Stewie Generis

Science, shmience

Why would you “believe in” facts when fantasies are so much easier and so much more fun? Especially if those fantasies play into your made-up narrative of grievance and victimhood? Well, if you’re part of the Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis, you wouldn’t.

Yesterday’s Rapidly Failing New York Times had a piece about the largest measles outbreak in 30 years now under way in Minneapolis. The Somali community there, which, before 2008, had a higher vaccination rate than the general population, is now grappling with a completely preventable disease that had been eradicated in the U.S. by 2000.

measles

Day 4 Measles rash

There have been 44 confirmed cases so far, and at least 7000 people have been exposed to the virus, which has an incubation period of 21 days. It’s a highly contagious disease, spread through the air, that has very serious complications in 30% of cases, including blindness, brain inflammation, and pneumonia. It causes the most vaccine-preventable deaths of any disease.

According to the article, the Somali community in Minneapolis was “targeted” by anti-vax activists, including Andrew Wakefield, who met one-on-one with members of the community starting in 2008, and who provided them with bogus statistics about how the autism rate in their community was higher than elsewhere.

Wakefield is the guy whose “research” created the whole “vaccination=autism” myth in the first place, and who is now banned from practicing medicine in his native Britain. He says he doesn’t feel responsible at all for what’s happening now.

wakefield

Wakefield, dangerous, self-promoting fraud

Wakefield’s research has been found to be an “elaborate fraud” , but in the internet age, that doesn’t really matter now. The lie was repeated often enough by others, including lots of “celebrities”, who now have a big stake in keeping it going and who have made the anti-vax movement a part of our political landscape.

And it’s not just the usual suspects on the right. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president and someone who you would think would know better, supports the anti-vaxxers.

Our President is an anti-vaxxer, and, let us not forget, he appoints the Surgeon General who advises us all on health matters. Here’s a piece that speculates that, under Trump, the anti-vaxxers might “win”.

So you might be thinking that since you’ve had the MMR (measles, mumps rubella) vaccine, you’ll be OK even if all the idiots around you get measles. Not so fast.

First of all, the vaccine is very effective, but not 100% effective. Of the 44 now infected in Minneapolis, 42 were not vaccinated, but the remaining two were. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak in Disneyland where 51 people were infected, including six who had been vaccinated.

But more importantly, you’re not going to like your life if you’re the only healthy person in a sick population. And you shouldn’t.

So what’s the solution here? Dunno.

There are a lot of unintended consequences to be dealt with in the age of universal connectivity and instantaneous communication. The devaluing of “truth” is one we’ve seen already, and the demotion of science to “belief system” is another. The return of measles, polio, and, for all I know, the Black Death, may be in the mix as well.

Immortal art and confirmed bachelors

It would be nice to live in a world where someone’s gender or sexual orientation was unremarkable and didn’t come up in workplace matters or in courtrooms – where it would actually be odd to refer to it.

But that’s not the world we live in now. Homosexuality, for example, is regarded very differently depending on where in the world you find yourself. In Iran, there is none, if you believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or in Chechnya, either.

The map below comes from this site, where you can find a breakdown of how gay people stand. There are ten countries were homosexuality now is punishable by death.

rightsmap

In general, North America and Western Europe are on the right side of history here and seem to be illuminating the path forward. But it’s a daily struggle.

Yesterday, Trump signed his “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty” order, saying, “For too long the federal government has used the state as a weapon against people of faith.” The long national nightmare of persecution of Christians may be coming to an end. But many Evangelicals are not happy about it. They’re pretty miffed, in fact.

See, they were expecting Trump to include language that he had promised, and that had appeared in earlier drafts of the order, which would allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees based on faith beliefs. Slate commented on the original language:

“a homophobic government employee could refuse to process a same-sex couple’s tax returns or Social Security benefits; federally funded religious charities could refuse to serve transgender people or women who’ve had abortions; and government contractors could fire all LGBTQ employees, as well as any workers who’ve had sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, a homeless shelter or drug treatment program that receives federal funding could reject LGBTQ people at the door, citing religious beliefs.”

Apparently, Trump was somehow made to understand that in pleasing the evangelicals on this point, he would be displeasing a larger segment of voters, so his “core principles” kicked in, and he decided in favor of getting more “likes” and “re-tweets” with the new version, leaving the LGBT community alone, at least for now.

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about the Italian Renaissance (bet you didn’t see that coming!), because it’s pretty clear that it produced some of the most beautiful and enduring works of art mankind has ever seen, and many if not most of these works were produced by homosexuals. Moreover, the principal patrons and beneficiaries of this torrent of creativity were churches and other religious institutions, including and especially the very center of Christendom itself, the Vatican.

In Florence, where Lorenzo the Magnificent was amping up the patronage and philanthropy exemplified by his grandfather Cosimo de Medici, you had a raft of “confirmed bachelors”, working more-or-less contemporaneously, producing art that can only be called immortal.

Lorenzo death mask

Death Mask of Lorenzo de Medici, 1492

Here’s an interesting read that explains the official attitude towards homosexuality at the time,

During the Renaissance, Florence developed a reputation for being pervaded with homosexuality – “sodomy” in the language of the time. Smarting from this reputation, reeling from population loss suffered during the Black Death, and pressured by homophobic clerics, in 1432 the city government set up a judicial panel called “The Office of the Night” exclusively to solicit and investigate charges of sodomy.

It goes on to say that although the population of Florence at the time was about 40,000, there were 17,000 arrests for sodomy during the 70-year tenure of the Office of the Night. That’s a lot – nearly half the male population for two generations.

But in the meantime, in the studios and palaces of the wealthy, the guys were hard at work.

The model for Verrocchio’s “David” is thought to be the fourteen-year-old Leonardo da Vinci:

david-verocchio

Donatello’s “David” really speaks for itself, n’est-ce pas?

david-donatello

Michelangelo’s “David” is the most famous and perhaps most beautiful:

Michelangelo-David

All these bachelors worked for the Medicis, as did lots of others, including Sandro Botticelli:

sandro-botticelli

Birth of Venus

When it was time to decorate St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Lorenzo lent out a few of his guys to the popes. Michelangelo and Botticelli painted the Sistine Chapel.

