Stalin, Putin, and Ukraine: A History of Cultural Genocide

 Perversely, a blessing can become a curse.  Ukraine is endowed with some of the best soil on Earth.  That has not led to peace and prosperity.  Rather, it has made it a target of opportunity for some of the nastiest people the world has ever produced: Hitler, Stalin, and Putin.  Timothy Snider provides some background for the current warfare between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine in his historical masterpiece Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  Many soldiers would be killed in the wartime battles in the regions separating /Russia and Germany, but even more innocent civilians would die because of the policies imposed by Stalin and Hitler.

“In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people.  The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.  During the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism (1933-1938), the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland (1939-1941), and then the German-Soviet war (1941-1945), mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region.  The victims were chiefly Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Balts, the peoples native to these lands.  The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power.  Though their homelands became battlefields midway through this period, these people were all victims of murderous policy rather than casualties of war.”

“The lands of today’s Ukraine were at the center of both Stalinist and Nazi killing policies throughout the era of mass killing.  Some 3.5 million people fell victim to Stalinist killing policies between 1933 and 1938, and then another 3.5 million to German killing policies between 1941 and 1944.  Perhaps three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in combat or as an indirect consequence of the war.”

In the early 1930s both Hitler and Stalin were formulating their long-term plans and Ukraine was a central focus for both.  Hitler, ever mindful of the near starvation suffered by the Germans during The Great War, saw Ukraine and its fertile land as the reason for waging war.  His plan included capturing all the productive farmland east of Germany, starving to death or transporting to Siberia the resident populations, save for necessary agricultural workers who would be used as slaves.  German farmers would move in and take control.  Meanwhile, Stalin needed export products to gain the money needed to buy the machinery and tools necessary to make his nation a modern power.  Due to the depression, Europe was a hungry continent, and the agricultural produce of Ukraine was critical to his plan.

“For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food.  It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image.  Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil, and its millions of agricultural workers.  In 1933, Ukrainians would die in the millions in the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world.  This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end.  In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war.  The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered.  During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.”

It is important to recognize what Stalin did to Ukraine because it is eerily similar to what Putin is now doing to Ukraine: be willing to destroy a nation and its peoples in order to create a new cultural entity..

After the first world war sections of western Ukraine became a part of Poland.  Stalin considered Poland to be a western enemy and the former Ukrainians a potential threat to the Soviet nations.  Nevertheless, Ukrainian farmers thrived initially through the 1920s as they were left alone as they worked their lands.  But given the dedication to communism, this could not go on indefinitely.  Stalin’s five-year plan of 1928 called for massive amounts of Soviet agricultural produce to be exported and for that production to take place on collectivized farms.

“Collectivization had to mean a great confrontation between the largest group within Soviet society, the peasantry, and the Soviet state and its police, then known as the OGPU.  Anticipating this struggle, Stalin had ordered in 1929 the most massive deployment of state power in Soviet history.  The labor of building socialism, said Stalin, would be like ‘raising the ocean.’  That December he announced that ‘kulaks’ would be ‘liquidated as a class’.”

The term “kulak” could be defined as needed in a given location.  It was intended to remove anyone who might impede the collectivization process.  Large farm owners and community leaders were particular targets.  Teams would be established in each location to determine who might be considered a kulak and what the punishment might be (either death or exile).  The large number of the exiled provided the opportunity to create the slave labor camps of the Gulag.

“The Gulag, which the Soviets themselves called a ‘system of concentration camps,’ began alongside the collectivization of agriculture and depended upon it.  It would eventually include 476 camp complexes, to which some eighteen million people would be sentenced, of whom between a million and a half and three million would die during their periods of incarceration.  The free peasant became the slave laborer, engaged in the construction of the giant canals, mines, and factories that Stalin believed would modernize the Soviet Union.”

The last crop before collectivization was implemented, the last crop sowed by free men and women, would set a standard that could never be met again in the future.  The peasant population would pay for this failure.  Nowhere was the disappointment greater than in Ukraine, and nowhere was the punishment so severe.

