Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21^st Century.

In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.

You can see the five-minute video here:

As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”

Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.

The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:

Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.

We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.

Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.

Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.

The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.

History is something that binds us all together, and that includes an unlikely pairing of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the affirmative action movement in the United States. To understand the motives of why Putin feels so possessively towards Ukraine and why affirmative action is central to the advancement of minorities, we must draw upon the history of both.

To comprehend why Putin is so interested in protecting his interests in Ukraine, it’s necessary to consider how since the time of Napoleon, more than two hundred years ago, Russia has repeatedly been attacked from its west. There have been three major incursions into Russia from other European countries. First was Napoleon from France in 1812. Second was Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 and third was Germany again, this time under Adolf Hitler in 1941.

When the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, there was Russia and sixteen other states nearby republics. One of those sixteen was Ukraine, which was one of the founding republics in the U.S.S.R. Other republics that came to form a barrier of protection around Russia were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kirghizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (there were four others that came later).

What early leaders of the Soviet Union, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, did was to form a protective shell around Russia. In some ways, it is similar to the United States asserting that it has control of the Americas (North, Central and South) through the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The U.S. has engaged European countries twice to “protect the independence of Cuba.” First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and then in 1962 in staring down Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The key point is that both Russia and the United States have acted in ways to protect themselves from invasion. Each has formed geographic barriers around its borders. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it left Russia in many ways unprotected.

For many years post-1989, the Ukraine had a government friendly to Russia. However, in recent years, Ukraine has become more independent and interested in developing closer relations with western Europe. Economic trade between western Europe and Ukraine has increased and Ukraine has also asked to become part of the western defense alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

For Vladimir Putin and many others in Russia, this is scary. This is also not the way it should be according to the Russian playbook. Russia’s field of reference is the Soviet Union of old, in which Ukraine and other republics on its western flank protected it from western incursion, or western even influence.

In this light, it makes sense that Putin would want to take control of the Ukrainian government. In his mind, doing so would include the possibility of using military force to do so.

I am not asserting that NATO countries, including the United States, should just stand by and let Russia invade Ukraine without consequences. But it is important to understand that Russia has valid reasons to want to control Ukraine. That is something that is very different from when they placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962, a country thousands of miles outside of their “sphere of interest.”

So, drawing upon history, it is important to understand from where Russia comes and why it is important for NATO countries to negotiate with Putin. One component of an agreement might be to include a declaration agreeing not to include Ukraine in NATO now, but to have a sunset provision whereby the issue could be reconsidered in twenty years.

In many ways, looking at Russia’s current desires is not that different from the ways in which many white people in the United States look at minorities. In 2019, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the history of African-Americans, beginning with the estimated first day that slaves from Africa arrived on the American shore of the colony of Virginia.

Lead author of the 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, does a remarkable job of connecting the elements of slavery to current problems that African-Americans face. She is joined by a number of other outstanding writers who provide more detail on subjects such as how urban interstate highways have been intentionally designed to divide black neighborhoods, how the work of slaves on southern plantations provided need for investment and eventually the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The work of the Times is greatly supplemented by lessons from the Pulitzer Center.

Many white people are now getting upset about Critical Race Theory, which is simply a recognition of how contemporary conditions (good and bad) for African-Americans is a result of the history of blacks in America.

It is because of the discrimination that black people have endured in America, now for more than 400 years, that programs such as Affirmative Action have been needed, and still are. Affirmative Action is a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment.

Affirmative Action is not something that is limited to race. It is used for those who are economically disadvantaged, or for people with disabilities, or for women. It is necessary to balance the playing field.

White people need to understand the history of minorities, just as NATO countries need to understand the history of Russia. To be fair, the reverse is true in each case. On a global level, if we are going to live peacefully and with justice, it is important to understand one another’s history.

The post What Putin and Affirmative Action have in common appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Ukraine, for many Americans is way out there – somewhere in the nowhere land of Uzbekistan or North Korea. Ukraine is very far away from our daily lives.

And yet, it may be worth our while paying a little attention to what’s going on in Ukraine right now. It might just have consequences for all of us down the line.

A friend went home to spend Christmas with family in Venezuela – a much closer geography. He tells me that the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy is to all extents and purposes done. Motorcycle delivery guys can now make change for a $20 US bill with 20 US $1 bills. The bolivar is history. The surprise was that, in addition to paying for goods and services in dollars, in Venezuela my friend could now also pay with Russian rubles.