Botticelli’s frescoes:

botticelli frescoes

Michelangelo’s ceiling:

ceiling

Out in the main part of the Basilica you can find Michelangelo’s Pieta, perhaps the most beautiful single object ever created by human hands, done at age 24.

michelangelo_pieta_grt

Anyway, this is not the place to summarize the brilliant body of contributions made by “confirmed bachelors” to the world in general, and to the church in particular.

Today’s point is that it would be nice not to have to reference anything about the personal lives of these geniuses and to let their art stand on its own. Maybe we’ll all get to that point some day. But today I think it’s useful to point out to the National Association of Evangelicals that employing gay people is not something they need to promote laws against.

Trump: “Totally destroy”

Today, our President will sign one of his fantastic, unbelievable, huge, beautiful, better-than-anyone-else’s Executive Orders. He doesn’t seem to understand that these orders do not automatically become the law of the land when he signs them, but then there’s so much he doesn’t understand. In his mind, an Executive Tweet has the power of an Executive Order, which has the power of a bill passed unanimously by both the House and Senate and upheld by the Supreme Court.

But it doesn’t work that way. At least not yet.

Christian conservatives will be visiting the White House today, and Trump intends to celebrate the occasion by delivering on his promise, repeated during the campaign and after inauguration, to “totally destroy” what’s known as the Johnson Amendment, a ban on churches and other tax-exempt organizations supporting political candidates that was proposed by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 and agreed to without discussion or debate.

With the Johnson Amendment, according to the IRS website, tax-exempt organizations “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office”.

Because it’s written in the tax code, fully repealing the Johnson Amendment will require an Act of Congress. Does this make me feel any better in the Trump era? I’ll get back to you on that.

Even in the dark pre-history of 1954, when we were still trying to decide whether schools should be segregated by race, lawmakers understood the idea that the separation of church and state was one of the most important pillars of our democracy. Does it seem too much to say that this is really the thing that most clearly separates us from the Islamic Republic of Iran? Or the Taliban?

The NPR site has a nice little Q and A on what it’s all about. Basically, it’s about money and political advantage. Surprised?

trump

I’ll boil it down for you this way: if something seems to benefit Republicans in general and Trump in particular, they will make it so.

And if they have to shred the constitution to do it, or if it has unintended consequences down the line, or if it ultimately ruins the good thing we’ve got going here in the good old U. S. of A., well, so be it. They’ll have theirs.

Fat, dumb, and happy

There is not a day that passes now without some news of the Trump administration undoing something that was done during the Obama administration. It might be a big, important thing like consumer protections in the financial industry or oil pipeline construction, or it might be a smaller thing that, on the surface, seemed like a good idea that would benefit all of us and that no one could really object to, like the designation of a National Monument.

But it is now clear that the principal objective of the current administration is to remove any evidence or traces that Barack Obama was ever the President of the United States. Rather than moving forward, Trump is focused on moving backward eight years.

Yesterday, it was the “rollback” of Michelle Obama’s healthy lunch initiative, which was aimed at reducing childhood obesity by implementing better standards for school lunches. The “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act” was signed into law by President Obama in 2010.

Huge victory over the forces of evil, apparently, as Sonny Perdue, our Secretary of Agriculture, vowed to “Make School Meals Great Again.” Seriously. That’s what he said. And, “schools will no longer have to try so hard to cut the salt in students’ meals or work in whole grains and non-fat milk.”

Margo Woota, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said, “It’s discouraging that just days into his tenure, one of the first things that Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue will do is to roll back progress on the quality of the meals served to America’s children.”

I have a Hungarian friend who moved to Spain several years ago because the “conservative” government in Hungary was driving him crazy. He explained that even though they controlled everything in Hungary and have everything they want, they still had to do some small but awful thing virtually every day just to antagonize their opponents on the left and rub their noses in it. It might be something like reducing support for the arts, making some rule that irritated bicyclists, or simply insulting some public figure for no real reason.

He said he thought it was just to keep everyone on the left, or, as he put it, anyone with a little heart, on the defensive and in a state of anxiety and upset. He said he thought Trump was behaving similarly because if things were just quiet and normal for a while, there might be a breather in which people would wake up and actually get together and impeach the guy. His theory was that as long as everybody was running around madly reacting to daily outrages, no organized effort to hold Trump accountable for ethics breaches or other impeachable offenses could really get rolling.

I don’t know if Trump can really be that devious. He just seems like an impulsive, ignorant, unprincipled man-baby to me. It would be far simpler to just be a good leader, to be the President of everyone including his enemies, as a way to avoid problems, even if it was nothing more than a cynical tactic to raise his approval rating. It would be easier just to do the right thing once in a while, rather than to pounce on every opportunity to punish your detractors.

But it just isn’t going to be that way, and with the likes of Perdue and Betsy DeVos making policy for our kids, it seems like the children are destined to be fat and dumb, while the corporate elite will be happy.

School-Lunch

The GOML Bicentennial is here!

Yup, this is the 200th blog, post, column, article, bloviation, rant, or whatever that I’ve “published” here since “Get Off My Lawn” began in October.

Stewie’s been going at full speed without a break.

Kurt's dog

To the few of you that have been with us from the beginning and have read every word: thanks, and you may take the rest of the day off!

For those who have joined us more recently and may have missed some of the early ruminations, here are a few pieces selected randomly from the archives for you to sample. Some are from the days before GOML was open to comments, so it would be cool if anyone was moved to say something about any of them now.

Stewie votes in the Massachusetts Primary

Baseball and War: Parallel worlds in 1941

Revisit Stewie’s crystal ball from Inauguration Day

Privatizing public spaces in Boston

On the death of Castro

On the Trump campaign taking responsibility for incitement

On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor

Bernie voters have some responsibility

Climate change and Team Trump

What’s the matter with Pueblo?

I read an article in the L.A. Times the other day about how Trump voters in Pueblo County, Colorado, are loving Trump’s first 100 days and all the accomplishments he has accomplished, because he accomplishes so much every day.

