I really hope a few of you take the bait on the below….  Read the paragraph that begins with “Below, I speculate”.  The rest is your choice.

The word is that the Supreme Court ruling on a woman’s right to choose will be sometime this month, as will the public report of the Congressional Committee on the Insurrection of Jan 6, 2021 and surrounding months post election 2020.

And, of course, the Uvalde tragedy and the place of weapons of war in public use is and will continue to be front and center.  And on and on…we are a nation horribly divided, with no good outcome in sight.

“Extra Credit”: Now talk is actually beginning about the possibility of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.  If/When, what are your feelings about a possible outcome.  Same rule as with the others, express your opinion before such talks actually begin…bearing in mind that this is still in the possibility phase now, and there is a long, long way to resolution.

Given the topics of this post, I think the most recent Letter from an American by Heather Cox Richardson deserves your time as well.

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Below, I speculate about the Supremes and the Insurrection, and invite your pre-opinion opinions as well, BEFORE the respective report and public hearing.     And, Guns are fair game as well.  And Ukraine.

Deadline for any comments to be published here the day before the Announcement of the Supreme Court opinion, or the first public hearing of the Insurrection Committee, whichever comes first..

If you wish, here is my blog written January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection.

Here is my May 4, 2022 blog about the leak of the Draft of the Supreme Courts potential ruling on abortion.  (There are two significant additions to this blog at the end of the comments section, both added on May 29.  Carol’s letter in last Sunday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a long article from the Twin Cities Catholic Archdiocese, give added and opposing perspectives).

I’m also including here my first blog in which George Floyd’s name appears after he was murdered on May 25, 2020.

I have no more knowledge about any of these, than anyone else ‘outside the walls’.   What I write below is as well- or ill-informed as anyone else.

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January 6 Committee: I think the Committee has accumulated an immense amount of relevant and legally significant testimony and evidence implicating individuals at the highest levels of government during the period following the 2020 election.  Best I know, the Committee deliberations relate only to Congressional matters, not to Court.  But their evidence is very important to potential legal challenges.

The Committee, I believe,  knows a whole lot more than thus far revealed.  This terrifies the ultimate targets, who may never actually testify on the record.  The Committee record has been provided by persons with direct knowledge, pieced together over many months.

I don’t believe that the Committee considers it necessary to call in the then-President or even the co-operators who have dodged subpoenas.  I doubt there is a court in the land which would actually indict #45. He is a pathological liar and if they somehow got him in the dock, he’d lie anyway.  Their paths to the truth have thus been from other sources.

(I’m certain there is plenty of internal debate over process – this is totally normal.  They know how the system they are part of works.)

There are additional dilemmas.  Many folks, such as intelligence officials, police officers and the like, do not and did not have clean hands.  Some want #45 to win.  Some were allies, actively or passively complicit.

The Department of Justice. separate,  is criticized for not proceeding more quickly and publicly, but I think its actions are justified by its knowledge of how the law works.  Any of us can have our opinions.  In the court of law, the rules are different.  This is an immense case without precedent in our history as a country.

The Congressional Committee has its own rules and procedures, and the Department of Justice is not part of Congress, rather the agency empowered to enforce the laws of the nation.  Our system of co-equal branches can seem inconvenient but it is essential to a functioning democracy.

I think the Nuremberg Trials after World War II are a reasonable analogy to today.  The persons who followed the orders in Germany basically were allowed to go home after the War ended.  The legal targets then were the major leaders who were the reason the violations of human rights took place.

At this point, we in the public really know nothing.    So, I await the public hearing which I will watch with great interest.

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The Supreme Court: Choice, Abortion, Roe v Wade or whatever you call the topic.

The leak of the Draft of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court – the Alito Draft – occurred on or about May 4, one month ago.

To my knowledge all there has been since then is hot air.  There has not even been much public speculation about who did the leaking, or why they did so.

In personnel terms, the Supreme Court is a small organization, with a long history of ‘close to the vest’ control of information, including amongst the Justices themselves, who often are not of the same opinion or in agreement about rationale.

This is even more true in these days of intense ideological polarization.

I think back to recent history about intentional political leaks (actually dirty tricks) that appeared to be real, but may well have been false flags from the beginning, intended to mislead.

The two particular cases which come to my mind are the time years ago in the Karl Rove years when mysterious ‘evidence’ appeared: a computer file ‘discovered’ in a park that had information about the enemy.  More recently a computer taken in for repair which supposedly had the goods on someone else, second or third or fourth hand….  Both were big news at the time they were reported.  Both were empty….