“The weather was unusually fine that summer.  The crop of 1930 in Ukraine set a standard that could not be met in 1931, even if collectivized agriculture were as efficient as individual farming, which it was not.  The bumper crop of 1930 provided the baseline number that the party used to plan requisitions for 1931.  Moscow expected far more from Ukraine than Ukraine could possibly give.”

“By autumn 1931 the failure of the first collectivized harvest was obvious.  The reasons were many: the weather was poor; pests were a problem; animal power was limited because peasants had sold or slaughtered livestock; the production of tractors was far less than anticipated; the best farmers had been deported; sowing and reaping were disrupted by collectivization; and peasants who had lost their land saw no reason to work very hard.”

Laying the fault on the collectivization process could not happen.  It had to be the fault of the Ukrainian peasants.  Either they were hiding food crop from the government, or they were in a counterrevolutionary revolt, or they were actively supporting espionage in concert with their countrymen residing in enemy Poland.  Crackdowns on the freedom of the Ukrainian peasant would follow even though government officials were aware of starvations occurring. 

“Stalin…offered his closest collaborators the theory that collectivization was missing only the correct legal basis.  Socialism, he claimed, just like capitalism, needed laws to protect property.  The state would be strengthened if all agricultural production was declared to be state property, and unauthorized collection of food deemed theft, and such theft made punishable by immediate execution.  Thus a starving peasant could be shot if he picked up a potato peel from a furrow in land that until recently had been his own.  Perhaps Stalin really did think that this could work; the result, of course, was the removal of any legal protection that peasants may have had from the full violence of the triumphant state.  The simple possession of food was presumptive evidence of a crime.  The law came into force on 7 August 1932.”

Laws must be enforced.  Bands of state representatives would descend on the lands where the peasants lived like an occupying army with the mission of finding the food that was being hidden and the permission to punish the offenders.

“The communist party in Soviet Ukraine, though disproportionately Russian and Jewish in its membership, now included many young Ukrainians who believed that the countryside was reactionary and were eager to join in campaigns against peasants.”

“Watchtowers went up in the fields to keep peasants from taking anything for themselves.  In the Odessa region alone, more than seven hundred watchtowers were constructed.  Brigades went from hut to hut, five thousand youth organization members among their member, seizing everything they could find…The brigades took everything that resembled food, including supper from the stove, which they ate themselves.”

The behavior of these brigades resembles the reported behavior of today’s Russian occupying army in Ukraine.  It is as if Stalin has returned to power.

“Like an invading army the party activists lived off the land, taking what they could and eating their fill. With little to show for their work and enthusiasm but misery and death.  Perhaps from feelings of guilt, perhaps from feelings of triumph, they humiliated the peasants wherever they went.  They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport, or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray.  Women caught stealing on one collective farm were stripped, beaten, and carried naked through the village.  In one village the brigade got drunk in one peasant’s hut and gang-raped his daughter.  Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations—and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated.  This was the triumph of Stalin’s law and Stalin’s state.”

Stalin was unhappy and distrustful of the Ukrainian peasants.  They, though starving, continued to provide him with food—enough to feed themselves and contribute to export markets, but Stalin was determined to make them suffer even more because they threatened his view of a docile Soviet nation, one that still harbored nationalist aspirations.

“In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.  He shifted to a position of pure malice, where the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he, Stalin, the victim…It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.”

In the fall of 1932, Stalin would institute regulations that would ensure that Ukrainian peasants would die of starvation.  The following were the main measures.

“On 18 November 1932, peasants in Ukraine were required to return grain advances that they had previously earned by meeting grain requisition targets.  This meant that the few localities where peasants had had good yields were deprived of what little surplus they had earned.”

“Two days later, on 20 November 1932, a meat penalty was introduced.  Peasants who were unable to meet grain quotas were now required to pay a special tax in meat.  Peasants who still had livestock were now forced to surrender it to the state.  Cattle and swine had been a last reserve against starvation.”

Stalin would distribute just enough food to the cities to keep people there alive.  He distributed none to the peasants and then forbade them from going to the cities to beg for food.

