The first part of a two-part look back at one of Radio 4’s best-loved comedians. You can hear episode two on BBC Sounds from Thursday 23rd May. Not quite a biography, not quite a documentary, these programmes celebrate Jeremy Hardy’s Radio 4 life, with material from his very first appearances in stand-up shows in the mid-1980s, via his own early sitcom At Home With The Hardys, and right through to his glorious appearances on The News Quiz and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – as well as the very best of the ten series of his own ground-breaking Jeremy Hardy Speaks To the Nation and his final solo series Jeremy Hardy Feels It. Narrated by his great friend and colleague Sandi Toksvig, the programme also features never before broadcast behind-the-scenes material and shines a light on how and why the man once described as “an incendiary vicar” stayed so funny and so beloved for over thirty years. There’ll also be some singing. The show is produced by his longest-term collaborator, David Tyler for Pozzitive who has all the tapes. Narrator: Sandi Toksvig Producer: David Tyler A Pozzitive production for BBC Radio 4

Comedy series written by Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds. Ed Reardon, author, pipe smoker, consummate fare-dodger and master of the abusive email, attempts to survive in a world where the media seems to be run by idiots and lying charlatans. In the first episode of this new series, Ed and Elgar return to London (from their failed jaunt living in a shepherd's hut in the country) destitute and on the lookout for a new roof over their respective heads. Could a carrier bag filled with wooden spoons be the answer to their problems? Ed Reardon ...... Christopher Douglas Olive ...... Stephanie Cole Pearl ...... Brigit Forsyth Maggie ...... Pippa Haywood Jaz ...... Philip Jackson Ping ...... Barunka O'Shaughnessy Stan ...... Geoffrey Whitehead Elgar..... Colin the cat With Sarah Ovens, Dan Tetsell and Ellen Thomas Written by Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds Producer Simon Nicholls A BBC Studios Production

Naomi Klein analyzes the epic media failure on Trump-Russia and discusses the agenda for change and resistance that should have been. 

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi details how on Trump-Russia the media failed to do its job.

Ali Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, lays out the scandal in plain sight: Israeli collusion with Trump and the broader U.S. political power structure. 

The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz tells the bizarre tale of China’s illegal influence over the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush. 

And Alison Klayman talks about her film "The Brink," a look at the past year of Steve Bannon’s project to bring his white nationalist agenda global.

 

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Moderate Rebels LIVE - Max Blumenthal discusses his new book "The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump" with Ben Norton. We address US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria; blowback from CIA covert operations; and the failure of Russiagate.

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Tony Horwitz on the Confederate flag

'The South Side of Chicago is called 'Chiraq' by the locals, because more people get shot there than American soldiers did in the Iraq war', George Gittoes

Web-only discussion with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. They discuss the Justice Department’s decision to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S. military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes. This comes as President Trump is considering Memorial Day pardons for American military members accused or convicted of war crimes, including former Blackwater contractor Nicholas Slatten, who was twice found guilty of first-degree murder in the deadly 2007 Nisoor Square massacre in Baghdad which killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians. He was sentenced to life in prison last December.

Democracy Now! 2019-05-24 Friday

• Headlines for May 24, 2019
• Exclusive: Julian Assange's Attorney Decries Espionage Charges as "Grave Threat to Press Freedom"
• Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage Charges Against Assange Are Most Significant Attack on Press in Decades
• Jeremy Scahill: New Indictment of Assange Is Part of a Broader War on Journalism & Whistleblowers

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Democracy Now! 2019-05-27 Monday

• Noam Chomsky: We Must Confront the "Ultranationalist, Reactionary" Movements Growing Across Globe
• Chomsky: Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change & the Undermining of Democracy Threaten Future of Planet
• Chomsky: Arrest of Assange Is "Scandalous" and Highlights Shocking Extraterritorial Reach of U.S.
• Chomsky: Trump Radically Interfered with Israel's Election to Help Re-elect Netanyahu
• Noam Chomsky: The Green New Deal Is Exactly the Right Idea
• Chomsky: By Focusing on Russia, Democrats Handed Trump a "Huge Gift" & Possibly the 2020 Election

