Here and There

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
—The late American journalist and satirist P.J. O’Rourke

One day. It was literally from one day to the next that we finally got past U.S. Election Day 2024 on the 5th of November—only to have the date of Ireland’s general election confirmed on the 6th. The campaigning here officially began two days later when a government minister signed an order to hold the election once the taoiseach (prime minister) visited the home of the Irish president to ask him to dissolve the Dáil (lower house of parliament). The election will be held on the 29th.

That seems mercifully brief when compared to the marathon Squid Game that is the American electoral process. In reality, in Ireland as in the U.S. the campaigning for the next election never really stops. The difference is that in the U.S. the date of the next general election and all future elections are known years, decades and, theoretically, centuries in advance, as presidential and congressional terms are fixed by the constitution. Under the parliamentary system in Ireland (also typical of most other countries), taoisigh (that’s the plural of taoiseach) have wide discretion to call elections—as long as it happens within a five-year window following a new Dáil’s first meeting. So, nobody knows for sure when the next election will be until a few weeks before.

Given how the American electoral process itself has become a campaign issue in recent times, it’s interesting to compare and contrast how things work here as opposed to there. For one thing, virtually all voting in Ireland will take place on a single day. There is no early voting, and everyone will vote in person. Except for a few specific circumstances voting by mail is not allowed. In the recent U.S. election, I voted in the state of Washington by downloading and printing a ballot and then mailing it to the county elections office in the U.S. By contrast, Irish citizens living abroad (like my daughter) simply do not get to vote unless they happen to be back home for a visit. And yes, Irish polling places do require voters to show identification.

After the polls close in Ireland, ballots are all counted by hand. This means it can takes days for the final results to be known, although it has to be said the poll workers are impressively efficient under the circumstances. Of course, hand-counting works better in a small country than it would in a massive one like the U.S. Interestingly, Ireland did try using electronic voting machines (manufactured in the Netherlands) on a trial basis back in 2002, but it proved controversial. It was leftist parties with the loudest concerns, mainly over the lack of an audit mechanism or paper trail. An independent commission was established to study the matter, and it ultimately recommended against the machines. The nail in the coffin came when a group of Dutch hackers demonstrated how easily they could infiltrate and change the electronic tallies.

In the end, the 7,000 machines purchased by the government for €54.6 million (including €3 million euro of charges for storing them for five years) were scrapped—much to the government’s embarrassment

As far as I know, Ireland has never attempted postal voting, but another country where I once lived used to have it. Mail-in voting was allowed in France from 1958 to 1975 at which point it was banned because of instances of fraud. These days proxy (i.e. absentee) voting is allowed in France for those with a legitimate reason as to why they cannot vote in person, and more recently internet voting has been introduced for citizens living abroad.

One reason that Irish ballots take so long to count is because of the country’s complicated voting system. It is called “proportional representation with a single transferable vote” (PR-STV). Some states in the U.S. are trying out this system, calling it ranked-choice voting (RCV). Several have employed it for local elections, and some (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and the District of Columbia) have used it or plan to use it for federal and statewide elections.

Meanwhile, several other states have passed or attempted to pass laws banning RCV. The argument against it is that it is overly complicated and confusing for voters.

There is definitely a learning curve to this way of voting, but the Irish seemed to have embraced PR-STV and are quite happy with it. The main advantage is that it eliminates the need for runoff rounds. You are essentially voting in the first and second rounds—and possibly even more—all at the same time.

Voters rank their first-choice candidate as No. 1 and then, optionally, any other candidates on the ballot as 2, 3, etc. (This is why Irish election posters don’t just ask for your vote; they ask for your No. 1 preference.) Ballots are counted and, if no candidate’s first preferences have exceeded 50 percent, then ballots are re-counted as many as necessary, each time removing the lowest vote-getter and distributing his or her votes according to their preferences for No. 2, No. 3, etc. This continues until someone exceeds 50 percent—or until all preferences are exhausted, at which point the highest vote-getter is declared the winner.

This definitely seems to result in a better reflection of the voters’ wishes than the British method. The UK uses a system called single member plurality or, more commonly, first-past-the-post. A single round of voting is held, and whoever gets the most votes—even if it is not a majority—wins. In a country with three major political parties, this results in some skewed results. For example, in the British general election held in July, the Labour Party received 33.7 percent of the nationwide vote yet was rewarded with 63.2 percent of the seats in Parliament, making the party’s leader Keir Starmer the Prime Minister.

Ireland’s system seems more representative than that, but it is prone its own strange results. In the 2020 general election, the party with the most votes was Sinn Féin (erstwhile political arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army) with 24.5 percent of the first-preference votes. Because Sinn Féin had no prospect of forming a coalition to achieve a working majority, the government was instead formed by longtime political enemies Fianna Fáil (22.2 percent) and Fine Gael (20.9 percent) along with the Green Party (7.1 percent). In turn, that resulted in two rotating taoisigh during the government’s term, meaning that at no point was there a government leader whose party had received more than 22.2 percent of voters’ first preferences.

I bear all of the above in mind whenever Irish or British people insist to me that the U.S.’s Electoral College is a crazy way to pick a nation’s leader.

Non-consecutive

 Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
 He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1976

Here’s me raising my head out of my bunker, blinking in the daylight, and asking, “Is the election over yet?”

Asking that right now in Ireland amounts to a mean trick. No sooner are we finally past the interminable season of American electoral politics, but an election is called here in the republic. Mercifully, the campaigning here lasts a mere three weeks, and the votes will be cast by the end of the month. Not that politicians and pundits haven’t been angling for years—or that the media have not been publishing regular polling outcomes—with an eye on the next electoral go-round, but law and custom restricts Irish politics from doing much overt politicking and campaigning outside of these few weeks. That just feels civilized.

There are many contrasts and comparisons to be made between U.S. elections and European ones generally (and Irish ones specifically), and I expect to do that one of these days, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what to say about the American result? Clearly, the public’s emotional and intellectual reactions are every bit as polarized as their debating and pontificating were during the long campaign. Nothing feels settled. As with every election, one side now has the ascendancy, and the other has serious processing to do about what went wrong and how to go forward. That’s even more true than usual this time around, as the result was pretty darn decisive, belying how narrowly divided we kept being told the voters’ intentions were.

Out of curiosity, I went back and re-read what I wrote at this point eight years ago, the first time Donald Trump was elected. What stood out was the sense of utter surprise. I suppose that marks some kind of progress that this time around, while journalists were unable (nor should they have been able) to tell us who would win, the public were not misled about what to expect as much as they were eight years ago. That doesn’t mean some of the public reactions in social and other media haven’t been every bit as extreme as that other time, nobody seems to have been blindsided by anything other than their own heartfelt hopes.

Back then, I observed that Republicans benefited electorally from a nomination process that enabled an unruly, messy, sometimes angry grassroots. Democrats had a more top-down process that made the eventual nominee seem inevitable from the beginning. Of course, that would have been normal enough this time, given that the party had an incumbent president determined to be reelected. Circumstances, however, resulted instead in a nominee that did not participate in a single primary in the 2024 cycle. The miracle is, given that situation, that Kamala Harris did as well as she did.

Should I feel prescient that I also pointed out that the Republican field of primary candidates back then actually seemed more diverse than the Democratic one? Yes, America has once again missed its chance for its first female president (and one of color), but I just heard someone on ABC News point out that this time one out of three people “of color” (whatever that means exactly) voted for Trump. Democrats did themselves no favors presuming that certain demographic groups owed them their votes.

In my eight-year-old post, I also offered what I called “a silver lining” to those fearing an impending dark cloud of a Trump presidency. I probably should have foreseen that it would only annoy those it was meant to comfort, but I feel vindicated.

“If you believe that there is way too much money in politics and that deep pockets are determinative,” I wrote, “then you should take comfort that the candidate who set an all-time record for the most money collected and spent lost and that the candidate who set a new benchmark for low campaign spending won.”

Democrats used to talk about campaign finance reform all the time. Not so much anymore. Now they are the party of big political money. Their presidential candidate outspent the winner by three to one, yet lost the popular tally by more than 3 million votes. No matter how you feel about that result, you have to take encouragement from this proof that money is not necessarily determinative in elections.

By contrast, my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people determined to escape their Trump nightmare by emigrating might be happier in Canada than in Europe may not have aged as well. Eight years later, Justin Trudeau is still Canada’s prime minister but may not be much longer. A BBC piece last week reported he’s under intense pressure to step down, as his Liberals have been trailing the Conservatives in polling by a wide margin for months. It compared his troubles to those of Vice-President Harris in terms of a majority population feeling their country is moving in the wrong direction.

So, is Europe a better destination? Well, that’s a long story. As I said, stay tuned.

Beyond Reason

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
 —Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality, 1721

How do you form your political opinions? How do any of us?

Depending on where you are on your life’s journey, you may be struggling to work out the right and wrong of every political issue or, if you are older, your positions may well be be encased in concrete.