“As starvation raged throughout Ukraine in the first weeks of 1933, Stalin sealed the borders of the republic so that peasants could not flee, and closed the cities so that peasants could not beg…Stalin’s justification was that the peasant refugees were not in fact begging bread but, rather, ‘engaging in a counterrevolutionary plot,’ by serving as living propaganda for Poland and other capitalist states that wished to discredit the collective farm.”

Snyder provides this final comment on this Stalin-induced tragedy in Ukraine.

“In fall 1933, in villages across Soviet Ukraine the harvest was brought in by Red Army soldiers, communist party activists, workers and students.  Forced to work even as they died, starving peasants had put down crops in spring 1933 that they would not live to harvest.  Resettlers came from Soviet Russia to take over houses and villages, and saw that first they would have to remove the bodies of the previous inhabitants.  Often the rotten corpses fell apart in their hands.  Sometimes the newcomers would then return home, finding that no amount of scrubbing and painting could quite remove the stench.  Yet sometimes they stayed.  Ukraine’s ‘ethnographic material,’ as one Soviet official told an Italian diplomat, had been altered…the demographic balance in Soviet Ukraine shifted in favor of Russians.” 

Was it ever Stalin’s intention to eliminate from Soviet Ukraine those people who might wish they rather owned their property in a capitalist democracy to the west?  If so, it makes Putin’s motives, actions, and methods in 2022 nearly identical to those of Stalin in 1932.  Captured Ukrainian nationalists, according to reports, are being treated like the kulaks of Stalin’s era—either killed, imprisoned, or exiled to the Russian hinterlands.  Ukraine’s agricultural production is again being stolen from its farmers by Russians.  Putin is destroying Ukrainian infrastructure wherever he can reach it, and “Russifying” the occupied regions.

Both Stalin and Putin had the motive of converting Ukraine from what it was into something it didn’t wish to be.  In Putin’s case, a healthy democracy with western ties and eventually a better living standard than Russia can provide is an intolerable affront.  All countries must have lower living standards than Russia or there is no justification for his rule and his methods.  In his view, the current Ukraine must die and go away forever.

That sure sounds like cultural genocide to me.  Ukraine has suffered enough at the hands of the Russians.  It is time for the Russians to suffer at the hands of the Ukrainians.  The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy war for the US and western Europe.  Putin must be defeated.  The US and Europe must not be cowardly.

 

The Covid Pandemic Has Been Terrible, but We Do Not Yet Know How Terrible

 Most of the world seems to have decided that they can live with the covid virus and its multiple variants.  Infection rates rise and fall as new variants appear, people continue to die, but at a relatively low rate, and vaccines appear to provide considerable protection from severe illness for the infections that do occur.  The issue of whether to wear a mask is mostly left to the individual to decide.  Many people feel comfortable returning to their pre-pandemic lifestyles.  The assumption seems to be that while the virus is not going away, we will learn to live with it, much like we live with flu viruses or those of the common cold.  A combination of vaccines and improved natural immunity that will follow from multiple infections over years will reduce the virus to a nuisance not a threat.  Basically, the conclusion is that if we are not likely to die or be severely sick during an infection, then why worry? However, there is at least one country that has decided to follow a different path: China.  China seems to have decided to worry—about something.

The initial outbreak occurred in China.  Severe measures were taken to suppress the epidemic with considerable success.  For a long time, China was smug about how it had controlled the situation.  Similar measures also worked well whenever new cases were encountered.  China appeared to have an effective approach, but one that less powerful governments would have difficulty imposing on their citizens.  As a result, many countries would impose restrictions until lower infection rates were attained but reimpose them when inevitably a resurgence would occur.  These less intrusive tactics were deemed justified by the appearance of effective vaccines that brought us to where we are today.  China’s approach became more complicated as newer variants became more transmissible and containment of an outbreak required even more draconian restrictions.  At present China is placing entire populous cities into a complete lockdown with citizens unable to leave their homes while the virus is causing infections.