It’s a small, but pertinent, detail.

Venezuela, along with the rest of Caribbean, Central and South America, were once unequivocally considered to be under the umbrella of US purview. Let’s not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis as an earlier attempt to disrupt that way of the world. And yet, quietly, and somewhat menacingly to a distracted US, Russia has in recent years again begun to spread its tentacles into the economic heart of one of our neighbors immediately to our south.

How many rubles go about their daily lives in Venezuela? Nobody knows.

Food is once again abundant in Caracas, at least and perhaps not only, in its better neighborhoods. There are whispers of hope in the air. The dollar is now king. If you have dollars, you can not only just get by, but also even live well. The caveat, of course, is that you have dollars. Those millions of Venezuelans who had, out of necessity, to flee Venezuela in recent years are not in that column. After you force the poor, the needy and the undesirable out, you can aspire to a thriving society, apparently. Regrettably, we’ve seen attempts at that scenario before in our history. When you muscle any segment of your population out, you are veering far away from accepted norms of decency.

Almost suddenly, after years of waste, destruction and damage to the lives of its citizens and the infrastructure of the country, Venezuela is now signaling an economic shift. By the end of December 2021, the country had doubled its petroleum output from just a year before – not back to when Venezuela was a major force in petroleum production worldwide, but a long way toward a surprising and flag-waving celebratory candle cake for the Maduro regime.

Money is once again flowing, if not into Venezuela – at least not from the known Western world, then definitively round and about within its borders. What kind of money, again we don’t entirely know. So many Venezuelans have been sanctioned by the United States that now those very same Venezuelan citizens may just have decided to keep their enormous wealth home and plow it back into their country’s economy. Sanctions are flawed, and in this case, perhaps, counter-productive to US interests. Money needs a sanctuary. And just maybe, Venezuela is now a sanctuary for its own and odd money in general.

And in this repositioning of Venezuela, the ground has shifted.

Russia and China are now firmly ensconced, along with Iran, as Venezuela’s allies, protectors and supporters.

Why is that important?

Because this is happening in the Americas, just a little less than 2,000 miles south of Key West. This is not some distant Ukraine, Belarus or Uzbekistan.

For better or worse, for decades after WW2, it was taken as a given that the Americas were within the United States general sphere of interest and influence. We had sometimes benign and at times harmful relationships with nations within that domain.

Russia, on the other hand, had all of Eastern Europe, and not coincidentally, Ukraine and the Stan countries at its southern borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan et al to do with whatever it wished.

East was East, and West was West.

Except that many of the countries under Russian overview weren’t happy with that division. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those nations grabbed at the chance of change. Ukraine wanted autonomy from its overseer, Russia. Ukraine wanted to shift its essential values westward. As did Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia and many of the former Russian affiliates.

And Europe opened its bosom.

Europe said, Come on in!

Ukraine was a big fan of the EU, and Ukraine said, Let’s do it.

And all was good, for a while.

Then came Putin, a Russian ultranationalist, a man obsessed with Russian power and superiority, a man with an exaggerated ego rarely seen in history – Thump not withstanding, a man focused on a Soviet-style view of the world as a greater Russia reinvigorated, a man who feels Ukraine’s aspirations as somehow a threat to his nationalistic manhood.

Cuba means nothing to Putin. He has done nothing to alleviate Cuba’s pain. Venezuela, on the other hand, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves -greater even than Saudi Arabia’s, means a lot.

And if Ukraine can be European, maybe Venezuela can be Russian, if you will.

Welcome to Putin’s worldview.

In Venezuela, Putin gets to mess with America like never before.

Almost overnight in the Ukraine crisis now upon us, all bets are off.

On Jan 14th, the BBC reported that …

“… a senior diplomat in the Kremlin described two recent rounds of talks with the US and NATO as “unsuccessful.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who led negotiations with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, said he didn’t want “to confirm anything, won’t exclude anything here either”. When asked whether Russia might consider establishing a military presence in Washington’s backyard, Mr Ryabkov said it depended “on the actions of American colleagues”

Russia is not excluding a presence in Cuba or Venezuela; quite the opposite, in fact. Russia is positioning itself for a major confrontation that may just include the Americas.

Putin’s focus is far beyond Ukraine.

