We began the HERE & THERE week on Monday with guest Adam Tooze, the eminent and best-selling economist.  His new book, Shutdown, combines the immediacy and pace of journalism with the depth of knowledge and thought of history as he explains how Keynesian economics trumped Darwinian self-interest as central banks shifted from the post-Great Recession money-squeeze of "austerity" to a flood of greenbacks to combat the contraction caused by the Coronavirus. Tooze floods HERE & THERE with sharp observations and interesting ideas. You can find the show here.

Remember Mencken's mocking definition of "Puritanism” — the fear that someone, somewhere is happy?  Well, "The New Puritanism," the one focused on the Devil in welfare, stays with Mencken and adds three words to his concept — "on my dime."  So many of the same people choking on the "un-freedom" of their COVID-masks also can't swallow the idea that their tax money might actually make someone less in need and more happy. Tuesday's HERE & HERE guest Eli Hager of Pro Publica exposed the humiliation and punishment of the poor institutionalized 25 years ago by Bill Clinton (and his bipartisan co-conspirator Newt Gingrich. You can find the show here.

Thursday's trip to the archive featured PBS Frontline producer Zach Stauffer whose investigation of the Marines’ Super Stallion and the Navy’s Sea Dragon helicopters is summed up in the program's title: "Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn?"  The bad news is that the lieutenant, a pilot, and his maintenance team knew the dangers of their machine and tried to warn the chain of command about them. The worse news is, no one listened to them and Van Dorn's was not the only life lost as a result. 
You can find the show here.

Although there is constant concern in New Mexico about water and our shrinking supplies under pressure from climate change, real, serious studies of the H2O issue come along once in a generation.  On Monday, the superb environmental journalist Laura Paskus of the Our Land component of New Mexico Public Television's New Mexico in Focus magazine series takes us through the latest expert examination, commissioned by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.  It's the first of its in-depth kind since the days, more than 20 years ago, of Governor Bill Richardson. What's changed? In four words: things have gotten worse.
 
Tuesday, Gregg Gonsalves of the Yale University School of Public Health, a columnist for The Nation and a winner of a 2018 MacArthur "genius" Fellowship tells us what's wrong with the Coronavirus vaccines: not enough people are getting them.  And Gonsalves says, the same lassitude or complacency at the Biden White House has not only slowed distribution of vaccines, it's why there aren't enough infection-protection masks in every American home.
 
At first glance, it would seem the four lessons City University of New York International Relations Professor Rajan Menon wants us to learn from America's 20 years in Afghanistan apply mostly to planning for future wars.  And there is already a noisy claque doing just that. But, as you will hear next Wednesday, those principles might also be applied to the Biden Administration's recent diplomacy against China. Following Menon's lessons might prevent the recently-conceived AUKUS and Quadrennial alliances from pushing the U.S. into a future war with China.
 
Regime-change, forcing from office Venezuela's thuggish President Nicolas Maduro, is something a lot of his countrymen devoutly wish for.  Still, even many of Maduro's most determined opponents wondered whether to laugh or cry about the amateurish attempt at an overthrow led by some former fighters from U.S. Special Forces.  It failed, leaving it's would-be guerrillas all captured or killed. One reason: it seems to have been penetrated by Venezuela security services almost from its inception.  Joshua Goodman, the Associated Press' Latin America news director, broke the story in May and retells it as our encore of the week on Thursday.

—dmarash

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