People question China’s strategy because it is extremely stressing to its own people and to its economy.  Shock waves to China’s productivity propagate throughout the world.  Most pundits question the wisdom of the approach and suggest a failure of leadership.  Xi Jinping is accused being unwilling to admit that his “zero-covid” policy was overkill, so he stubbornly continues to stick with a failed policy.  That contention may prove correct, but just because most experts disagree with China does not demonstrate that China is wrong.  Perhaps experts’ time might be better spent wondering if there could possibly be reasons why China’s strict approach might be the appropriate solution in the longer term.

Let us consider some of the data finally being released.  And let us also consider that China, with its intrusive policies, might have been just as aggressive in evaluating the virus and its consequences much earlier in the pandemic.  Could China have discovered something to worry about?

Before the covid virus spread worldwide and became a pandemic, much could have been deduced about the threat it was becoming from previous experiences with other versions such as the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.  Consider the article Here’s what coronavirus does to the body published early on in February, 2020.  It clearly warns that the virus would threaten the respiratory system of a patient and would also likely spread widely to other organs where it would be able to reproduce and cause damages.  This claim was based on observations with the earlier versions as well as data from early covid-19 patients. 

“Such has been the nature of past zoonotic coronaviruses, ones that hopped from animals to humans like SARS and MERS. Unlike their common-cold-causing cousins, these emergent coronaviruses can spark a viral-induced fire throughout many of a person’s organs, and the new disease—dubbed ‘COVID-19’ by the World Health Organization—is no exception…”

Covid is foremost a respiratory disease.  So much so that the standard test for the disease is to search for evidence of the virus in the sinus passages.  One worries about infection if symptoms appear in the respiratory system.  If the symptoms disappear and the virus is not found with a nasal swab, the patient is assumed cured and returns to normal life, or at least tries to.  Medical personnel observe non-respiratory symptoms in covid patients, as one would expect if the virus is capable of spreading to organs throughout the body.  Occasionally these symptoms are severe, but usually they are minor compared to issues with the lungs and receive relatively little attention.  It soon became evident that many “cured” patients were complaining about lingering health conditions.  These cases have been dubbed incidences of “long covid” and the invasion of multiple body organs by the virus is the prime suspect.  It has also been learned that the incidence of long covid is unrelated to the severity of the covid infection.  One can suffer from the condition without even realizing one had been infected with covid.

The UK seems to be the country most interested in tracking the long-covid issue.  The Economist reported on findings in April 2021: Researchers are closing in on long covid: The results are alarming.  The condition is difficult to identify with precision because the symptoms are many with sufferers often claiming multiple conditions.

“There are, indeed, many of them. A survey of almost 3,800 people around the world reported 205. A sufferer typically has several at a time, with the most debilitating usually being one of three: severe breathlessness, fatigue or ‘brain fog’.”

Many sufferers become patients demanding relief as their ability to function properly damages their lifestyles and diminishes their capability to perform at work.  The indication is that these patients could be a severe long-term burden on healthcare systems in addition to the normal pandemic burden.

“Britain’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that 14% of people who have tested positive for covid-19 have symptoms which subsequently linger for more than three months…In more than 90% of those cases the original symptoms were not severe enough to warrant admission to hospital.”

“At the time when the ONS collected those data, at least 1.1% of Britain’s population, including 1.5% of working-age adults, reported symptoms dragging on for three months or longer. Multiply that by the hundreds of millions around the world who have been infected at some point by SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, and a public-health catastrophe may be in the making. In the short term, it was only right that effort focused on dealing with the acute disease. Today covid-19’s chronic after-effects also need to be considered.”

These early studies relied on patient-reported symptoms causing many to wonder if the reporting was accurate.  Could these figures be an exaggeration of reality?  The UK recently came out with another study: Clinical characteristics with inflammation profiling of Long-COVID and association with one-year recovery following hospitalisation in the UK: a prospective observational study.  This was essentially a survey of people who were hospitalized and recovered from their initial covid infection   At five months and at one year, these people were asked about their recovery.  This approach suggested that the count of people claiming lingering symptoms was vastly underestimated with only about a quarter of the people claiming full recovery.  Apparently, many people feel lingering effects but not all request medical assistance.