My sense is that most, if not all, of us like to think we arrive at our opinions sensibly and logically. That we take in all the evidence and arguments and then arrive the right view through reason while applying self-evident moral standards.

Over time, though, when our conclusions repeatedly land in the same place in agreeing with certain friends, politicians and/or a political party (call them your politics peer group), it might become easy to simplify the political judgment process by simply following the lead of those people you’ve come to trust for their political judgment. Or more likely, you may have found news sources that you have come to trust and it so happens that you and your politics peer group usually, if not invariably, have the same reactions to each fresh news report.

What I’ve just described, however, amounts to choosing a side. And once you’ve chosen a side, your reasoning is no longer deductive. It has become inductive. In other words, rather than examining the evidence neutrally and seeing where it leads, you are starting with a conclusion and looking for information to back it up. When it comes to modern politics, there are plenty of news sources and opinion makers to provide that selective information to you—also known as talking points.

Is it even possible to look at political issues neutrally? Probably not. The best we can likely do is to be as aware as possible of our own core values and to use them rigorously as a yardstick against each issue that comes along. The risk in that, though, is that occasionally your conclusions might not perfectly match your politics peer group. In fact, people who are very individualistic and committed to deductive reason will find that they have no ideological home. You may occasionally find yourself disagreeing with people you admire and respect or on the same side as people you don’t like very much.

It can be kind of lonely. People who are very hard-core about their politics—the kind who have litmus tests for friendships—won’t trust you. Worse, reality may trip you up. You will eventually come up against the fact that the question of right and wrong in the real world is often not as clear as we would like.

When I was younger and more idealistic, my position on capital punishment was unyielding. Taking a life was wrong. That is an eminently satisfying position when it came to innocent people on death row purely because of their social and racial circumstances. It’s a bit harder to muster enthusiasm for pushing that position energetically when the person in question is a monster like Ted Bundy or Timothy McVeigh. Things get muddier still when we realize that society makes decisions about human life and death all the time, albeit usually in a more indirect way. And then there’s the flipside to the capital punishment question: abortion. If you accept that a viable fetus (i.e. which would likely survive if prematurely delivered) in the womb is some sort of human life, many if not most people would judge that it can be reasonably sacrificed for any number of reasons, especially if it is to save the mother’s life.

In other words, the position that human life cannot be considered absolutely sacrosanct without exception is not tenable in the real world. Reality requires society to make choices with winners and losers. Once you accept that, things get messy indeed.

Perhaps that is why it is easier for us to concentrate on who we would rather have as winners and losers instead of adhering strictly to moral principles. That won’t stop us, however, from framing our arguments as being based on morality even if they’re really about partisanship.

Past and Present

This was given to me by one of these guys, right here. He was a hell of a rugby player. He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.
 —President Biden speaking of his distant cousin Rob Kearney and confusing the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, with a brutal British military force of a century ago, in Dundalk on April 12

In Belfast this past week, there was a reunion of major figures commemorating the quarter-century anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (called the Belfast Agreement by Unionists). The hosts were Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, by virtue of being head of government of the United Kingdom of which Northern Ireland is part, and Hillary Clinton, as chancellor of Queen’s University, which hosted the event.

Prominent attendees included former U.S., British and Irish heads of government, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, who were key participants in negotiating the agreement credited with ending Northern Ireland’s violent period known as the Troubles. Also on hand was Gerry Adams, whose pivotal role had been to bring the insurgent Provisional Irish Republican Army on board even while ostensibly denying that he had any connection to them.

Tributes and testimonials were paid to key figures no longer with us, including Nobel Peace Prize winners John Hume and David Trimble, major Nationalist and Unionist political leaders of the time who risked everything for peace and whose political parties subsequently paid the price of perpetual exile in the electoral wilderness. Ironically, political benefit was reaped instead by more extreme parties led by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, both of whom are also no longer with us.

Particularly inspirational among the guests was former U.S. Senator George Mitchell who, at 89 and in poor health, made the journey to Belfast. He did more than any other outsider to bring the various parties together for the historic accord.

The anniversary exercise was in turns moving, nostalgic, edifying and educational, particularly for a generation that has come of age since those days. It is once again a tricky time in the North—it’s always a tricky time in the North—as the main products of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its meticulous power-sharing arrangement, have not functioned for 31 months since it was brought down by the Democratic Unionist Party over unhappiness over the UK implementation of Brexit. Elections were held nearly a year ago which saw, for the first time, saw Sinn Féin overtake the DUP as the largest party, putting Michelle O’Neill in line to become the North’s first ever First Minister.

Despite a new agreement negotiated by Sunak between the UK and the European Union that goes as far as the DUP could realistically hope for, the unionists still refuse to go back into government. Nationalists suspect, not unreasonably, that unionists simply don’t want to go back into a government they would no longer be in charge of.

Many hoped that the DUP would feel pressure to revive the assembly amid all the attention brought about the Good Friday anniversary. Frankly, though, the DUP didn’t get where it is by paying attention to opinions and attitudes outside its own community.

There were hopes that the logjam might be broken during a mid-April visit by President Biden, ostensibly also to commemorate the Good Friday accord. It quickly became apparent, however, that the chief purpose of Biden’s trip was to indulge in a nostalgic plastic-paddy victory lap. He spent the briefest amount of time possible in Northern Ireland, giving a perfunctory speech at Ulster University’s new campus, before heading to the republic for several days of visits to his ancestral homes in Louth and Mayo, bringing along a huge delegation of U.S. government officials and family members, including his sister Valerie and his son Hunter.

At each stop, including an address to the two houses of the Irish parliament (Oireachtas), he gave a variation of the same emotional, rambling speech. There were the obligatory platitudes about peace and the future and doing the right thing, but mostly it was about himself. How much he loved Ireland. How much he missed his mother and wished she could be there. How at home he felt—at least until the last night when he said he couldn’t wait to get back to Delaware.

Everywhere he went, he ran late, partially because of necessary rest breaks but also because he seemed determined to shake every last hand in the country, kiss every baby and pose for every selfie. The fact is, for all his professed love of Ireland, he can’t hold to a candle to what his contemporary Senator Mitchell accomplished 25 years ago when it really mattered.

At one point in his Oireachtas speech, he became somber, saying, “I’m at the end of my career, not the beginning,” adding, “The only thing I bring to this career—and you can see, how old I am—is a little bit of wisdom.”

Biden didn’t sound like someone getting ready for another presidential campaign. By the time he finished the tour in the Mayo town of Ballina, however, with a speech that followed an impressive array of Irish musical talent, he seemed newly energized. Yes, it was more or less the same speech we had heard a couple times before on this trip, but it had more pep this time.

The over-excited Irish press speculated he might actually announce his reelection bid in Ballina. It was amusing to see the country collectively go all fanboy crazy for yet another Irish-American presidential visit. On the ground, though, real people were a bit more measured. They marveled at the vast expense to bring so many people from the U.S. for what amounted to a personal holiday. Even in our own corner of the countryside, we did not escape the roar of the presidential tour in the form of overlying Chinook helicopters.

Perhaps the best example of Mayo practicality came from radio presenter/podcaster Laurita Blewitt, one of the president’s many distant cousins here. Her husband, a well known sports pundit, recounted her exchange with Biden during a banquet in Dublin Castle.

In his usual impulsive manner, the unfailingly affable president said to her, “Laurita, you guys have gotta come with us to Knock [Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in Mayo] on Air Force One tomorrow.”

Her reply: “I can’t. I have to get my hair done in Foxford at 11 am.”

Another son of the auld sod

After 15 Grueling House Speaker Votes, America’s Long National Nightmare Can Finally Begin
 —Headline on the satirical news website The Babylon Bee, January 7

It may have taken 15 votes, but Kevin McCarthy finally did become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. His road to this position was long and not always promising. He first got elected to Congress during the Bush 43 Administration as part of the Republican class of 2006 in which he was one of the so-called Young Guns, along with Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. Those two are long gone, but McCarthy somehow managed to adapt, survive and hang on through the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus and the winds of change that elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

There is much to ponder about the constitutionally prescribed process that resulted in so many ballots for Speaker becoming necessary. Much of the press coverage focused on the fact that such a number was unprecedented—unless you went back a century. There were suggestions that this was symptomatic of fundamental disarray in the Republican Party, if not in the entire U.S. political system. Perhaps it is, but such wrangling after national legislative elections is not unusual in other countries.

For example, here in Ireland, as I wrote three years ago, the 2020 general election resulted in three different political parties having a theoretical shot at forming a government but only after a complicated negotiation for a coalition. Voters went to the polls on February 8, and though the results were quickly known, it was not until June 27 that Micheál Martin was sworn in as Taoiseach, roughly equivalent to Speaker of the House in the U.S. system. The following year, the Netherlands took nearly 10 months of negotiations to form a government after its parliamentary elections.