So we might just think about projecting ourselves a little bit (or a lot) into our near future.

Russia invades Ukraine.

The US imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s banks and ways of doing business with the rest of the world.

Russia reacts. Russia sends military equipment and/or troops to Venezuela and Cuba.

Then what?

The US sends troops to Colombia?

A young Colombian friend of mine was already thinking about that possibility in a conversation with his friends at lunchtime here in Bogotá today.

Those with upcoming military service are worried, he told me.

And so, Ukraine has come home to roost.

Ukraine is not so far away at all, as it turns out. In fact, perhaps Ukraine is already here.

So now what?

The post Venezuela: Ukraine comes home to roost appeared first on Occasional Planet.

President Joe Biden did something that his three predecessors failed to do during their nearly twenty years of presiding over America’s longest war. Biden leveled with the American people and told them that the war that they were fighting in Afghanistan was one which they were not going to win. That was Truth to Power, something that rarely comes from the mouth of someone in Power. He said that he was taking action to forthwith remove American troops, contractors and support personnel from Afghanistan.

It was time for a president to acknowledge to American and global citizens that if there had been a good time for the United States to extricate itself from Afghanistan, it would have been shortly after air strikes flattened key Al Qaeda positions in 2002-2003. Since then, any chance of “winning” the war had long since passed. No matter how many corners could be turned in the future, America and its allies were not going to win a war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s willingness to say that the United States was leaving Afghanistan; his courage to follow through on this pledge indicate how remarkable both he and his actions have been. This is particularly so in comparison to American presidents of the recent past.

Biden’s courage to take responsibility for a final resolution of this chapter of American conflict with Afghanistan is the headline. It should remain that way for weeks, months, even years to come. It is difficult to think of any action by any American president since the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson chose to fight for human and economic rights for minorities and poor white people in America that matched what Biden did.

However, as well received as Biden’s decision has been by most of the American people, there has not been a concurrent “trickle down” of support reaching many of the fine men and women in the American media.

No sooner had President Biden delivered his remarkable speech on August 16 than MSNBC cable journalists Nicolle Wallace and Brian Williams agreed that “95% of the American people will love the speech, and 95% of the press will hate it.” Kudos to them for being so spot on and brutally honest about their colleagues in the media.

The response of most of the media to the Biden speeches in many ways reflects the theater of the absurd. Prior to the speeches, if you could have gathered leading media commentators around in an informal gathering and asked them what they would suggest that the United States do about Afghanistan, it almost a sure bet that most would have said that the United States has to get out of Afghanistan. They might further add that the U.S. has to analyze the wars in which it has engaged since its last “victory” in 1945 in World War II and learn how to avoid going to wars which have “loser” written all over them. Finally, should the U.S. once again become involved in a war in which it has no way out other than formally or informally turning tail and leaving, it needs to rehearse Biden’s script on how to say “enough is enough.”

Members of the media seem to suffer from the same malady as other well-educated people who take their particular profession too seriously. Journalists lock themselves into the norms and standards of their profession and remove themselves from the grounding that comes from seeing oneself first as a human being and a reporter second.

No sooner had Biden delivered his seminal speech than they criticized the president with nit-picky questions and comments about the American extrication. There is legitimate grounding to many of their questions, particularly about the strategy and logistics of the final days in Kabul. However, the tone expressed by many of the journalists is snarky and absent of praise for the bold and thoughtful actions taken by Biden.

This is not to imply that no critical questions should be allowed in a press conference when journalists speak “Truth to Power” as clearly as Joe Biden did. Biden spoke the “Truth” about America’s presence in Afghanistan. He may have overlooked some of the smaller “truths” about the difficulties that American forces were facing in the final extrication.

For example, when he stated that there was no way for him and his advisors to know that the Taliban might be able to seize the capital city of Kabul and the area surrounding the Hamid Karzai Airport, that simply does not jibe with the on-the-ground reporting that we have seen and the video that accompanies it. When Biden was not straight about events that both the media and citizens could clearly see, then it undermined the credibility of his assertions about the wisdom of terminating the presence of American troops in Afghanistan immediately.

