as the Senate considers confirming Trump’s Justice Department nominees: if those nominees cooperated with Trump’s deceit to overturn the 2020 election, they cannot now be entrusted with the responsibility to preserve the rule of law and protect our Republic. As our framers knew, our institutions only hold when those in office are not compromised by personal loyalty to a tyrant.”

“So this question is now paramount for Republicans: Will you faithfully perform the duties the framers assigned to you and do what the Constitution requires? Or do you lack the courage?”

Sarah Longwell, a Republican and the publisher of The Bulwark, responded, writing: “This. Donald Trump has revealed how shallow the vast majority of the current GOP’s commitment is to the constitution and the American experiment. These confirmation hearings will be another inflection point for the few who claim they value their oath. I hope some rise to the occasion.”

Huffington Post Commentary on Jack Smith’s Report

Why Donald Trump Wasn’t Charged With Insurrection

Prosecutors had a mountain of evidence — but a series of key obstacles got in their way.

By Brandi Buchman

Jan 14, 2025, 06:57 PM EST

It fully investigated and completely cleared so you think you are completely cleared because you committed no crime

What happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to many of the nation’s courts and judges, was an insurrection by the very definition of the word. So why, at the end of a yearslong probe, did special counsel Jack Smith ultimately forgo charging Donald Trump with inciting one?

The answer was spelled out in Smith’s charging report to Attorney General Merrick Garland that went public on Tuesday. The report was an unambiguous presentation of why Trump’s alleged criminal effort to unlawfully retain power left prosecutors no choice but to charge him with four felonies. A federal judge (and Smith) only agreed to dismiss the case because Trump won the election in November and prosecutions against sitting presidents are against long-standing Justice Department policy.

Smith’s report could be the final word any prosecutor ever has on Trump and Jan. 6. However, if prosecutors or congressional lawmakers can convince courts (and each other) in the coming years that an existing five-year statute of limitations for federal cases isn’t on pause while Trump is president, then Smith’s report may not be the end of one story, but the beginning of another.

First, to understand where Smith ended up, a bit of history is necessary.

The Mile-High Road To Nowhere

In November 2023, Colorado District Court Judge Sarah Wallace ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution in violation of Section III of the 14th Amendment.

The judge’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by six Republicans in Colorado and one unaffiliated voter who wished to remove Trump from the ballot ahead of the 2024 election. They argued that Trump’s remarks from the Washington Ellipse on Jan. 6, his alleged intimidation of voters and election and state officials, his failure to immediately call down the mob, and his alleged pressure campaign on then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election amounted to insurrectionary acts, and therefore his ouster from the ballot in Colorado was warranted.

The voters argued that while Trump may not have engaged in violence personally on Jan. 6, that element did not need to be proven in order for him to be disqualified from the ballot.

They claimed it was simpler than that, because Trump violated his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and spent “three hours watching [the events] unfold on television without doing a single thing even though he was the most powerful person in the world,” a lawyer for the voters argued in court.

In her 2023 ruling, Wallace said she was convinced Trump had “engaged” in insurrection, based on the harrowing evidence and testimony she’d considered. But she could not disqualify him.

Disqualification hung on a persnickety distinction: Section III, or the insurrection clause, did not actually consider whether the president of the United States was considered an “officer” of the United States, Wallace found.

Section III of the 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

For “whatever reason,” Wallace wrote in her ruling, the drafters of the Constitution’s insurrection clause “did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath,” and it wasn’t for her court to decide what the drafters meant.

Trump fought the ruling all the way up to the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled against him in December 2023. In a 4-3 decision, the state justices concluded that Trump was an officer of the United States, that he engaged in insurrection and that he must be removed from the ballot on those grounds. Trump appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in March 2024 — one day before Super Tuesday primaries — the nation’s most powerful court ruled for the first time in its history on how to apply the insurrection clause.

They reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling and declared that Colorado’s secretary of state had no authority to remove Trump from the ballot. While states could disqualify a person from running for office or holding it, the insurrection clause was something Congress alone had the power to enforce or modify, the court ruled.

Trump’s lawyers recoiled at the notion that he could be charged with providing rioters “aid or comfort” because, his attorney Scott Gessler argued, not a single Jan. 6 rioter was charged under the Insurrection Act. The fact that more than a dozen people were charged (and later convicted) of seditious conspiracy, or plotting to stop the nation’s transfer of power, was not acknowledged by Trump’s defense.

As Smith alluded to in his final report, Trump’s regular defense of his conduct around Jan. 6 hinged on claims that his words at the Ellipse — where he called on his supporters to “fight” — were broadly protected under the First Amendment.

But there is a difference between speech and incitement, and Smith wrote Tuesday that while the special counsel’s office had “reasonable arguments to be made that Mr. Trump’s Ellipse Speech incited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and could satisfy the Supreme Court’s standard for ‘incitement’… particularly when the speech is viewed in context of Mr. Trump’s lengthy and deceitful voter fraud narrative that came before it,” there was never any “direct evidence” that prosecutors were able to develop proving an explicit admission or communication with co-conspirators.

To succeed in trying Trump for inciting an insurrection, they would have to prove subjective intent showing that Trump meant to cause the full range of violence that day.

With other, more “solid” charges available to prosecutors that would allow them to forgo clearing any “rigorous” hurdles for speech, dropping pursuit of the insurrection charge was the most legally sound choice.

Unprecedented, Unparalleled, Uncertain

Wallace and the Colorado Supreme Court have not been the only parties in the legal system to characterize Jan. 6 as an insurrection.

As Smith pointed out Tuesday, judges in several Jan. 6-related cases have described the attack on the Capitol as an insurrection. This happened even when the charges were misdemeanors and the individual’s conduct was in no way connected, or described as being connected, to part of a “rebellion.”

For example, when a Chicago police officer and his sister, Karol and Agnieszka Chwiesiuk, were headed to trial for Jan. 6 misdemeanor offenses, they asked a federal judge to quash any reference to an “insurrection” or being among “insurrectionists” during proceedings. The judge refused.

These were “accurate descriptors,” because “what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, was in fact an insurrection and involved insurrectionists,” the judge wrote.

This also happened in the case of Jan. 6 rioter Sara Carpenter, a former New York police officer who, prosecutors said, ignored orders to leave the Capitol and at one point used a tambourine to slap away a police officer’s arm. She spent 30 minutes inside the Capitol building that day. When she emerged, tambourine in the air, she exclaimed: “The breach was made and it needs to calm down now. Congress needs to come out, they need to certify Trump as president, and this is our house.”

Smith noted that in Carpenter’s case, the judge made it plain when writing that “what occurred on Jan. 6 was in fact a riot and an insurrection and it did in fact involve a mob.”

But in these and other instances, the courts were never obligated to resolve how to define an insurrection under Section III.

Before even touching the question of whether Trump incited an insurrection, prosecutors at minimum needed guidance on exactly what proof is required to establish that an insurrection took place, and how to distinguish an insurrection from a riot.

The special counsel’s office didn’t have that.

Dictionary definitions of “insurrection” sometimes make a distinction between an insurrection and a “rout, riot, or offense connected with mob violence” when it features both an organized and armed uprising against the government, Smith wrote.

But doubt began to creep in when prosecutors considered the very limited amount of case law regarding insurrection in the U.S.