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Smart people are not only just as prone to making mistakes as everyone else—they may even be more susceptible to them. This idea has been dubbed the Intelligence Trap. It explains the flaws in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, and how the decisions of even the brightest minds and talented organisations can backfire.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how scientists sought to understand the properties of gases and the relationship between pressure and volume, and what that search unlocked. Newton theorised that there were static particles in gases that pushed against each other all the harder when volume decreased, hence the increase in pressure. Those who argued that molecules moved, and hit each other, were discredited until James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann used statistics to support this kinetic theory. Ideas about atoms developed in tandem with this, and it came as a surprise to scientists in C20th that the molecules underpinning the theory actually existed and were not simply thought experiments. The image above is of Ludwig Boltzmann from a lithograph by Rudolf Fenzl, 1898 With Steven Bramwell Professor of Physics at University College London Isobel Falconer Reader in History of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews and Ted Forgan Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham Producer: Simon Tillotson

Marcie Smith, and adjunct lecturer in economics at Jon Jay (CUNY) questions the sanctification of Gene Sharp, who has been called the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," and portrayed as apolitical. Smith talks to me about her recent piece, published on NonSite called "Change Agent: Gene Sharp's Noeliberal Nonviolence", which looks at Sharp's noeliberal ideology and his role as a defense state intellectual and Cold War champion. This I play the audio of a book talk I attended by Max Blumenthal about his latest book The Management of Savagery How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

Some events give extraordinary insights into the biases of the economics profession. The trade war with China clearly fit the bill.

The origins of the trade war can be traced to campaign promises Trump made to go after China over its large trade surplus with the United States, which he attributed to “currency manipulation.” The argument was that by intervening in currency markets (buying up U.S. dollars), China was propping up the value of the dollar against its own currency.

This makes Chinese goods and services relatively cheaper to U.S. consumers and makes U.S. goods more expensive to Chinese purchasers. The net effect is to increase U.S. imports of Chinese goods and reduce U.S. exports to China, thereby leading to a large trade deficit.

While most economists now acknowledge that China was intervening in currency markets in the last decade (they did not acknowledge the currency intervention at the time), they insist that this is no longer an issue. China is no longer a large net buyer of dollar denominated assets, so the argument goes, therefore it is not currently keeping down the value of its currency against the dollar.

As I have argued elsewhere, this argument ignores the effect of China holding well in excess of $3 trillion worth of dollar denominated assets. Its decision to hold a massive stock of dollar assets depresses the value of the Chinese yuan against the dollar, thereby maintaining the competitive advantage from a lower valued currency.

This is the same logic that applies with the Fed’s decision to hold trillions of dollars worth of assets that it acquired as part of its quantitative easing program. Even though the Fed is not currently buying assets, most economists argue that its holding of assets still works to keep down interest rates. Perhaps in the next decade they will acknowledge that the same relationship holds with China’s massive stock of dollars and the relative value of the dollar and the yuan, but for now they insist that currency intervention was only an issue in the past.

This is important background, because currency values will directly affect our trade balance with China, and thereby impact the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. While reducing the trade deficit will not get back most of the relatively high paying manufacturing jobs that were lost in the last decade, it would likely still be a plus for relatively less-educated workers who still rely on manufacturing as a source of higher paying jobs.

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In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, two of the Obama administration's most consistently hawkish advisors, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power have rebranded themselves as anti-war voices in a world turned upside down by Trump’s radical foreign policy and what we’ve been told is an global environment of rising "authoritarianism."

With a perfunctory “we could have done more” gesture towards accountability for their role in an administration that turned Libya into a broken state and assisted the destruction of Yemen before they move on to positioning themselves as truth-tellers on behalf of a kinder, gentler machine gun hand in the run up to a potential Warren, Sanders or Harris administration, Rhodes and Power have tested the limits of liberal amnesia.

On this episode, we take a closer look at their rebranding and what it says about the so-called “foreign policy” debate in the 2020 democratic primary and what actual accountability looks like beyond empty tweets and self-serving “I was trying to change things from the inside” revisionism.

Our guest is Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi of Michigan State University.

NASA scientist Peter Kalmus explains how he slashed 90% of his personal emissions. Senior South American reporter Sue Branford warns the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the planet, is not just dying. It is being murdered. Then we will hear 16-year-old Greta Thunberg’s  …

National Security Adviser John Bolton is more powerful than ever and is obsessed with regime change in Tehran. His boss is threatening to bring the “end of Iran” as some news outlets help spread the administration’s unveiled attempt to gin up a Gulf of Tonkin-style justification for war. Iranian author and analyst Hooman Majd explains how we got here and how Iran’s leaders view the Trump administration. 