Media tends to consistently give itself a free pass. This is unfair for so many reasons. When vitriol is directed at Joe Biden as if he were Donald Trump, then the media’s checks and balances on Trump are undermined. The way for the media to enhance its credibility, and to gain more support from the American people, is for journalists to operate as human beings first and reporters second. We tend to admire politicians who speak to us as if they were across the table from us in our kitchen; the same holds true for journalists. The media is the lens through which we learn so much about what is going on in the world, our country, our regions and our localities. No need for grandstanding; just some low-drama honesty and truthfulness.

The post When a President Hits a Home Run, don’t criticize him for wearing the wrong color shoelaces. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“He based his popularity on his extraordinary charisma, much discretionary   money, and a key and well-tested political message: denouncing the past and  promising a better future for all.”

The Atlantic posted the above quote in 2014, and no they weren’t referring to Trump. The Atlantic was referring to Hugo Chávez, former President of Venezuela. Chávez was a populist president nonpareil who knew just how to manipulate the longings of Venezuela’s working poor in order to recast his country as an ephemeral nirvana. He had the wealth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and at the time revenue-producing oil exports to help him realign his country’s values and interests. That realignment has cost the Venezuelan people dearly. Because of severe shortages of the very basics, food, water, electricity, gasoline and money, it’s estimated that more than five million Venezuelans have had no choice but to flee the country. Populist policies can have severe negative long-term consequences.

As we approach the 2020 Presidential election, it might be worth asking, “How did Venezuela get itself into its mess?” Well, through a confluence of historical and social events, but mainly through Venezuelan voters’ decision to elect Hugo Chávez as President in 1999. He stayed on as President until his death in 2013, and set in motion the mess that Venezuela is in today.

How did he get elected in the first place? It turns out that he had charisma.

Merriam Webster defines charisma as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure.” Charisma is a kind of magnetism that, for whatever reason, draws people in. Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. Mitch McConnell has zero charisma. Obama has charisma in abundance, Hillary Clinton not so much. Biden not a lot either. Kamala Harris does, and how! Pence zilch.

Charisma, it seems, is essential to being a populist leader, though not all charismatic leaders have the desire or mindset to be populists. Even though it wasn’t always so, these days, populism connotes despotic and authoritarian politics. We have or have had populist leaders on the left, Castro in Cuba and Chávez in Venezuela among them, and those on the right, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Duterte in the Philippines, and our very own authoritarian media-celebrity Trump. And populism is nothing new. Argentina had Perón for a long period of time. Argentina is still reeling in economic havoc from Perón’s populist input in the 1950’s.

Thump, to his followers, is charismatic. No matter that his popularity stems from people’s scattershot knowledge of him as a TV personality, a sort of Kardashian presence in our collective consciousness, he has presence when he speaks in public. He has the ability to embody the charisma of himself as a self-styled outsider. It turns out that that was enough to get him elected. And that was enough to make him the poster boy of the Republican Party. To be a populist leader, you need to be able to convince and impress your followers with preposterous promises. “We will build a wall! We will replace Obamacare! We will make America great again!” Four years in, and what do you know; we still have Obamacare, there is no wall, and Thump’s promise to remake America and upgrade its crumbling infrastructure mess of highways, bridges and airports are just Trumpian words blowing about in the winds of a pandemic.

Populist leaders set themselves up as representing the people versus a vague ill-defined elite. The populist leader is always there at just the right moment to pick up the slack and connect the dots to take advantage of people’s longings for true change. Populist leaders get themselves elected by penciling themselves in as representatives of the disenfranchised. You have to be able to pretend to be able to change the world if you ever want to be a populist leader. Populist followers get caught up in the excitement of the pretend moment. And Trump does pretend really well. Until he doesn’t. Put on the spot, Trump is always eager to place the blame, all blame, any blame, elsewhere. He swallows baseless off-the-wall shadow-world ideas and right-wing theories as if they were nectar of the gods. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us that our Emperor-in-Chief has no clothes.

Frighten, belittle, and ridicule are essential Trump attributes. To attack your opponents is a given in politics. But much as Chávez in Venezuela, Trump has gone way beyond attack to try to frighten, belittle, and ridicule his opponents. Trump is the king of belittling, calling his opponents, and most especially women, by one word pejoratives, Crazy Hillary, Sneaky Dianne (Feinstein,) Goofy Elizabeth (Warren) and now Phony Kamala. His tactics are already tired, documented, and shameless.

