American presidents (4): Jimmy Carter
August 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).
His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.
Jimmy Carter was the 39th president who served from 1977-1981.
He was a born-again Christian who took over his father’s peanut business and served in the Georgia Senate and as Georgia Governor before running for the White House. He presented himself as a Washington outsider at the post-Watergate time when the federal political system was in disrepute. His determination to be a kind of ‘people’s president’ led him to reject many of the trappings and traditions of the office and he famously declared: “I will never tell a lie”.
Although Carter was a Democratic president at a time that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, his outsider status played against him at a time of a newly resurgent Congress and he had a troubled relationship with the legislature. Also he ran against the tradition of building up America’s image by making a controversial ‘crisis of confidence’ television address.
Carter’s major focus was on America’s energy crisis and he created a new Department of Energy and passed the National Energy Act. However, US citizens were reluctant to trade down for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, having taken office during a period of international stagnation and inflation, this persisted throughout his term.
On the foreign relations front, Carter was the first president forced to confront the rise of militant anti-American, Islamic fundamentalism. The taking of 52 American hostages in Teheran in late 1979, the failure of an attempt to rescue them, and their eventual release only minutes after he left office all helped to define his tenure at the White House as a time of perceived weakness. However, he was responsible for the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and he signed the SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union.
In the presidential election of 1980, Carter was roundly beaten by the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, suffering the worst electoral defeat of amy incumbent president in American history. However, perhaps more so than any other president in modern times, Carter was been incredibly active on the international stage throughout his post-presidential period and has been called “The American Ghandhi” (he is now 89).
You can read more about Jimmy Carter here.
Posted in History | Comments (1)
A time-lapse map of every nuclear explosion since 1945
July 31st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
American presidents (3): Gerald Ford
July 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).
His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.
Gerald Ford was the 38th president who served from 1974-1977. In fact, he was in the White House for a mere 816 days – the shortest term in modern times.
In spite of media images of Ford as president stumbling or falling, in his younger days he was an all-star athlete before becoming a lawyer. Most of his political career was spent in the House of Representatives where he served a total of almost 25 years for a district in Michigan, finally becoming Minority Leader for the last eight of those years. He hoped that he would be chosen by Richard Nixon to be his Vice-Presidential partner but Nixon instead went for Spiro Agnew.
When Agnew had to resign as Vice-President over bribery charge unrelated to the Watergate scandal, Nixon finally had to turn to Ford and make him the new unelected Vice-President and someone who showed great loyalty during the Watergate affair. When Nixon became the first president in US history to resign the office, Ford became the first – and, so far, only – unelected president in the nation’s history,
Although he was an uncharismatic leader and a dull speaker, Ford entered the White House with a lot of good will which he immediately lost when he pardoned Nixon a month after taking the oath of office and then issued a clemency for Vietnam draft dodgers. Furthermore he had a strained relationship with Congress: he was a Republican president and Congress was Democrat-controlled, resulting in Ford exercising the presidential veto no less than 77 times. In turn, Congress blocked his efforts at legislation.
Domestically Ford faced the economic impact of the oil price increases of 1973 and the combination of inflation and unemployment on his watch resulted in a period of stagflation. He launched a WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. On the international front, Ford’s request for more aid for South Vietnam was turned down by Congress and the North Vietnamese subsequently overran the south. However, he progressed the SALT II negotiations and signed the Helsinki Accords.
When Ford sought the Republican nomination for the presidential race of 1976, he was opposed by Ronald Reagan who ran him a close second. A weakened Ford was then narrowly beaten in the general election by Jimmy Carter.
You can read more about Gerald Ford here.
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An understated performance from Nicolas Cage?!?
July 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Well, yes, in the new independent movie “Joe” which I have reviewed here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Nicolas Cage losing his s**t
July 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’ve just been to see the latest movie starring Nicolas Cage who is rather noted for his histrionic performances. In background reading about his new film, I found a reference to this YouTube compilation of some of his most over-the-top thespian scenes. Enjoy
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How life on Earth as we know it could have been transformed just two years ago – and only a few scientists noticed
July 28th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I was at a barbecue in West Sussex this weekend and had an interesting chat with a family friend called Gerry Bond who told me about a recent event that could have changed life on Earth as we currently enjoy it.
On 23 July 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.
Fortunately, the blast site of the CMEs was not directed at Earth. Had this event occurred a week earlier when the point of eruption was Earth-facing, the outcome could have been disastrous.A CME double whammy of this potency striking Earth would probably cripple satellite communications and could severely damage the power grid.
NASA offers this sobering assessment:
“Analysts believe that a direct hit . . . could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. . . . According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multiton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.”
You can see the latest discussion of this event here.
Of course, CMEs are the not the only occurrence that could transform or even destroy humankind. If you’d like to be aware of some other possibilities, check out this book review.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
The best photograph of my granddaughter Catrin and me
July 28th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This photograph of me with my three and half year old granddaughter Catrin was taken by Vee’s nephew David at the home of his brother in Egham at a family gathering this summer. David had a copy framed for me as a birthday present. I love it. Thanks a million, David.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (3)
Did Salieri kill Mozart?
July 27th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
In 1979, there were the first performances of a play by Peter Shaffer called “Amadeus” which postulated that Antonio Salieri drove Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an early death or even poisoned him. I did not see the play but I did view the 1984 American film “Amadeus” directed by Miloš Forman [see my review here].
This weekend, after 35 years, I finally saw the play. The venue was the Chichester Festival Theatre which has just been the subject of a £22 million refurbishment. “Amadeus” is the first play since the project was completed.
In a fine performance, Rupert Everett played Salieri, while Joshua McGuire was Mozart. In the play, Salieri is the central character as compared to the film. Also, although Shaffer wrote both, the play is ultimately dismissive of the notion of murder while the film seems to give it some credence.
So did Salieri kill Mozart? There is simply no credible evidence as explained here.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (2)
This week’s films – my reviews of three very different movies
July 26th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
As regular visitors to this blog will know, I am a keen movie fan. This week, I have seen three films all very different:
- “The Railway Man”, set during and after World War Two, with some harrowing scenes – my review here.
- “Begin Again”, located in today’s New York with lots of songs and a real feel-good tone – my review here.
- “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes”, set a little in the future in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco – my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How safe is it to fly?
July 25th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
There have been three aviation disasters in the last week: the shooting down last Thursday of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew, the crashing of TransAsia Airways flight GE222 while trying to land at a Taiwanese airport on Wednesday, killing 48 and injuring 10, and the crashing today of Air Algérie flight AH5017 from Burkino Faso to Algiers, which was carrying 110 passengers and six crew members.
So how safe is it to fly? The short answer is: in spite of these accidents, it is very safe to fly and becoming more safe over time. You can see relevant statistics here.
I keep a flight log – that’s what comes of having a father and a father-in-law who flew with the RAF – so I know that I’ve made 542 flights totalling just over 1,000 hours in the air. I’m going to keep on flying because there are still many countries that I wish to visit.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)