The point of the article was that Trump won there, although it has been a Democratic “stronghold” in the past, and that those who voted for him have no regerts. Er, I mean, no regrets.

A lot of it was the paper asking, “Well, what about how Trump said such-and-such during the campaign and is now saying the opposite?”, and the people answering, “What about it?”

In other words, there is nothing Trump can say or do that’s going to change anyone’s mind here.

voter

Proud Trump supporter

One sentence fairly early in the piece pops out at me as the actual explanation for the whole Trump phenomenon:

In short, if all those people in Washington and places like Hollywood and New York are so riled up, Trump supporters suggest, that means he must be doing something right.

It’s just hard to know what to say in response. These people are saying they’d rather have no health care than see someone who is actually qualified in the White House if that person is a “liberal”. They’d rather have dirty air and water than listen to one more argument about someone in North Carolina who isn’t happy with the bathroom they’ve been using. They’d rather embrace anti-democratic “strongmen” around the world and alienate our historic allies than be “pushed around” and condescended to anymore.

One person says, “What happened to the eight years Obama was in office? Promise, promise, promise, and the only change under Obama was that things got worse.” Someone else talks about how, since Trump’s election, business confidence has increased and the stock market has “soared”.

There is really no point in showing them anything like this. They just don’t care:

mess

In other words, FoxNews is doing very well in Pueblo County.

I used to try to minimize the Fox effect in my own mind by thinking, “You can fool 47% of the people all the time and that’s a great business model – but it’s not enough to win an election”.

How wrong I was.

I used to think, OK, you’re tired of political correctness like a lot of people are, but how can you be taken in by this dishonest, unprincipled con-man? It turns out that even Trump voters don’t believe a word he says, but they love to hear him say it.

Where is it all leading? How will it end? One thing is becoming clear to me: whatever disaster our toxic President Crazy-pants brings down on us, the people of Pueblo County and many other places in Trump Nation will regard it as a move in the right direction and a great accomplishment.

Only in America

The other night, at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, host Hasan Minhaj finished his remarks by saying, “Only in America can a first-generation Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the president. It’s a sign to the rest of the world, it’s this amazing tradition, that even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment.”

hasan

For the first time since Reagan was in the hospital recovering from being shot, the president wasn’t there. Trump was in Harrisburg, PA, because he’s a pathetic coward and dangerously thin-skinned narcissist who can’t take a joke. And because, unlike Minhaj, he doesn’t respect the First Amendment at all, as it apparently allows people to disagree with him publicly. He spent the evening leading chants of “Lock Her Up”, asserting that all news (except FoxNews) is fake, that coal mining jobs are coming back, that the first hundred days of his presidency were much better than anyone else’s, and so on.

But today’s blog isn’t about Trump. It’s about Asian Salad, or should I say “Asian” salad. There was an opinion piece in the Rapidly Failing New York Times (the “rapidly” is new, just added in Harrisburg!) a few days ago by author Bonnie Tsui, complaining about the casual racism of the word “Asian” in this context.

Am I taking this too seriously? The casual racism of the Asian salad stems from the idea of the exotic — who is and isn’t American is caught up wholesale in its creation. This use of “Oriental” and “Asian” is rooted in the wide-ranging, “all look same” stereotypes of Asian culture that most people don’t really perceive as being racist. It creates a kind of blind spot.

Most of the RFNYT readers who commented on the piece thought that, yes, she was taking this too seriously, though some agreed vehemently that these sorts of “micro-aggressions” must not be tolerated. Quite a few noted that it was just this sort of over-sensitivity and identity politics that invites the backlash that ultimately leads to Trump getting elected.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this controversy, except to celebrate that at least it is someone with “Asian” roots complaining here, unlike, say, the concern trolls who want Chief Wahoo banished from baseball. The minute Native Americans complain about him, as they well might, Wahoo has to go. But they haven’t yet, at least as far as I’m aware.

wahoo

But what struck me most from the “Asian Salad” article was this sentence:

“To a white audience, it reads as diverse. To actual Asian-Americans, it reads as ridiculous.”

I started thinking, is there a corollary to “Asian Americans” anywhere in Asia, or anywhere else? In other words, is there a sizeable population of second-generation “North American-Koreans” living in Seoul, say, who are offended by some local fast food joint selling American Bar-B-Q or whatever? I don’t think so.

Yes, there are pockets of American ex-pats and conscientious objectors who have established a beach-head elsewhere, but in general they attempt to assimilate and become like everyone around them. If they move to France, they aspire to become French, not to sit around Les Deux Magots complaining that they’re insulted by the American Hamburger on the menu. More likely, they’d join in the criticism of America from their new home. And if, against all odds, Le Figaro published some complaint along these lines, does anyone imagine Parisians chastising themselves for their own insensitivity?

Our country is really the only one in the world founded on the idea of accepting everyone from everywhere else, and turning them into “Americans” (again apologies to indigenous peoples here). Or letting them retain their own culture and respecting that, if they want, though you’ll be hearing from my cousin, Screwie Generis, on the subject of multiculturalism soon enough.

It’s galling to hear other people elsewhere in the world (I’m looking at you, Germany), criticizing us for racism, cultural insensitivity, and intolerance. Do we have a lot of work to do and a lot of room for improvement before every last citizen is treated as they’d like? Yes, of course.

But only in America has this goal been enshrined in the founding documents. That’s why so many people want to come here (or to escape here, if you prefer), and so few want to leave.

And if a new arrival or one of their descendants wants to point out that the rest of us are a bunch of racists for putting Asian Salad on the menu, the New York Times is ready to give them a platform to fire away. The rest of us will give it serious consideration.

Arkansas on a spree

So Arkansas has executed four people in the last eight days, after not executing anyone for twelve years. Wow. This is really a disgrace.

lethal

Before I tell you why I think this is a disgrace, let me make most of you angry by telling you what my cousin Screwie Generis thinks. Screwie is a lot smarter than I am, and he thinks the death penalty is just fine. Here’s how he responds to some of the standard objections to the death penalty.