But Trump has something that his populist antecedents never had. Trump has Twitter. The app didn’t exist before 2006. Trump is the king of Twitter attack politics. Trump has almost single-handedly rebranded every news story unflattering to him as fake news. It’s an incredible achievement. It turns out that micro blogging suits Trump’s id to a tee. Micro blogging, the compression of ideas into 140 characters, which doubled in 2017 to 280 characters, is something that somehow fits the Trump worldview perfectly. More than 280 characters, which most ideas and points of view demand, doesn’t seem to work for this President. Trump is, after all, a man of small Twitter thoughts.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take his rants seriously. Other tyrannical despots with bare-bone ideas have done very well for themselves and reduced their countries to shadows and ghosts of their former selves. Look no further than Venezuela, a country just a hop, step and jump to our south, where pensioners now receive less than a dollar per month government assistance to subsist on.

The post Populist bedfellows: Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The first of the much-anticipated three debates-that-aren’t-debates is now thankfully behind us. And make no mistake. The whole world was watching. The day-after reactions from allies and adversaries alike should render thoughtful Americans not only terrified and outraged but also more determined than ever to turn out the most massive vote in recent memory to oust a man and a party that have debased the presidency, the Constitution, and America’s standing in the world.

Here’s what the world is saying.

Britain

“This dark, horrifying, unwatchable fever dream will surely be the first line of America’s obituary.”

“A national humiliation.”

“The rest of the world – and future historians will presumably look at it and weep.”

India

“Never had American politics sunk so low.”

“U.S. embarrassed itself before the world for 100 minutes.”

France

“Chaotic, childish, grueling.”

Germany

“America sinks lower.”

“Clearest loser was America.

China

“The recession of U.S. national power.”

“ Division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. political system.”

Spain

“Chaotic and virulent.”

Kenya

“This debate would be sheer comedy if it wasn’t such a pitiful and tragic advertisement for U.S. dysfunction.”

Australia

“America faces a dangerous several weeks.”

“A debate swamped by the rancor engulfing America.”

The post The whole world watched the Trump-Biden “debate.” And they were horrified. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The US Supreme Court didn’t always have nine members. The original Supreme Court established by the Constitution in 1789 had six. However, the number of Supreme Court justices is not set by the Constitution. Congress sets the number, and Congress has flip-flopped. The six members were reduced to 5 in 1801. And in fact, the number of justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling on the present nine in 1869. In other words, the number has never been set in stone. Just possibly, to enable a broader spectrum of opinion on the Supreme Court, we could have 13, 15 or more members.

Is that unthinkable?

No. Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number to 15 in 1937 though the idea wasn’t well-received. Roosevelt was accused of trying to pack the court, attempting to load the court with justices who would support his New Deal policies. The Senate voted down his 15-member Supreme Court idea 70 to 20. But just last year, the Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg again raised the possibility of a 15-justice Supreme Court. In Buttigieg’s plan, five justices would be Democratic, five Republican, and five apolitical. More recently, as a response to the possibility that Thump might be able to load his own Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey got himself into trouble with the Biden campaign by pushing that his party “must expand the Supreme Court” if power shifts to the Democrats. Markey is not alone. On September 20th, former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted, “If the court-packers succeed in forcing another conservative onto the court regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election, enlarging the court would be a democratic necessity, not payback.”

And if 15 Supreme Court members somehow seems to be pushing the envelope, how about 79? Spain’s Supreme Court, the Tribunal Supremo, was established in 1812 and started out with 16 members. Over time, that number first increased to 25, and then to 33. 33 became 40, until finally 40 became the 79 magistrates that make up the Spanish Supreme Court today.

Lifetime tenure is not taken literally in most parts of the world. Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Peru, Australia and South Africa are among the countries that require justices appointed for life to retire at 70. Longevity, one of the factors that makes the US selection process so fraught, is removed from the picture. Finland sets the retirement age for its Supreme Court judges at 65, as do Ukraine and Barbados.

And there are various options for the Supreme Court selection process too. In Germany, judges of the Federal Court of Justice, the highest court, are selected by an electoral committee convened by the Federal Minister of Justice. There are 32 members, the Secretaries of Justice of the 16 German Federal States and 16 representatives appointed by the German Federal Parliament. Voting is secret. Once a judge has been chosen by this committee, he or she is appointed by the President. But his or her confirmation requires a two-thirds majority vote in the German Parliament; this gives the opposition pretty much veto power over any candidate, but also ensures complicity in the election of judges.