Trump loves to talk about locking up his political opponents and with William Barr as his attorney general, it may not be unthinkable. That is precisely what the former President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is charging happened to him. Lula, the once popular leftist president of Brazil, is serving a 12-year prison sentence on corruption charges. But, in an exclusive prison interview with The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, Lula says his prosecution was an attempt to destroy him and the Workers Party he built. Greenwald discusses his interview and plays highlights of his conversation with Lula.

 

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Amid the convulsions in the years following the Arab Spring, Peter Hessler went to the ancient city of Amarna, site of another short-lived attempt to remake a nation • Read the text version here. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Behind the News, 5/16/19 - guests: Eric Blanc, Catherine Kaiman - Doug Henwood

George Packer won the 2013 National Book Award for The Unwinding, a biographical examination of the seismic shifts in economics and politics over the past three decades that have brought the United States to the brink. A longtime New Yorker staff writer possessed of a ''far more coherent worldview than most reporters'' (The New York Times Book Review), he was honored with two Overseas Press Club awards in 2003 for his coverage of the war in Iraq and his reporting on the civil war in Sierra Leone. His books include the bestselling The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Blood of the Liberals, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In Our Man, Packer charts the rise and fall of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the brilliant but self-absorbed architect of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Balkan wars. Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture (recorded 5/14/2019)

Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution 

The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world. Interpreters of the Constitution are faced with the challenge of how, over time, to read a document that’s not only old but also inflexible.

In his new book Fidelity & Constraint, by Oxford University Press, Lawrence Lessig, one of the nation’s leading legal minds, explains that a fundamental approaches to interpreting the constitution is a process he calls translation. In fact, some of the most significant shifts in constitutional doctrine are products of the evolution of the translation process over time. In each new era, judges understand their translations as instances of “interpretive fidelity,” framed within each new temporal context.

Throughout American history, there has been a second fidelity in addition to interpretive fidelity: what Lessig calls “fidelity to role.”

In each of the cycles of translation the role of the judge — the ultimate translator – has also evolved. Old ways of interpreting the text now become illegitimate because they don’t match up with the judge’s perceived role.

When that conflict occurs, the practice of judges within our tradition has been to follow the guidance of a fidelity to role. Ultimately, Lessig not only shows us how important the concept of translation is to constitutional interpretation, but also exposes the institutional limits on this practice.

The first work of both constitutional and foundational theory by one of America’s leading legal minds, Fidelity & Constraint maps strategies that both help judges understand the fundamental conflict at the heart of interpretation whenever it arises and work around the limits it inevitably creates.

Guest – Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig serves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund, and on the advisory boards of Creative Commons and the Sunlight Foundation.

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Free Range Kids

You may have heard about the shaming of parents who let their son or daughter walk to school by themselves, or ride public transportation alone. They’re often ridiculed on social media and cast as neglectful. But in some instances, the consequences have gone beyond public shaming.

In 2015 parents in Silver Spring, Maryland made national headlines they were investigated for child neglect for letting their children, ages 6 and 10, walk home from a park by themselves.

In another case Lenore Skenazy, a former New York Daily News columnist was called America’s worst mom after writing a column in 2008 about why she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway by himself.

Last year, Utah passed a law making it not a crime for parents to let their children play in a park without supervision or walk home alone from school. This is hopeful news for our guest Lenore Skenazy who has been advocating for so-called free range parenting laws for many years.

Under the law, neglect does not include allowing a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities such as going to and from school by walking, running or bicycling, going to nearby stores or recreational facilities and playing outside.

A recent U.S. Census showed that 7 million of the nation’s 38 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are left home alone on a regular basis, while the average time spent alone is six hours per week. Only a few states legislate an age under which kids may not be home alone.

Guest – Lenore Skenazy – New York City columnist-turned-reality TV show host got that title after letting her 9-year-old son take the subway, alone. In response to the enormous media blowback, she founded the book and blog, “Free-Range Kids,” which launched the anti-helicopter parenting movement. She has lectured internationally, including talks at Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House, and has written for everyone from The Wall Street Journal to Mad Magazine. Yep. The Mad Magazine. And she’s a graduate of Yale.