“2320 participants have been assessed at five months after discharge and 807 participants have completed both five-month and one-year visits. Of these, 35·6% were female, mean age 58·7 (SD 12·5) years, and 27·8% received invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). The proportion of patients reporting full recovery was unchanged between five months 501/1965 (25·5%) and one year 232/804 (28·9%).” 

“The sequelae [consequences] of a hospital admission with COVID-19 remain substantial one year after discharge across a range of health domains with the minority in our cohort feeling fully recovered. Patient perceived health-related quality of life remains reduced at one year compared to pre-hospital admission.” 

Much of the data accumulated is from the pre-vaccine era.  This source suggests that while vaccines limit infections somewhat, the incidence of long covid seems to persist at a similar rate.

“Vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID by lowering the chances of contracting COVID-19 in the first place. But for those who do experience a breakthrough infection, studies suggest that vaccination might only halve the risk of long COVID — or have no effect on it at all.”

One might also wonder if children are safe from long covid.  They are not.  Consider this article from Bloomberg Businessweek: The Children Left Behind by Long Covid.

 “The U.S. and the world are trying to move on from Covid-19. Everyone is tired of even thinking about it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has effectively given up on trying to impose collective measures to control the virus. Even people who’ve been vigilant are ditching their masks. And, yet again, cases are rising in the U.S.”

“More cases will mean more long Covid, including pediatric long Covid. Estimates of the number of children who face long-term symptoms are far from precise, but they probably range from 5% to 10% of those infected with the virus, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious diseases expert at Columbia University… Even at the lower end of the estimates, that translates to more than a half-million children of the 13 million so far infected. (Studies of infected adults indicate that an estimated 10% to 30% may have long Covid.)”

There is a report from the National Institutes of Health providing detailed information on how the virus distributes itself through the body of infected people and can persist for long periods: SARS-CoV-2 infection and persistence throughout the human body and brain.  This was determined by performing autopsies on people who died from covid or were infected by covid while dying from some other cause.  It demonstrates that while the virus may not always appear active in the various organs, it remains capable of reproducing itself, suggesting it is active at a lower level than in the respiratory system or it is latent and could become active at a later time.

“COVID-19 is known to cause multi-organ dysfunction in acute infection, with prolonged symptoms experienced by some patients, termed Post-Acute Sequelae of SARSCoV-2 (PASC). However, the burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance is not well characterized, particularly in the brain. We performed complete autopsies on 44 patients with COVID-19 to map and quantify SARS-CoV-2 distribution, replication, and cell-type specificity across the human body, including brain, from acute infection through over seven months following symptom onset. We show that SARS-CoV-2 is widely distributed, even among patients who died with asymptomatic to mild COVID-19, and that virus replication is present in multiple pulmonary and extrapulmonary tissues early in infection. Further, we detected persistent SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including regions throughout the brain, for up to 230 days following symptom onset. Despite extensive distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in the body, we observed a paucity of inflammation or direct viral cytopathology outside of the lungs. Our data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for months.”

“Overall, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in respiratory tissue of 43/44 cases (97.7%); cardiovascular tissue of 35/44 cases (79.5%); lymphoid tissue of 38/44 cases (86.4%); gastrointestinal tissue of 32/44 (72.7%); renal and endocrine tissue of 28/44 cases (63.6%); reproductive tissue in 17/40 cases (42.5%); muscle, skin, adipose, and peripheral nervous tissue in 30/44 cases (68.2%); ocular tissue and humors of 22/28 cases (57.9%); and brain tissue in 10/11 cases (90.9%).”

“Finally, a major contribution of our work is a greater understanding of the duration and locations at which SARS-CoV-2 can persist. While the respiratory tract was the most common location in which SARS-CoV-2 RNA tends to linger, ≥50% of late cases also had persistence in the myocardium, thoracic cavity lymph nodes, tongue, peripheral nerves, ocular tissue, and in all sampled areas of the brain, except the dura mater.”

And then the authors leave the reader with this thought over which to ponder. 