Other countries take other Supreme Court selection approaches. In Chile, lists of candidates are provided by the court itself. In Costa Rica, Supreme Court justices are elected by the National Assembly for a period of 8 years, renewable again only by National Assembly vote. In Denmark, the Monarch appoints judges based on the recommendation of the Minister of Justice and the advice of a Judicial Appointments Council, an independent six-member body of judges and lawyers. In Qatar, magistrates are appointed for three-year renewable periods. Uruguay appoints its justices for 10 years, with a new term possible after a lapse of five years.

The current US model is not by any means the only Supreme Court blueprint available or followed in much of the rest of the world. In fact, we may have valuable lessons to learn by studying and evaluating how the rest of the world goes about recommending Supreme Court justices, choosing the number of possible justices and deciding on how long those justices stay on the court.

The post Supreme Courts: American and international variations on a theme appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In quarantine here in Bogotá, the days flow into more days.

But sometimes the routine of sameness is broken up. At a certain moment, live amplified mariachis playing in front of my building can break into song without warning.

Mariachis, and Bogotá has many, have a long tradition here. It used to be that mariachis congregated in one area of the city, along Avenida Caracas in the 50’s blocks. Anybody celebrating an aniversary, a birthday or a surprise event could drive up and hire a group of mariachi musicians right off the street, and the mariachis would follow the hirer to his of her home where they would suddenly burst into song outside the window of the surprised. This usually happened at night to increase the surprise.

Quarantine has changed all that. Nobody is driving to Avenida Caracas to hire mariachis anymore. The business model has changed.

Now the mariachis are wandering the streets of Bogotá playing in front of random buildings, looking for customers in broad daylight, hoping aginst hope that someone will hire them and pay them for their music.

They are not alone.

Other musicians of all variety have begun doing the same. At any time of the day, there can be a sudden eruption of music on the streets outside. Today there was a very powerful drumming ensemble. I had never heard this sound nor this vibration before and was unsure at first about what was going on. My cats were equally unsure and raced to the windows. These were amplified drummers looking to impress, and they did, and again looking to drum up business, and again in need of money.

Colombia is going through one of the longest quarantines in the world. 2 other Latin American countries, Peru and Argentina, are in the same boat. In Bogotá, we started our quarantine early, mid-March, and we are still going strong. Colombia’s President Duque said this week that 57% of Colombians, out of a population of 50 million, are still living their lives in self-isolation. And our quarantine countrywide, just now, has been extended till the end of August. Occupancy in ICU’s in Bogotá is hovering at about 90%, and our peak is not expected for some more weeks.

Vehicular traffic on the street outside my building is minimal; there are at times delivery trucks, taxis and some cars. Quarantine has been a boon for food and supermarket delivery services, so there are often motorcycle deliverers, bicycle deliverers and even pedestrian deliverers coming and going. I see people walk their dogs, and some people, though not many, going out with shopping bags and coming back from the supermarket with their shopping bags full.

Sometimes our quarantine has been strict, only one person per household allowed out at a time for essentials such as groceries, banking or pharmacy purchases. And sometimes our quarantine has been more relaxed though the city still maintains a control that only allows those whose national identification number ends in an even number to go out for needed services on even dates, and those whose ID’s end in an odd number to go out on odd dates.

And in this way, we go on. Days flow into more days.

Every so often, there are desperate shouts from those in dire straits walking the streets. Help us! they cry out. We need food, we need help! Men and women are wandering the city begging for help.

But we are in the middle of a pandemic with an uncertain future. Few are in a position to offer scarce money to all of those asking for help, and to those who might come tomorrow encouraged by those who got something today.

Others come by my building, shouting Eucalipto from the street. They are selling eucaliptus leaves. Colombians have a soothing belief in the power of eucaliptus to cleanse the body. I’m all in, but I haven’t gone down to the gate of my building to buy Eucalipto leaves yet.

People have been telling me for months that I have to go out.

 You need to leave your apartment, many have said. Go and walk about your neighborhood. Feel the sun on your skin!

 My psychologist has advised the same.