Some U.S. courts have already defined “insurrection” as something that occurs when it involves “overthrowing a sitting government, rather than maintaining power.”

This dynamic posed “another challenge to proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 qualified as an insurrection given that he was sitting president at that time,” the report states.

There was not a single case, Smith said, in which a criminal defendant in America had been charged with attempting to overthrow the U.S. government from the inside.

Prior to Jan. 6, such attacks had only ever come from the outside.

According to Smith, applying incitement for insurrection in the context of Trump’s case “would have been a first, which further weighed against charging it, given the other charges available, even if there were reasonable arguments that it might apply.”

London Activities in January

Citra Sasmita, Act One (detail), 2024, from Into Eternal Land, The Curve, Barbican, 2025 © Citra Sasmita

This exhibition was made possible thanks to Lead Support from the Bagri Foundation, additional support from the MENAEA Collection, Kuala Lumpur, the Henry Moore Foundation, and Natasha Sidharta, as well as a residency in partnership with Delfina Foundation.

In January 2025, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita will transform The Curve for her first solo exhibition in the UK: a new commission titled Into Eternal Land. Working fluidly across painting, sculptural installation, embroidery and scent, Sasmita will invite visitors on a symbolic, multi-sensory journey through the 90-metre-long gallery to explore ideas of ancestral memory, ritual and migration.

An interdisciplinary artist, Sasmita’s practice challenges fixed ideas in relation to gender roles, hierarchies of power, systems of oppression, and more. Her work refuses categorisation both in terms of materials and iconographies, questioning reductive, colonial conceptions of traditional Indonesian art and the historic marginalisation of craft traditions. Into Eternal Land speaks to universal and urgent concerns: connecting with ancestral traditions, grappling with the power and precarity of the natural world, and proposing the possibility of feminist resistance.

Sasmita’s practice often engages with the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique. Dating from the fifteenth century, and traditionally practiced exclusively by men, Kamasan was used to narrate Hindu epics. Reclaiming this masculine practice, Sasmita is interested in dismantling misconceptions of Balinese culture and confronting its violent colonial past. Underpinning her work is a dedication to alternative narratives, particularly the experiences of women who have been fetishised, suppressed or erased. Reinventing inherited mythologies – from indigenous Indonesian histories to Dutch colonial narratives, to contemporary society – her protagonists are powerful women who populate a post-patriarchal world.

For her Barbican commission Into Eternal Land, the artist draws inspiration from a rich range of sources. These include centuries-long histories of displacement and migration across the Indonesian archipelago, as well as the symbolism of heaven, earth and hell across cultures – from the story of Bhima Swarga crossing hell to save his parents, as recounted in the Balinese epic Mahabharata, to Dante’s Inferno and beyond.

Panoramic scroll paintings – Sasmita’s reinterpretation of Kamasan paintings – unfurl along the curved walls of the gallery, depicting women undergoing transformation and reincarnation: becoming trees or bird spirits, emitting flaming auras, pouring forth water and blood. Shrine-like installations encircled by long braids of hair reference deep genealogies and memories held in the body, while paintings on python skin nod to rituals of sacrifice. Textiles hang from the ceiling like flags, conceived of as symbolic portals to another realm. They feature hybrid woman-plant beings, who hold powerful knowledge of herbal medicine. These works are made in collaboration with women artisans in west Bali, whose knowledge of this specific embroidery technique is in danger of disappearing. A mandala (circle) of ground turmeric serves as the focal point of the final chapter of the exhibition, offering a space for meditation. An ambient soundscape by Indonesian composer Agha Praditya Yogaswara offers a sonic response to Sasmita’s cosmologies.

Citra Sasmita said: “Facing the majestic space of The Curve makes my heart tremble, but at the same time it invites me to explore possibilities that I had never imagined before. As a Balinese person, I believe in the ability to be embodied in space and time. The Curve has allowed me to present a ritual for the space itself, along with the cosmology and cultural roots that I bring from Bali. I am very much looking forward to how visitors will feel when they experience this exhibition.”

About Citra Sasmita

Citra Sasmita (b. 1990, Bali, Indonesia) is a self-taught artist. She studied literature and physics, then worked as a short story illustrator for the Bali Post before she began developing her expanded artistic practice. Major group exhibitions include to carry, Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, forthcoming 2025); Precarious Joys, Toronto Biennial of Art (Canada, 2024); After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (Saudi Arabia, 2024); Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney (Australia, 2024); Choreographies of the Impossible, 35th São Paulo Biennale (Brazil, 2023); The Open World, 3rd Thailand Biennale, Mae Fah Luang Art and Cultural Park, Chiang Rai (Thailand, 2023); Garden of Ten Seasons, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (Germany, 2022); Kathmandu Triennale (Nepal, 2021-2022); ARTJOG MMXXII, Time To Wonder, Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2021); and the Biennale Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2019). Solo shows include Atlas of Curiosity, Yeo Workshop (Singapore, 2023); Ode To The Sun, Yeo Workshop (Singapore, 2020); and Tales of Nowhere, Museum MACAN, Jakarta (Indonesia, 2020

Week beginning 8 January 2025

Elie Mystal Bad Law Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America The New Press, March 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Elie Mystal does not disappoint in this fiercely passionate, but so cleverly analytical, exposure of the inherent inequality espoused in the ten laws he addresses in this volume. Some of Mystal’s language, as for the first of his books I read, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution could possibly offend. But, how on earth can his language be more offensive than the laws he opens to scrutiny? Let us try to be fair at least in this small contribution to fairness amongst the appalling unfairness Mystal exposes and read with as open a mind as possible. There is plenty to offend, and it is certainly not Mystal and his arguments. He asserts that the facts he presents are correct – he has no problem with having a fact checker! He also acknowledges that this being so, that a reader who disagrees is doing so because of the conclusions he draws from the facts. Although this statement is made in the acknowledgements, I believe it is imperative that it forms part of this review and underpins the reading of this book. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Following articles: Louisa Anne Meredith; American Politics – The Daily -humorous quote, Raw Story articles -Jack Smith Report, Washington Post cartoon; The Danger of Miseducation, Jess Piper.

Hidden women of history: the Australian children’s author who captured the bush – before May Gibbs’ Australiana empire

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Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.

Published: January 7, 2025 6.03am AEDT

Authors

Lauren A. Weber Lecturer in Literature, Language and Literacy, University of Wollongong
Sara Fernandes Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Partners: University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU; University of Wollongong provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

May Gibbs is a household name in Australia. Her most famous book, Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, published in 1918, has never been out of print. Chances are you have read her work, or had it read to you. You’ll almost certainly have seen her personified native flora illustrations, which these days adorn everything from tea towels to pyjamas.

But have you heard of her predecessor, Louisa Anne Meredith? Like Gibbs, who began to publish in the decades following Meredith’s death in 1895, she drew her literary inspiration from the Australian landscape and crafted her own “brand” in its image.

Unlike Gibbs, though, Meredith’s illustrations were naturalistic. She rendered native Australian flora and fauna as characters for children’s literature, arguably beginning this tradition. But she didn’t “cutesify” them, or give them human features.

As researchers, we believe Meredith’s work for children should be recognised today for its innovations in genre: blending science writing, travel writing, poetry, and fairy tale. It is also anchored in a desire to shape the Australian child into the ideal young colonialist, by framing the land as unoccupied and in need of European care and management.