In other words, protracted post-election negotiations are often the norm in many countries. Usually in the U.S., though, because there are only two viable national parties, such negotiations tend to happen mostly out of the glare of intense press coverage. After the 2020 U.S. elections, Democrats had a similarly thin margin in the House, but they managed to make all their intra-party deals before the official vote for Speaker. Is that better than how the Republicans did it? Is it preferable to keep political messiness more out of the voters’ view or is there some value in having the in-fighting in public view?

As it happens, I have a couple of strange connections to the new Speaker of the House, and not just deriving from the fact he and I were both born in Bakersfield, California.

I do not know the man and have never met him, but with a name like Kevin McCarthy he obviously has an Irish connection, and I have a way of running into those. Back in 1998—before McCarthy was first to elected to office (to a seat on the Kern County Community College District Board of Trustees in 2000)—he was in charge of Bakersfield’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. That was the one for which my bride of three days was drafted to be the queen. She was given no choice in the matter by an Irish-American family friend from my home town, who had a penchant for latching onto any visiting Irish people. He had previously secured the parade queen’s crown for the visiting niece of our town’s Irish priest, who hailed from Donegal.

Once McCarthy’s struggle to be elected Speaker began dominating the worldwide airwaves, it was inevitable that local Irish genealogists would go to work. American presidents’ Irish connections have been a fascination here since John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, followed by his sentimental and celebrated visit to Ireland a mere five months before his tragic death. No other U.S. president has had as close a connection to Ireland, but a surprising number of them have at least had Irish in their DNA. Subsequent visits here have been made by Richard Nixon (Quaker roots in Kildare), Ronald Reagan (Antrim, Tipperary), both presidents Bush (Down) and Barack Obama, whose maternal ancestors were traced to the village of Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border. Obama’s visit, in particular, caused great excitement here and to this day is commemorated by an elaborate service station complex called Barack Obama Plaza near Moneygall on the Dublin-to-Limerick motorway.

Nixon’s 1970 visit is of particular interest in this house. It included a visit by First Lady Pat Nixon (born Thelma Catherine Ryan) to meet distant cousins in the South Mayo town of Ballinrobe and to see her “home place” very near where my wife is from. The local story is that the land owner, on short notice, had to locate a likely structure (a mucky old shed as it happened) and quickly clean it up and make it presentable for the visit. Mayo is also home to cousins of President Biden, who (not unlike the man who made my wife a queen) delights in his Irish connections, which also includes cousins in County Louth.

So what have the genealogists come up with for Speaker McCarthy? An article in a local newspaper informs us that his great-grandfather was Jeremiah McCarthy from Cork. It turns out that Jeremiah married a fellow Irish immigrant named Mary Heskin. A 24-year-old widow, she was from a family with 15 children in a South Mayo village. In other words, she was from just down the road from us.

Jeremiah and Mary were married in the Kern County town of Tehachapi, 40 miles from Bakersfield. For some reason our local paper spells the town’s name Tihachiopia.

Atomic Age?

“No scientific subject has ever aroused quite the same mixture of hopes and fears.”
 —Nobel-Prize-winning English physicist Sir Edward Victor Appleton, on atomic energy

One of the first places in the United States where nuclear power was put on the ballot was in the California county where I was born and grew up. It was also the first time U.S. citizens shut down a nuclear plant project with their votes.

Partly in reaction to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the country had gone on a spree of building nuclear power plants. One was proposed to be built ten miles west of the town of Wasco, which would have put it about twenty miles from my own home town. At first, the project was non-controversial, but as things progressed, opinion divided. My father’s boss was one of the main leaders in the campaign against it.

The area was politically conservative, which should have made it supportive of energy independence and of the cash the project would have injected into the local economy. The concerns, though, were over public safety and, most importantly, the fact that nuclear reactors require huge amounts of water for cooling. Locating it in a place with extremely hot summers and which gets about six inches of rain a year did not make a lot of sense to farmers who, even in the best of times, are in a perpetual struggle for water. In an advisory vote in March 1978, voters rejected the project with a 70-percent majority.

Popular culture has always conspired to make us fear atomic power. The world’s first general awareness of the split atom was two bombs wreaking havoc on Japan in 1945. Nearly every bad thing that has happened in horror and monster movies since the 1950s onwards has been caused by nuclear radiation. In 1979, James Bridges’s movie The China Syndrome, a made-up story about safety coverups at a nuclear plant, put atomic fear in people. That alarm was magnified by the nearly concurrent partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Four years later Mike Nichols’s based-on-true-events film Silkwood, about the mysterious death of a nuclear plant whistleblower, heaped on more paranoia.

Subsequent accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) and Fukushima in Japan did nothing to make people more comfortable with nuclear energy. The thing is that, with a little digging, we find that these events are not always exactly as we collectively recall them. No one actually died as a result of the Three Mile Island accident. In the case of Chernobyl, around 30 first-responders died. There was an increase for a time in thyroid cancers among those living near the plant, but few of those were fatal. In Japan in 2011, thousands died, but all fatalities were because of the earthquake and tsunami. No one died from radiation exposure.

Are nuclear plants safe? No source of energy is completely safe, but nuclear is clearly statistically safer than, say, coal. But is it safe enough? I don’t know the answer. Only society collectively can decide what is safe enough and what tradeoffs are acceptable or the least bad. Most people who know a lot about this stuff seem to be saying that, if the world is serious about trying to alter humankind’s contribution to climate change, then the real choice is between mass adoption of nuclear (which emits no carbon) or a serious dismantling of the modern economy. Renewable energy sources like wind and sun are appealing, but there are limits to how much they can provide. Over the summer the European Union quietly designated nuclear fission as green energy. Without a lot of fanfare five years ago, John Kerry (now a special presidential envoy for climate) changed his stance on nuclear from anti to pro.

What European country produces the most electricity carbon-free? Easily, that is Norway. Virtually all its electricity comes from hydroelectric plants. Others with low carbon footprints are Sweden, which gets 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear, and France, which normally gets 70 percent from nuclear. (Due to some problematic maintenance, several French nuclear plants are currently offline.) In one of the worst positions is Germany. In the wake of Fukushima, it began dismantling its nuclear program while also continuing to make itself dependent on Russian gas imports. Now with the war in Ukraine, it depends on coal imports.

One of the most outspoken voices for nuclear, coming from the left, is author/activist Michael Shellenberger, who has twice run for the Democratic nomination for governor of California. He features in a documentary I saw at the recent Galway Film Fleadh and about which I wrote on my movie blog: Frankie Fenton’s Atomic Hope. The film is extremely thought-provoking and well worth seeing for anyone interested in the topic. What is interesting is how the nuclear debate is playing into the climate-change discussion. The movie has been surprisingly well received in some climate activist quarters.

It seems to me that that the nuclear energy alternative more or less forces the hand of climate crusaders. If people truly believe that the current climate trajectory has existential consequences for humanity and that altering human behavior is the only hope of affecting that trajectory, then doesn’t nuclear power have to be considered as possibly the only way to accomplish that without societal breakdown?

Two key questions thus are 1) is the production of nuclear energy reasonably safe enough to adopt widely and, if we’re not certain, 2) do we have enough confidence in climate computer models to take the risk anyway?

Meanings, Hidden or Otherwise

“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”
 —Musician, singer-songwriter, satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer

“There are times I was not sure if it was fantasy or a political satire (loved Bob) or both. If it was a political satire, I was a little unclear as to what was being satirized.”

So wrote an early reader of my newly published novel Last of the Tuath Dé, and she was by no means alone in wondering if it was actually meant to be some sort of Swiftian parody. That pleased me. I mean, the part where she wasn’t sure.

To be clear, the aim of the book (it’s a sequel to my earlier fantasy adventure The Curse of Septimus Bridge, about a nice young Seattle woman’s induction and baptism of fire in the profession of demon hunting) was really no more ambitious than to provide some escapist entertainment—perhaps mainly for myself but hopefully for others as well. But the provocateur in me doesn’t mind if the book also gets readers to think, question and wonder.

My Dallas Green books (Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, Lautaro’s Spear, Searching for Cunégonde) are all firmly entrenched in particular times and places, and there are frequent references to contemporaneous events and politics. Such real-world stuff generally doesn’t intrude on my fantasy books, but this time the story involved the end of the world being brought about by, among other things, a worldwide collective madness of a religious/political nature. It was going to be hard to avoid parallels—inadvertent, unintended, subconscious or otherwise—with real-world events. Indeed, now more than ever people seem to be finding themselves alarmed by what they see as fanaticism among those they disagree with.

I know from experience that, in reading my book, readers will reliably overlay whatever sociopolitical template suits them. When the Zen’ei, harbingers of the apocalypse in this story and magnets for Mercenaries, cultists and fanatics, trash the major cities of the world with their unthinking violence, I have no doubt that many will nod knowingly and think of the stop-the-steal protestors, trespassers and rioters of January 6. At the same time, I will not be surprised if other readers read the same text and see it as a representation of that segment of BLM protestors and/or Antifa activists who wreaked havoc in several major U.S. cities during the summer of 2020.