Lots of people believe nonsense, just because they want to believe it.  “False flags” work.

Q-anon  also comes to mind.  No one seems to know who Q is, and all that matters is the question.  The receiver can & does make up his or her own answer.

In the matter of the Supreme Court Draft, it is as reasonable to assume, as anything, that it was intentionally leaked, perhaps not even by or with the knowledge of any of the justices or their staffs, to assess and manage public reaction present and future.

It makes absolutely no difference which “side” did the leaking – it wasn’t an accident, I’d guess, and the leaker had a motive.  I’ll be surprised if we ever learn who the leaker actually was.

Legal issues in a complex society are complex.  As I learned over many years, there is no such thing as “clearly” in Law.  If Law was clear, in our society, there would not be need for swarms of lawyers whose job it is to argue a case, one way or another.

I don’t know how the Supreme Court will rule.  I will be most interested in the exact verbiage in the final ruling compared to the leaked document.  What the Court individually and collectively doesn’t know is how the public at large will accept whatever ruling eventually is published; and we in the public will be well advised to think about how we can accommodate differing beliefs about what “life” means for the mother of an unborn child.

It isn’t as simple as the most avid pro-lifer, or pro-choicer, likes to portray.

I’m pro-choice, but by no means a ‘baby-killer’ as I have personally been described.

Stay tuned.

Again, weigh in at this space BEFORE the opinions actually are revealed.

A second post on the topic is at May 27.

Today I watched the entire news conference in Uvalde TX in the wake of the carnage at Robb Elementary School May 24.

The Governor and Lt. Governor of TX were center of attention.  I won’t recount much from that meeting, which will cover the walls of todays news, print and visual and virtual.  I first mentioned the tragedy in my blog yesterday.

The death toll so far: 19 early elementary students; two of their teachers; 17 injured; the shooter, age 18 armed with an AR 15, was killed.

To my knowledge, none of the folks on the dais today in Uvalde implicated the unregulated firearm which killed 21 people.  There was abundant finger pointing at mental illness, and maybe the need for more places to put such people.

Lurking in the background is a long history of Texas deregulating guns.  Not coincidentally, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has its annual meeting beginning this week in Houston TX.  There will be more news….  I remember a similar situation in 1999 when the same NRA had its annual convention in Denver, a few days after and within miles of Columbine High School.  Here’s an interesting recount from NPR of what happened in 1999.  (My son and family lived then, and still live, about a mile from Columbine High School.  I was there a week after that carnage.)

I have a long interest and concern about this topic.  I entered “guns” in the search engine for my past posts, and came up with 85 referring to the topic.  The first of these, April 4, 2009, was the third I wrote, about the Binghamton NY shooting in 2009.  You can read it here.

I wrote all of these posts, and what I can say without equivocation is that I have never argued that guns should be eliminated; only that they need to be regulated.  Guns have their place in our society, but not in the hands of someone set to destroy someone else.

Somebody said, yesterday, that we are a nation of over 300,000,000 people, awash with over 400,000,000 guns, ever more dangerous.  Many of us, perhaps most, do not own or use a gun.  those who have them often have many, of all sorts.

This is what I said about this issue in 2009: “I have no issue against hunters and hunting in the traditional sense of that word: shotguns, regular rifles, licenses….
The national debate for years has gone far beyond the lines I describe above. We are an armed and very dangerous nation of far too many people armed to the teeth, wallowing in fear and resentment of this, that or the other.”  It’s much worse, now.

So, I think I’ve been “on the court” on this issue for a long time, and I will continue to be so.  The issue needs to be settled politically – one party and one party only consistently has worked for common sense gun regulation.  That party is the Democrats.  But it’s not an easy political issue.  It is demagogued dishonestly but effectively.  Words like “confiscation” are bandied about.

There were a few comments I flagged from today’s news conference in Uvalde TX.  They were all from the Texas Governor, and carefully prepared.

The emphasis on mental illness is a standard and false dodge.  We are a country with about 4% of the world’s population with a wildly disproportionate share of the kind of gun violence which visited Uvalde yesterday.  Mental illness arguably exists elsewhere, similar to here.  But there is far less access to weapons of mass destruction.  It is harder to kill your neighbor in other countries….

The Law in Texas has a long history of over 60 years.  60 years ago I was in the U.S. Army and our gun was an M-1, very low class and ineffective compared with today’s killing equipment.  Somebody reminded me this afternoon of the infamous Texas Clock Tower Massacre in 1966 where Charles Whitman killed 18 people with long guns from the 28th floor balcony overlooking the University of Texas.