Louisa Anne Meredith’s illustrations were naturalistic, unlike May Gibbs’. University of Melbourne

Dedicated to her craft

Louisa Anne Meredith (born Twamley in 1812) was an author and illustrator, born to a precariously middle-class family in Birmingham. Her father, Thomas Twamley, was a hard-working corn miller and dealer. Louisa’s mother (who shares her name) married him much to the dismay of her prominent family, the Merediths. They were descended from Welsh nobility.

At 22, Twamley’s first collection, Poems (1835), was positively received. English critic Leigh Hunt sang her praises in his 1837 poem, Blue-Stocking Revels, or The Feast of the Violets:

Then came young Twamley,
Nice sensitive thing,
Whose pen and whose pencil
give promise like spring.

By her mid-20s, Twamley had a handful of books in print under her maiden name, as well as a series of prints, sketches, paintings, colour plates and miniatures. She was entirely dedicated to her craft. Her fresh style of publishing original poems alongside accomplished naturalistic illustrations was something new.

Tasmanian life, for English readers

Twamley’s accomplishments were numerous by the time she married her maternal cousin, Charles Meredith. The couple emigrated to Australia in 1839. Meredith’s first book published from the colony, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844), offered readers a “small fund of information on common every-day topics relating to these antipodean climes”. Louisa’s prose was accompanied by her original illustrations of colonial life.

By 1840, she settled in Tasmania and made the island her chief literary concern. She published a series of books depicting Tasmanian life, intended for readers there and back in England. In addition to her writing, Louisa was an active conservationist, as a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

While Meredith is largely remembered for her botanical illustrations and travel writing, she was prolific as a children’s writer. She published a range of books for children set in Tasmania, created from her colonial perspective. Public knowledge of her contributions to Australian children’s literary history is scarce outside Tasmania.

Meredith’s writing for children includes Loved and Lost! The True Story of a Short Life (1860), Grandmamma’s Verse Book for Young Australia (1878), Tasmanian Friends and Foes, Feathered, Furred, and Finned (1880), and Waratah Rhymes for Young Australia (1891).

Her work found young readers in both Australia and England. Her writing often dramatises this connection. Waratah Rhymes, for example, features a dedication in which she signs off from London in 1891 “to the young Colonists of to-day”, inviting their “warm welcome”.

Meredith’s contribution to the history of Australian children’s literature rests in her desire to write an account of “island life” for the white Australian colonial child. On the one hand, she reconfigured familiar European genres, such as the adventure novel (she was a fan of Gulliver’s Travels) and fairy tale. On the other, her aesthetic was distinctively colonial, expressed through Tasmanian fauna and flora.

In these books, the settler child is positioned as inquisitor and mini colonialist. Their discovery of the landscape through fictional encounters positions them to craft the nation in their image.

They reflect the “recurring narratives of nation-building” identified by Goorie and Koori critic and poet, Evelyn Araluen, as typical of Australian children’s literature. Araluen actively dismantles those narratives in her Stella prize-winning collection, Dropbear.

‘Cutesifying the bush’ vs naturalism

Meredith’s illustrations for children are naturalist. University of Melbourne

There is a striking resemblance between the works and interests of Meredith and Gibbs, who was also a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Yet there are also significant differences.

Meredith was interested in science. She wanted to render scientific concepts legible for young readers by, as she explained in Our Wild Flowers (1839), giving “a little pleasant information, without any difficult terms, or unexplained names”.

While Gibbs had her own successful career as a botanical illustrator, in her writing for children she concocted a magic formula for cutesifying the bush. Her style exemplifies what Araluen calls “intricate forms of kitsch”. Where Meredith’s illustrations for children take inspiration from naturalists such as John Gould, Gibbs puts bums on gumnuts and reins on seahorses.

Left: Meredith, Tasmanian Friends and Foes (2nd Ed. 1881); Right: Gibbs, Little Ragged Blossom (1920). State Library NSW

While their aesthetics are very different, the work of both Meredith and Gibbs reflects a settler-colonial view of the environment that aims to domesticate the bush and manage land.

Illustration by Lousia Anne Meredith. University of Melbourne

Meredith does this by importing the British-colonial apparatus of taxonomy, scientific vocabulary and botanical illustration, to order and explain a landscape perceived as being both wild and ripe for cultivation.

Many scholars, including Araluen, have argued Gibbs’ work embodies some of the worst aspects of colonisation. Her imagery and narrative, argues childhood researcher Joanne Faulkner, “reimagined the bush as a ‘home’ for colonizers, essentially ‘indigenising’ them in the image of white gumnut babies”.

These national emblems, embraced by many non-Indigenous Australians, were crafted on stolen land.

Exporting Australia’s children’s stories

In 1884, the Tasmanian government awarded Meredith a pension of £100 (the equivalent of around A$17,000 today) for “distinguished literary and artistic services” to the island.

Since Meredith, Australian children’s books and media have become lucrative exports. Typically, they sell an optimistic image of the sun-drenched “lucky country” to local and international audiences.

Meredith was cannily attuned to the importance of trading a desirable image of her colonial setting. She referenced Australia’s “sunny clime” and “fertile hill[s] and glade” in Waratah Rhymes.

May Gibbs was successful in marketing her work, now a merchandising empire. Perth Mint/AAP

Both Meredith and Gibbs were successful in the business of their writing, explicitly considering their work’s marketability. Meredith had her own monogram branding. She advertised the availability of Grandmama’s Verse Book for international distribution.

Gibbs commissioned a set of Gumnut Babies postcards, anticipating what would become a merchandising empire (the royalties support the works of The Northcott Society and Cerebral Palsy Alliance). It now includes crockery, bedspreads, plushies, pyjamas, stationery and more.

Last year, the Royal Society of Tasmania established the Louisa Anne Meredith Medal to be awarded every four years to a “person who excels in the field of arts or humanities, or both, with outstanding contributions evidenced by creative outputs”.

The Australian children’s literary market is just as internationally saleable as it was in Meredith’s time. Today, the global phenomenon of Bluey continues her legacy of charming children (and adults) around the world through personified Australian animals.

American Politics

From: The Daily

Republicans in Congress want guidance from Trump, but that is like asking your socks where your shoes are.

From: The Raw Story

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

January 7, 2025 11:51AM ET

Special Counsel Jack Smith, set to leave his office before Donald Trump is sworn in as President in less than two weeks, has indicated that he will deliver his report to Attorney General Merrick Garland Tuesday afternoon. The two-volume report details the findings of his investigations into the now-President-elect, which resulted in felony charges against Trump. These charges stem from his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including his role in the January 6 insurrection, as well as the alleged unlawful removal and retention of highly classified documents from the White House.

By law, Special Counsels are required to send a report of their findings to the Attorney General. Even Trump Attorney General Bill Barr released a highly redacted version of the Mueller Report, although he did so after mischaracterizing the findings in a letter he published ahead of the release. (A federal judge later said the letter was a “distorted” and “misleading” account of Mueller’s report.)

Critics, including legal experts, are demanding Attorney General Garland release Smith’s report to the public.

“Follow the law, release the reports,” urged conservative Bill Kristol of The Bulwark. “Just as AG Garland released special counsel Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, the AG should now release Weiss’s report on Hunter Biden and Smith’s report on Trump and Jan. 6, and Trump and classified documents.”