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Speaker(s): Professor Daniel Markovits | Merit is not a genuine excellence but rather a pretence, constructed to rationalise an offensive distribution of advantage. Merit, in short, is a sham. The meritocratic ideal—that social and economic rewards should track achievement rather than breeding—anchors the self-image of the age. Aristocracy has had its day, and meritocracy is now a basic tenet of civil religion in all advanced societies. Meritocracy promises to promote equality and opportunity by opening a previously hereditary elite to outsiders, armed with nothing save their own talents and ambitions. But today, middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. At the same time, meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry. In spite of its promises, meritocracy in fact installs a new form of aristocracy, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of income and wealth is not land but human capital and free labor. And merit is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an offensive distribution of advantage. Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He publishes in a range of disciplines, including in Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal. Markovits’s latest book, The Meritocracy Trap, places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit. Oriana Bandiera (@orianabandiera) is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics and Director of STICERD. This event is the Morishima Lecture. This lecture series is held in honour of Professor Michio Morishima (1923-2004), Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at LSE and STICERD's first chairman. STICERD (@STICERD_LSE) brings together world-class academics to put economics and related disciplines at the forefront of research and policy.

Ten Federal Elections that shaped Australia.

Who, in modern Britain, has power? That's the question Hugo Rifkind asks in this new series of stand-up journalism. Each week, Hugo looks at a group of people generally considered powerful, and examines what they actually can and can't do. Hugo ought to know about power. Born into a political family, he attended Cambridge and has spent 18 years writing for The Times. During that period, he has met prime ministers, royalty, Eurocrats, lawyers, judges, celebrities, billionaires and, of course, other members of the media elite - including his fellow regular panellists on The News Quiz. Yet in all that time, none of these people have seemed truly to be ruling the world. And if they aren't, who is? This week, Hugo looks at the power of Members of Parliament. He speaks to Stella Creasy MP about the limits to which she can help her constituents, to Damian Collins MP about what the Chair of a Select Committee can order people to do, and to Andrew Mitchell MP about how Whips can keep MPs in check - which sometimes involves tears. Presented by Hugo Rifkind Written by Hugo Rifkind and James Kettle Reader: Susan Rae Produced by Ed Morrish A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4

 

Writing of the failed US-sponsored coup attempt in Venezuela on April 30, Uri Friedman of The Atlantic (5/1/19) referred to the Venezuelan branch of the coup as Juan “Guaidó’s pro-democracy movement.” The logical contradiction could scarcely be more pronounced: A wave of Friedman’s wand transforms a political force seeking the military overthrow of Venezuela’s elected government into a “pro-democracy movement.”

The Venezuelan government’s current mandate comes from winning an election on May 20, 2018 that was observed by more than 150 members of theInternational Electoral Accompaniment Mission. In a joint report, the observers said of the agency that organizes the country’s electoral process, “The technical and professional trustworthiness and independence of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela are uncontestable.” The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, one of the groups that participated in the observer mission, reported that the “results communicated by the National Electoral Council reflect the will of the voters who decided to participate in the electoral process.”

The Wall Street Journal (5/1/19) performed the same trick, writing that “Venezuela’s democratic leaders launched a revolt against Cuban-backed dictator Nicolas Maduro.” In the Journal’s universe, Maduro is a “dictator” despite heading a country with a legislative branch controlled by the opposition, where in October 2017 the opposition won five governorships, and which has thus far declined to arrest a politician agitating for a military putsch in open collaboration with hostile foreign powers, to the extent of entertaining the possibility of supporting a US invasion and supporting US-led sanctions that are devastating  the country’s economy.

Imagine what the US would do with, say, someone acting in concert with a similarly energetic Iranian or Chinese effort to oust the US government. It’s not an exact analogy, since Iran and China have no history of ruthlessly dominating the region in which the US is located, but the point should be clear.

For the Journal, “Venezuela’s democratic leaders” are those who sat out the country’s election, claimed it was unfair and then declined to file an appeal with the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE). One is hard-pressed to imagine a more soundly democratic practice than Guaidó not running for president and then declaring himself president even as 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of him at the time. According to historian Tony Wood (London Review of Books, 2/21/19):

Maduro won 68 per cent of the vote, on a turnout of 46 percent—more or less par for the democratic course in the US, but low by Venezuelan standards.