So, which is the right interpretation? The answer is: yours.

Once literature is out there in the world, it has its own life. You—and maybe even most readers—may take lessons from my work that are completely different than anything that was in my mind. I know I have certainly done that to other artists’ works. Authors may tell me they intended one thing, but their work may tell me something completely different. There are necessarily two participants in any single literary transaction.

So, is that it? Am I some mealy-mouthed relativist with no positions of my own?

Don’t worry. I did slip in some strongly held beliefs and personal principles. Look hard and you’ll find them.

Or if you don’t want to look hard, then I’ll just tell you what some of them are. Like these:

From Chapter 9:
  “They insist on their own language. Mercenaries call themselves Legionnaires. They call demons ‘hants,’ and for them Demon Hunters are ‘Hant Oppressors.’ ”
  “That is no accident. To control words is to control the mind.”

From Chapter 19:
  “But he fills the world with lies. He should have been stopped.”
   “Do you remember none of my lessons? You can’t stop lies. If you begin suppressing lies, it is not long before every uncomfortable thing you hear sounds like a lie.”

From Chapter 22:
  “… This may surprise you, but I realized you were right. I had never believed the conspiracy theories before, but the more I thought about yours, the more it began to make sense.”
  “You do know, don’t you, it’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s true?”

There may be others, and it might be worth reading the book to find out. If you want to do that, then click here (or on the book’s cover over on the right-hand side of this page) to go to my book blog where you will find lots more information about the new book as well as all my other ones. And you will also find links to many online sellers of the paperback and digital editions.

Too Big to Concur?

Kavanaugh Burns Down His Home Just To Get It Over With
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper web site The Babylon Bee, June 24

Is the United States simply too big to hold together?

Americans, like most everyone else in the world, tend to take the size of their country for granted, but when you live for a while in a smaller country, you begin to notice things. For one thing, a national consensus seems easier to achieve.

For example, let’s take the abortion issue. Historically, Ireland was predominately Catholic, socially conservative country. Yet when social mores evolved, people went to the polls and voted to legalize the procedure through a change to the country’s constitution.

Is there any possibility something like this could happen in the U.S.? It’s hard to imagine, despite the fact that in the U.S. abortion could be legalized (or banned) nationally simply by an act of Congress. The cumbersome constitutional amendment process would not even be necessary.

One of the arguments for overturning the Roe v. Wade precedent was that abortion is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, the issue actually was addressed in the Irish constitution. That document’s 1983 Eighth Amendment said, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

Four years ago Irish voters repealed that amendment, making it possible for their elected representatives to legislate on the issue. That was seen as a huge victory for women’s abortion rights. Ironically, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling, America is now in the same situation as Ireland (abortion being a legislative matter), but because of the different context, it is seen as a setback for women’s abortion rights.

Upon the Eighth’s repeal, Ireland’s government promptly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. That’s pretty standard in Europe. The UK and the Netherlands permit the procedure during the first 24 weeks, and Sweden 18 weeks. Other countries range between 10 and 14, except Malta, where abortion is outlawed altogether, and Poland, where it’s allowed only in the case of rape, incest or saving the mother’s life.

Ireland’s law actually matches fairly closely the general U.S. opinion. Polls have consistently shown Americans favor legal abortion during the first trimester but not in the second or third ones. So why doesn’t Congress or state legislators simply put that into law? Why does the public debate always seem to be conducted between those who either want abortion banned entirely and those who want it guaranteed until the day before a baby’s birth?

Simply put, it’s hard to compromise when your position is tied to your core beliefs about humanity. If you truly believe a zygote has a human soul, then you’re going to consider its elimination murder. That makes it a public matter. If you believe that a woman’s physical autonomy is paramount, then you’ll conclude the fate of a zygote, embryo or fetus is a concern only for the woman carrying it. That makes it a private matter.

How do you reconcile public policy when society is divided between those two world views? Obviously, it happens because we can see that democratic countries, like those in Europe, arrive at legislative solutions—and as it happens, ones not so far off from the polling in the U.S. I mentioned.

Here’s the rub. The overall national opinion in America is not uniform in every geographical sector. Some states already have very liberal abortion laws on the books, while others have laws (old and new) that ban the procedure. (Some of the so-called trigger laws may possibly be revised since Roe’s revocation is now a reality and not merely theoretical.) So, is that the solution? A patchwork of abortion policies decided (ultimately) by the voters in each state? That may satisfy people who look at the issue with a certain legal detachment, but it does not make people happy who have strong beliefs in the human values mentioned above. Living in a state with an abortion policy you agree with is small consolation when people just across the state line have the opposite situation.

To a certain extent, the same is true about how people feel when talking about national borders—but there may be more detachment in that case. I don’t think, for example, Germans fret about the lack of abortion rights in Poland in quite the same way that Washingtonians think about the situation in Idaho. Washington and Idaho, after all, are part of the same country.

Or are they? I mean, in a cohesive, social sense? That brings me back to my original question. Is the U.S. too big to contain its diversity of world views and human values? It all comes down to how strongly people are tied to certain beliefs and how motivated they are to defend them—or impose them on others.

History and Context

Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed, walls and gates broken down, and human blood shed in torrents like water. But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed.
 —Influential Anabaptist religious leader Menno Simons (1496-1561), whose followers were known as Mennonites

Many words have flowed on the war in Ukraine. Given the going price of talk (cheap), allow me to throw in mine for what they’re worth (two cents).

Since my main gig is film blogging, I can begin by recommending two movies. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, I was at a film festival, specifically the Dublin International Film Festival. By complete coincidence, one of the films I saw there was Elie Grappe’s Olga, a fictional story about a teenage gymnast forced into exile during Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests and Revolution of Dignity during 2013-14. In the movie we see Kyiv as the modern, glistening city it was and, hopefully, will be again. We also get a crash course in how Ukrainians rose up against a corrupt, pro-Russian government and chased it from power. It’s a useful reminder that the current war has a context and that Ukraine has a history that didn’t begin only when the country started showing up daily in our newscasts.

The other movie is one I saw three years ago at the Galway Film Fleadh and which I recently rewatched. It was directed by Oscar-nominated Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland and is based on the true story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. It is called Mr. Jones after the film’s central character and also after a George Orwell character that may have been inspired by him. The film recounts his journey to Moscow in 1933 where he was determined to learn how Stalin was funding the Soviet Union’s military buildup. On a visit to Ukraine (then part of the USSR), he slipped away from his handlers to see firsthand the devastating famine caused by Stalin’s policy of wheat exports. Such an atrocity was seen as impossible in the minds of other western journalists, who idealistically saw the Soviet Union as the way to the future and to modernity. The most egregious example was The New York Times’s Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty, who actually won a Pulitzer Prize for articles debunking Jones’s famine accounts, which had appeared in The Times of London. Despite Duranty’s clear journalistic malpractice, his Pulitzer has never been revoked. Jones was kidnapped and murdered in Mongolia in 1935, presumably by the NKVD (Soviet secret police).

Beyond film recommendations, I offer my own strange connection to Ukraine. As far as I know, I have no Ukrainian ancestry, but it so happens that four of my great-grandparents were born in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast region of Ukraine, which is currently under Russian occupation. Several earlier generations were also born there. They were farmers who did not mix much with people outside their own German-speaking community.

They began as a Dutch Anabaptist movement and fled persecution in the Low Countries in the early-to-mid-16th century for Poland’s Vistula Delta region where they were valued for their skill in building dykes. In the mid-to-late-18th century, they were invited by Catherine the Great to settle in what is now Ukraine. This was territory recently won by Russia in a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire and which had been dubbed New Russia or South Russia. In return, the devoutly pacifist Mennonites were granted special status which, among other things, exempted them from military service. During the reign of Tsar Alexander II in the late 19th century, the government moved to strip the special status, prompting many of them to emigrate elsewhere. Families resettled all over the world, and that is how my maternal grandparents came to be born in Kansas, live for a time in Oklahoma and then finally settle in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

What my family history tells me is that, while Vladimir Putin insists Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, it is actually a conquered territory that Russia has used as a buffer against perceived threats and which Moscow has treated brutally for generations. No wonder so many Ukrainians (though not all, it should be noted) would prefer to be part of the democratic liberal community of Western Europe.

To much fanfare, the European Union has kicked off the long, bureaucratic process of admitting Ukraine as a member. Depending on how events on the ground develop, this could turn out to be farsighted, provocative or merely symbolic. The dilemma for Europeans is whether Ukraine will eventually be seen as a new and shining outpost of Western values or wind up as an unfortunate sacrifice to Russia’s paranoia about its security. Would such a sacrifice even satisfy Putin?

To put it another way, will Ukraine be Finland in 1940 or Hungary in 1956? Or more worryingly, Poland in 1939?