But Trump is in court attempting to block its release. Trump’s attorneys were allowed to review the draft report, and reportedly spent three days in Jack Smith’s office doing so, Politico reported.

How the groveling Washington Post got it so terribly wrong

D. Earl Stephens

January 5, 2025 11:10PM ET

How the groveling Washington Post got it so terribly wrong

Rough of Ann Telnaes’ cartoon killed by the Washington Post

On Thursday, October 25, 2024, I pronounced The Washington Post to be dead.

That was the day their wormy, billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, crashed through the wall separating news from business — fact from fiction — and had his henchman in the newsroom pull an editorial that was set to run that weekend endorsing the person who didn’t lead an attempted coup, Kamala Harris, for president of the United States of America.

As I said in my piece:

Their failure to make this endorsement goes beyond a catastrophic lack of judgment, because we know they know that what they are doing is nothing but a gutless attempt to appease a would-be dictator, Trump.

On Friday, WaPo was at it again, and this time it cost them the services of Ann Telnaes, the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, who said she was leaving the newspaper because it killed her cartoon (above) depicting Bezos of doing what he does best these days: falling at the fat, little feet of the despicable Trump.

Here’s how Telnaes put it on her Substack piece Friday night:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

The Danger of Miseducation

Dylann Roof and January 6th

Jess Piper

Jan 08, 2025

In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof has never expressed remorse for the murders. He remains on death row in Terre Haute Federal Prison in Indiana.

Our nation asked the question then and now…why?

Here is an explanation from Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, the authors of Denmark Vesey’s Garden:

“Americans soon learned Roof’s flawed understanding of slavery, among other factors, fueled his racial hatred and attack. In his online manifesto, Roof claimed that ‘historical lies, exaggerations, and myths’ about how poorly African Americans had been treated under slavery are today being used to justify a black takeover of the United States.”

This is the radicalizing effect of misremembering history. Of disinformation. The terror and hate and death dealt by a young man turned conspiracy theorist turned white supremacist turned murderer.

I understand miseducation — I received one myself.

I grew up learning that the Civil War was fought because of “northern aggression.” It was the Lost Cause. Slavery was just a peculiar institution.

I don’t remember learning Black History in high school, but if it were taught, I imagine it a side note when we studied the Civil War. History was dominated by white men and I grew up hearing excuses for slavery.

Black folks were enslaved but don’t forget about white indentured servants.

The enslaved were taken care of by benevolent masters.

Black folks were content with their lot in life and happy to be in America.

I learned these things from the textbooks I studied.

We know some former slaveholders and their descendants worked to construct a romanticized memory of the antebellum South…they started writing their revisionist histories almost as soon as the ink was dry on the papers at Appomattox.

A major player in the whitewash movement was the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This group of Rebel apologists put up monuments to the Confederacy and wrote poisonous curriculum for public school children.

This is an actual description of the “benevolent Master” from a Georgia textbook from the 1950s:

As a rule the slaves were comfortably clothed, given an abundance of wholesome food, and kindly treated. Occasionally some hard-hearted master or bad-tempered mistress made the lot of their slaves a hard one, but such cases were not common.

Cruel masters and cruel mistresses were scorned then just as men and women who treat animals cruelly are now scorned. These slaves were brought into the colonies fresh from a savage life in Africa and in two or three generations were changed into respectable men and women. This fact shows, better than any words can, how prudently and how wisely slaves were managed.

Ah, the civilizing effects of brutality. Of manacles. Of beatings. Of family separation.

And did this textbook entry compare enslaved men and women and children to animals? Of course it did. The word “chattel” is defined as “moveable property” and shares a common origin with the word “cattle.”

Years ago, I worked in a building with a History teacher who taught students that slavery was just a part of the many causes of the Civil War.

This teacher talked about economics.

Yes, the Southern economics of free labor in the form of slavery.

This teacher talked about territorial expansion.

Yes, whether slavery would be expanded West.

This teacher talked about the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, the election signaled the end of Southern rule and the beginning of secession in order to hold onto slavery.

Slavery. The Civil War was principally fought over slavery and watering it down, whitewashing the cause of the Civil War, has had devastating effects on students. That miseducation matters. Pseudohistory is dangerous.

And, it continues.

Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of the insurrection. The riot turned mob that stormed the US Capitol.

Most of us watched it live. Traitors pushed back the police line and beat officers with our flag and entered our Capitol to block our peaceful transfer of power.

Some of the insurrectionists broke into the Capitol with the intent of murdering lawmakers. They built gallows on our Capitol lawn.

I watched my own Senator raise a closed fist in solidarity with the mob.

We all watched it unfold. We have seen irrefutable evidence for years. We saw the worst of the offenders sent to prison and hundreds given probation.

We saw it happen. We know what happened. We can’t deny what happened.

And yet the January 6th apologists have already started to revise history. They started just days after the attack. Just like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They need to revise history — it is a common theme among right-wing Christian nationalists. A common theme among traitors.

On #ThisDayInHistory in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building. Earlier that day, President Trump held a rally, where supporters walked to the Capitol to peacefully protest the certification of the 2020 election. During this time, some individuals entered the Capitol, took photos, and explored the building before leaving. ~Mike Collins, (R, Georgia)

That is a bold-faced lie and Collins has repeated it often.

I was teaching on January 6, 2021. I couldn’t keep up with the attack minute by minute, but I checked the news during passing period. When the bell for 7th hour rang, my Department Chair walked down and said, “Turn on the news.”

I was horrified to see the smoke and people scaling the walls and the mob attacking the Capitol. I turned my computer off and taught the next 50 minutes trying to hold it together. I told my students that our Capitol was under attack and it looked like Americans were responsible.

That night, every teacher in my district received an email from our Superintendent. She instructed us not to talk about the insurrection the next day. I was enraged…were we just going to remain mute on an attack on democracy?

And here is something worse — the revisionists are already on school boards. A Kansas school board recently refused to adopt a teacher-created social studies curriculum because some on the board viewed the curriculum as biased and “anti-Trump.”

My god…

I find the similarities in revisionist history stunning. The same Confederate flag was carried by Dylann Roof and some of the insurrectionists on January 6th. It even feels like the same sort of people who revised history for the Civil War are revising the history of the insurrection.

Confederates turned MAGA.

Though it is very recent history, the insurrection revisionists are already seeing the fruits of their labor.

I have family members who claim the FBI and Antifa were responsible for the attack — that the friendly grandmas on a tourist visit had nothing to do with the mob. That January 6, 2021 was set up. That it was rigged to make Republicans and Trump look bad.

Dylann Roof pointed his angry miseducation at Black folks. He murdered the innocent in part because of his miseducation.

The next angry person will likely target Democrats. The revisionists on Capitol Hill are inspiring acts of violence against an entire party.

We are in the early days of the revisions. We still have time to stop the sane washing. The whitewashing. The lies.

The miseducation of a nation.

~Jess

The Emanuel Nine. May they rest in peace.

Clementa C. Pinckney

Cynthia Graham Hurd

Susie Jackson

Ethel Lee Lance

Depayne Middleton-Doctor

Tywanza Sanders

Daniel L. Simmons

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

Myra Thompson

My name is Jess and I was a high school Literature teacher for 16 years until I decided to run as a Democrat in a rural, red district in Missouri. I bring you news and politics from Missouri and beyond from a rural progressive point of view.