1. “It’s cruel and unusual”. Perhaps, but then almost everything about our prison system is cruel and unusual, starting with the absurdly high incarceration rate itself, and going all the way up to using prison as a warehouse for all our deinstitutionalized mentally ill. There is no logical basis for singling out the death penalty for its cruelty or unusualness.

2. “It’s used disproportionately against people of color”. This is not an argument to end the death penalty – it is an argument to use it more often on white offenders. The question isn’t what color the murderer is, but whether he committed a capital offense.

3. “It might make you feel better, but it won’t bring back the victim”. Exactly! Nothing can bring back the victim. Life imprisonment can’t do it. A slap on the wrist can’t do it. No punishment you can invent will bring back the victim. The point of capital punishment is that actions have consequences, and this is the correct price to be paid for ending someone’s life.

4. “It doesn’t deter crime”. Nonsense. It deters the shit out of the guy you’re executing. No more stabbing the corrections officers for you, sonny boy. Anyway, if deterrence was the main objective of capital punishment or any other punishment, we’re doing it all wrong. You’d have to start by performing the punishment where those you’d like to deter can see it – in the public square or on TV, for example.

5. “It’s not justice, it’s revenge.” It’s both. But so what if it was just revenge? Why is that not an adequate justification? And, again, isn’t any other punishment also “revenge”? The more important question is, did the guy commit the crime or not?

6. “It’s costly.” Quite beside the point. Everything we do as a society, both the right things and the wrong, has costs. This argument belongs somewhere else. Are you challenging me to think of a cheaper way to kill someone? Because I can do it if you are.

7. “The state has no right”. Hmmm. What “right” does the state have to do anything at all? There are plenty of people out there who think the state has no right to collect income tax, to designate National Monuments, to seize land by eminent domain, or to do many other things that we now allow it to do. The state has whatever “rights” we grant to it.

8. “What if you execute the wrong guy?” OK, now you’re making sense. You cannot execute someone if there is any chance whatever that he is the wrong person. You just can’t do it. The Innocence Project has done some great work in this area, though I’m a bit puzzled by how Barry Scheck can use DNA to free both the innocent and the guilty (remember O.J.?) It’s a really horrible thought that even one innocent person was ever put to death. But, again, this is less an argument against capital punishment than an argument against convicting innocent people. It would also be horrible (maybe even worse!) for an innocent man to spend his life in prison. But, yes, I get it: if you find out someone is innocent, and you haven’t yet executed him, you can release him. The standard for capital punishment cannot be the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that got him convicted, but must be raised to “without a molecule of doubt”.

9. “The murderer is a changed man – he’s rehabilitated and no longer the same guy who committed the crime”. Again, so what? I’m no longer the same guy I was when I (did something) 20 years ago. But I still did it. It still has repercussions for someone else. Can you just murder someone and say, “Hey, that was last week – I’ve grown!” and be absolved? Should we give Poland a call and tell them to leave this guy alone?

10. “The poor guy has the I.Q. of a dust mite – he doesn’t know right from wrong.” He doesn’t know right from wrong, but you want to let him go free? No thanks.

11. “You must take the perpetrator’s background into account – he had a terrible upbringing and it’s understandable why he did the things he did.” Puh-leeeze! First, tons of people had rough upbringings and did not choose to kill anyone. In making this argument, you are denying free will, and, well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on whether we have free will. But more importantly, think of the implications if we go along with it! You’re saying we have to set the murderer free because his step-father put cigarettes out on his chest when he was nine, and he can’t be held responsible for his actions. Fine. Release him. And when he does it again, you have to release him again because the back-story hasn’t changed. You’ve made the punk into James Bond – he has a license to kill.

Whew. OK. Enough from Screwie. But at this point you’re probably asking why, if I think Screwie’s arguments defending capital punishment merit repeating here, did I start by saying that what Arkansas is doing is a disgrace.

Arkansas is executing these guys because their supply of the lethal drugs that they use for executions is nearing its expiration date, and they think they might have trouble getting more.

Screwie might be able to convince me that there are valid reasons to defend capital punishment, but I can’t be convinced that running low on poison is one of them.

What could possibly go wrong?

A wax worm that eats plastic has been discovered. Could this lead to a way to solve the problem of plastic waste disposal?

worm2

That would be nice, as humans now produce 80 million tons of polyethylene every year.

great_pacific_dump

We’re going to need a lot of wax worms.

holes

Holes eaten by 10 wax worms in 30 minutes

Here’s a brief video in which a Spanish scientist explains the accidental discovery, and a link to her publication about it.

Once we figure out what to do when the world is overrun with the wax worms, we should be good to go.

Maybe robots will eat them? But not ones made of plastic? Don’t know yet.

In any case, I, for one, welcome our new wax worm overlords.

Manspreading for Trump

There was a piece on the CBS Evening News last night that had some college kids explaining why they like Trump. I wasn’t listening to them, so I have no idea what their reasons were, but I’m sure they were just brilliant.

Anyway, glancing at the screen, I was struck by how the younger generation, at least those who like Trump, appeared to be oblivious to the concept of “Manspreading”.

I snapped this pic of the TV:

manspreading

According to the internet (is there any other source of information now?), Trump is a well-known manspreader and takes great pride in his manspreading skills. He’s the best and provides a great role model for his young supporters.

Trump

Historical note:

elvis

One more reason to dislike Trump

He’s the first President in 130 years not to have a dog in the White House.

Gotta get those coal jobs back

In 2014, the last year for which statistics are available, the total number of jobs throughout the entire coal industry in the U.S. was 76,572, including office workers, sales staff and all of the other individuals who work at coal-mining companies.

The Whole Foods company alone employs 72,650.

To put it in further perspective, the coal industry falls somewhere between the economic clout of travel agencies and the bowling industry, two other sectors that are on a downward trajectory in terms of overall employment.

coal

Looking at the above list, it strikes me that none of the other industries highlighted pose anything like the health risk to its employees that comes with coal-mining, or anywhere near the power to destroy the environment of all for the benefit of the few. Some will argue that skiing has a pretty bad environmental record (golf, too), but its impact is nothing like coal’s.

