Somaliland vs. Somilia

The New Neo Posted on by

Somaliland is in the news lately:

The new breakaway country of Somaliland is proving to be a thorn in the side of Iran and its Houthi proxies. And here’s the interesting bit; even as negotiations with the United States are underway to try to bring an end to hostilities, Somaliland’s friendliness towards the United States and Israel, and their willingness to allow U.S. basing of military assets, including at the deep-water port of Berbera, is reportedly making Iran and the Houthis feel somewhat maladjusted.

“Iran is said to be ‘deeply threatened’ by the small African breakaway state, Somaliland, because of the potential for U.S., Israeli and Western powers to use its deep water port and airbase.

“Such moves would severely disrupt Iran’s plan to use their proxy, Yemen’s Houthi terror group, to attack Red Sea shipping.”

I’ve written this previous post about Somaliland. Since then, I’ve been wondering what makes Somaliland so different from its neighbor, Somalia, and so many other states in the region. I think the answer is probably complicated and probably contains many elements of which I’m unaware. But one is probably its different colonial history; Somaliland was a British colony and Somalia was an Italian colony. This can make a world of difference.

Here’s the history; the two areas actually diverged a long time ago:

Somaliland has been a distinct region from Somalia since the late 1800s. It was a British protectorate until 1960 (meaning a dependent territory, over which the British government exercised limited jurisdiction).

It then became independent for just five days.

At this point it merged with present-day Somalia, which was then under Italian rule, beginning a long and often violent struggle.

A rebel group, the Somali National Movement (SNM), emerged in Somaliland in the 1980s. In 1991 they declared Somaliland’s independence following the ousting of the military dictator Siad Barre, whose forces had killed tens of thousands of people during civil war along ethnic, clan-based lines.

The article also says the two regions are “culturally and ethnically distinct.” But Somaliland is also extremely poor and suffering from drought.

This is from a Somaliland website:

1 July 1960, Somaliland chose to unite with Somalia with the aim of creating a “Greater Somalia” that would unite all Somalis in five countries in the Horn of Africa including Northern Kenya, Italian Somalia, French Somaliland (Djibouti), and Eastern Ethiopia.

1961: Somalia betrayed the treaty that joined it with Somaliland by passing a different Act of Union in its National Assembly. …

The people of Somaliland had no say in the making of the constitution of the new Somali Republic. In a majority of Somaliland districts the 1961 referendum on the constitution was boycotted and the constitution rejected. One legal expert commented that the legal validity of the legislative instruments establishing the union were “questionable.”

?The early years of the union saw the steady political and economic isolation of former Somaliland. Political and military positions were awarded disproportionately to “southern” Somalis. The 1961 attempted coup by a group of highly qualified Somaliland military officers was an indication of the disenchantment with the union that Somaliland had entered into.

The whole thing led to a bloody civil war, with the Somali dictatorship killing many Somalilanders. Ultimately, though, Somaliland broke away and has been fairly stable since. It’s a completely Muslim country and yet – as I wrote in my previous post – very pro-Israel.

Al Green loses his primary

The New Neo Posted on by

No great loss – except to Al Green.

This is an example of the effect of redistricting. Green would have almost certainly been a shoe-in if he was running in his old district. But he can’t do that, because his old district doesn’t exist. So he switched to another district, and was defeated in the runoff:

The race for Texas’ solidly Democratic 18th Congressional District was an incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic clash, with Green and Menefee both trying to preserve their places in Congress after redistricting altered the congressional districts around Houston.

Green has been among President Donald Trump’s fiercest critics in Congress, pursuing impeachment charges on multiple occasions against him during both of Trump’s terms. Green has been kicked out of Trump’s State of the Union addresses multiple times as well for standing up and protesting amid the speech.

The new district is not competitive for the GOP, so Menefee will almost certainly win in the general.

The Trumpian primaries and Trump’s influence

The New Neo Posted on by

The recent primaries in several states have been framed as a test of Trump’s power. But it’s a test he would be failing no matter what happened, according to the MSM, the Democrats, and other assorted Trump-haters. If his picks hadn’t won, it would have been, “Trump’s now a eunuch, a powerless has-been.” Now that they’ve won, it’s,”Trump’s a dangerously tyrannical bully, controlling everything and everybody through threats and fear.”

In reality, I don’t think it’s either. Trump is as much a reflection and result of opinions on the right as he is a shaper of those opinions. For example, I’ve been seeing significant complaints about Cornyn for quite a while online, Trump tapped into that and also probably escalated it, but it already existed.