Week beginning 1 January 2025

Angela Youngman The Dark Side of Jane Austen’s World Pen & Sword|Pen & Sword History, August 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Angela Youngman’s detailed and absorbing exploration of Jane Austen’s world, through her own narratives and additional material, is a valuable read. Although Austen has portrayed the period faithfully in the novels, even if not in great depth, Youngman’s choice to research beyond an analysis of the novels provides authenticity to the work, adding valuable insights into Austen’s world. Written in an accessible style, with so many references to the novels we know, or would like to know more about, this work is a delight to add to the Pen & Sword publications that I appreciate.

Much of the dark side of the way in which women’s relationship to marriage and property differed from men’s can be gleaned from the novels. However, Youngman’s exploration of additional information not only supports the fiction but shows the stark adverse reality of primogeniture as it impacts the younger children in a family. She shows that where the sexism lies is in women’s poor chances of benefitting through primogeniture that favoured the male line, but also the lack of options available to them. No religious, military, or legal career was open to a woman. Her future was in marriage or, if a spinster, dependence on her male relatives, becoming a governess or a companion. Youngman’s references to coverture rely on legal material rather than the novels, one example of the additional sources used in this volume. Where adoptions are discussed, Youngman draws upon Austen’s family experience; she looks more widely when referring to marriage agreements. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Sarah C. Williams When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women John Murray Press|Hodder & Stoughton, September 2024. |

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Reading the first three chapters raised a question for me – could I respond positively to this biography coming as I do from a feminist rather than theological perspective? For the emphasis on theological thought and Josephine and George’s religious commitment at this point in the book is vast. The feminist points that have been made, the couple’s commitment to an equal marriage and Josphine Butler’s disappointment that the Oxford thinkers she met were without any feminist understanding, are addressed only briefly. I persevered as I was particularly interested in Butler’s response to the Contagious Disease Act, an Act that really makes for thorough feminist thought and examination. *

Chapter 4, seeing justice, Liverpool, 1866-69, provides a welcome change. Highlighting the city’s features, combined with the couple’s professional life (George) and the life Josephine sought outside her family duties, widens the perspective of the biography. Josephine’s connection with the workhouse remains religious, but the move into recognising her language as different from that of other middle-class women who became involved with ‘fallen women’ is not only based in religion, but in feminist principles. She rejects the stereotype that places women into categories (moral and immoral) based on their sexuality. Significantly, she argues that the categorisation that placed some women into an impure category had its basis in neither religion nor science. From here she becomes actively involved with the Contagious Disease Acts, in place since 1864. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

After the reviews: comment on fictional account related to the Contagious Disease Act; Singapore stopover; four days at the south coast; Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?; Jimmy Carter; Portia Zvavahera Art Exhibition, Cambridge; Cambridge walk; Plays between air raids and songs in shelters: How cultural life is thriving in wartime Ukraine.

* The Contagious Disease Act, and the complications arising from grappling with its implications are debated in Stand We At Last, by Zoe Fairbairns. This is a feminist historical novel, set mainly in Britain, but with a long and informative period in Australia. It is on kindle, and also available second hand in paperback and hard cover. I cannot bear to let either of my paperbacks go as they have different covers. One as above, and the other more contemporary. The kindle version is with me whenever I want to reread when travelling.

A leafy stopover in Singapore on the way home

In the past the idea of a stopover has been anathema to me. I just want to get to London. Or, on my return, wonderful Canberra. However, I enjoyed this break in the flight, with an overnight at a hotel outside the airport, relying on a taxi ride, and returning on the hotel shuttle bus. The view from the hotel window was attractive, and there was a food market close by. Wandering around Changi Airport is a pleasant thing to do.

Four days at the south coast – as delightful as the Amalfi Coast

This was no Capri, Sorrento or Positano, or guide but the wonderful beaches, bushland, home cooked meals, and barbeque with delicious prawns and haloumi as well as the regular barbecue feast items were delightful. An attempt at making a pavlova with monk fruit for sweetening was not a total success, but it will be worked upon. In the meantime, covering it with plenty of fruit was an improvement. We began the family and friends’ jigsaw marathon with a panorama of the Grand Canal, Venice. This is where we spent two Christmases in the past, but a family Christmas at the coast cannot be equaled. This was a wonderful holiday as usual. The weather was hot and sunny most of the time, and the sea breeze very welcome also. The drive home was enhanced by a coffee at Batehaven bakery (and a takeaway cream bun reminiscent of Rottnest, and Cafe Nero in Glasgow) and a pie and milkshake at Bungendore Pie Shop. Now back to a diet …of sorts. The agapanthus in full bloom welcomed us home.

From The Atlantic, December 24, 2024.

Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?

What the research says about the gender divide across the world By Jerusalem Demsas – Atlantic staff writer

It’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics.

Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women.

Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?

Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at Kings College London who is writing a book on the root causes of gender inequality across the world. Originally published in June, this episode helps untangle some of the reasons young men may be feeling disaffected and reacting differently than young women to macroeconomic and political trends.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Following the election, there have been many many arguments made about the growing gender gap between young men and young women. That women are more likely to vote for Democrats has been a consistent feature of my entire life, but this wasn’t always the case.

In the year 2000, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-d democratic politics.

That was a notable finding, because in the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that, from the early ’80s through the mid-’90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies. They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

While we’re waiting for the sort of definitive data that can help researchers untangle exactly which men were more likely to vote for Donald Trump and why, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite conversations of the year, with Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a senior lecturer at King’s College London, whose newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence, has followed research and her own personal travels across the world to understand the root causes of gender inequality.

Trying to understand why it is that relations between young men and women seem so fraught can help us begin to understand the downstream political consequences of these cultural shifts.

Here’s our conversation, originally published back in June.

[Music]

Alice, welcome to the show.

Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.

Demsas: Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what we’re creating right here. So we’re here to talk about the divergence between young men and women’s political views, particularly on sexism. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you: What determines whether someone is sexist? What determines whether they hold sexist beliefs?

Evans: Wow, okay, big question. So, I think, generally, the entire of human history has been incredibly patriarchal. So to answer that question, I need to explain the origins of patriarchy. For thousands and thousands of years, our culture has vilified, blamed disobedient, naughty women. You know, they were witches. They were terrible people. A woman who was disobedient or who wasn’t a virgin was shamed and ostracized. So there is a long history. Sexism is nothing new. And actually over the 20th century, much of the world — Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia — have become rapidly more gender equal. So in terms of human history, the big story is the rise of gender equality in much of the world. But certainly sexism persists, and we do see in Europe, in South Korea, in China, in North America, young men expressing what we call hostile sexism. Now, it’s worth distinguishing between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.

So let’s suppose I’m a patriarch in a conservative society, and I think Women are incompetent, and we don’t want to ruin their little heads, and they can’t take care of these things, so I’ll manage these things for the women who just don’t know any better. So that’s benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is a sense of resentment of women’s gains. So when we ask questions like, women’s rights are expanding at the expense of men, or women are getting these handouts, or men are the ones who are discriminated against. It’s a sense of resentment, the thing that feminism has gone too far, that women are getting all these perks, and so you know, every day as a woman, I wake up with a free fruit basket, right?

Demsas: Wait, I didn’t get mine this morning. I’ll have to check in.