“Interestingly, despite having much lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in early cases compared to respiratory tissues, we found similar levels between pulmonary and the extrapulmonary tissue categories in late cases. This less efficient viral clearance in extrapulmonary tissues is perhaps related to a less robust innate and adaptive immune response outside the respiratory tract.” 

What do these various sources tell us?  The vaccines at our disposal do not eliminate infections.  Consequently, the number of vaccinated who become infected will continue to be significant no matter how high the vaccination rate is.  With current relaxed restrictions, eventually everyone would be infected at least once with many infected multiple times.  If 10 to 30 percent of those having been infected now have long-term aftereffects, that number could rise beyond 100 million in the US.  A significant fraction of these would be seeking medical attention and unable to perform in our economy.  This would be a catastrophe.

What do these sources not tell us?  We should be doing autopsies of people who contracted covid and recovered and then went on to die from some other condition.  We should be particularly interested in long-covid sufferers to evaluate the viral load that might persist in multiple organs and how it varies with time.  We don’t yet know for sure if long covid is caused by damages caused by the initial infection or by the persistence of the virus in parts of out bodies, or both.  Could the virus find areas in our bodies where it can lie dormant for long periods and then be reactivated at some time in the future.  We older people are well aware that a chicken pox infection as a child can reappear as a nasty case of shingles in our senior years.

If China’s response is considered extreme in terms of excess restrictions on life, ours in the US is also extreme in the lack of restrictions and in the willingness to let infections propagate to the entire population.  How can we relax restrictions before we know what is going on?

 

The Supreme Court Must Protect Us from Our Constitution’s Failures: Keep Roe v Wade

Nearly a decade ago I encountered a book that forever changed my understanding of the US legal system.  That find was The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz.  His writing moved me to write an article titled The Death of Justice and the Tyranny of Law.  It is now a week since the publication of a draft opinion by Samuel Alito that indicated the Supreme Court was about to overturn the fifty-year-old Roe v Wade decision.  Such a momentous decision, it seemed, could only arise from what Stuntz deemed one of the most serious faults of our Constitution: the lack of constitutional protection for our individual freedoms in the face of intrusive government legislation.

Stuntz defines two types of criminal laws.  The first are substantive in nature: defining acts that are deemed criminal and the penalties that can be imposed for this behavior.  The second are procedural in that they define which types of actions are available to policing agencies as they try to assign guilt or prevent crimes.  It would seem that a constitution would have to address the restrictions on both types of laws.  He provides an interesting comparison of the US Bill of Rights (1789) and the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).  Only eleven weeks separated the introduction of these two documents, yet they were startlingly different in their focus.

The French focused on protecting citizens from the imposition of unjust or unreasonable laws.  Their document included phrases that would thrill libertarians today.

“Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others....” 

“The law has the right to forbid only such actions as are injurious to society....” 

“Every man being presumed innocent until he has been pronounced guilty, if it is thought indispensible to arrest him, all severity that may not be necessary to secure his person ought to be strictly suppressed by law.”

The Bill of Rights, on the other hand, focused almost entirely on procedural matters, leaving legislators the power to do to people almost anything they wished.

“Procedure dominates these texts.  Save for the First Amendment’s protection of speech and religion, nothing in the Bill of Rights limits legislators’ ability to criminalize whatever they wish.  Save for the mild constraints of the Eighth Amendment [cruel and unusual punishments], nothing in the Bill limits the severity of criminal punishment.”

To fully understand the Roe v Wade decision, one must realize that the case came up at a time when legal abortion was not available for most people.  Consequently, women who wished an abortion generally had to resort to illegal means.  The result was a bloodbath where so many women were being injured or killed that many religious organizations recognized that something had to be done.  The Court came up with a compromise that allowed abortion to be legal before the time in the pregnancy when the fetus became viable: 24 to 28 weeks.  To provide women this freedom from existing laws, the justices had to search for a justification.  They chose to identify a “Right to Privacy” as a means.  The Constitution nowhere indicates a right to privacy.  However, the Ninth Amendment does have a bit of a crack through which rights can be gained or maintained.

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The “Liberty Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment can also be of occasional use. 