Guaidó’s claim to power rests on the idea that, since this vote was invalid, not only is Maduro not the legitimate president but, according to a Transition Law the opposition released on 8 January, there is no president. Constitutionally, this is shaky ground. Article 233 of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution specifies the circumstances under which a president can be replaced: death, resignation, removal by the supreme court, physical or mental incapacity, abandonment of post. The National Assembly has a supervisory role to play in each of these scenarios, but nowhere does the constitution say that the legislature can claim executive power for itself. This is why the opposition instead cites Article 333, a provision that exhorts citizens to help re-establish constitutional order in the event that it is derogated by an act of force. In other words, the opposition is claiming the constitution no longer applies but that in the resulting “state of exception” the National Assembly is empowered to bring it into effect once more, as soon as Maduro—whom it calls a “usurper”—is removed. Another significant detail: Article 233 requires new elections within 30 days, but the opposition’s Transition Law makes no such specific commitment.

It’s hard to conceive of a case for considering such actions “democratic,” yet this is the record of those whom the Journal calls “Venezuela’s democratic leaders.”

In February, the Washington Post (2/26/19) ran an article headlined “How Venezuela’s Pro-Democracy Movement Has Learned From Past Mistakes.” It says that

since January 5, when Juan Guaidó was sworn in as [the National Assembly’s] president, he and its members have used the “Cabildo Abierto” (or open town meetings) to engage communities, communicating a message of inclusion for this new stage of the pro-democracy movement….

Many in the pro-democracy movement are successfully arguing that nonviolent discipline is a key to success. Guaidó, along with other political leaders and civil society organizations, has repeatedly called for the struggle to be assertive but peaceful.

This too mischaracterizes Guaidó as being part of a “pro-democracy movement.” The description is ill-fitting, considering that Guaidó’s movement has rejected the Venezuelan government’s proposal for dialogue, as well as Mexico and the Vatican’s offers to mediate talks, in favor of siding with the global empire that has unleashed widespread violence and poverty in the region and that, according to a study by two US economists, killed an estimated more than 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 in the course of preventing the country’s economic recovery.

Perhaps even more absurd is when international attacks on Venezuela are cast as exercises in democracy. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (2/6/19) described one of the countries involved in the aggression, Canada, as “a moral leader” of something called “the free world.” Evidently it wasn’t enough for Kristof to write the same article two years earlier, almost to the day (2/4/17), under the headline “Canada, Leading the Free World.” In the more recent piece, Kristof’s case rests not only on such matters of world historic importance as Canada’s “traffic safety laws,” but also on Venezuela:

Trump gets headlines with his periodic threats to invade Venezuela to topple President Nicolás Maduro, but Canada has been quietly working since 2017 to help organize the Lima Group of 14 nations pushing for democracy in Venezuela. When Canada recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, he won credibility because nobody sees Ottawa as an imperialist conspirator.

Lost on Kristof was that that Canada’s “moral leader[ship]” and status as a member of whatever “the free world” is was exposed as smoke and mirrors not even a month earlier, when Canadian police armed with military-level assault gear invaded Unist’ot’en, an indigenous territory whose people never ceded control of their land to Canada in any treaty, and arrested 14 people who had set up a checkpoint to defend the land from construction of a natural gas pipeline. Far from “nobody see[ing] Ottawa as an imperialist conspirator,” many scholars have shown that Canada is an imperialist power in its own right, notably as an oppressive and exploitative force in countries in the same region as Venezuela, such as Honduras and Haiti.

Kristof, however, takes for granted that the Lima Group is committed to democracy in Venezuela, even though its members have subverted democracy in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Also in the Lima Group is Colombia, which, according to NACLA (3/7/19),

has the highest number of recorded assassinations of human rights defenders in the world. In the first 15 days of January 2019 alone, nine social leaders were murdered.

Honduras is a member too, and after its sham elections in November 2017, the Honduran government “used excessive force to suppress the wave of demonstrations that followed” (Amnesty International, 6/13/18),  detaining hundreds of people and denying the right of due process in several cases. Lima Group countries violate democratic principles at home, but Kristof assures us that they are “pushing for democracy in Venezuela.”

More to the point is the cognitive dissonance in describing an unelected organ of outside powers like the Lima Group, who are in no way accountable to Venezuelans, as “pushing for democracy in Venezuela.” In Kristof’s worldview, a non-democratic body forcing out Venezuela’s elected government in violation of international law will magically have a democratic outcome.

Maybe the most ridiculous article on this subject came from TownHall.com editor Katie Pavlich, writing in The Hill (4/30/19), who asserted that Maduro, who

has been able to maintain power throughout years of fraudulent “elections” in the country, is backed by Russia, China, Iran and personally protected by Cuban gangs. Guaidó is backed by US allies Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Israel, Canada and others. For the sake of democracy alone, the choice here is obvious.

