US Police are Third Highest Worldwide Military Expenditures
Following only China and the US military | #TC93
Welcome to Third Cultured – a foreign policy and LGBTQIA+ politics newsletter – published by yours truly, Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight the unique role Queer people play in the politics of the United States and the world-at-large.
Third Cultured is available to all but, as Austin Kleon says, "This newsletter is free, but not cheap.” If you’re able, support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber!
This edition:
Commentary
Stories to Watch
Commentary
As if tensions weren’t high enough with the Derek Chauvin trial, a 26-year veteran of the force named Kimberly A. Potter shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year old Black man, not even 10-miles away from the very courthouse where Chauvin’s murder trial is ongoing.
Within hours, the police station was surrounded by protesters where they clashed with officers in riot gear, stun grenades, tear gas, and finally the Minnesota National Guard.
This isn’t surprising from the nation that spends more on policing than every nation other than China. (Graphic: Speaking Security)
In another part of the Midwest, Michigan is handling a fourth COVID surge and, rather than get its citizens to follow basic guidelines, the governor is trying (and failing) to increase the amount of vaccines sent to her state. How will having more vaccines make the crazy folks in Michigan – the people willing to kidnap and do lord knows what to their governor – take a shot they’re not interested in receiving?
On the international front, things are on a tear so far this week with:
a new (and symbolic) Afghanistan withdrawal deadline: 9/11/2021, bringing America’s longest war to a 20 year close;
a response from Iran that it’ll be enriching uranium to 60% in response to apparent Israeli attack (a nuclear weapon requires 90%);
a proposed summit with Russia in a third country to discuss "the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia”;
a threat from Russia toward US warships heading to the Black Sea to turn around “for their own good”;
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will review and vote on a bipartisan “countering China” bill on April 14;
25 Chinese aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Monday, including fighter jets and nuclear-capable bombers.
World tensions are in full-blown spring fever, and it’s only getting hotter by the day.
Stay safe and healthy, beautiful people. And, thanks for reading.
xoxo,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some great reads worth your time.
A gay priest and a queer fitness instructor with a strong interest in social justice log on to Zoom. (Washington Post)
America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses (The Atlantic)
The use of the phrase a nation of immigrants to describe America first appeared in the late 1890s, in the Congressional Record, according to Donna Gabaccia, a scholar at the University of Toronto. It was used only sparingly until the 1950s, when it was popularized during the movement to broaden the label of white to include a more diverse group of Europeans. Mae Ngai notes that in 1958 John F. Kennedy, himself the descendant of Irish immigrants, published a book called A Nation of Immigrants that included only two paragraphs on Asian and Latino immigration. To call America a nation of immigrants is not wrong, either as a factual statement or an evocation of American myth. But that fact coexists with this one: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in.
Ancient Greece’s Army of Lovers (The New Yorker)
The unit to which those men belonged was known as the Sacred Band. Comprising three hundred warriors from the city of Thebes, it was among the most fearsome fighting forces in Greece, undefeated until it was wiped out at the Battle of Chaeronea, in 338 B.C.—an engagement during which Philip of Macedon and his son, the future Alexander the Great, crushed a coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes. Scholars see Chaeronea as the death knell of the Classical Era of Greek history.
Others might find the story interesting for different reasons. Not the least of these is that the Band was composed entirely of lovers: precisely a hundred and fifty couples, whose valor, so the Greeks thought, was due to the fact that no man would ever exhibit cowardice or act dishonorably in front of his beloved. In Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue about love, a character remarks that an army made up of such lovers would “conquer all mankind.”
An Afro-Indigenous Approach to Agriculture and Food Security (Civil Eats)
Belt and Road Initiative in the 14th Five Year Plan: an explainer (PPDC)
Bessemer Amazon Union Vote: We Learn as We Struggle! (Southern Worker)
Blowout in Bessemer: A Postmortem on the Amazon Campaign (The Nation)
Like explaining, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to pay dues in Alabama,” working a campaign from the vantage point of the plant gate is another tactic that successful organizers never use. Why? Because the employer is watching. That holds for all employers, let alone Amazon‚—a company that actually develops surveillance systems. The last thing nervous workers want is to be seen near the place they work, talking with union supporters. Successful campaigns require house calls—unannounced physical visits to workers’ homes so the conversation can be had away from the company’s watchful eye. In an interview in The American Prospect, an organizer in the Amazon campaign explained that they were not house-calling, because of the Covid pandemic. But in a hard-to-win campaign, you should put on a mask, ring the doorbell, have your sanitizer dangling from your chest or in your hands so it’s obvious, and step back and engage the worker, socially distanced but securely.
Bravery, Not Blowout (Against the Current)
Can we fall in love completely without completely losing ourselves? (Crush)
China’s Exit to Year Zero (Palladium)
Feel Right at Home: A sixth-generation Texan returns to a beloved landscape to endear her husband to her home state (Texas Monthly)
Haphephobia by Olly Nze (The Audacity)
Hidden Wealth: Abraham Lincoln imagines a mineral-based recovery act (Lapham’s Quarterly)
HIV Vaccine Closer Than Ever After New Trials Show Promising Results (them.)
Homeless in the Shadow of Apple’s $5 Billion Campus (OneZero)
how come these ghosts is white? (sweater weather)
Interview: Noam Chomsky (TK News)
Joe Manchin beats his chest for D.C. elites while struggling W. Va. waits for help (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Putin, oil, Sechin, Ukraine: delaying the energy transition? (China-Russia Report)
Return the National Parks to the Tribes (The Atlantic)
More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.
We live in a time of historical reconsideration, as more and more people recognize that the sins of the past still haunt the present. For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend—and protect and preserve—these favored gardens again.