 For months, I felt no pressing need to heed their advice. But I went out last week for the first time in four and a half months. I put on my N95 mask, my doorman opened the gate of my building and I was free. I walked downhill, knowing full well that I would have to retrace my steps uphill to get home. My mask felt tight on my face, and that was good. I felt protected. I walked about my Chapinero Alto neighborhood in Bogotá, feeling my breath pushing out and pulling in within my mask, not exactly comfortable but not completely unbearable either.

I found a city transformed.

Restaurants that defined the Zona G, the Gourmet dining area of the city, are now not only shuttered, but decimated, their furnishings removed, their windows displaying For Rent/ Space Available signs. The local Starbucks store and other coffee shops were open for to-go only; their indoor seating areas were blocked off for all. Some other restaurants have banners plastered across their facades large enough for passing motorists or bus passengers to see their phone numbers and their now Deliveries Only presence. It’s clear that many restaurants are gone forever. And gone with them the employment they offered to so many. Seeing this new ragged restaurant reality impacted and saddened me.

Corner grocery stores were open. These mom and pop stores have no choice. They open or they go hungry. Taxis were still parked on both sides of 65^th Street; their drivers were still congregated in front of the small storefront where they take their coffee on break. Nobody was actually drinking coffee. The drivers wore masks, but there was no social distancing; they were just chatting as close together as before. These are the same drivers who might show up if I ever requested taxi service, those professing their taxi disinfected and their willingness to serve. I am not, other than in an extreme emergency, going to be calling a cab anytime soon.

I stopped in at a vegetable store that had clear guidelines on how to self-distance and shop posted at the entrance. Many stores here are completely open to the street with neither doors nor windows during business hours, so there is ventilation. I paid for my vegetables in cash – fresh avocados for the first time in months – and put the change into a separate pocket of my jacket where is stayed isolated for many days.

In complete contrast to the United States, since March there have been no passenger flights, other than humanitarian, within or to or from Colombia. There is no intercity bus service, the most common way for Colombians to travel. In fact there is no interstate, or interdepartment as it is here, travel without special permission for extenuating circumstances. Where you happened to be toward the end of March is pretty much where you are today.

And so for the moment, the days flow into new days, one day not at all unlike the day before.

The post Bogota quarantine: Nobody is hiring mariachis anymore appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For those who don’t vote in the US because they think it’s too time-consuming, too complicated or too confusing, consider the voting process in the African nation of Burundi.

Burundi, for the Africa-map-challenged, like me, is landlocked country. It’s that little red dot on the map between Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and southeast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Lake Tanganyika lies along its southwestern border. Its capital cities are Bjumbura ( the political capital) and Gitega (the economic capital). Burund’s population is about 11 million. The country’s literacy rate is 68 percent. It operates politically as a constitutional republic with a bi-cameral parliamentary structure. Currently, 24 different political parties hold seats or are vying for them.

And that’s where the complexity sets in. According to the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa [EISA], in parliamentary elections, each valid voter is given 24 ballots – each bearing the name and symbol of a different party – and two envelopes. In the polling booth, the voter puts her chosen ballot paper in the white envelope, and the rest into the black one. Exiting the booth, voters then put the white envelope with their chosen ballot paper into one box for votes cast, and the black envelope into another box, before having their thumbs marked with indelible ink so they can’t vote again. The number of black envelopes containing useless ballot papers (at any given polling station) have to match with the number of white envelopes to avoid cheating.

I have now read that description about a dozen times, and I think I’m beginning to understand it. But still, I’m glad I’m not a first-time voter in Burundi.

Burundi is slated to hold a presidential election on May 20. 2020. With six candidates vying for the job, voting will presumably be somewhat simpler than the complicated routine of parliamentary elections, and the current ruling party is expected, by knowledgeable observers, to win the day. Notably, other African nations have postponed their national elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, but as of this writing, Burundi is moving ahead.

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Once upon a time, we had Paint by Numbers. Now suddenly, we have Life by Numbers. Numbers circulate in our daily 2020 lives just as much as coronavirus, officially SARS-CoV-2, does in our air; known, unknown, knowable, unknowable, ambiguous markers of the times we are living in.

Infections

These days, news publications and websites worldwide first and foremost publish the new daily number of infections from coronavirus. There are websites, worldometer one of the most popular, given over to just keeping track of new infections, deaths and recoveries country by country on a day-to-day basis. Millions check in every day to see how we’re doing. We try to make sense of the numbers, to negotiate whether we are feeling more, or less, vulnerable to the immediate risk to our lives.