Longer excerpt from the tweet:

Coming on top of a string of similar events, [Paxton’s win] is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force. …

There have been a lot of very determined attempts to fragment the MAGA base and attempt to drive a wedge between them and the Trumpster. I see this on X and other social media – lots of indignant blithering about Israel and the Iran war that seems very light on substance and very heavy on attempting to fracture the Republican coalition.

I don’t think it’s working. [Last night] is evidence that Trump’s endorsement matters, and the base is not kindly disposed towards any Republican pol who’s perceived as not being on his team.

Again, I think the emphasis is wrong there. Yes, there are people who don’t like GOP office-holders who are disloyal to Trump himself, and who consider Team Trump the important thing. But I think the majority of voters support Trump because of what he has done and what he plans to do – that is, his policies – rather than thinking his policies are good because they’re his. Of course,Trump’s personality isn’t separate from his actions, but it’s the latter that most MAGA people emphasize and if he started doing things that were perceived as out of line with those policies he’d be losing their support.

And yes, there are people who want to take over the MAGA movement for various nefarious reasons, including Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred. But there are others who are turning on Trump merely because they are isolationists who perceived him as promising no more wars forever, not just “no forever wars.” But I think that most people on the right understood Trump to be a Jacksonian rather than an isolationist, and see the Iran war as a Jacksonian conflict that is not only necessary but long overdue. In line with that, though, if he ends the Iran war with a bad deal, one perceived as giving away too much to Iran, many of those who have stuck with him so far may become at least somewhat disillusioned.

Also – contrary to the scare propaganda of the left – Trump isn’t going to be running for a third term. If his health holds up, which I sincerely hope it does, he’ll be in office for a little over two and a half more years. Trump’s 80th birthday is only a couple of weeks away, and if all goes well he’ll be 82 and a half on leaving the presidency. At that point, Trump will have a successor or successors. But Trump is sui generis, and there won’t be anyone quite like him again, for good or ill.

Why, we were just telling scary stories – say the climate-doomers

The New Neo Posted on by

For some reason, Now It Can Be Told:

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

So are we to conclude that author Bryan Walsh sometimes did know and yet failed to communicate that he was writing the equivalent of a Hollywood script?

As for why he’s telling the tale now, it’s a domino effect:

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

Walsh still says things will be bad, just not as bad. But why would we trust that prediction?

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100.

Walsh seems to be saying, in most of the article, that if we could predict the policy we could predict the climate. But I have always thought that’s a case of hubris. There are too many variables and too many unknowns interacting in too complex and too poorly-understood a fashion. And that’s even if you assume that scientists and journalists are always acting in good faith, which is – as they say – somewhat implausible.

“Butler was staged”

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do so many people believe the Butler assassination attempt was staged? Or that all the assassination attempts on Trump were staged?

About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged according to a new survey.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans. …

Perhaps the most striking finding was that 42% of Democrats said they believed the Butler shooting was staged.

Among independents, that figure fell to 21%, while just 7% of Republicans said the same.

My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so. There are also many people for whom most of life is lived online, watching a screen and coming to think of people as actors on that screen. The idea that these attempts were fake is one that’s spread online, and for people who believe the worst of Trump it’s a “truth” they can get behind. The fact that other people were wounded and one person killed at Butler? Fake. The photos of the assassin on the roof? Fake.

As just one example of the folks spreading this particular set of ideas, I bring you the odd couple, Candace Owens and Hunter Biden. Yes, you heard that right (the clip is less than a minute long):

Or a conspiracy. The JFK conspiracy theories have spawned countless others. But to the best of my knowledge, it never became a widespread idea that he hadn’t died and that the killing was fake; he was obviously dead in a way that would have been difficult for even the most devoted conspiracy theorist to deny. As far as I know, though, the other attempted presidential assassinations between then and now – for example, the shooting of Reagan, or the attempt on Ford’s life – never engendered any sort of widespread notion that they weren’t real.

Perhaps that sort of idea began with 9/11 Truthers. There was a not insignificant number of people who believed the WTC and Pentagon attacks were, if not exactly fake, then a performative plot by the US government:

The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled …

Extraordinary. And there are also the people who think the moon landings were faked.

The other day I heard two jokes about conspiracy theorists and the tenacious quality of their beliefs. Here’s the first:

“Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”

And the second:

“A JFK assassination conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God welcomes him and says, ‘To reward your lifelong search for the truth, I will answer one question for you.’

“The man doesn’t hesitate. ‘Who really killed John F. Kennedy?’ he asks.