Evans: Yeah, exactly. But this is a real, I think—so I’ve done interviews across the U. S., in Chicago and Stanford and in Montgomery, in California, in New Haven, in New York, in Toronto, in Poland, in Warsaw, in Krakow, in Barcelona, in London. And a lot of young men do feel this sense of resentment. And you can understand it. If you feel that life is hard, if you feel that you’re struggling to get ahead—so we know as college enrollment increases, it’s become really, really hard to make it into a top college place.

Demsas: Let’s step back for a second, This question, though, that I have is, you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment. Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you’re seeing in the data?

Evans: I think it depends on how we phrase it. So, in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, Yes, women could work, they can go out to clubs, they can do whatever they like, they can be totally free, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender equal, and that holds across the board. The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers. But in culturally liberal economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive. But, sorry, I should have been more clear, they do express this hostile sexism, so this sense of resentment that women’s rights are coming at men’s expense. But that’s not all men, right? And so it’s only a small fraction of young men. You know, many young men are very, very progressive and they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, et cetera.

Demsas: I just want to drill down into what exactly we’re talking about, right? Because I think most people know there’s a gender gap between men and women, and let’s start in the American context here. People know that with Trump—you have almost 60 percent of women are supporting Biden, while a majority of men back Trump.What’s actually happening here in the U. S. context that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s driving this conversation?

Evans: It’s difficult to know why people do stuff, so everything I say is speculative. What I’m trying to do is when I look at the data, I try to understand, you know, what are structural trends affecting one particular generation that distinct from other generations and why would it be happening in particular parts of the world and not others? So here are three big structural drivers that I’m not a hundred percent sure about, but I would suggest them as likely hypotheses. One is that men care about status. Everyone cares about status. Big examples of status goods include getting a great place at university, being able to afford a nice house, and also having a beautiful girlfriend. Those three things—good education because that matters for signaling for credentials; good place to live; and a pretty, pretty wife or girlfriend—those are your three status goods. Each of those three things has become much, much harder to get. So if we look, as university enrollment rises, as it has, it becomes much harder to get to the top, to get to the Ivy League, right? So only a small percentage of people will get to the top, but those getting to the Ivy League is so important for future networks. Meanwhile, those who don’t even have bachelor’s degrees will really struggle to get higher wages. So one is that men are struggling to get those top university places, which are important for jobs. Then on top of that, housing has become much more expensive. And the gap between wages and house prices has massively increased. Especially if you don’t have inherited wealth. So for the guy whose parents were not rich, it becomes so much harder to get onto the property ladder. So it’s especially hard for these young men to get status. Now, a third and really important factor is that it’s become harder to get girlfriends. So as societies become more culturally liberal, open minded, and tolerant, women are no longer shamed, derided, and ostracized for being single without a boyfriend. You know, in previous decades or centuries —

Demsas: I don’t know. Some women are, some women are. See the full ( very long, and provocative) transcript at Television, Film and Popular Culture: Comments.

Former President Jimmy Carter has passed away, and the way that Carter led his life both before his presidency and after is a role model for every American.

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Sarah Jones & Jason Easley Dec 30

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Jimmy Carter’s Legacy Is So Much More Than The Presidency

James Earl Carter was a person of deep Christian faith. He was one of the few presidents who lived his life guided by that faith. To detail Jimmy Carter’s political accomplishments would be a disservice to the man and his life.

The biggest impacts that Carter had on his country and the world aren’t measured by legislative or foreign policy accomplishments. Carter will always be politically remembered for the Iran Hostage Crisis that ended up consuming and ending his presidency, but Carter may have saved the nation by winning the presidency itself.

Jimmy Carter won the first presidential election after the foundation-shaking Watergate scandal. The nation had yet to find its footing as Gerald Ford served out the rest of Richard Nixon’s second term.

Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon tainted his presidency. In 1976, America needed someone who would restore stability and faith in the presidency, and Jimmy Carter did exactly that.

Carter’s presidency did not go the way that he would have wanted, but instead of fading into ex-presidential obscurity, Jimmy Carter became the most prominent ex-president in the world.

Carter strived endlessly for peace and lived his values by building homes for the needy well into his 90s through Habitat For Humanity.

Jimmy Carter got something that most one-term presidents don’t get. Carter became more respected and beloved after his presidency than he was while in office.

The Current Decent President Remembers Jimmy Carter

The only president comparable to Carter in terms of decency is the current president. Joe Biden, and First Lady Jill Biden said in a statement after President Carter’s passing:

Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian.

Over six decades, we had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend. But, what’s extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well.

With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us. He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe.

Art Exhibition in Cambridge

Portia Zvavahera’s paintings are quite disturbing in it concept and execution. However, the exhibition was certainly worth a look and gave rise to a great deal of thought, although it was a bit too heavy for discussion.

A peaceful walk after the exhibition!

Edited article from CNN (some photographs have been omitted)

This article reflects some of the mindset and activities discussed in Anton Rippon, Nicola Rippon Wartime Entertainment How Britain Kept Smiling Through the Second World War, reviewed in my blog on October 16, 2024.

Plays between air raids and songs in shelters: How cultural life is thriving in wartime Ukraine

By Svitlana Vlasova, CNN, published 12:01 AM EST, Sun December 29, 2024

Since the Ivan Franko Drama Theater reopened six months after Russia’s full-scale invasion, it has staged more than 1,500 performances, attended by more than half a million spectators. Yulia Weber/Ivan Franko Drama Theatre, Kyiv, CNN —

Olha Mesheryakova doesn’t know what the next year will bring for her life in the capital of war-torn Ukraine, for her family or her business. She is confident, however, that in 2025 she will attend a dozen performances in the theaters of Kyiv. The thought gives her a sense of hope.

“This creates a certain expectation, gives a kind of structure, great support at a time when the world around me has gone crazy, and I know exactly what I’m going to do on December 23, for example, because I bought tickets in the summer. Honestly, it gives me hope and faith in the future. It’s some kind of magic,” said Mesheryakova, an entrepreneur.

She is far from alone in her passion for theater. To get tickets to a popular performance, she, along with thousands of other Ukrainians, has to hunt for them months in advance.

On a blacked-out street in the center of Kyiv in mid-December, cars move slowly, as hundreds of people descend on the small, historic building of the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, located just a few hundred meters below the presidential residence.

Since the theater reopened six months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, it has been packed almost every day.

Over that time, the theater itself, its actors and its audience have changed. Its director, Yevhen Nyshchuk, volunteered in the military in 2022, as did many of his colleagues. For example, all three actors who played the main roles in “Three Comrades,” adapted from the post-World War I novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, ended up at the front and were able to return to the stage only a year later.

“Remarque sounded completely different. The reality of the war, which has already affected everyone, has changed us. I felt the audience had changed its perception of the theater, had more appetite for it, for this exchange of energy,” Nyshchuk, also an actor, told CNN.

Theater director and actor Yevhen Nyshchuk volunteered in the military in 2022, as did many of his colleagues. He often addresses the audience before performances to thank them for their commitment. Yulia Weber/Ivan Franko Drama Theatre

Nyshchuk felt this altered appreciation for Remarque’s writing so keenly in part because he and his colleagues continued to serve in the Armed Forces. To perform the plays, they received permission from their command to take short leaves.