The author went on to write:

The United States and much of the pro-democracy global community have backed Guaidó, but serious enemies looking to gain a stronger foothold in the hemisphere aren’t backing down from Maduro. What happens now will be definitive and will determine a free or tyrannical future for the country.

One can infer that the countries who are resisting the nonexistent “Cuban gangs” and backing Guaidó enumerated in the first paragraph of this middle-school essay are the ones that Pavlich considers “the pro-democracy global community”—a list that includes Brazil, another Lima Group freedom fighter, which is governed by a fascist who was only elected because the country’s most popular leader was a political prisoner; Israel, which governs nearly 5 million Palestinians who have no right to vote on who rules them or how; the colonial Canadian state that oppresses indigenous peoples as brutally as the US does African-Americans; and the US itself, which imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country, and is less a democracy than an oligarchy.

At every turn, Guaidó and his backers have taken steps that have nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with what Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Independent, 5/1/19), who teaches human rights and philosophy at the University of London, aptly labeled “a white supremacist foreign intervention.” That corporate media manage to portray this as a “pro-democracy movement” is both a tragedy and a farce.

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Featured image: Depiction of Juan Guaidó in The Atlantic (5/1/19). (photo: Fernando Llano/AP)

Updated: 5/11/19

The German bank was Trump's partner on countless investments at a time when most of Wall Street shied away. As a result, 'New York Times' finance editor David Enrich says, it has a trove of information about Trump. "Deutsche Bank has become the Rosetta Stone for congressional and state investigators who are trying to better understand and get information about Donald Trump's network of business and his own personal finances," Enrich says.

Journalist Oliver Bullough runs kleptocracy tours in London, in which he points out mansions bought by corrupt foreign leaders and oligarchs. His book 'Moneyland' describes their secretive transnational world.

Also, Ken Tucker reviews Lizzo's first major label album, 'Cuz I Love You.'

'New Yorker' staff writer Dexter Filkins says President Trump's current National Security Adviser John Bolton has been hawkish his whole life. His aggressive world view often contrasts with Trump's isolationist tendencies. After President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, Bolton said "Homo sapiens are hardwired for violent conflict." Filkins' new article is 'John Bolton On The War Path.'

Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews 'Dead To Me,' a new black comedy series on Netflix starring Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate.

Ten years ago, the developers of the Python programming language decided to clean things up and release a backwards-incompatible version, Python 3. They initially underestimated the impact of the changes, and the popularity of the language. Still, in the last decade, the vast majority of community projects has migrated to the new version, and major projects are now dropping support for Python 2.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Python 3.6 is the default. But Python 2 remains available in RHEL 8.

Using Python in RHEL 8

To install Python, type yum install python3.

To run Python, type python3.

If that doesn’t work for you, or you need more details, read on!

Python 3

In RHEL 8, Python 3.6 is the default, fully supported version of Python. It is not always installed, however. Similarly to any other available tool, use yum install python3 to get it.

Add-on package names generally have the python3 prefix. Use yum install python3-requests to install the popular library for making HTTP connections.

Python 2

Not all existing software is ready to run on Python 3. And that’s OK! RHEL 8 still contains the Python 2 stack, which can be installed in parallel with Python 3. Get it using yum install python2, and run with python2.

Why not just “Python”?

Okay, okay, so there’s python3 and python2. But what if I use just python? Well…

$ python
-bash: python: command not found

There is no python command by default.

Why? Frankly, we couldn’t agree what python should do. There are two groups of developers. One expects python to mean Python 2, and the other Python 3. The two don’t always talk to each other, so you might be a member of one camp and not know anyone from the other – but they do exist.

Today, in 2018, the python == python2 side is more popular, even among those that prefer Python 3 (which they spell out as python3). This side is also backed by an official upstream recommendation, PEP 394. However, we expect that this viewpoint will become much less popular over the lifespan of RHEL 8. By making python always mean Python 2, Red Hat would be painting itself into a corner.

Unversioned Python command

That said, there are applications that expect a python command to exist and that assumption might be hard to change. That’s why you can use the alternatives mechanism to enable the unversioned python command system-wide, and set it to a specific version:

alternatives --set python /usr/bin/python3

For Python 2, use /usr/bin/python2 instead. For details on how to revert the changes or do the setup interactively, see man unversioned-python.