Chilean Déjà vu?

If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave
 —Chilean president-elect Gabriel Boric upon being elected on Sunday

Is history repeating itself in the Land of Poets?

In Chile’s 1970 presidential election, the choice was narrowed down to extremes on the left and right. There was a popular, moderate incumbent president (a Christian Democrat), but under the constitution in effect at the time he was not allowed to run for re-election. Instead, his party’s standard-bearer was a weak candidate, so the choice boiled down to right and left. In those days Congress determined the winner of the three-man race, and the Christian Democrats threw their support to socialist Salvador Allende. His election was followed by three years of instability caused by (depending on your point of view) either Allende’s radical reforms and policies or by his opponents’ overreaction to them. In 1973 he was overthrown by a military coup, and a junta ruled the country for the next 17 years.

Superficially, something similar to 1970 seems to have just happened again. But there are key differences. Under a different constitution—one written originally under the Pinochet dictatorship—a first-round presidential election on November 21 drew several candidates from a variety of parties across the political spectrum. The largest single vote-getter was the Republican Party’s far-right nominee José Antonio Kast with 27.91 percent of the vote. Not far behind was the far-left candidate of Apruebo Dignidad (an alliance whose name means “I approve of dignity”) Gabriel Boric with 25.72 percent. Given the overall makeup of the first-round voting and the opinion polls, it was no surprise that, in the second-round vote held this past Sunday, Boric was the winner—although the margin of his victory (more than 11 percent) was indeed notable.

Boric’s party is the left-wing Social Convergence, and his coalition has the support of Chile’s Communist Party. Do we need to worry about a right-wing reaction as happened in 1973? Probably not. One major difference between Boric and Allende is that Boric actually received a majority mandate from voters. Perhaps even more significant is that there has been a huge generational shift in Chile. Protests in the streets in 2019 led to the election of a Constitutional Convention after a plebiscite in which 78 percent of voters chose to replace the country’s current charter. Given the makeup of the elected convention, the new constitution will be much more leftist-oriented than any in the country’s history.

Sometimes it helps us North Americans to draw comparisons between the United States and other countries. For example, we might say that electing Gabriel Boric as president of Chile would be comparable to Americans electing… who? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Comparisons like that are not ideal because, for one thing, what is considered left-wing in the U.S. is often much different than what the label represents in other countries. For another thing (and to be unkind) Sanders is as old as dirt, and Warren is no spring chicken either. It is a strange feature of U.S. politics these days that the American political duopoly keeps throwing up geriatric candidates to the voters. As a result, the de facto leaders of America’s left in government are dinosaurs from another age.

This is not the case with Gabriel Boric. At 35, he barely met the minimum age qualification to run for president. A former student leader while studying law at the University of Chile, he was in the forefront of the protests leading to the Constitutional Convention. He and those around him are of an entirely new generation which sees the world much differently than their parents and grandparents did. While the appeal and lure of socialism have long tantalized certain segments of previous generations, anyone who spends much time around young people these days knows that as a political philosophy it is much more mainstream among that age group than it has ever been before.

During his campaign, Boric repeatedly promised to “bury neoliberalism,” i.e. free-market capitalism. That is unsettling for those of us who associate free markets with democracy and personal freedom. On the positive side, though, he cites as his models Europe’s Nordic countries (which are firmly capitalistic, despite what some may think) and Uruguay—as opposed to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which was Allende’s model.

Decades from now, will Chileans be happy with their political choice? Maybe. Maybe not. In any event, they will at least know it was their own choice and not, as in North America, a legacy bequeathed them by elderly leaders who will by then be long gone.

Declining Post-sectarianism

President Higgins Formally Asks DUP Are They For F***ing Real
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper web site Waterford Whispers News, September 16

Many of us worry about what looks like increasing rates of sectarianism or divisiveness or polarization or whatever you want to call it. It seems like every issue or challenge that arises—the pandemic, extreme weather events, elections—immediately requires people to go to separate corners and politicize the atmosphere.

Is it ironic or inevitable that the division appears to get worse when things are actually going relatively well. To be sure, there are plenty of things to worry about, but many of the things people are anxious about—climate change, economic collapse, failure of democracy—tend to be looming things which, in some cases at least, may not even happen. Many are concerned about racial and economic inequality, but these problems are by no means new and, when viewed from a long historical perspective, actually seem to be on a trajectory, even if much too slow for those concerned, for getting better.

What worries me, among other things, is the polarization. It seems to be a phenomenon that waxes and wanes over history. Paradoxically, major wars—or more specifically, their aftermaths—appear to foster unity. Long-lasting, prosperous peacetime seems to give people time and space to dig into their differences.

A big part of the polarization problem is that it is human nature to readily perceive prejudices in others but not to recognize them in ourselves.

Ireland, a relatively small country, makes for an interesting laboratory for the armchair amateur social scientist. A century ago the island lived through a violent rebellion and war for independence and then a bloody civil war. In the process, the island was partitioned and two communities settled into an uneasy co-existence. Much of the past century was marked by violence from paramilitary groups and from the British military. Thankfully, since1998 there has been a peace agreement. Violence has not been completely eliminated, but it has been vastly reduced. Free trade and travel within the European Union, if not exactly equivalent to reunification, fostered a sense of unity on the island. That progress has been challenged in recent years by a narrow majority of United Kingdom voters deciding to leave the European Union, taking Northern Ireland with it.

Tensions have risen over issues of trade between and among Northern Ireland, the Irish republic and Great Britain—as well as the prospect of the return of some form of border controls. All this has been going on against a backdrop of centenaries for the events that resulted in independence for 26 of 32 Irish counties and the island’s partition.

At the birth of the current century, there was much salutary rhetoric over respecting and celebrating the diverse communities on the island. With the advent of Brexit, however, there has been at least a partial return to the old recriminations back and forth between unionists/Protestants on one side and nationalists/Catholics on the other. To be clear, those labels are generalizations and simplifications. The sectarian division is more accurately described as being between those who bear residual resentment toward the old colonizers and those who identify with the old colonizers. In other words, this is people harking back to their tribal roots and narratives.

The latest flashpoint in the tribal divisions is an inter-denominational service scheduled two weeks from now in the Church of Ireland cathedral in Armagh. Described by the organizers as a “service of reflection and hope,” its purpose is to commemorate the island’s partition on its centenary and, thus, the formation of Northern Ireland. Among the various dignitaries invited were Queen Elizabeth and Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins. The latter has politely but firmly—and in the face of some criticism, defiantly—declined.

Usually, it is the unionist politicians who come off looking like intransigent dinosaurs, clinging to their fundamentalist religion and traditions in the face of a changing world. This perception really doesn’t do justice to how far the late firebrand Ian Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party came to make peace with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the insurrectionist Provisional Irish Republican Army.

President Higgins’s decision to rebuff the invitation has been supported by a large majority in the republic. There is no way the president should have to “celebrate” the partition of his country, say his defenders—despite the fact event organizers have been clear it’s not a celebration. Unfortunately, the same logic could be used to justify all manner of intransigence on both sides of the sectarian divide. If both sides had stubbornly and consistently clung to such logic, there would have been no Good Friday Agreement ending the North’s Troubles.

The fact that the president’s position looks perfectly justified and reasonable to most of the republic’s citizens is a useful illustration of how much easier it is to recognize prejudice in others than in oneself.

Running for the Exit

I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
 —Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, writing about Joe Biden in his 2014 book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

[T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
 —President Biden, discussing Afghanistan in a press conference on July 8

This is a foreign policy catastrophe, the likes we haven’t seen in decades, I’m afraid, internationally
 —Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney, commenting on the Afghanistan situation in a radio interview on Monday

In the lead-up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was much media speculation about how much it might, at the end, resemble the country’s chaotic retreat from Vietnam in 1975. As it happened, there were a lot of similarities. From panic at the U.S. embassy, among others, to desperate last-minute crowding at the capital’s airport, there was plenty of fodder for déjà vu for those of us who remember well the fall of Saigon.

For one thing, the endgame was set up by a peace treaty. In the earlier case, it was the Nixon Administration’s pact with North Vietnam, which resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973. In the current situation, it was the Trump Administration’s agreement with the Taliban a year and a half ago. In both cases, those pieces of paper were tossed aside once a subsequent U.S. administration pulled troops out suddenly. In 1975 it was the Ford Administration, which had little choice after Congress cut off all Vietnam funding. Today it is the Biden Administration, which announced four months ago the drawdown of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

One difference between the two situations is the reaction of America’s hard political left.

“Ho Chi Minh puts a lot of hope in our hearts,” declared a woman attending a spontaneous celebration in April 1975. “As we practice the philosophies we believe in we forget that there are other people who believe in the same thing but practice it differently because of their environment. The greater struggle lies ahead.”