The coal industry gets the focus though, because it has been the subject of government regulation, and because Hillary Clinton has been unwise enough to disparage it. It is therefore the poster-industry for the “How Democrats Want To Destroy America” contingent, and the focus of various demagogues, most notably Donald Trump. Coal also has the advantage of being geographically focused in a small region, so if you want to target a certain group of electors, coal is a good bet.

Of course, neither government regulation or Hillary Clinton are actually responsible for the long downward trend in coal jobs. Automation is the culprit, and it’s been going on since 1920.

coal jobs

And, looking to the future, automation is only going to get a lot better still. For a frightening peek at what robots already can do, check this:

There is nothing Trump can or will do to bring more jobs to the coal industry, although I’m confident he will be able to resume the environmental destruction.

Sidney Poitier: tempus fugit

Sidney Poitier turned 90 years old a couple of months ago, and is now the oldest living recipient of the Academy Award for “Best Actor”.

His family was from the Bahamas, where they were farmers, and his dad also was a cab driver in Nassau. They would regularly go to Miami to sell produce, and Sidney was born there two months prematurely, making him a U.S. citizen. You could call him an “anchor baby”, I suppose, except that the family returned to the Bahamas a couple of months after the birth, when Sidney was healthy enough to go.

sid

The family did send him back to Miami when he was 15 to live with his brother, as he had become something of a troublemaker, and he moved to New York at 18, first sleeping in a bus terminal toilet, and taking work as a dishwasher, where a waiter taught him to read the newspaper.

He joined the American Negro Theater, but was received poorly by audiences as he had no singing ability, something that they expected of all performers. He got his chance in movies in 1950, at age 23, in “No Way Out”, and then had increasingly important roles until he became the first actor of African descent to be nominated for a competitive Oscar in 1958, for his work on “The Defiant Ones”.

He won the Oscar for “Best Actor” in 1963, for “Lilies of the Field”, a movie I liked mostly because of his magnetic screen presence. I can still see him consuming that soft-boiled egg the nuns gave him for breakfast, expecting him to perform heavy physical labor all day on that fuel alone. One gulp, no chewing, and a challenging glare that wordlessly shouted, “That’s it? You must be joking.”

sidney3

Fifty years ago, in 1967, Poitier appeared in three big films with a race-relations theme, something he had obviously become the go-to guy for. He was in “To Sir With Love”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, and “In the Heat of the Night” in that year. If I asked you who played the lead in any of these three, you’d say Sidney Poitier, right? I certainly would.

sidney2

guess

sidney1

You saw it Gillespie. What are you going to do about it?

“Sir” and “Dinner” are predictable, and, in my opinion, forgettable, though in 1967 they passed as groundbreaking and important “social statements”. Kind of embarrassing and cringe-inducing, looking back from today’s perspective.

I just saw “In the Heat of the Night” again the other day, though, and it stands up quite well. It evokes the time and place vividly and convincingly, has sharp dialog and a complex plot. It’s diminished mainly by the sequels and T.V. adaptations that attempted to capitalize on its success.

Rod Steiger put his indelible stamp on the whole “southern sheriff” character/caricature (who could forget that rapid-fire gum-chewing?). But it’s Sidney’s movie, all the way.

rod

Both “Heat” and “Dinner” were nominated for the “Best Picture” Oscar in 1968 (movies released in 1967), and “Heat” won the award.

In addition to Best Picture nominations, both “Heat” and “Dinner” also had a Best Actor nomination, but in neither case was Sidney Poitier the guy nominated. Spencer Tracy was nominated for “Dinner”, and Steiger was nominated and won the award for “Heat”.

Weird. And, it must be said, probably racist. By this point, Poitier was starting to get a little criticism for playing an “over-idealized” version of the Black Man, and one with de-emphasized or non-existent sexuality, but that’s not much of a reason to exclude him from even being nominated when neither of these pictures is anything at all without him, and not his fault in the first place.

And to add insult to injury, he didn’t even get a nod for “Supporting Actor” that year. Cecil Kellaway was nominated for “Dinner” (seriously?), and Poitier got no recognition at all for “Heat”.

For the “Academy”, the lesson here is Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: your worldly honors are fleeting. No one really needs you to validate their work, and the silly pronouncements at your annual orgy of self-congratulation speak more negatively about yourselves than positively about those you flatter.

And for Sidney Poitier, Tempus Fugit. It was a long time ago – hard to believe fifty years have passed in the blink of an eye.

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How to make a cat trap

Lay out some tape in a rough square on your floor.

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2. Wait nine seconds.

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Earth Day, 2017

Of all the seismic changes in our culture that were either wrought by or illuminated by Trump’s ascendancy, the most disheartening to me is the demotion of science and the scientific method to the status of “belief system”.

It never occurred to me until recently that not only was there no universal agreement on the ability of science to clarify details of how the natural world worked, for example, or to settle what used to be called “old wives tales” once and for all, but that those who trusted science to perform these functions might actually be in the minority among their neighbors.

It was always simple to me. If someone asserted that their grandmother taught them that you could bring cold water to a boil faster than hot water, and that their grandmother was a very wise person, rarely wrong in anything she said, and a fabulous cook as well, there was no reason to “believe” it or “disbelieve” it. It wasn’t something that you had to take on faith, as it could be easily settled by science. In your own kitchen. In ten minutes. And without casting aspersions on the grandmother or her abilities as a cook.

It was either true or it wasn’t. Demonstrate it and learn the truth – the actual truth.

There’s a really cool and yet extremely depressing site called Yale Climate Opinion Maps that will provide a nice way for you to spend a few minutes on Earth Day. It allows you to display where people live who believe that climate change is a real thing, or think it’s caused by humans, or whether they think it will affect them directly, and so on. You can display the information by state, county, congressional district (the doorway to madness!), etc. You can mouse-over the results for more detail in each case. Fun.

Here’s a sample, showing where people live, by county, who think global warming is happening (sorry, you have to go to the site itself for the cool mouse-over info and more).

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Here’s one showing, by congressional district, the percentage of adults who think CO2 emissions should be regulated.

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And here’s one, by state, showing where people trust scientists on this subject.

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Another reason to be happy to live in Massachusetts, except that the climate is actually horrible here.