Note, We do not recommend this approach. We recommend you explicitly refer to python3 or python2. That way, your scripts and commands will work on any machine that has the right version of Python installed.

Note that this works only for the python command itself. Packages and other commands don’t have configurable unversioned variants. Even if you configure python, the commands yum install python-requests or pip won’t work.

Always use the explicit version in these cases. Better yet, don’t rely on the wrapper scripts for pip, venv and other Python modules that you call from the command line.  Instead use python3 -m pip, python3 -m venv, python2 -m virtualenv.

Third-party packages

Not all Python software is shipped with RHEL 8 – there’s only so much that Red Hat can verify, package and support.

To install a third-party package, many sources on the Internet will suggest using sudo pip install. Do not do this! This command translates to “download a package from the internet, and run it on my machine as root to install it”.

Even if the package is trustworthy, this is a bad idea. A large part of RHEL 8 relies on Python 3.6. If you throw in another package, there’s no guarantee that it will co-exist peacefully with the rest of the system. There are some protections in place, but you should generally assume that sudo pip will break your system.

(Not to mention it won’t work as-is: the command name is pip3 or pip2.)

If you want to use third-party packages, create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv --system-site-packages myenv (or for Python 2, install python2-virtualenv and run python2 -m virtualenv --system-site-packages myenv). Then, activate the environment using source myenv/bin/activate, and install packages into it using pip install. The packages will then be available as long as the environment is activated. While this does not protect you against malicious packages, it does protect the system from unexpected breakage.

When a virtual environment is active, unversioned commands like python and pip will refer to the Python version that created the virtual environment. So, to install the Requests package, run  pip install requests (or if you prefer being explicit, python -m pip install requests).

The --system-site-packages switch makes the environment re-use libraries installed system-wide. Leave it out to get an isolated environment, where all libraries outside Python’s standard library need to be installed explicitly.

Another possibility is installing user-specific packages with pip’s --user switch. The command python3 -m pip install --user flake8 will make the flake8 linter available to you personally, leaving system tools like yum unaffected.

If you truly need something installed system-wide, build a RPM package and use yum install.

Obligatory note: Third-party packages installed with pip are not reviewed or supported by Red Hat.

Platform-Python: The Python behind the curtain

Careful readers might have noticed a discrepancy here: Python is not installed by default, but yum is, and yum is written in Python. What magic makes that possible?

It turns out there is an internal Python interpreter called “Platform-Python”. This is what system tools use. It only includes the parts of Python needed for the system to function, and there are no guarantees that any particular feature won’t be removed from it in the future.

However, libraries for Platform-Python are shared with the “user-visible” Python 3.6. This conserves disk space, and it also means that, for example, yum extensions built for Python 3.6 will work for the system tool.

If you are not re-building the distro, do not use Platform-Python directly. Install python3 and use that.

Porting to Python 3

It won’t be in RHEL 8, but there will come a day when support for Python 2 will end. If you maintain Python 2 code, you should think about porting it to Python 3.

Python 3 was first released in 2008. For over a decade, it has been improving in features, performance and – ironically – compatibility with Python 2. You might have heard horror stories and urban legends about porting code to Python 3.0 or 3.2 that would be much less scary nowadays.

I’m not saying porting is trivial now, but it’s definitely gotten easier. As with any other change to a system, porting to Python 3 mainly requires knowledge of your codebase, good tests – and some time.

What’s the reward? Python 3 is a better language – after all, it’s the language Python 2 developers choose to use! For enterprise applications, the main feature is reduced risk of hard-to-debug, input-dependent bugs when handling non-ASCII text such as people’s names (or emoji).

There are many community resources that document and help with porting to Python 3.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably working on a large, conservative code base. We ported a few of those, and distilled our experience in the the Conservative Porting Guide, a hands-on walkthrough that focuses on compatibility and keeping working code throughout the porting process. Give it a try, and if you find that something is not covered, let us know – or even send a pull request to it!

If you maintain Python C extensions, a similarly focused guide is part of the py3c project.

Takeaways

To install or run Python on RHEL 8, use python3 – unless you have a different version in mind.

Do not use sudo pip.

Do not use platform-python for your applications. However, use platform-python if you are writing system/admin code for RHEL 8.

And if you have some code for Python 2, now is a great time to start modernizing it.

Enjoy Python in RHEL 8!

 

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