“No State shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

This Ninth seems to say that even if there is no explicit right specified in the Constitution, if that right already exists, it cannot be assumed that that right can be taken away.  However, this document, as are most amendments in the Bill of Rights, is so terse as to be subject to multiple interpretations.  

The Roe v Wade decision has been in place for about 50 years—two generations.  Does that qualify the right to an abortion as being a right “retained by the people?”  As usual, the Constitution is of no help, meaning that decision is determined by the biases of those who have the right to make such judgements.  Alito’s draft does not seem to attack the privacy right directly, only the abortion right, and that because he and his allies deem it to not have been in place long enough to satisfy them.  Alito claims that this decision would only void the right to abortion, but then, chillingly, proceeds to list things that he claims are not included such as rights to use contraceptives, for sex between persons of the same sex, for marriage between persons of the same sex, and marriage between members of different races.

Recognizing the biases of the justices presumably ready to overturn Roe, one must fear that almost any right attained in the last century could be taken away.  The limited right to abortion that has been in place is quite popular.  A large majority of citizens do not want the law changed, but that seems to be of no consequence. 

What then can angry citizens do?  They can take to the streets and let everyone know that they are madder than hell and intend to vote out of office anyone who is not on their side.  And then threaten to take away the extreme privileges that the Supreme Court justices have garnered for themselves.  Of course, the antiabortion people will take to the streets as well and make their own threats.  The only way out of the situation is if the justices become so afraid of what they have unleashed that they decide to back down and quit fomenting civil wars.

  

Severe Weather Is Increasing in the US because of Climate Change

 Watching the collection of network news programs, one is struck by the rate at which severe weather events or threats of severe weather are presented.  Almost daily, there are weather maps with various bright colors indicating potential flooding, tornadoes, blizzards, and such.  Is this a change in reporting strategy, or is climate change really causing dramatic changes in weather patterns?  When global warming first became a news topic, it seemed that noticeable changes might be expected on a century timeframe.  Now it appears that change is coming much more rapidly.  Is the rate of change down to the decade scale, or is it even quicker than that? 

A quick survey of easily available data provides some insight.  Since carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver for warming, one should realize that for all the talk of carbon reduction there is little indication that the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has been altered.  It continues to rise at an increasing rate.  Consider data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This chart accounts for other greenhouse gases by converting their various effects into CO2 equivalences.

This presents a more precise picture and suggests greenhouse gases continue to increase but perhaps at a slightly slower rate.

The effect of global warming is to produce air and water possessing more energy.  Warmer air can hold more moisture and warmer oceans can produce that additional moisture.  With more energy and moisture available one would expect more extreme weather events.  The EPA provides a short summary of several observable weather features over time.

“U.S. and Global Temperature. Average temperatures have risen across the contiguous 48 states since 1901, with an increased rate of warming over the past 30 years. Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Average global temperatures show a similar trend, and all of the top 10 warmest years on record worldwide have occurred since 2005. Within the United States, temperatures in parts of the North, the West, and Alaska have increased the most. “

“Seasonal Temperature.  As the Earth warms overall, average temperatures increase throughout the year, but the increases may be larger in certain seasons than in others. Since 1896, average winter temperatures across the contiguous 48 states have increased by nearly 3°F. Spring temperatures have increased by about 2°F, while summer and fall temperatures have increased by 1.4°F. “ 

“High and Low Temperatures. Many extreme temperature conditions are becoming more common. Since the 1970s, unusually hot summer days (highs) have become more common over the last few decades in the United States. Unusually hot summer nights (lows) have become more common at an even faster rate. This trend indicates less “cooling off” at night. Although the United States has experienced many winters with unusually low temperatures, unusually cold winter temperatures have become less common—particularly very cold nights (lows). Record-setting daily high temperatures have become more common than record lows.”

“Heat Waves.   Heat waves are occurring more than they used to in major cities across the United States. Heat waves are occurring three times more often than they did in the 1960s—about six per year compared with two per year. The average heat wave season is 47 days longer, and individual heat waves are lasting longer and becoming more intense. “

The following chart illustrates the significant decade-by-decade changes observed in heat wave data. 