It would be really great if you could somehow convince the people who don’t “believe in” climate change that when virtually every real scientist in the world tells you climate change is real and human-influenced, then that’s all you need to know about it. You don’t need to inject your grandmother’s ideas about it into the mix (unless she’s a climate scientist, that is, in which case we already know what she thinks).

They can also tell you whether cold water boils faster than hot if you’re curious (spoiler alert: cold water takes longer to boil than hot, of course).

Anyway, from all of us here at GOML, we wish you and yours a Happy Earth Day, and we hope there are many, many more. Or, to be more realistic, at least a few more.

When pigs fly

Which of these photos says “President” to you, and which says “Pig”?

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I’ve been doing my best to ignore Trump lately, but it’s not easy to do.

The Super Bowl champion N.E. Patriots had their White House visit and photo-op this week. It turned out to be the same day as their former Tight End, convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, killed himself in jail. The simple juxtaposition of those two events should have been enough to make some sort of point about “Winners” and “Losers” sufficient to support the perpetually aggrieved man-baby on his favorite subject, winning. But it wasn’t.

When you’re a pig, you must wallow in mud no matter what the occasion.

The Failing New York Times published the team photo along with the previous one from the last Patriots victory visit two years ago (Winning!), which seemed to show that more Patriots visited when Obama was president than now. But it wasn’t true – the Trump version had the non-football staff seated on the lawn, while the Obama version had them joining the players on the stairs, so in fact there was no real “story” here.

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OK, maybe someone needs to straighten that out, especially in the Twitter era, because you wouldn’t want fake news to be created out of nothing, would you? But that person should not be the President of the United States. It just shouldn’t. Leave it to the surrogates – it’s right up Kellyanne Conway’s alley, so let her do it. But no.

Failing @nytimes, which has been calling me wrong for two years, just got caught in a big lie concerning New England Patriots visit to W.H.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2017

Today’s Twitter feed has this, which you may file under the heading “Sad Pig”:

No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2017

I particularly liked the accomplishment of misplacing a “very powerful” armada on its way to the Korean peninsula. The Chinese laughed about it. The South Koreans didn’t think it was funny at all.

But his greatest accomplishment of all is just wearing everyone else down to the point of surrender. Resistance is futile.

It took a while, but “Obama tapped my wires” is gone! Just gone. It had a little bit more staying power than the previous record-holder, “Pussy-Grabbing”, but, in the end, outrageous as it was, the man-baby just ground everyone else down by repeating and extending the lies, moving the goalposts, claiming victory, deflecting, bullying, ignoring evidence, and attacking anyone who tried to shed any light on it. Winning!

And let’s not forget the total success of the whole “tapping” thing in the first place – getting Jeff Sessions lying to congress about meetings with Russians off the news. Hard to even remember that one. Not that anyone really cares about the Russians running our government – that one’s apparently gone as well.

And now we have that very same Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, saying he doesn’t think a judge on an island in the pacific should over-rule Trump. Yup, the Attorney General thinks our court system and the separation of powers is pretty bogus.

But that “Mexican Judge” won’t ultimately get in the way of Trump’s Muslim Ban, because Our Man on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, will make it right.

Some of the man-baby’s as yet-unaccomplished accomplishments:

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But these things will be “accomplished” very soon. In fact any one of them could be “accomplished” today, simply by having the man-baby tweet that it is “accomplished”. Who’s going to refute it? A congressional committee? The Attorney General? The Supreme Court?

When pigs fly.

Antiquities: dealing vs. stealing

Four months ago, I wrote something about how, through the miracle of digitization, a long dismembered illuminated manuscript called the Beauvais Missal was being re-assembled. I mentioned how the leaves of this work had been broken up and sold individually (an activity known as “biblioclasm”) by a rare books dealer and notorious book-breaker in New York named Philip Duschnes, who had purchased the Missal from William Randolph Hearst.

Duschnes’ name crossed my screen again today in a story about how the Boston Public Library is going to return three items to their rightful owners in Italy, after having had them in their collections for decades. The items were all purchased “legitimately” by the BPL. including one from Duschnes in 1960, Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia.

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It’s the one on the right. In English, it’s “Rules of the school of Our Lady of Mercy “.

The B.P.L. is putting a rosy spin on the affair, bragging about how it discovered the true history of the items through its own researches, has been a careful custodian of them for decades, and now wishes to return them to their rightful owners.

In a press release, they explained

“Today Boston Public Library announced the return of three items from its Special Collections to the State Archives of Venice, Italy and the Library of Ludovico II De Torres in Monreale, Italy. During a repatriation ceremony with Mayor Martin J. Walsh and representatives from Homeland Security, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Italian Carabinieri, Boston Public Library formally returned the Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia, a medieval manuscript dating to 1392; an illuminated leaf from the manuscript Mariegola della Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, dating from between 1418-1422; and Varii de natvralibvs rebvs libelli, a collection of works by Bernardino Telesio, published in 1590.”

As regards the item purchased from Duschnes,

Questions about the Mariegolas’ provenance emerged through new independent scholarship and a recent project funded by the library to research and describe its medieval manuscripts holdings in preparation for electronic cataloging and digitization. The Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia was written in Bologna in 1392 for the use of the scuola (confraternity) of Our Lady of Mercy at Valverde, a spiritual and charitable brotherhood. It was part of the scuola’s collection until the confraternity was dissolved in 1803, at which point it passed into the collection of the State Archive of Venice. Beginning in 1879, the manuscript was on permanent display in the Archive’s Sala Diplomatica Regina Margherita. The manuscript was taken off exhibition in the late 1940s, at which time several manuscripts disappeared under unknown circumstances, including the Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia.

Another way to say “disappeared under unknown circumstances” is that the item was “mistakenly” stolen , and somehow managed to find its way to Philip Duschnes and then to the BPL.

What’s interesting to me about this version of events is that it doesn’t quite mesh with the provenance of the item given in the BPL’s own link, which states that prior to Duschnes, the previously known owner was one Michael Zagayski. Zagayski was a Polish collector of Judaica whose collection was stolen by the Nazis in 1939.