Deaths

In 1918, the year of the last pandemic, approximately 50 million people died. Our fears are well-founded. Though not even close to 50 million, the number of deaths from coronavirus is staggering. The stories of these deaths will not be fully told for a long time. In this year of 2020, we are witnessing a reordering of the world. The number of ICU’s and ventilators available in a broad geographic spectrum close to where we live is now essential information.

False claims, lies, self-congratulations

On April 9, the Atlantic attempted to document the number of misguided assertions made by Trump about coronavirus. More recently, CNN reported on the latest number of Trump’s false claims. And just this week 3 New York Times reporters waded through Trump’s pronouncements during this pandemic from March 9 forward. They found 600 instances of self-congratulation, far outnumbering the 160 instances of empathy or appeals to national unity.

Time and money

$1,200 is the first dollar amount of assistance being rolled out to some 80 million Americans by the federal government. With that, those of us included in the distribution will be good for a couple of weeks, or being optimistic, let’s say a month or even two if we can keep our expenses to a minimum. If the 18 months or 2 years being touted as a time frame for the arrival of a vaccine tallies true, many of us will have been in self-isolation and in need of assistance for more than 540 to 730 days by then. Today welcome news was reported: Scientists at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University in England are preparing for mass clinical vaccine trials by the end of May. Tests have shown their vaccine to be effective in monkeys. If the trials prove the vaccine safe and effective in humans, the first millions of doses could be available as early as September, well ahead of general vaccine expectations just weeks ago. We can only hope.

Steps

I’ve been in self-isolation for 7 weeks and counting now. I’ve started a regime of planned walking about my 84 square meter apartment as a form of exercise. My goal is 4,000 paces per day. Some days I register 3,000 paces back and forth, some days 6,000 and some days 2,000. I don’t stress over the numbers. 2 of my cats are mystified about this new walking behavior. They watch me perplexed as I walk counting numbers aloud as a way to keep my mind active and distracted. Sebastian, my youngest and most playful cat, joins me for a lot of my pacing, racing in front of me, beside me, behind me. He makes the whole endeavor a lot more entertaining.

Breathing

15 X 3; I take 15 deep breathes at least 3 times a day to help disperse my anxiety. My anxiety attacks are generally greater in the early hours of the morning as I’m waking. Sometimes, I take 15 deep breaths before even getting out of bed. Once I get my day going, the anxiety diminishes.

Aging

I’m about to turn 70, another number. It turns out that based on the statistics available so far I’m a perfect target for coronavirus, male just hitting 70. I wrote an innocent piece on turning 70 on Occasional Planet not so long ago at all. I wondered then where I was going to spend my 70^th birthday. At the time, I had no idea. It turns out that, in all probability, I’m going to spend my 70^th birthday in self-isolation in my apartment in Bogotá, most likely pacing back and forth from room to room counting out loud as Sebastian tries to trip me up.

Shopping

Right now in Bogota, Colombia, where I live, men get to go out for essential services such as grocery shopping on odd days in the month, women on even. My outings are solely confined to taking my garbage out and going down to the gate of my complex to receive deliveries. The doorman wears a mask, the deliverer wears a mask and I wear a mask. And of course, I wash my hands in soap and water for at least 20 seconds after each foray into the great outdoors.

Disinfecting

2 X 35 X 99.9. Today, I felt privileged. I had ordered 2 Lysol containers of 35 disinfectant wet wipes apiece online. The wipes guarantee the elimination of 99.9% of viruses. I had read that these wipes were now the equivalent of disinfectant gold and I ordered them without believing that I would ever get a delivery. Lo and behold and on a Sunday afternoon no less, the wet wipes arrived. And I gave a deep sigh of relief, and thanks, that things might truly yet return to some form of normal.

Work

I’m lucky. I can work from home. This week I gave 6 English classes using Zoom, did 2 translations and 1 commercial video voice-over. And I got to work from home on my art, my writing and my cartoons. Many millions of others don’t share the luxury of being able to work as I do. For untold numbers of people worldwide, the risk of contracting the virus is outweighed by the need to go out to work in order to put food on the table.

Vaccine?

The key number for all of us right now is how many days, how many weeks, how many months, now many years until we have a vaccine. Choose a number. The truth, despite the good work being done at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, is that nobody knows.

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