Added a war veteran-turned-anti-war-activist, “It’d be so far out to be there right now.” He was referring to the capital of soon-to-be-absorbed South Vietnam, which had just been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The above quotes are from a 46-year-old event in Isla Vista, the densely populated student ghetto abutting the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California. They were chronicled in the student newspaper The Nexus, and yes, I was the hack scribe who reported them. A similar event had been held weeks earlier to mark Cambodia’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge.

Some of the people at the April event were there simply to express relief at the final end of the war and the U.S.’s involvement in the region. Others were wholeheartedly celebrating a U.S. defeat at the hands of Communists. For others, the celebratory mood may have been more about something more general: a former colony casting out a Western superpower.

I can’t imagine that very many on the political left today are celebrating the Taliban’s victory. I no longer have the contacts I did during my Seattle days, so I’m not really sure. If any are celebrating, though, it cannot be without mixed feelings. While the new rulers of Afghanistan have done their best to project a more presentable image as their return to power loomed, their track record and unabashed world view suggest their rule will be a disaster for anyone who cares about western liberal democratic values in general or the rights of women and minorities in particular. In my experience, though, the hard left tends to see such rights and social issues not as ends in themselves but mainly as issues to exploit tactically in their ultimate aim: to see the that right people end up in charge.

To be clear, when I talk about the “hard left,” I’m not talking about people who vote for Democrats. My experience with hard-core leftists is that they mainly vote for fringe candidates in protest or, more often, don’t vote at all. If they do vote for a Democrat, it’s usually grudgingly and/or tactically. They do, however, show up en masse at demonstrations and protests, which sometimes results in generating enthusiasm and motivation for Democratic-leaning voters.

While the hard left is definite minority in America, it’s hard not to notice that views once considered on the political fringe have infiltrated the mainstream. A sign of this is the ardent media coverage—both left and right—of the so-called “squad,” a half-dozen Representatives who, according to opinion polls anyway, are well to the left of most Democrats—let alone most Americans.

As for Afghanistan, those of us who have seen this movie before know pretty much what to expect. In North America and Europe there will be reflections and recriminations about how the occupation of the country began and why it turned out the way it did. In Southwest Asia there will be strife and misery and perhaps yet another refugee crisis. (For years after the fall of South Vietnam, waves of so-called “boat people” flooded out of the country.) There will be heartbreaking tales of people, mainly women, whose lives and opportunities will be set back to a previous century. One also has to ask if Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will go back to being a haven and base for international terrorists.

In the last presidential election, we were told a vote for Joe Biden was a vote for returning to normalcy, sanity and competency. Things are definitely back to what’s considered normal in Washington, and I suppose the capital is as sane as it’s ever been—for whatever that’s worth. Competency? Even if you think ending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was a good idea, you still have to wonder if the terms of withdrawal couldn’t have been negotiated better and whether the actual exit could have been handled more competently.

Watching Biden on countless Sunday morning news programs in the 1990s and 2000s, it was always clear to me he considered himself a foreign policy maven. Yet, to anyone paying attention, it was also clear that his ideas—which were just that, since as a senator or even vice-president he had little discernible influence on actual policy—were always a little off from establishment foreign policy thinking. Whether it was his idea of splitting Iraq into three countries or advising President Obama not to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden, he always seemed oddly contrarian.

Reportedly, Biden overruled his top military advisers in following through on the Trump Administration’s deal with the Taliban. You have to wonder what that says about his judgment as he faces upcoming crises with places like Iran and North Korea.

Biden’s real strength was always in domestic politics, and that probably tells us more about his handling of Afghanistan than all his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Apparently, polls said that getting out of Afghanistan ranked as very popular among U.S. voters. If it remains popular after this fiasco—even after heart-wrenching footage of people clinging to taxiing aircraft in Kabul—then maybe the president will have succeeded on his own terms.

Bot and Sold

This is a cross-posting with my movie blog.

A funny thing happened on my film blog last month. No, it wasn’t something I wrote—or at least that’s not what I’m talking about anyway.

I have a page where each month I present a few statistics from the previous month. Mostly it’s to get an idea of who is looking at my blog but also to amuse myself. The page features a pie chart showing the various countries from where I am getting hits. Historically, about half the hits are from the United States with the next larger slices from places like the UK, Ireland and Canada. After that the slices get pretty fragmented into a few dozen other countries all over the world. I also list the ten weekly commentaries in my archive that have gotten the most hits. And then just for fun I list five of the most entertaining web searches that have found my site.

When I went to gather the numbers for May, I encountered something that hadn’t happened before. Ninety-seven percent of the hits were from one country, and that country was Indonesia. The U.S. came in second with two percent. Twenty-six other countries were tallied with percentages rounded off to insignificance.

Why did internet users in Indonesia suddenly take an interest in my movie reviews? The answer is that they almost certainly didn’t. Something else was going on. I think the term we’re looking for here is web bots.

While such a massive number of hits from one country is unprecedented for my humble site, this weird kind of bot activity is not. Only very belated did I realize that my site was prowled by Russian bots coming up to the 2016 election. During September, October and November of that year, 11.9 percent of my hits came from Russia (after Ireland at 34.13 percent and the U.S. at 20.45 pecent). That had never happened before. Historically, my hits from Russia had always been nil or negligible. Cluelessly, I just shrugged and thought it must have had something to do with a few movies I had reviewed that were made by an Azerbaijani filmmaker. He had contacted me through a Russian email address (Azerbaijan being a former republic in the USSR), and I figured that he must have just had a lot of friends and relatives checking out my reviews of his films.

It was an embarrassingly long time afterward that it dawned on me that it might have had something to do with the 2016 presidential election. In my defense, I was kind of oblivious to the Russian trolling thing because none of those political bot messages everyone talked about seemed to show up in my Facebook feed. Did you know that hidden in your Facebook settings is a profile page where Facebook displays all the information it think it’s found out about you—things like religion, political preference, etc.? From this I know that Facebook has never been able to figure out what political party I support, and maybe that’s why I somehow avoided all the bot propaganda that I kept hearing about in the wake of President Trump’s election.

When the 2020 election rolled around, I was more savvy, so I kept an eye out for any more bot funny business. Sure enough, the numbers went screwy again. In the period from September to November 2020, the second and third most hits (after the U.S. at 36.09 percent) were from Hong Kong (20.26 percent) and China (7.56 percent), respectively. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Does that mean Chinese bots were working mischief during the election? People who had screamed bloody hell about Russian interference four years earlier did not seem concerned about it anyway. After all, the right candidate had won.

What does it all mean? Beats me. I don’t mind all the extra hits, but it would be nice if, while the bots are at it, they’d click on some of ads and maybe buy something.

We’re definitely in a strange time when it comes to the internet. A few times lately our broadband service has been disrupted by denial-of-service attacks by malicious cyber actors. Also, the entire Irish healthcare system has been forced to go retro because of a ransomware attack (traced by the authorities to Russia) that put its online systems out of commission. That points up the risks in having systems that are overly centralized. There may be other lessons as well. More than one acquaintance who happens to be a nurse has said that they love having the system down. It means a lot less time filling out online forms and more time actually working with patients. It also means fewer statistics on Covid ‑19 cases and death and on progress with vaccinations on the nightly news—something the government may not be all that unhappy about.

Okay, I can understand all the Russian bot activity in 2016 and all the Chinese bot activity in 2020, but what the heck is the deal with Indonesia in May of 2021? That one has me completely confounded. I can only hope the bots are aimed directly at me because one of the characters in my most recent novel Searching for Cunégonde happened to have an Indonesian father.

Dates with Destiny

This is a cross-posting with my book blog.

Coming up with titles for a book or a story can be either easy or frustrating.

In the case of the first two installments of the Dallas Green trilogy, the titles came fairly easily. In fact, I had the title Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead in my head for a long time before I seriously tackled the book itself. It was something a good friend of mine quipped during a discussion about Mexico, and it stuck in my head for years. When it came time for the sequel, the idea of Lautaro’s Spear came to me fairly easily, keeping consistency with the mention of major historical figures of Latin America. The third book, though, was a real struggle. I considered all kinds of figures from Irish history and legend but found them all unworkable. I ended up on settling for Searching for Cunégonde, which referenced a fictional character from French literature.

As for the fantasy books, I had had The Three Towers of Afranor in my pocket since high school. The Curse of Septimus Bridge was likewise straightforward, and I had the title of that book’s sequel settled (for now anyway) before I even started writing.

When coming up with titles for books, I try to come up with something that hasn’t been used before and which aspires to being unusual or unique. The goal, which may or may not be misguided, is to have something that would be easy to find in a web search.

Interestingly, coming up with a title for my recent short story proved to be one of the more frustrating experiences in coming with a title. I liked the idea of having a French word in it since one of the two main characters is French. Since the plot essentially consists of a meeting, the word rendezvous lent itself. As a title, though, it is hardly unique. If you search that title on the Internet Movie Database, you find there are no fewer than 150 feature films, short films, TV episodes that have the title Rendezvous, Rendez-Vous, Rendez-vous or some other variation as an original title or alternative (e.g. foreign language) title. The good news is that titles cannot be copyrighted, so there is nothing to stop writers like me from reusing them. The drawback is the risk of having one’s work overshadowed by a better known one with the same name.