I have no idea where Duschnes got the item from, but I do know that what it meant to be a legitimate Rare Books and Manuscripts dealer in 1960 is somewhat different than what it means now. Duschnes enjoyed a good reputation in his day (except among his peers who objected to his greed-induced biblioclasm), but issues of provenance were not nearly as sensitive then as now, and “acquiring” items from far-off and war-torn places was seen more as a capitalist right than a historical privilege.

The representative of the Italian police working on this case, Fabrizio Parrulli, said he expects many more cases of repatriation like this one.

The Boston Public Library holds nearly 250,000 rare books and one million manuscripts. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said during Wednesday’s ceremony, “Hopefully everything we have is ours now.”

What are the chances?

No True Frenchman

You know the “No True Scotsman” logical fallacy? It’s a ploy that makes any argument impervious to contradiction.

If Angus, who lives in Glasglow and who puts sugar on his porridge, is proposed as a counter-example to the claim that “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”, the “No true Scotsman” fallacy would work this way:

(1) Angus puts sugar on his porridge.
(2) No (true) Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
(3) Therefore Angus is not a (true) Scotsman, and
(4) Angus’ putting sugar on his porridge does not disprove the claim that no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

The other day, Marine Le Pen, the right wing “National Front” candidate running for President of France said that France wasn’t responsible for the Vél d’Hiv roundup. This was the action of July, 1942, in which the French, without any help from the Germans, deported 13,000 “stateless” Jews, i.e. those that had fled to France from elsewhere in Europe, seeking French protection from the Nazis.

French police rousted them from their beds, sent 6,000 immediately to Drancy (a transit camp for Auschwitz in the Paris suburbs), and crammed the rest into an indoor bike track in the 15th Arrondisement called the Vélodrome d’Hiver for five days without food, water or toilets, before deporting them to be murdered. They conducted the round-up to demonstrate to the Germans that they were reliable allies, in agreement with the German goals.

But “the French” didn’t do that, according to Le Pen, who said, “France wasn’t responsible for the Vel d’Hiv. If there was responsibility, it is with those who were in power at the time, it is not with France. France has been mistreated, in people’s minds, for years.” Le Pen wants true Frenchmen to be proud of France. Fair enough.

No, it was the Vichy regime then in power that was responsible, and they couldn’t really be French, because no true Frenchman could have done such a thing. Except that they were as French as any Frenchman has ever been – Philippe Pétain, the “war hero” of Verdun was at the head of the Vichy government, and was a beloved figure enjoying great popularity in France at the time of the Vél d’Hiv episode.

Petain

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And all the police that conducted the operation were, what, if not French? And all of the citizens looking on as the Jews were taken away were French as well. Some clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the scene, while many jeered and insulted the deportees. But they were all true Frenchmen.

As the years pass, and living memory of the events is gradually extinguished, there is a strong tendency on the part of those who interpret history now to confuse French dislike of or resistance to the Germans with some feeling of goodwill or responsibility toward the Jews. The way I see it, no one wants to be occupied by Nazis, but they might be able to find a silver lining in that cloud: the Christ-killers get what they’ve always deserved, and lots of choice apartments in the Marais become magically available overnight. Furnished, too!

According to this NYT piece,

Ms. Le Pen’s words also flew in the face of over four decades of historical research into the eager collaboration of the wartime French government, which had been installed in the spa town of Vichy. It was the French government’s police chief, René Bousquet — a favorite of the head of the government at the time — who organized the roundup, impressing his German counterparts with his energy.

“Vichy did not have a knife to its throat,” the historian Philippe Burrin wrote of the Vel d’Hiv roundup in his landmark book, “La France à l’Heure Allemande,” (“France Under the Germans”).

“Without the help of the police” — the French police — “the SS was paralyzed,” Mr. Burrin wrote. “The French authorities were entirely disposed to get rid of foreign Jews,” he wrote, referring to the officials’ offer to the Nazis, on that occasion at least, to hand over Jews who were not French citizens.

It always puzzles me that people who advocate for the removal of Jews from public life refuse to acknowledge that others have tried it before and succeeded. And then call those who mention it liars and slanderers. It’s weird. They say they’d like to do it but are offended by the notion that someone did do it?

The antecedents and founders of Le Pen’s “National Front”, though French, might as well be Nazis. Attempts to explain how they are not Nazis make distinctions without differences. They hated the Jews, who they regarded as “the other” and a threat to French life. The party was founded by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted holocaust denier, who famously referred to the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail of history”. Marine finally kicked her father out of the party two years ago, and has been trying to “de-demonize” it, make it less odious and more acceptable to the true Frenchmen, with good success.

I’ll defer discussion of the frightening rise of blatant anti-semitism in France in recent years, and just say that French sentiment is what it has always been, though the degree of the “blatant” fluctuates. Not much has changed since Dreyfus, Zola, and Herzl, or forever before that, despite the stark lessons of the intervening history.

Marine Le Pen is a true Frenchwoman. She has made it acceptable for French people to think and say things which have not been acceptable to think or say for decades. She has a lot of popular support, and the people who may well vote her in as the next President of France are also true Frenchmen.

Wild Mountain Thyme

I saw an OK flick the other day, “Their Finest”. It’s about making a patriotic movie to rally British morale after the evacuation of their trapped army from Dunkirk in 1940. I liked it well enough – it was ostensibly about something I find interesting, but it morphed into more of a love story and a story of the growth and emergence of a talented woman film-writer. It had the advantage of a strong and sympathetic female at its center, which is something we’ve talked about here at GOML in the past.

Their Finest Hour and A Half Directed by Lone Sherfig

The movie’s principal weakness is that it doesn’t know when to quit. It goes on past the moment it should end, and actually breezes right through two or three points that would have been a perfectly appropriate ending, until it feels like it’s testing the patience of the audience a little bit.

But it does have several emotional moments that are really well done. One, for me, comes when the cast members of the movie within the movie are gathered having drinks after the project is just about done, and are led in the singing of the Scottish folk song, “Wild Mountain Thyme” (actually written by Francis McPeake, who was from Northern Ireland).