“U.S. and Global Precipitation.  Total annual precipitation has increased over land areas in the United States and worldwide. Since 1901, precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.1 inches per decade over land areas worldwide. However, shifting weather patterns have caused certain areas, such as the Southwest, to experience less precipitation than usual.”

“Heavy Precipitation.  In recent years, a higher percentage of precipitation in the United States has come in the form of intense single-day events. The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events remained fairly steady between 1910 and the 1980s but has risen substantially since then. Nationwide, nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1996. The occurrence of abnormally high annual precipitation totals (as defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has also increased.”

“Tropical Cyclone Activity.  Tropical storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico has increased during the past 20 years. Storm intensity, a measure of strength, duration, and frequency, is closely related to variations in sea surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic and has risen noticeably during that time. However, changes in observation methods over time make it difficult to know for sure whether a longer-term increase in storm activity has occurred. Records collected since the late 1800s suggest that the actual number of hurricanes per year has not increased.”

“River Flooding.  Increases and decreases in the frequency and magnitude of river flood events vary by region. Floods have generally become larger across parts of the Northeast and Midwest and smaller in the West, southern Appalachia, and northern Michigan. Large floods have become more frequent across the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and parts of the northern Great Plains, and less frequent in the Southwest and the Rockies.”

“Drought.  Average drought conditions across the nation have varied over time. The 1930s and 1950s saw the most widespread droughts, while the last 50 years have generally been wetter than average.  Specific trends vary by region, as the West has generally experienced more drought while the Midwest and Northeast have become wetter. A more detailed index developed recently shows that over the period from 2000 through 2020, roughly 20 to 70 percent of the U.S. land area experienced conditions that were at least abnormally dry at any given time. However, this index has not been in use for long enough to compare with historical drought patterns.”

One of the weather features most observable and most newsworthy is the incidence of tornadoes.  It was not covered by the EPA report, but this source provided annual incidence data over the period 1950-2020.  The number of tornadoes observed is low in the early years, gradually increasing until about 1990.  Over that period from 1950 to 1990, the annual average of observed tornadoes was 710.  Over the period 1990-2020, the annual average was 1229.  The incidence rate was higher and rather flat suggesting that the differences may be due to more precise detection and recording methods rather than an actual increase in rate.  Another source provided a more interesting way to look at tornado data as it relates to climate change.

“Annual tornado activity from 1955 to 2013.  The black squares represent the number of days per year with a tornado classified as a E(F1) or greater, and the black line and circles represents the decade’s average number of tornado days.  The red triangles represent the number of days per year that had more than 30 tornadoes classified as (E)F1 or greater, while the red line and circles represent the decade’s average number of tornado outbreaks.”

The number of days when a tornado was observed began falling after about 1975.  This may indicate that the number of storms that are generated and propagate across the nation has decreased as well.  What has changed is the number of incidences when a storm condition can generate 30 or more tornadoes in a single day.  Perhaps there is some sort of threshold of energy and/or moisture content that more easily generates tornadoes.  The annual tornado incidence data could be interpreted as an increase in these multiple tornado events as the world became warmer.

There is another way to look at weather severity.  “Follow the money” is usually productive advice.  This source provides tabulations of costs of severe weather events over the period 1980-2020.  The annual cost (in billions of dollars) from severe weather incidents, averaged over a decade, increased from 18.4 in the 1980s, to 28.48 in the 1990s, to 53.98 in the 2000s, to 84.5 in the 2010s.  Those costs are growing at a greater than inflation rate, suggesting that climate change is providing more destructive and costly events.  It is even more ominous to tally the maximum damage cost of any year within a decade.  That quantity increases from 45 in the 1980s to 65 in the 1990s, to 235 in the 2000s, to 330 in the 2010s.

Yes, it appears that climate change is increasing weather severity, and the severities are increasing from decade to decade.  The data is not able to indicate definitively that the rate of change is accelerating, but it would not be surprising if it was. 

Climate change is no longer an issue that can be put off to the next generation.  It is happening now and it is getting worse.