Since the war began, the Ivan Franko Drama Theater has staged more than 1,500 performances attended by more than half a million spectators. Seventeen plays have been premiered. One of them is “The Witch of Konotop,” a mystical play that explores themes of love and power. Tickets were sold out in minutes for the entire run and many Ukrainians have joined a waitlist for any that become available.

Its director, Ivan Uryvskyi, said he was astonished by the play’s success and the influx of new theater-goers.

“Thousands, tens of thousands of spectators wanting to be at the theater. I can’t find an explanation for this,” he told CNN. Full houses and sold-out performances are typical at most of Kyiv’s theaters, according to their websites and e-ticket services.

Uryvskyi says not all come to the theater to escape from the sad reality of war. It is often the opposite.

“Someone needs to plunge into the present day and understand themselves. And he/she doesn’t need to go to a comedy, they don’t need to be distracted. He needs some serious dialogue. Maybe he needs to cry it out in the theater,” said Urivskyi.

Even if people want to escape from the war, they often cannot, as performances are regularly interrupted by air raid sirens. The audience has to leave the theater building and take shelter at the nearest metro station. If the danger passes within an hour, the performance resumes. Otherwise, the show continues on another day.

Both new plays and those that have been in the theater’s repertoire for years get loud applause from the audience.

“When people applaud for 10 to 20 minutes, they give some part of their applause to the artists for the performance, and looking at each other they give another part to themselves, for the fact that, for example, today everyone survived a missile attack of more than 120 missiles and more than 100 drones, and in the evening they came to the performance, which was not canceled,” Nyshchuk said.

The Ukrainian book store Sens, which opened earlier this year, offers more than 57,000 books as well as a café and an event space. Sens Bookstore

A thriving book scene

The number of bookstores in Ukraine has increased from 200 pre-war to almost 500 now. The largest of them, Sens, opened on Kyiv’s main street in the midst of the war. Offering over 57,000 books, it is crowded at any time of the day and says it had more than half a million customers this year. The store’s event plan is scheduled for months in advance.

For its founder, Oleksiy Erinchak, the launch of such a large-scale project in wartime seemed logical. He began the war as the owner of a small bookstore, opened on the eve of the invasion. It became a volunteer hub in the first months of the conflict and grew so popular that Erinchak started thinking about a new, larger space. Meanwhile, the book market and the needs of the audience had changed due to the impact of the war.

“(A) book is the most convenient way to spend time during the war when it is impossible to predict anything. Many people have switched to the Ukrainian language (from Russian). They are trying to understand what it means to be Ukrainian. And books make it much easier to do that,” Erinchak told CNN.

According to the Ukrainian Book Institute, the number of adult Ukrainians reading books every day has doubled during the war to 16%.

“Maybe it’s just war, or stress, and a person just hides under the covers, under the bed, opens a book and travels to other worlds to get away from it all. Or not traveling to other worlds, but delving deeper to understand why did this happen in our lifetime? And books actually have many answers, and you can feel them, understand them, and feel better,” Erinchak explained.

He argues that the current popularity of books should be maintained in the future.

“Local culture always flourishes during wartime… If people are bringing money to the Ukrainian bookstore, it means that we need to invest this money further in Ukrainian books, in Ukrainian culture,” he said, which in turn will help build resilience to future potential Russian disinformation. “We need to build this foundation in our book and cultural sphere as strongly as possible and build a semantic shield around it, a dome so that it would be much more difficult for others to break in and influence the minds of Ukrainians.”

A few songs before the end of an anniversary concert this fall by one of the most popular Ukrainian bands, Okean Elzy, an air raid was announced in Kyiv.

Part of the audience went down to the subway to take shelter, joined by the band. There, on the subway stairs, the performance resumed, with a speaker instead of a professional sound system, with only guitars – and hundreds of voices singing along to every hit.

“Okean Elzy’s 30th-anniversary concerts are a mirror of our history. We have been together for 30 years: at big concerts and in shelters, in stadiums and in dugouts… But it’s not the place that matters, it’s our togetherness,” the band later posted on their Instagram account.

In the almost three years since the full-scale invasion, Okean Elzy’s frontman Svyatoslav Vakarchuk has performed more than 300 concerts for the military, including at positions near the front lines. In some videos posted on the band’s social media pages, what sounds like artillery fire can be heard while Vakarchuk sings for the military. Okean Elzy has donated almost 280 million UAH ($6.7 million) to the Defence Forces of Ukraine, a spokesperson for the band said.

The Ivan Franko Drama Theater also regularly organizes charity performances and says it has already raised more than $1.2 million for the Armed Forces. Additionally, it offers its stage to troupes that have lost their theaters to Russian occupation or can no longer perform in them due to adverse security conditions.

“The Witch of Konotop,” which premiered in April 2023, became one of the most popular theater performances in Ukraine. Yulia Weber/Ivan Franko Drama Theatre

The vibrant cultural life in cities to the rear contrasts with the situation in the frontline areas of Ukraine, where Russia keeps seizing territory.

Yegor Firsov, a chief sergeant who has been fighting against the Russians since 2022, says he is generally sympathetic to an active cultural life, even if some of those on the front lines may be fighting in “real hell.”

“When it comes to women and children, I and my brothers-in-arms, and everyone, supports it,” he told CNN. “Because people are distracted from stress and in such difficult times they want to experience something genuine, and bookshops and theaters are about the real thing, about life.”

And on those rare days when Firsov manages to come to Kyiv from the front, he too goes to concerts.

“Culture is a part of our lives, it is both about war and partly about leisure, because even we, military men, need mental healing, need to be distracted, to be resilient.”

Week beginning 25 December 2024.

Diana Wilkinson The Girl in the Window Boldwood Books, December 2024.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

I was disappointed in this novel, despite some clever writing and twists.

Starting with those, the way in which the main character, Izzie, moves between watching her husband, using her column to investigate his and others’ motivations together with an attempt to unravel the truth is absorbing. The way in which Izzie demands truth and explanations from those she investigates but persists in maintaining her own silence and lies is an excellent insight into her character as well as those from whom she makes such demands. The way in which the various characters were exposed as innocent or guilty, contrary to Izzie’s assumptions (or what we think are her assumptions) is clever. However, I found Izzie quite unappealing, and none of the other characters is particularly engaging. The continual references to Izzie’s angst about her past, although that past was horrendous, dragged. Overall, the writing was not engaging enough to sustain the rather long-drawn-out narrative. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

After the review: Gender Institute event; John Marsden – obituary and commentary on the two schools he founded; Cindy Lou eats in Canberra and Cambridge; American Cable Television suffers after the Presidential Election; Cambridge – Castle Mound; Cambridge Black Creatives Art Exhibition.

Gender Institute Signature Event

‘Taking back our stories’: Talking about Indigenous Women’s Family History Research Thursday 6 February 2025, 5-6.30pm

This panel explores opportunities and barriers for Indigenous women to ‘take back’ their stories. It will consider issues of archival access; barriers to Indigenous family history; the limits of academic history practices and the importance of Indigenous family history for individuals, families, communities and nation-building. This discussion will be led by Aunty Dr Judi Wickes and Dr Kath Apma Penangke Travis, with contributions from program convenor Dr Beth Marsden, collaborator Professor Kat Ellinghaus and participants in the Research Centre for Deep History Indigenous Family History Research Residency.
Register here

Newswire – John Marsden

Legendary Australian author dies aged 74

Story by Blake Antrobus

The award-winning author published more than 40 books – including the best-selling Tomorrow series, which chronicled a fictional invasion and occupation of Australia.