It’s not just films and books that have titles though. Something one may not think about is that political cartoons can have titles. I was reminded of this fairly soon after I released my short story as a small e‑book. One morning I glanced at The Times of London to see a cartoon by Peter Brookes lampooning U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s high-level meeting on climate in Shanghai in mid-April. Provocatively, it portrays Kerry and his Chinese interlocutor meeting cheerfully over the body of a Uighur while power plants belch out smoke in the background. The title is “Climate Change Rendezvous.”

This cartoon is a blatant homage to the famous Evening Standard cartoon by David Low which appeared in September 1939. That one was called simply “Rendezvous,” and in that context the word harkens back to its original meaning (before the French began using it to mean appointment or date): a place for troops to assemble.

Low’s cartoon depicted Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin meeting with exaggerated gestures of politeness over the body of a fallen Polish soldier. The cartoon was published 27 days after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact containing a secret protocol dividing Poland into “spheres of influence” between the Soviet Union and Germany; 19 days after Germany invaded Poland; and three days after the Soviets invaded the country. This joint military action was the official beginning of World War II.

It seems harsh to draw a parallel between talks over climate change and a cynical accord to carve up a sovereign nation, but if political cartoonists know anything, it is that subtlety and nuance are not friends to those trying to get a point across in a single image. Also, shock has a certain value when it comes to attracting eyeballs—and hopefully, brains. In the end, the cartoon is not really about climate change.

The plight of the Uighurs, referenced in Brookes’s cartoon, has been ongoing since the region was forcibly incorporated into China in 1930 but has escalated since 2014 when the Chinese government began the internment of more than a million Muslims, mostly Uighurs, in state-sponsored camps. Testimonies have described suppression of religious practices, political indoctrination, forced sterilizations and abortions, and infanticides. Critics have labeled Chinese policy both ethnocide and cultural genocide and have compared it to the Holocaust. So the cartoon’s comparison to the Hitler and Stalin regimes is not that far off after all.

Still, it may be unfair to imply, as the cartoon seems to, a moral equivalence between the U.S. and China, given that the Chinese government bears the responsibility for its brutal treatment of the Uighurs. Still, the suggestion that the U.S. government may be turning something akin to a blind eye to the atrocities in pursuit of a possibly quixotic climate deal with the Chinese is arguably fair comment. A century from now, will history celebrate John Kerry’s efforts at climate negotiation—or will the question loom larger of why the world left Uighur men, women and children to their fate?

That recalls another use of the word rendezvous. Politicians as dissimilar as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have at critical moments memorably invoked a moral crossroads with a common phrase—rendezvous with destiny.

Personal Truth

Study Finds Connection Between Believing Russia Rigged 2016 Election and Believing 2020 Election Was Foolproof
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper web site The Babylon Bee, November 17

Ages ago during my thrifty student days in Europe, I found it beneficial to be open-minded and flexible when traveling.

Transportation was kept cheap by holding out my thumb on the side of a road. For a two-month period I used a Christmas gift from my parents, a Student Rail Pass, for both transportation and shelter by scheduling overnight train journeys whenever possible.

One thing I learned was that a free bed could be had for a night or two if I was willing to undergo a bit of proselytization. My diverse array of friends included young born-again Christians who were firmly convinced I belonged in their community. The problem was that I was raised with no religion and my analytical nature found it impossible to accept one religion over another (or atheism for that matter) without some sort of hard objective evidence. My friends’ response was to recommend various clergymen and lay people who might be able to help me sort out my thoughts. An extra enticement was that some of these people would kindly lodge truth-seekers for free.

I took advantage of a couple of these offers, and to be clear, I did so with a completely open and curious mind. One was an Anglican minister and his wife who had a lovely, large apartment in the city center of Paris between the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. Another was a community called L’Abri which was operated out of the home of its founder, American-born theologian Francis Schaeffer, in a picturesque spot in the Swiss Alps southeast of Lake Geneva. I spent several days there, reading, discussing and asking all manner of questions.

In the end I did not have the life-changing breakthrough my friends were hoping for, but I did come away with a huge appreciation for the science of epistemology. That’s a branch of learning which poses the question, how can we actually know anything? When you start thinking about it deeply, you find it’s a lot harder than you’d think. A lot of what we “know” is really belief accepted on faith. A lot of self-described atheists like to attribute their rejection of religious doctrine to science, but one of the most profound insights I gained from my brief time at L’Abri was the realization that it takes every bit as much blind faith to believe there is no God as it does to believe God exists.

A clear understanding of the limits of knowability is relevant these days when we have media outlets and pundits accusing others of willfully ignoring the truth. In fact, the manner in which some groups, parties or publications proclaim that they are delivering The Real Truth reminds me of nothing so much as the history of my ancestors in 16th-century Europe when the Christian church split into multiple sects, each certain unto death what the nature of God was and what He wanted. As I listen to what passes for political discussion today, I sometimes wonder if we are not in such a time again and if politics is not merely the modern equivalent of religion.

An article I read in The New York Times in February has become stuck in mind. It is a detailed piece requiring 14 minutes to read. It recounts an incident at Smith College in the summer of 2018 when a woman ate her lunch in a lounge of a deserted dormitory. A janitor noticed her in the dormitory, which was closed for the summer, and did as he had been instructed. He notified campus security that he had seen an unauthorized person there.

“A well-known [unarmed] older campus security officer drove over to the dorm,” continues the article. “He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: ‘Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.’”

The piece goes on to tell how the student, whose family had immigrated from Mali, subsequently made accusations of racism against the cafeteria worker who had provided her with lunch, even though the cafeteria was only supposed to be serving students in a summer camp program at the time; the janitor who had called security; another janitor who whose shift had not yet begun at the time; and the security guard.

After a lengthy investigation the college president “released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair [the cafeteria worker] altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.” The janitor who had made the call had been put on leave for three months. The other one left his job after his photograph was circulated widely on social media. The cafeteria worker was later furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic and found that notoriety over the incident hindered her search for a new job. Accusations of racism against her continued to be posted by visitors to Smith College’s Facebook page.

The incident is clearly unfortunate for all involved. What struck me was this paragraph from the Times article: “This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

Personal truth? I do not judge or question what went through the student’s mind and heart when confronted alone by a man in uniform, but isn’t there a logical disconnect in speaking of “truth” together with “facts that are at odds with it”? If the facts are at odds with it, in what sense is it truth? If something feels deeply and personally true to someone, does that qualify as truth?

These questions are important if, as a society, we are going to get the shared understanding of reality that is necessary to coexist and work out our differences. If The New York Times accepts that something deeply felt is a form of truth, then what are we to say to the 47 percent of voters who told Rasmussen in December that “it’s likely that Democrats stole voters or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win” and, in particular, the 36 percent who said that voter fraud was “very likely.”

Doesn’t that highlight the tension between millions of people’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that may be at odds with it?

The more our politics is based on diverging tenets of blind faith, the sooner we are likely to find ourselves in a new epoch of religious wars.

Broadcasters in a State

RTÉ Documentary Makes Public Really Sad About Homelessness For A Whole Hour
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper website Waterford Whispers News, January 19

In my previous post I vented my frustration with the increasingly polarized and fragmented media landscape when it comes to broadcast journalism. I was speaking specifically about the United States, but what about other countries? I attributed the U.S.’s partisan environment to the sheer size of the country combined with technology that rewards narrowcasting. Surely, those would not be such prominent factors in other countries?

What is distinctive about the States as a country, besides its size, is that it has no dominant national broadcaster. That’s an institution pretty much ubiquitous throughout the rest of the world. Canada has the CBC, the United Kingdom has the BBC, France has France Télévisions, Russia has RT, and Ireland has RTÉ. Many countries also, unlike the U.S. and Canada, exact a household license fee for the purpose of subsidizing the national broadcaster. In Britain, for example, this means BBC viewers do not have to watch commercials—apart from the BBC’s own adverts touting BBC programs. Ireland has the worst of both worlds with viewers (and actually non-viewers as well) required to pay the annual license fee but still having to sit through commercial advertisements. Despite its hybrid viewer/corporate revenue stream, RTÉ has long been unable to balance a budget, although it has just been announced that it finally does have a surplus—thanks to the fact that for the past year people were literally forced to stay at home with little else to do but watch telly.

Technically, the U.S. does have a national broadcaster through the taxpayer-funded non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting which supports the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) networks, but these do not have anywhere near the dominance in America that other countries’ public broadcasters have. Also, because PBS’s and NPR’s taxpayer funding meets only a small part of their budgets, they rely largely on voluntary viewer contributions and corporate underwriting. In fact, one could make the argument that, due to their heavy reliance on corporate underwriting, PBS and NPR actually constitute one more facet of the U.S. corporate media landscape, albeit one with a very specific educated and affluent viewer demographic.