“God smiles and says, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the Texas School Book Depository with a Manlicher-Carcano rifle. There was no second shooter and no conspiracy.’

“The man mutters, ‘Shit. This goes much higher up than I thought.'”

Once again, Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physicsguy” writes:

… [W]e have:

“Trump has set a final offer on the table with his minimum demands while pointing a gun at the IRGC’s temple: “Sign or die.” ”

And we’ve seen this same scenario of “final offer” multiple times for the past 7 weeks with no “sign or die” result happening. So why believe it this time? The Iranians just keep stringing it out

I think many of us (including me) share at least some of that impatient and uncertain feeling of unease. Why wouldn’t we? The outcome is uncertain and the propaganda around this enormous. Everyone reporting on the possibilities or probabilities has an agenda. Most of the agenda is anti-Trump.

Last night I was thinking about the need for patience. As physicsguy says, it’s been something like seven weeks since the ceasefire began. In the culture in which we live, that seems like a long time to wait while seemingly being jerked back and forth. But is it a long time, really? I submit that it is not, especially considering the stakes and the players.

Now, you may think – as I sometimes do – that there shouldn’t be negotiations at all with this entity. But I know I don’t have the full story. I strongly suspect (without actually knowing) that the reasons for the negotiations are as follows: (1) to reset the clock on the war for purposes of the need for Congress’ approval (2) intelligence gathering and planning (3) turning up the economic screws and letting the Iranian leadership fester in the problems that result (4) giving the Gulf States a needed rest; and (5) waiting to get what we want – the open Straits and the nuclear material – and then following up with more regime-weakening moves. The latter could definitely involve Israeli action, probably behind the scenes.

In the past, the only war endings that didn’t take a lot of time were situations in which one party surrendered unconditionally. Otherwise, when for example an armistice was involved, it ordinarily took many many months to iron things out. I’m not going to take the time to analyze each case, and often the peace achieved wasn’t on terms that were so great, but seven weeks is very short compared to the examples that come to mind (Versailles, Korea, Vietnam). For Korea, for example, Google AI says, “Negotiations for the armistice spanned over two years (1951-1953), the longest negotiated armistice in history.”

I don’t think there’s any chance of these talks going on that long. But at what point Trump will run out of patience I don’t know. It could happen any day now, or it could go on for another month or two. As a society we lack the patience for any more. Perhaps we lack the patience for even seven weeks.

If I had a dime for every headline I’ve seen lately with things like “disastrous deal” and “Trump surrenders,” I’d have a fair amount of extra cash. This is something to remember:

The whole message is this:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we stick to the deal that had already been under discussion, they claim the U.S. is backing out of the deal.

Then they blame America or Israeli influence for the lack of a deal instead of The Islamic Republic making unreasonable demands for a settlement after they lost the military fight and are facing an economic crisis.

We saw the same thing with Gaza repeatedly.

And Trump himself has warned about that, for what it’s worth – in his own characteristic braggadocio style:

I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet, weak and ineffective people like failed Senator Thom Tillis (Soon out of office!), Bill Cassidy, who just suffered a massive Primary loss, really bad Congressman Thomas Massie, a major sleazebag who lost in a landslide to a great American Patriot (Endorsed by “TRUMP”) after showing tremendous disloyalty to his Party (and Country!), and almost all Dumocrats, people that have totally lost their way, constantly supporting bad policy and even worse candidates, but are constantly critical of each and every fantastic win I have. These people should go home and rest, they do nothing but create division and loss. In other words, they are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that! President DJT

Trump is responding to this sort of thing:

Having started something he cannot finish, the US president, egged on by Israel’s warmonger-in-chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, has boxed himself into a corner. Either he resumes the illegal bombing of Iran on an even bigger scale, brazenly threatening war crimes in hopes of forcing surrender; or else he accepts a negotiated compromise that falls embarrassingly short of his initial aims, including eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, and leaves an angry, more hardline, strategically strengthened regime in power. …

A peace deal, with add-ons, that is broadly in line with Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact with Tehran, which Trump foolishly wrecked and is now the most Iran seems willing to offer, would rightly be counted an abject Trump failure. It would represent a landmark US strategic defeat with significant implications for the global contest with China and Russia. And any deal that left the regime charging transit fees in the strait of Hormuz would be utterly humiliating. No amount of spin could conceal such a presidency-defining calamity.

You can feel the author’s excitement at the prospect.

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a previous post.]

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that – human nature being what it is – no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion – of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country – its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.