The young adult series has been described as “the best series for Australian teens of all time”, selling millions of copies and sparking a successful movie and TV series.

Legendary Australian author dies aged 74

The Tomorrow books have become a staple of Australian libraries and young adult reading.

Businessman Simon Holmes a Court paid tribute to Mr Marsden in a touching post on X (formerly Twitter).

“He was one of the standout teachers through my schooling — in many ways similar to the character of John Keating in Dead Poets Society,” Mr Holmes a Court wrote.

“His 1st book So Much to Tell You was based on my year group — many identifiable characters. A gift to our year!

“Complex man, but I’m so glad to have crossed paths.”

Letters from the Inside by John Marsden is one of the most devastating books I have read. Of a more optimistic bent, and a fascinating read is Take Risks, reviewed in my blog of December 22, 2021. The following article is about the schools that Marsden founded and are described in Take Risks.

After ‘surviving’ negative experiences in the classroom, author John Marsden founded his own school to try to improve the system

Story by Judd Boaz and Sarah Lawrence

John Marsden was an acclaimed author who turned his talents to teaching. (ABC News: Dave May)

When interviewed by the ABC about the schools he spent the last decades of his life building, author John Marsden shared some insights into his hiring policies.

“I didn’t want teachers whose main interest in life was the colour of their next dishwasher,” he said. Marsden hoped to find staff who had lived life to the fullest and were as passionate about teaching young people as he was.

The Victorian author had dropped out of three different university courses before finding teaching, a calling he said he fell in love with almost immediately.

Marsden’s passion for education stemmed from his own difficult experiences at school.

“I got in trouble all the time,” Marsden said of his time at The King’s School in Sydney during the 1960s.

“I found it a pretty tough experience and it took all my survival skills to get through the years I had there.”

Sarah Mayor Cox is a literacy expert and long-time friend of John Marsden, and said the author’s own experiences at school drove him to provide a better environment for his students. See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog.

Cindy Lou indulges in Canberra

Oliver Brown

Oliver Brown’s chocolate drinks are a marvellous indulgence – they are generous, delicious, and a reasonable price. The cake display was tempting, but for us the drinks were enough. Our young chocolate lover was also unable to finish his hot chocolate, and some of the freshly cooked churros had to be taken away. The staff were delightful.

Ginger and Spice

This is a terrific Chinese restaurant, with lunch specials and a splendid menu. The service is pleasant, the food generous and delicious, and it is adjacent to the Gungalin tram spot. We had a lunch special of sweet and sour chicken (note that the large portion of chicken is partly hidden by the rice) and cumin beef, and from the menu the smaller portion of fried rice and some wonderful prawns with a garlic sauce, served with vegetables. One of the fortune cookies was particularly appreciated!

Cindy Lou Eats in Cambridge

Namaste Village

A new find in Castle Street, Namaste Village, is an excellent Indian vegetarian restaurant. The street food in particular was excellent – generous, delicious and delightfully different.

Stir

Stir is a lively coffee place on Chesterton Road. It has indoor and outdoor seating, pleasant service and a range of breakfast and brunch items, as well as pastries and coffee. It can be quite noisy, but the outdoor tables when the weather is fine, are usually available – some people must like the noise inside.

The poached eggs were nicely cooked, the beans (to a special recipe) delicious, and the chili jam a hit.

American Cable Television suffers after the Presidential Election

This is an interesting report on the cable television programs that, until the American Presidential election I watched. Clearly, I am not alone.

The idea that MSNBC is being arrogant, and incorrect, with its suggestion that viewers will return is at odds with the comment in the article that 2016 saw the same result after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Certainly, viewers have expressed their disdain for Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visiting Trump. Others have defended them, one stating ‘We are traumatized by the loss’ (of the Presidential Election to Donald Trump). These discussions have raised a debate about whether people such as Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (they are joined by others on the show, some presenting, and others as MSNBC analysts of law, policy and business matters) are journalists or ‘just’ presenters…or commentators? I shall be interested to see whether there is some analysis of why viewers have left the shows, and the debate about journalists/presenters.

Morning Joe Hits Record Low Ratings, But MSNBC Thinks Viewers Will Be Back

MSNBC and its flagship shows Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show are struggling through record. low ratings, but MSNBC thinks viewers will be back after Trump’s inauguration – Sarah Jones & Jason Eastley, December 18.

MSNBC And Morning Joe’s Woes Continue

There has been a change in the political media landscape since Election Day 2024. Viewers have fled MSNBC and CNN, and so far, they have not come back. The hosts of Morning Joe made the situation even worse by going to Mar-a-Lago and making nice with Donald Trump.

This act was viewed as a betrayal by many MSNBC viewers who have expressed themselves by not watching the morning show.

The result has been record-low ratings for the morning show.

MSNBC’s other flagship brand, The Rachel Maddow Show, has also experienced its own record-low ratings. Some Maddow viewers have expressed on social media that they can’t stomach Maddow’s tendency toward negativity in her storytelling.

If anyone thought that this experience would teach MSNBC and other corporate media not to take their audiences for granted, the network does not seem to be getting the message.

The Independent reported:

At the same time, MSNBC executives feel that the network’s loyal viewers will return after the sting of Kamala Harris’ loss fades away and Democratic anger over Trump’s policies grows. This happened in 2016 when MSNBC’s audience fell by 41 percent immediately after Hillary Clinton’s loss, only for the channel to experience a sustained “resistance” surge in 2017 after Trump took office.

“A post-election dip in viewership was always projected and internal thinking is that it will pick up in the New Year, post-inauguration,” a network source told The Independent.

See also Raw Story <newsletter@m.rawstory.com> for coverage of American politics.

Cambridge

The last part of our trip was spent having a lovely break in Cambridge where we caught up with family and friends. Having lived in Cambridge for over 6 months, and returning there on each trip to the UK, it is a joy to walk into the city, visit familiar cafes, and find new ones, have a sandwich at John Lewis (and recharge our phones at their convenient stations) and visit art galleries. On this occasion we visited Kettle’s Yard on Castle Street, and I was thrilled to be at a private viewing of a project for experienced artists and aspiring artists. This was held at a very familiar spot, near Garden Walk, in which I canvassed for the British Labour Party for several years while in the UK.

A walk up Castle Mound

This is a lovely walk, and only possible because two Labour Councillors, the late Claire Richards and Jocelynne Scutt fought to save it from a misguided attempt to sell it. Unfortunately, the County Council chambers in the distance were not saved. Cambridge is in the far distance.

Nov 15, 2019 · Labour County Councillors Jocelynne Scutt and Claire Richards have stepped up their campaign to have Castle Mound registered as a town green and save it for future generations of local residents and visitors to the city.

Private Viewing – Cambridge Black Creatives

This “unique arts group [supports] black creative people in Cambridge. We are creating a transformational space for art making and honest discussion on racial issues.” Reclaiming Narrative pamphlet.

Below, in the top row: Sandra Scott- Untitled, Fabric painting, quilting and applique; Selena Scott – Bajan Man, German’s Boy and The Thinker.

http://www.cambridgeblackcreatives.co.uk

More on Cambridge next week – another art gallery and another lovely, but not so politically important, walk around this lovely city.

Cindy Lou at Courgette

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