The Texas Governor had to bring up the what-about standard: what about Chicago, New York, Los Angeles….  I had to look that up.  Of course, there are problems everywhere.  The three cities together have metropolitan area populations of 42 million; Texas has about 29 million population.  And it caused me to wonder how much of the incidents in these three cities fits the pattern of Texas – killings in school, church, shopping centers….

It is impossible for me to generate sympathy for the government of Texas given its pattern and practice of always more and more deregulation of deadly weaponry.

This afternoon, on the second anniversary of the George Floyd murder in my own city in 2020, President Biden signed an Executive Order attempting to nick at the resistance that continues in the national legislature of dealing with this crisis in our own country.

There is much more to say.

And much, much more to do.  Get, and stay, active.

COMMENTS (More at the end):

from Judy: shaking our heads and hearts despair….knowing that God does the same….blessings to you…you have a great loving heart and keen mind.  Thank you for your thoughts.

from Louisa: Extremely well considered. Your writing always catches my attention. Thank you Dick!

from Larry: Dick, thank you for writing this.  I don’t remember the exact numbers but NAMI always says a very small percentage of violent crimes are done by people living with a diagnosed mental illness.  You said something like “regular and convenient dodge”, and just one more horrendous bit of disrespect and stigma heaped on people living with a mental illness.

from Fred: Excellent post, Richard, excellent.

from Rick: Totally agree with you cousin…keep up the good work and raising awareness of this sickness in America…the Texas Governor was ridiculous yesterday!

from SAK in England: Children are by definition innocent which makes this latest tragedy in Texas so poignant. Dostoevsky (or are we supposed to “cancel” him for being Russian!? He died in 1881) was often troubled by the death of children – his novels debate the question of how a benevolent God can allow this. The Christian theological answers often involve the concept of free will, that God out of respect for humanity granted it free will – unlike some other religions where everything is pre-determined. Perhaps God, looking at the current state of affairs on earth, might be slightly less respectful of humanity! Just kidding of course & I am in admiration of this concept of free will.

Arriving from the UK to study in Austin Texas decades ago, we were told about the mass shooting from the tower. This was at a time when you couldn’t see an armed police officer on the street in Britain – now sadly you do. We later took a bus in the wrong direction & ended up in a disfavoured part of town. Another of the group asked seriously whether we should take a plane back across the pond! All went well & I graduated from there but I do remember a professor being fired for expressing leftist views which astonished me as we had to take a couple of courses about US government, including democracy, to graduate.

Nowadays ownership of pistols & semi-automatic weapons is completely banned in the UK which “has some of the strictest laws about gun ownership in the world” according to some sources, e.g. here and here.

There have been massacres using guns in the UK as well but comparatively very few. This is not to brag after all the UK has an ineffective, scandal plagued prime minister who if he could do the right thing would have resigned yesterday. It’s only to show a correlation between fatalities & gun ownership. After all as you mentioned there are alas many suffering from mental problems everywhere.

It would have been in bad taste had the Financial Times featured this cartoon now but it appeared a few months ago so I hope you will allow me, with apologies, to include it:

[Extremely well-armed guy wearing Texas t-shirt and holding “Pro-Life sign]

Abortion is another issue that has come up on your pages & doubtless will show up again. Although I don’t like abortion & thank God for steering me away from that temptation, after all I daily ask him to “lead us not into temptation”, I don’t see how a secular (in the sense of separation of state & church at least) democracy can outlaw or try to make abortion difficult and/or hazardous.

Abortion is another issue that has come up on your pages & doubtless will show up again. Although I don’t like abortion & thank God for steering me away from that temptation, after all I daily ask him to “lead us not into temptation”, I don’t see how a secular (in the sense of separation of state & church at least) democracy can outlaw or try to make abortion difficult and/or hazardous.

from Mary: I usually take the liberty of listening to the spin offered by various outlets/papers and would recommend that.  If anyone is stuck to one source you get quite a biased picture of statistics but I am also convinced there are some who will never leave their ‘trustedsource.  It just makes me have a bit of a headache. After a period of saturation I default to watching nothing.

Spring is here; the ice is out, and for some people, canoeing on the northern lakes is on the mind.

This very evening, Friday May 20, my sister and brother-in-law, at the doorstep of 50 years marriage, are setting up their first overnight in Ontario’s immense Quetico park.  The map of their itinerary, starting at Nym Lake, Ontario,  is at the end of this post.   They’ll be out for nine days.  I’ll report on what I hear at the end.  I wish them well.  [See postnote.]