Shouldn’t the national broadcaster be the answer to polarized political reporting? Shouldn’t a public or semi-public entity with a mandate to serve the entire nation and, ideally, independent or semi-independent from corporate money be an antidote to all the partisan stuff? Maybe in theory, but not in my experience.

This is where I again get to mention my Master of Arts degree in journalism from Ohio State University. I did my studies in that fine institution back when the idea of a journalism school in college, particularly at the graduate level, was a new one. Most of my teachers had gotten their professorships bestowed on them honorarily in recognition of many years of working in the profession rather than through any academic qualifications. They were mostly well up in years because the teaching gig was basically their semi-retirement. These were old-school guys—and yes, they were mostly, if not exclusively, male—who experienced journalism as a blue-collar profession, pounding city streets and banging on manual typewriters, and who at the end of a workday unwound in smoky bars. They had a hard-nosed, practical and yet refreshingly idealistic idea of what journalism was. You were supposed to keep digging until you got the story, and you never took sides. In writing a story, you assumed nothing and took no one’s word at face value. Skepticism was the watchword.

If your mother says she loves you, went the rule, check it out!

I would love to find my old professors now—if any of them have lungs and livers that have survived this long—to find out what they think of the current state of journalism. I think I kind of know. They were basically newspaper guys, and even way back in the 1970s they looked down their noses at television. Of course, the internet was not even a thing yet. One principle they were clear on was that the government should have no role in the news business except as something to be covered aggressively. In many countries, one needs a license or an institutional qualification to practice journalism. In the U.S., by contrast, the First Amendment has always meant that every citizen is born a journalist. The government cannot pick and choose who is qualified to do the job.

My old professors’ main concern about state media in general was that it could not be objective when covering politicians who approved their budget and paid their salaries. Ironically, after a couple of decades of getting my television and radio news from state broadcasters, I find that the problem is nearly the opposite. Safeguards are in place in countries like the UK and Ireland to insulate state news organizations from government pressure. Significant public funding also tends to insulate them from advertiser pressure. That sounds like a good thing—until you cop on to the fact political and corporate pressure are often actually extensions of general public sentiment.

In practice, I find, state news organizations tend to become detached from the general public they are meant to be serving, not unlike the way political reporting at student-run college radio stations often goes off in its own idealistic direction. On top of that, state broadcasters are de facto gatekeepers of information in the way that the three big corporate network news organizations in the U.S. once styled themselves. In RTÉ’s world, if it determines something is not worthy or salutary for public consumption, it simply does not get reported. Yes, there is a much smaller commercial rival TV broadcaster here as well as several newspapers, but by practical necessity most people have to rely on RTÉ for their daily news.

Those who don’t find the state broadcaster reflecting their own personal reality inevitably look for alternative sources of information. Traditionally, stories have gotten passed around informally by word of mouth. Of course, these days finding alternative news sources is easier than it’s ever been, and there are no geographical limits.

Is there anything corporate broadcasters (in the U.S.) or state broadcasters (elsewhere) could do to better meet the needs of news consumers?

The reality may be that there is no perfect model for broadcast journalism and that the current state of information churn is the best we can hope for.

On one hand, after years of listening to measured, modulated and controlled news broadcasts from state broadcasters, the blaring and breathless style of U.S. cable news operations—with their all-too-frequent commercial interruptions—grates.

On the other hand, I often find myself wishing I could switch to a different Irish channel (sorry, Virgin Media, you’re not it) for a contrasting perspective or just to fill in the information gaps.

Searching for Truth

Everyone Who Was Completely Wrong About Election Day Ready to Explain What Happens Next
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper website The Babylon Bee, November 5

Commentators sometimes like wax nostalgic about the good old days when everyone in America got their daily news from a handful of television network news operations which were generally trusted to supply accurate and unbiased information. Why can’t it be like that now? Why have so many news outfits picked a particular political world view and decided to cater to that view’s particular audience—instead of treating the whole country as its audience?

If you think about it, that question more or less answers itself, doesn’t it? Don’t all news consumers with favorite information sources think that theirs is the fair and objective one? It’s the other ones that are biased, right?

This situation was made possible by 1) the size and diversity of the United States and 2) the proliferation of news sources thanks to breakthroughs in technology. The latter cause is key. There was a time not that many years ago when “narrowcasting” to relatively small and geographically scattered audiences was economically impractical. Now, thanks to satellites and the internet, it’s a cinch. Arguably, a politically splintered society is good for corporate business. More than ever before, politics has become a team sport, and we all know how profitable professional sports teams are. Cable news networks even have an advantage that sports broadcasters don’t. In televised politics, when you pick your own channel, your team is always winning—at least the argument if not the election.

Still, people have a basic desire to think the information they’re getting is accurate. This would explain why, after the election of Donald Trump four years ago, The New York Times had an advertising campaign proclaiming simply and emphatically “The Truth,” and The Washington Post introduced the chilling slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In the media generally there was much bandying of words like “truth” and “facts,” largely in response to questionable assertions by the new president but also as not-so-subtle digs at rival news organizations. Despite all this focus on truth, though, the country is nowhere near a consensus on what is “true” when it comes any major issue.

Here is what seems true to me. If Republicans generally think they are getting the truth—or at least more of it—from Fox News and if Democrats feel similarly about CNN, MSNBC and/or PBS, they can’t both be right. Whatever news you listen to will occasionally omit stories that get played on the other side. Stories reported by both will get different spins and emphases. The only way to make sure you don’t miss something or don’t get misled is to try listening to everything.

That’s time-consuming, though. If you’re busy but still want to be informed, wouldn’t it be nice if, to get back to the lament with which I began, there were one or more news sources that simply reported the major news of the day with some kind of balance and fairness you could trust? Such a news provider might annoy Democrats sometimes, but it would also annoy Republicans sometimes. Is there a market for such a thing?

There are actually people out there who see that gap and are trying to fill it. One that I came across a while back is called Ground News, and it takes an interesting approach. Available through its website or its app, it delivers a stream of news items but also includes information on what other media are carrying the same item. Furthermore it breaks down the other media sources according to where they fall on the political spectrum and gives you a liberal/conservative percentage breakdown on each article’s overall media distribution. If nothing else, it tells you whether the stories you find interesting are mainly being seen by most people or by mainly conservatives or by liberals. They even offer a browser extension that pops up if you’re reading another news site, e.g. The New York Times, and gives you the same media breakdown about the article you are reading there.

The goal is not to eliminate bias but to clearly identify it and label it so that you know where your news falls on the political spectrum. News sources are rated on a scale from the far left (e.g. Palmer Report) to the far right (e.g. The Gateway Pundit). Sources it considers in the center include the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and France24. Obviously, not everyone is going to agree on these classifications, but at least it’s some kind of yardstick. The Ground News website is freely accessible, but if you want to support them or get more features, there are a couple of subscription levels. You can also get their weekly “Blindspot Report” email which highlights legitimate news stories missed by sources on both the left and right.

Ground News is based in Canada, which is also the location of another source of serious balanced discussion, the charitable-foundation-run Munk Debates. Originally staged as live events in Toronto, the debates—as well as dialogs and interviews—are now accessible as streams and through a podcast. They highlight topical issues argued by prominent speakers on opposite sides in a congenial environment. Recent topics have included “Be it resolved: Go Green! Go Nuclear!” with University of Michigan professor Todd Allen and former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jackzko and “Be it resolved: The GameStop frenzy is good for investors and good for financial markets” with market traders Tom Sosnoff and Danny Moses. It is a nice change of pace from the usual stacked-deck panel discussions that proliferate cable news.

Another source I came across recently is the five-days-a-week email newsletter Tangle by journalist Isaac Saul whose main job is with the positive-news-focused digital media company A Plus. A 10-to-15-minute read, Tangle concentrates on the major DC political issue of the day—as well as a few briefer items—giving a meticulous examination of the positions on both partisan sides, as well as Saul’s own (generally middle-of-the-road) take. It is pretty balanced, although your own mileage could vary. Tangle is subscription-supported on the Substack platform—an increasingly interesting source of informed commentary for people willing to pay for it—but it can generally be read four days a week for free.

The funny thing about consuming reasonable, balanced and fair news sources, though, is that there always seems to be something missing. Human nature, especially when we are younger, craves the passion of being committed and involved on the right side of a grand ideological struggle. People used to satisfy that craving with religion. Nowadays they fill it with politics. In the current heightened environment, objective reporting can feel strangely bland.

Also, if you’re paranoid—and shouldn’t we all be?—there is the concern that these self-branded objective sources may be trojan horses that are trying to subtly and with sophistication nudge those in the political middle toward one side or the other under the guise of supposed neutrality. After all, can any individual or organization be truly neutral? Short answer: no.

In the end, that is the risk you run in trying to be informed. You might end up having your mind changed.