A Perspective On Violence

 An interview of David Garland  posted on Jacobin provides an insightful overview of the course and causes of violence in the U.S. on both sides of the Law.

Why the US Has Such a Brutal Penal Regime

Some excerpts:

"Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries."

"...the prison population in this country reached a peak of 760 per 100,000 in 2008. The European average is a bit more than 100 per 100,000..."
 

"The US homicide rate has fallen considerably since that peak in the 1990s. It’s now near six per 100,000, but that’s still six times as high as European nations — and more than three times higher than Canada."

"In the 1970s, there were about eighty or ninety civilians killed every year by the police in New York City. Now it’s about eight or nine civilians killed each year, and that has to do with training, accountability, selection, and practices in the police force."

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of law and professor of sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Proud to be Irish

Read:

 Ireland’s Presidential Election Was a Left-Wing Landslide

    By Daniel Finn 

I you do read the whole article in Jacobin I'll bet you will have a better idea of the political climate in Ireland than you do of the U.S. 

"Ireland’s presidential election was a resounding victory for the Left. Catherine Connolly, a left-wing independent backed by parties representing every shade of Irish left politics, from pale pink and light green to deep red, won 63.4 percent of the vote. This was more than twice the level of support for her main opponent, Heather Humphreys of the center-right Fine Gael party..."

The integration of historical perspective and analysis that can be seen in the article is rarely available in news media in this country outside of Jacobin, which is why I read it daily.

Osage Orange

 I took a walk along the river this morning thinking I might find some mushrooms as I had done exactly a year ago when we were having some similar rainy weather.  However, there were none to be found on this occasion.  I did see quite a few early arriving Sandhill Cranes, but was not quick enough to catch them with my camera.  I walked back toward my truck through a dense section of the riverside forest and was pleased to find this Osage Orange among the Cottonwoods.  

There are multiple trunks, but I think this is just one isolated plant.  That means that it must be a female of the species.  According to Wikipedia "Although the flowering is dioecious, the pistillate tree when isolated will still bear large oranges, visually perfect, but lacking the seeds."

Red Victoria

Krugman

Economist Paul Krugman has posted an article on Substack comparing economic development in China and the U.S. :

China Has Overtaken America
And Trump’s policies guarantee that we will never catch up

The evidence:

"The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more."

Krugman's conclusion:

"Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up."

Sandia Fall

A Clear Eyed View of Gaza

 How news sites classify columns as news or opinion seems often to be quite arbitrary.  Rather often, a fact-based account is consigned to the opinion section mostly because it is examining the situation from a point of view other than that of the currently dominant political perspective.  Such was the case with a recent piece by Guardian columnist, Nesrine Malik:

Gaza
While the perpetrators of Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland

B Song

Balloons

Blueberry Pancakes

Bike *

Beautiful Morning

*Actually a three-wheeler.

Old Mesilla

 Mesilla's San Albino has a design very similar to San Felipe de Neri in Albuquerque, but of more modest proportions.  The Plaza in front of the church was a little crowded with vendors, but it still seemed a calm and inviting place to visit on a sunny Sunday morning.  When we arrived in the Plaza the morning service was being broadcast to the neighborhood, and then the large number of parishioners in their Sunday-best began to file out, pausing to shake hands with the clergy.

  That is Margaret walking into the coffee shop across the street from the church.  The building is a thick walled adobe which was the residence of a lady named Josephine, and the shop was first known as Josephine's Gate until it got its current name recently.

The coffee and pastries are good, the large outdoor seating area is nicely shaded and the accomplished guitarist provided some nice sound as we killed an hour prior to meeting up with our daughters for lunch in Las Cruces.

Mesilla and the surrounding area was still a part of Mexico until well into  the 19th Century. Today it is about an hour north of the border.

On the previous evening we had enjoyed a family reunion dinner at Mesilla's biggest restaurant, La Posta. 

 

 

Memory

I have made several visits to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum, Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945. Thursday's visit was with my daughter from Portland and her spouse.  It is quite an extraordinary show, with many very well known artists from that fraught period of the history of Germany and the World.  Many of the paintings and sculptures had been displayed in a large 1930s exhibit of works the Nazis called Degenerate Art.  As we left the gallery I recounted my experience of viewing the exhibition for the first time a few weeks earlier.

I was pleased on that first visit to find examples of the work of Paul Klee.

Ships Departing by Paul Klee

Klee had been a favorite from the time I was a child.  I was very taken by his use of color in his abstract compositions.  I particularly remembered a picture of his depicting a reclining nude in a rainforest setting.  

When I got home I searched the Web for that particular picture I remembered with such fondness. It came as quite a surprise that no such painting by Klee seems to exist. Looking around at the work of other artists of the same period I decided that what I thought I remembered as a work by Klee was probably The Dream, painted in 1910 by Henri Rousseau.

So, a very long-held and cherished memory was a very poor representation of reality.  It got me thinking about what memories consist of, how they are stored and recalled, and what unreliable records they often are.  One of the things that distinguishes this particular memory is that it was possible for me to test its accuracy.  Many -- perhaps most -- memories are not so easily verified or refuted. 

"Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies." - Julio Cortázar