This voyage is nothing new and different.  Flo and Carter have canoe’d in Quetico and the Boundary Waters for years.  I’ve “been there, done that” with them on a couple of occasions, in 1992 and 2001.  They are for real.  This year, their son and one of our brothers, Eric and John, make up the foursome.  In my trips there were six of us in the canoes.

But the real focus of this post is to recommend a new book for your summer reading, about an English artist, Frances Anne Hopkins, best known for her art depicting the Voyageurs and their country, based on her living in Canada in the mid-1800s.

The book is brand new.  I’ve read the book, and I do know the author, who is a retired teacher of French (link to order the book is here).

MaryEllen and I are in an organization together, French-American Heritage Foundation.  Yesterday I sent the following to our colleague Board members.

A final note on a separate topic:

Thursday evening I attended the 10th anniversary celebration of Green Card Voices, “A Decade of Storytelling”.

The Landmark was filled with supporters of the organization, and it occurred to me that I probably had been at one of the first, if not the first, program of the organization in 2013.  I wrote about it at this space then.

Green Card Voices is doing great work representing immigrants as valued parts of our state and nation.  They are finding their niche nationwide, and if you’re interested, be in contact with them.

PRENOTE: The film Mission: Joy still on through May 19. Details.

This weekend is the annual Garage Sale in Woodbury.  A good neighbor and friend, Jim, is having such a sale and passed along an idea he and his wife are pursuing as their contribution to the Ukraine Crisis.  This is just a single idea from a single person.  If you’re wondering how to engage as an individual, take a look at this single idea from two citizens.  You can read the e-mail here: World Central Kitchen

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The May 12, St. Paul Pioneer Press front-page headline asked: “Is Ukraine an unwinnable war?”

Of course the war is unwinnable.  There has never been a winnable war.  However small, a war once declared in the long term is lost.  That fact certainly won’t end war: today somebody will kill somebody else somewhere, and feel totally justified: “he (or she) deserved to die”.  But murder tends to have consequences in the short or the long term in the social structure that is called humanity..

This reality won’t stop the latest or the next mis-adventure.  But the rest of us can open our eyes.

Back on February 25, right before the invasion of Ukraine began, I remembered my first ‘contact’ with Vladimir Putin in June, 2003.  You can read what I said then, here.   More detail is at the end of this post.  Summary: completely inadvertently I had a ‘close call’ with Putin and George W. Bush on Putin’s home turf, St. Petersburg, Russia, on June 3, 2003.

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Years ago I participated in an excellent workshop called the Landmark Forum.  One of the learnings from the workshop was about “winning formulas”, something we all have, with an endless variety of specifics.  Winning formulas are things that work for us: think babies crying; think bullying behavior; on and on.

We can come to rely on them – getting drunk dimmed the pain once, and it works again and again…until it doesn’t.

Despots – we’ve had and will have our own, here at home – have come on the scene over all of human history.  They all seem to have the same trajectory; the same general winning formula.  Their megalomaniac tendencies quickly outrun their common sense.  Up, up and away, they hypnotize  their victims, they take control, then comes the fall, taking their admirers and others along with them for the great fall.

Jimmy Jones, while no politician in the usual sense, was one of these, sufficiently successful that his very name became a descriptor for a particular kind of evil.  His followers “drank the koolaid”, and they died.

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In our own U.S. of A. we continue our now generations long war against Fidel Castro, even though he is dead, and we have had a lot to do with the impoverished lot of present day citizens of Cuba, just off our shores.   It’s an interesting variation on the despot theme.

Castro upset the status quo applecart in Cuba in 1959, overthrowing a corrupt despot and American puppet, Fulgencio Batista.  Many years later a relative of mine, prominent in banking and politics, told me he had made a $5 bet with a friend back then “that Castro wouldn’t last six months”.  He lost the bet.  He told me about this 35 years later.

At the North Dakota farm I found an old college history book, “A History of Latin America” by Hubert Herring, c 1963.  In the chapter on Cuba, at page 422, Herring wrote a concluding paragraph, as follows: “Reflecting upon the sorry state of Cuba in 1960, the onlooker could say that two things are reasonably clear: Cuba was indeed overdue for revolution and revolutions are never mild and gentlemanly.”   Doubtless, Herring is long gone,  but I wonder what he would have to say today.

