"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
For now, a math item and a physics item, maybe more later…
Four years ago, after the decision to have the 2026 ICM in the US was announced, I wrote:
"With the 2022 experience in mind, hopefully the IMU will for next time have prepared a plan for what to do in case they again end up having a host country with a collapsed democracy being run by a dangerous autocrat."
We’re very much in that situation now, and as far as I can tell the IMU is still planning for a normal, in-person event this July in Philadelphia.
The French mathematical society (SMF) announced yesterday that they would not participate (in the sense of not having a presence such as a booth) in the ICM this year. I’m hearing that other national math societies have taken or are considering similar action.
Setting aside the problem of lots of people for good reason not wanting anything to do with travel to the US right now, even those who do want to come here are facing serious problems getting a visa, in particular not being able to even get an appointment for a visa interview at this time.
The murders and Gestapo tactics now going on in Minneapolis surely influenced the SMF decision and may cause people now planning on attending the ICM to change their plans. The nightmare scenario for ICM organizers is having ICE and its thuggery move on to Philadelphia, which unfortunately seems possible.
Hell, my entire family, apart from one ex-sister-in-law were born here, white, working and middle-class and I don't like it when my family is traveling in the USofA during the turd reich.
THIS DISCUSSION between Michael Popok and Anthony Davis about how Trump and the Republica-fascists have led to the eclipse of America as the dominating super-power among putative democracies should be listened to by everyone. One of the problems I have with such entities as Popok's channel is that they put out so much content that the real gems in it get swamped, I hope that doesn't happen with this one. I think of the two Anthony Davis certainly has the more realistic view of the consequences of Trump II, that America's position has been permanently and fatally damaged. In the end of the discussion when Popok is giving what I think is a rather naive, lawyerly, panglossian view of how America could regain that position, Davis said something very interesting to me, something which I've been saying here for years. I've done a rough transcription of the discussion starting at about 7:22 in the video, Davis is a lot easier to transcribe than the meandering Popok, trying to consolodate the ideas through the verbiage.
P: Let me ask you a question because you and I had a little bit of a debate, a soft debate . . when I was on your show last week. . . . There's a premise to my question, which is I said to you, that just as Biden was able to heal a lot of these [international, etc.] relationships after Trump I. And through diplomacy and civility, you know, through a combination of carrot and stick, which is always present with the United States since Teddy Roosevelt or before . . . he was able to fix a lot of scarring that Trump had done in the global relationship the first time around. But I guess implicit in my question was that is a good thing and that the next president, Newsom or otherwise, will and should do the same thing and your response was a version of "it's too late these are techtonic plates that are premanently shifted that are creating new mountain ranges and you're not getting them back."
Two questions:
1. Should that be a goal of the Americans and is important to American interests and that the next president fix everything that Donald Trump Broke and
2 is it possible. I think it is. to at least try.
AD: Well, it's a little bit like the relationship between Canada and the US, isn't it. It's like family, you don't choose your family so you put up with your family. But your friends you can choose, you can have far better friends than you can family. We just learn to live with our family and I think with Europe and the rest of the world verses America the best that they'll be able to do is turn it into a situation where there might not be animosity but they're certainly not going to do business together. I think that's the best that Newsom or any future Democratic president could do, yeah, we could resign a few treaties, the Paris Climate Accord and various things but in terms of infrastructure, no. It's done now, I honestly think that's the case because unless they make a change to the Constitution, to the Bill of Rights, to the way that the system works in America, there is nothing to stop a future Donald Trump from becoming king again.
Popok: See, I think if we get eight years of civil discourse back led by a leader America respects and the world does, that's a true banner holder for American values as they do exist in both our aspirational Declaration of Independents and in our governing document of the Constitution, and in combination with reengaging with the world, in a way that Donald Trump has pulled in all the orrs, right forget about America First get back to our global interests we start resigning all the peace accords for the United Nations and go into the World Court, who knows, maybe what and get the money flowing, right, reestablish money as soft power deplomacy. The US is great for rescuing People . . .