Comment: I am for this with every fiber of my being! The moment I saw the First Nations seal at the Grand Canyon, I immediately wondered why every national park wasn’t stewarded by local tribes.
Silicon Valley Is Flooding Into a Reluctant Austin (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The Blue Arctic and the World-Island (Real Clear Defense)
Mackinder wrote the book as a follow-up to his 1904 paper "The Geographical Pivot of History," in which he identified the northern-central core of Eurasia as the "pivot state" of world politics. In that 1904 paper, he warned that a hostile power or alliance of powers in control of the "pivot state" could extend its political reach across Eurasia and use the vase human and natural resources of the great continent to build a navy that could overwhelm the world's insular powers (i.e., Britain and the United States).
In Democratic Ideals and Reality, which was written at the end of the First World War, Mackinder expanded his geostrategic worldview. He renamed the “pivot state” the “Heartland.” More importantly, he developed the concept of the “World-Island.” Mackinder’s “World-Island” consisted of the triple continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, which he envisioned as a single geographical concept. He called the triple-continent “this newly realized Great Island.” Strategists, he wrote, "must no longer think of Europe apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World has become insular or, in other words, a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe."
Comment: This is why the US needs to view “America” as the entire Americas, and we need to do it fast.
The Language Project (The Marshall Project)
The Language Project serves three purposes. First, through a series of powerful pieces by and about people with intimate experience with incarceration, we show the human impact of the words we choose. Second, our guide, 'What Words We Use — and Avoid — When Covering People and Incarceration,' makes public our decision to avoid labels such as 'inmate,' in favor of language that follows the logic of 'person-first' language. Third, we provide alternatives to the labels.
At its heart, journalism is a discipline of clarity. The Language Project is our attempt to set the record straight.The Making of “Midnight Cowboy,” and the Remaking of Hollywood (The New Yorker)
The Military-Photographic Complex (Systematic Hatreds)
The rise of domestic extremism in America (Washington Post)
More than a quarter of right-wing incidents and just under half of the deaths in those incidents were caused by people who showed support for white supremacy or claimed to belong to groups espousing that ideology, the analysis shows.
Victims of allincidents in recent years represent a broad cross-section of American society, including Blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, Asians and other people of color who have been attacked by right-wing extremists wielding vehicles, guns, knives and fists.The 73 far-right incidents were an all-time annual high in the CSIS database, which goes back to 1994.
These rainbow flag-waving corporations are backing the sponsors of anti-trans legislation (Popular Information)
Where America First Went Wrong on Confederate Monuments (Slate)
Why It’s So Hard for America to End Its Wars (The New Yorker)
“I think China knows that in the early stages of COVID, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to in real time give access to international experts, in real time to share information, in real time to provide real transparency. And one result of that failure is that the vaccine – the virus, excuse me – got out of hand faster and with I think much more egregious results than it might otherwise.”
– Secretary Antony J. Blinken with Chuck Todd of NBC’s “Meet the Press”
Stories to Watch
35,000: The projected number of unaccompanied minors expected to cross the southern US border by June. They’re fleeing extreme poverty and violence in Central America, particularly after two Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in November 2020. Worse still, Biden hasn’t totally overturned Trump’s refugee regulations and Joe’s administration is poised to allow in less than half (4,510) the refugees Trump did.
Beijing tops NYC: China’s capital now has more billionaires (100) than NYC (99).
Biden’s Budget: $1.52 trillion = $769 billion in non-defense spending (a 16 percent increase from the budget adopted for fiscal year 2021) + $753 billion in national defense programs (a 2 percent increase).
British Monarchy: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, died at 99.
China’s Big Tech: Beijing is reining in its tech giants by leveraging an anti-trust fine of $2.8 billion on Alibaba (4% of its 2019 revenue) and telling Ant Group to decrease the size of some of its services to lessen the “information monopoly” it has on up to 1 billion users in China. Huawei said global chip shortage is the fault of US sanctions.
Ecuador: The right-wing candidate, former banker Guillermo Lasso, won Ecuador’s presidential election against left-wing economist Andres Arauz in a runoff with 52.5%.
Iran Nuclear Program: Israel continued its escalation/provocation campaign in order to end the JCPOA for good, this time they reportedly disrupted power at Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility on Sunday which Tehran condemned as an act of “sabotage.” The US denies all involvement, but Israel knew what it was doing launching the attack while the US Secretary of Defense was visiting the nation. Iran announced it’ll be enriching uranium to 60% in response to apparent Israeli attack, its most severe violation of the 2015 JCPOA (a nuclear weapon requires 90% uranium enrichment). The US stressed it hopes the talks would continue in Vienna, but White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the “provocative Iranian announcement... calls into question Iran's seriousness.” Here’s hoping Bibi doesn’t get what he wants!
White House spokesperson Jen Psaki: “The U.S. was not involved in any manner. We have nothing to add on speculation about the causes. We are focused on the discussions that we expect to proceed this Wednesday in Vienna. We have not been given any indication about a change in participation for these discussions.”
Japan: Tokyo announced its intention to release Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific Ocean and East Asian nations are livid, China and South Korea in particular.
Luxor: Egyptian archaeologists unearthed a 3,000 year old city the week following its grand display of moving mummies through Cairo into its new national museum.
The lost city, known as Aten, is believed to have been founded by King Amenhotep III, the ninth king of ancient Egypt’s 18th dynasty who ruled the country from 1391 to 1353 B.C., the mission’s statement said. It is believed to be the largest administrative and industrial settlement in that era, nestled on the western bank of Luxor.
Mediterranean Drama: Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator.”
Peru: Far-left labor unionist Pedro Castillo took a surprise lead (15.7%) among 18 candidates in Peru’s presidential elections. Castillo will face a likely runoff in June against the second-place finisher, right-wing economist Hernando de Soto (14.4%).
