I have a longer, more thoughtful, blog in the making but some other items have caught my attention on this gorgeous morning.

First, it will be a beautiful day here in Madison. But though the weather is wonderful locally (dry and comfortable for the past few days), never be fooled by simply looking out the window. There is a huge difference between weather, what you see when you look out your window, and climate, longer term and/or global trends.

Agencies in the U.S. and Europe have been monitoring the climate globally since sometime in the the mid-20th century. It turns out that June was the hottest June on record. Then, on this past Thursday, the global temp hit 63 degrees F. That set a daily record for single day and the week has a good chance of setting a record that many specialist believe could go back 100,000 years. The waters of the North Atlantic have been recording temps some 9 degrees F above normal this summer. Climate specialists now give 2023 better than a 50-50 chance of being the hottest year on record, breaking the existing record set in 2016. As they say, records are meant to be broken but not this quickly.

Scientists are not surprised. This is what they have been predicting for years now. The usual carbon emission issue is coupled with an El Nino effect (hotter oceans than usual) to break records. The problem is that the impacts now tend to be cumulative rather than cyclical. Hot begets more hot! Even staid experts are now using words like ‘extraordinary,’ ‘terrifying,’ and ‘uncharted teritory.’ Yup, time to buy my lakefront home way up in Hudson Bay.

But let’s focus on that spot of ‘coke’ found in the WH. That’s what is important.

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Here’s another trend to make your day. Being MIA from class is way up in American schools after the pandemic.

The education experts say that missing 10 percent of classes during the school years puts a child at great risk of falling behind (unless they are a bored genius but there aren’t many of those). Exceeding this threshold is called ‘chronic absenteeism.’ Before the pandemic, close to 30 percent of kids were in this category. Recently, the rate has been approaching one in two kids, with some school districts being particularly hard hit. This is a sleeper effect from COVID.

Now, let is face a harsh truth. We were getting our fannies whipped on the education front by many countries … Finland, Norway, Poland, Japan, Hong Kong, China, and the list goes on. In global assessments of educational performance we typically are far down the list. I noticed the transformation in the composition of graduate programs at the University of Wisconsin during my career. The doctoral program in economics was taken over by foreign students in the 1980s as I recall, never mind engineering and the computer sciences where they have long dominated. Even in the Social Welfare (Social Work) doctoral program, Asian students had become a dominant presence. I often wondered, where have all the American kids gone?

Now, with teachers being chronically underpaid, with these poor bastards being attacked on all sides, including for all sorts of non-educational partisan and ideological reasons, who would want this crummy job any more. Teaching in most of the States is not like teaching in Scandinavia where you are paid well and appreciated as a skilled professional, or in France where school kids are fed nutritious meels since that is critical to learning (as opposed to here where ketchup once was classified as a vegetable to save a few pennies.) Not to worry, if the kids no longer come to school, we won’t need as many teachers. That will save a few tax dollars, surely a win-win outcome for Republicans.

If we continue to starve our research universities (as the Republican legislature is doing in Wisconsin), foreign students will turn to their own universities, which are improving as we speak. Then the dumbing down of America will be complete.

Let me repeat my favorite mantra one more time. I am sooo damn glad I’m an old fart and on my way out!

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One final thought for today … this one on an historical note. It is around the 100 year anniversary of Mussolini’s ‘march on Rome’ that established the first major Fascist regime in Europe. This got me thinking (lots of weird things get me thinking apparently). We actually have Communism to thank for the rise of European Fascism in the 1920s through the 40’s, a force that led to horrific conflicts and mass deaths. Thank you Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky (sarcasm intended).

Lenin and Trotsky, in particular, were convinced internationalists. They were convinced that the Red tide would quickly sweep out of Russia to the west and take over Europe, and do so quickly. After all, based on the theoretical writings of Karl Marx, Russia was the least likely candidate for revolution … too backward and agricultural. It had not gone through the pre-revolutionalry stages predicted by Marx and Engels. But places like Germany were perfect. In the early 1920’s the advancing Red Scare rushed through a number of countries. In America, for example, the scare led to the Palmer (U.S. AG) raids where hundreds of left-wingers were arrested out of paranoia and base fear. Immigration subsequently was curtailed severely. This paranoia was later resurrected in the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

Back to my main point. In 1923, Mussolini was able to walk into Rome and take power with a relatively small contingent of his ‘Blackshirts.’ The key moment came when Luigi Facta, head of the Italian Council of Ministers presented King Vittorio Emanuele III with a ‘Ratification of a State of Seige.’ Had Vittorio signed the document, the Italian Army would have been called upon to disperse the marchers and throw Benito’s ass in jail (though, like his admirer Hitler after the Beer Hall putsch, Benito may have also have made a comeback).

Now, here’s the big quesiton. Why didn’t Vittorio sign it? He was too afraid of the Communists and thought Benito a safer bet. Oooops, his mistake!

A decade later, President Paul Von Hindenburg also faced a growing threat from the left as the global depression wracked the German economy. The left and right fought pitched battles in the streets as the central government seemed increasingly impotent. After several meetings with Industrialists, former Chancellor Von Papen and other mainstream politicians convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, though the President despised the future Fuhrer personally. By this time, Hndenburg was becoming senile and would pass away in a few months. But what persuaded him to act against his instincts was assurances from Papen and others that Hitler could be controlled. After all, the Nazi’s would have a minority of ministerial positions in the new government. In any case, Hitler’s backers (the Brownshirts) were essential to keeping the Commies from seizing power. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.

Not long after this German disaster, the ‘left’ was legally voted into power in Spain. It was a loose coalition of reformers, Socialists, and Communists who frightened the pants off the established aristocracy, the military elite, and the Church. General Francisco Franco was a leader of the Nationalist forces that initiated a Civil war in 1936 against the Republican (or elected) forces. For 3 years, a brutal conflict ensued with atrocities on both sides. While many foreigners (including Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) joined the Republican side to defend what they saw as an imperiled democracy, they could not compete with the planes and tanks supplied by Hitler.

In the end, the Repubic was defeated, as much by internal divisions within the Republican coalition as by Franco’s army … the far left could never get along with the moderate reformers. Still, the Republic had considerable support among the people and held out for a long time. It was that nagging fear that the Communists would eventually rise to a dominant position that eroded this support. And so, Franco prevailed in 1939 and created the Dictaduro Franquista, his dictatorship, that would last until his death in 1975. I can still remember when we were told he was ‘on his deathbed.’ He was on it for a long, long time it seemed … a really long time. When he did finally ‘buy the farm,’ he left a bitterly divided country that had been savaged by hate and bitter divisions, a nation that did not begin to heal for another generation at least. Some have never forgotten.

There you have it … Lenin died before his anticipated world revolution could happen. Trotsky, the other big internationalist, was driven into exile by Stalin and murdered by his agents in Mexico in the mid 1930s. Aside from the eastern European countries occupied by Russian forces at the end of WWII, China, the North of the Korean peninsula, and briefly in south Asia, there was no international revolution. Communism was doomed to self destruct (in any pure form) based on its internal contadictions. But there was the rise of Fascism in Europe (and a hard-right movement in the U.S.) in response to its largely imagined threat. The suffering attendant to this has been incalculable. The number of deaths alone runs into the tens of millions.

And so it goes.