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Putin probably knows he’s on course for failure, but he will never admit it, and in the process do his best to destroy the very country he is trying to dominate.  All of us will be impacted by his fantasy.   No one knows what or when the last chapter reveals:  what “mission accomplished” will mean.

For some reason, I think Putin got some early ideas from his  contemporary leader, George W. Bush, in 2003; and got more reinforcement from his American counterpart 2017-21.  Now he’s stuck in an unwinnable war.  We will all lose,

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More about 2003 in St. Petersburg Russia: No, the visit to the hotel elevator wasn’t a celebrity contact.  We were on a Baltic Cruise with my cousin and her husband. Pauline and J.P. were celebrating their 40th anniversary.   In early June, 2003, our ship docked in St. Petersburg, and we signed on for two days of sightseeing in the city and area.

The June 3  itinerary included a brief stop at the hotel where the Bush’s had stayed when George Bush came to visit Vladimir Putin, native of St. Petersburg, who was then in his first term as Russian President (inaugurated May 7, 2000).  There was time to go into the hotel and see the actual elevator the Bush’s ascended to their room.  I had my camera, but didn’t take a picture (I’ve regretted that misstep ever since.). We could see, but don’t touch!  The elevator?  Average and ordinary.

Of course, we happened to be there at a significant time in American history.

The “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq began March 22, 2003.  On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on an Aircraft Carrier off San Diego, and gave the speech dubbed Mission Accomplished, name based on the banner behind him as he spoke.  Then came his visit with President Putin in St. Petersburg Russia June 1, 2003, two days or so before us.

That was our little league brush with history.

We all know the outcome of Iraq, and varied interpretations of what Iraq meant..

We can’t be the change we wish to see by sitting on the sidelines and complaining about what ‘they’ aren’t or should be doing.

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POSTNOTE: Related though not specifically on topic, I had the opportunity to watch an excellent on-line program related to political activism for progressives.  The YouTube presentation is here; a written summary of the hour and a half is here: Thoughts for Activists April 2022.  It is worth your time.

I titled this post “Unwinnable”.  I was going to add a question mark, but chose not to, since some of the issues raised are very much winnable IF activists and people in general are willing to make the commitment.  Putin’s war is doomed for himself, and his country, and perhaps for all of us.  But we can and should work to make a difference.

Earlier Post, May 9: Larry

COMMENTS: (more at end of post)

from Brian: Great, fascinating stuff!  Thanks for sharing.

from EO: I was intrigued by your mentioning Putin and Bush in the same blog.  As the war in Ukraine goes on, I keep thinking of the price paid by Iraq and Iran as results of the actions of the two Bush Presidents.   We paint Putin with a far different brush than our views of the Bushes, yet the hundreds of thousands of people that lost their lives because of the actions of the Bushes far outweigh the lives lost by Putin’s actions. If there is such a thing as heaven and hell, Putin will reunite with the Bushes in hell some day.

from Debbie: Thanks, Dick. That was interesting.  My thoughts go to Ukraine, though.  Many of my peacenik friends won’t touch on the choices that they have made to fight back.  The friends just consistently blame the U.S. and NATO.  I hate to see the needless suffering Putin has put on them.  I remember being a child of 5 and my Mom showed me photos of the concentration camps and I thought “why didn’t somebody try to save them”?  I still feel like that with the Ukrainians, the Rwandans, the Syrians, etc.

Response from Dick: Thanks for comment. Just to be clear, given the circumstances I personally can see no alternative for Ukraine other than to fight back, and indeed for the west to respond unequivocally.  At the beginning, I didn’t think that Putin would actually become the aggressor.  I was wrong.

Some weeks ago in an unrelated conversation about anti-war I recalled a conversation at a Nobel Peace Prize Festival at Augsburg University in Minneapolis.  Dr. Joseph Schwartzberg. well known in the twin cities peace and justice community, and I, were in booths adjacent to that of the official representative of the Gandhi organization in Minnesota.  The conversation got around to the topic of non-violence and anti-war.   The representative posed a question to both of us: what should our response be if we were protecting our property and an invader was about to assault us?  This question was from an advocate of non-violence.  Long and short, as I interpreted it, there are times when non-violence is not the appropriate response.  In my opinion, Ukraine is one of those times.

POSTNOTE May 16: Last night Fareed Zakaria had an excellent program on CNN about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.  Check to see if/when/how to watch the program.  I especially noted the story of the lesson taught Putin by the common rat who changed the conversation about attacker and attacked, and apparently influenced Putin’s later life, not in a good way.  You’ll have to watch the film for details.