I will spare you more of the panglossian 2008 Obama campaign style aspirational drivel. While Micheal Popok is hardly the worst of the media lawyers, he is, to quote my late father, 'full of soup" about this. Needless to say, Anthony Davis is almost as skeptical as I am about that working. You can listen to the entire discussion here.
Notice that Popock resorts to citing the thing which has zero legal power to do anything, the "aspirational Declaration of Independence" which, if he'd paid attention to that base-level knowledge of recent truth telling about Amerian history, he would know that The Reverend MLK jr. cited in his Dream speech, noting that it was an unpaid promissory note. Here's news for him, after payment started to be made through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the Roberts Court stopped payment on it yet again as has been done continually through our history. AT NO TIME SO MUCH AS THE WRITING OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS WHICH WERE NOT MEANT BY THE FRAMERS TO EVER REALLY DELIVER THE THINGS PROMISED IN THE DECLARATION. As I've noted here, even the great Civil War Amendments which aspired to make those Constitutional law had that payement stopped by a series of Supreme Court rulings which had them twisted, distorted and, as recently as two years ago, anulled by the Supreme Court. You would think he, as a practicing lawyer and commentator on current events would know that everything Davis said about what it would take to make others in the Americas - including a majority of those in the United States - Europe, Africa, Asia trust the United States again WOULD REQUIRE BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND BASIC STRUCTURAL CHANGE of a kind that an American lawyer just can't imagine ever being possible.
Trump is certainly the one who brought the "American Century" to a definitive end in Trump II BUT THAT HAS BEEN AN ONGOING PROJECT OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, CONGRESSES AND COURTS ALL DURING MY LIFETIME. That ending is now, indeed, definitive, and the world outside of the United States was not a party to that ending it or even a party in favor of ending it.
There is a reason that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize JUST FOR WINNING THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008, it is because he ended the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Neo-con disaster that brought about many evils, the greatest of them the Iraq debacle which is still playing out in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as Europe. They really believed in 2009 that Obama was the promised one who would embody the fulfillment of the claims of American democracy, not in the least part because he did something no one believed was possible, having a Black American president, overcoming our more than two and a half century old regime of white supremacist hegemony, itself embedded in the Constitution in structural ways that the Civil War Amendments didn't address.
It is the plain as day, clear as air truth that cannot be mentioned that LIES IN THE MEDIA is what Trump as a politician is made of, you will notice that the erudite Anthony Davis included the holy of holies, the sacred idol, the Bill of Rights among those things that would have to be changed, fundamentally, to make America trustworty again. Lies are behind the success of the ever worsening presidents and congresses that we have suffered ever since the Sullivan Decision took full hold - which I would date to about 1966 and certainly the media lies for the profits of its owners were what determined the 1968 election that brought us what was then the landmark of corrupt presidencies, Richard Nixon. It has given us ever worse presidencies with weakend Democratic ones whenever the Republicans policies crashed the economy. Certainly that is what got Clinton in office in 1992, Obama in office and Biden after the disaster of Trump I. Americans may have media and entertainment induced amnesia but the rest of the world does not.
The world wanted so to believe that first Obama, then Joe Biden had righted things and the United States would be what it had been before Trump and George W. Bush had made it in the period after the Rehnquist Court installed him in 2000. They really wanted that to happen only to see the American Constitution AS IT REALLY IS IN REAL LIFE AND PRACTICE INSTEAD OF HOLLYWOOD-CIVICS TEXTBOOK BULLSHIT CLAIMED IT WAS. There is no way that they are going to believe it again with the Constitution as it is now, nor should they NOR SHOULD ANY AMERICAN WHO IS AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRAT OR EVEN JUST A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT (AND BY THAT I DON'T MEAN A CAPITALIST CROOK). The faster we drop that bull shit the faster something will be done about amending the goddamned thing, getting rid of the Electoral College which brought us the two worst presidents in our lifetimes, both Bush II and Trump, the Supreme Court which has been the major engine of the corruption of our politics on a blatantly Republican-fascist partisan basis, the First Amendement which has created the lie that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" and that mass media, corporate media has that right to lie the oligarch's tools into office. And that's not to mention that other opportunity for the most corruption, the anti-democratically constituted Senate and its absurdly allocated powers to thwart democracy.