It’s a really beautiful song, and everybody who has any interest in traditional music has covered it at some point. Mark KnopfIer did a nice instrumental version, and I really like the authenticity and feeling of the Clancy Brothers’ version:

The Corries, a Scottish duet from the early sixties, did a very heartfelt and emotional version, which I also like very much.

In this version, when the chorus begins with, “And we’ll all go together…”, listeners join in, as they do also in the movie version and in many others as well. It’s a powerful and sad effect – it feels like an anthem to solidarity in some common cause or shared feeling. It almost makes you want to cry, but the thing is, you don’t even know what the hell you’re crying about!

And here’s my question for you today: What is this song actually about? Are we “all going together” to war? To a cult meeting where we’ll drink some thyme Kool-Aid and die? To courting? If it’s just a love song asking the lassie for her hand, “Will ye go, lassie, go?”, why so sad and serious?

Or are we just all going to pick some thyme and then come right back? Is it about summer being all too brief after waiting so long for it? It’s written like something promising is beginning, but it’s played like something tragic is ending.

Maybe it’s simply that element of morbidity in all things Scottish that often comes through – cold, wet, darkness, death, and melancholy – no matter the subject?

So tell us, dear readers, what does Wild Mountain Thyme say to you?

Marathon Monday Mashup

A few random, loosely connected thoughts occur to me about Boston and the things people say about it on Marathon Monday, always a big festive occasion here.

1. Boston is a racist, small, parochial city that is, at its heart, deeply illiberal.

Yes, OK, we’ve heard this often and I have no great desire to argue about it. I suppose the stereotype still fits in several neighborhoods that resist change and hang onto their ethnic enclaves like grim death. I won’t mention them by name because it always pisses people off, but you can tell by looking at a map who the usual suspects are – they’re all in Boston proper, but separated from “downtown” by bodies of water, train tracks and highways, or other natural and man-made boundaries that make it easier to retain their unique “character”.

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The Bad Old Days

2. Boston is a world-class city, internationally known for its culture, institutions, and history of progressive thought and action.

Yes, this one is also true and I like it a lot better. In fact, I would say the truths here greatly outweigh the truths of No. 1 above. No one can match our hospitals and universities. Our museums and symphony are as good as anyone else’s. We’re a technology and financial center, and an incubator of new businesses and ideas.

Great institutions anchor the Longfellow Bridge

I’ve heard it said that there are more books per capita in Boston/Cambridge than anywhere else. We can be counted on to be on the right side of history when it’s time to vote. True, we’re not New York, and we’re all in bed by 1:00 A.M., but that’s a good thing, if you ask me.

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And if you like sports, Boston has it all – plenty of championships in the four major professional sports, and a wealth of great college programs as well, e.g. three national powerhouses in college hockey within walking distance from one another: Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. A fourth, Northeastern, is quickly closing in on this elite circle. And amateur sports flourish here, too, which brings me to:

3. The Boston Marathon is an international, cross-cultural magnet. It is the oldest annual marathon in the world, and arguably the most famous. Tens of thousands will run officially and unofficially, and some will be professional athletes, but the overwhelming majority are amateurs. It will draw people from all over the world who have trained and sacrificed and traveled great distances for the honor of running “Boston”.

I’m writing this before the race, but I will go out on a limb and say that both the men’s and women’s winner will have come from a far away land and have an absolutely huge grin on their face despite the exhaustion of having gone all out for a couple of hours.

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Yesterday was a hot day, not a great day for running. But out on the Charles, lots of runners were getting in their last tune-ups before the race. Smiles all around, people taking selfies, locals and visitors in happy concatenation. A great day to be a Bostonian.

4. Martin Richard Park. Since the 2013 bombings, the Marathon has taken on a new and important aspect, beyond that of just sporting glory. It has come to embody the “Boston Strong” spirit of overcoming adversity, and not surrendering to our worst impulses. A new park and playground has opened up honoring Martin Richard, the little kid who lost his life in the bombings, and his family wants everyone to enjoy it and have good and positive feelings about it, like Martin would.

I hope it is successful and doesn’t become another in the unfortunate string of misuses and privatization of public space that we like to rail about here at GOML.

5. Doing harm while doing good. Apart from the Marathon, just about every weekend there is some sort of outdoor event where you can try to help an important cause. Maybe it’s a “walk for hunger” (shouldn’t that be a walk against hunger?), or one to support cancer research. It’s hard to keep up with them all, but everyone seems to want to do good.

But sometimes, even the well-meaning can do harm while trying to do good. I was out walking yesterday and noticed some pink plastic/rubber ties on stakes in the ground by the riverbank, obviously there to help participants navigate some part of a charitable event. Having just written a few days ago about the proliferation of plastics everywhere around us, I couldn’t get the following progression out of my mind:

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pink 2

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And, just to go out on a high note, here’s a bonus pic of a teenage goose on the ground and some teenage trash in the trees.

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Man and nature in harmony. If only.

That’s it for my Marathon Monday Mashup. Peace out, people!

DeVos: No steps forward, two steps back.

Betsy DeVos, our new Secretary of Education, wants to encourage job creation and free-market values. For the lucrative scam industry, that is.

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Everyone knows that the burden of student debt is a complex problem in the era of de-valued degrees, for-profit “universities”, and decreased job opportunities. You have to flip a hell of a lot of burgers to pay off your loans for that online B.A. you got from the University of Phoenix.

For-profit education is big business, and servicing and collecting on government loans is a big, profitable part of it all. One in eight Americans owes money on student loans totaling $1.4 trillion, and the companies charged with collecting that debt can get a little too aggressive – round-the-clock robocalls, threats, all sorts of bullying and questionable practices.

Companies like Navient, the Sallie Mae spinoff which is the largest player in this space, are making tons of money doing this, and are facing several lawsuits from consumer groups for putting their own interests ahead of the students they’re supposed to be helping. Navient preyed on students that Sallie Mae steered into costly loans that were designed to fail.

The Obama administration tried to require their Education Department to award contracts for debt servicing only after taking the past behavior of the companies into account, and to provide some protection for consumers. They issued a memorandum that would help mitigate abuses by

Requiring companies to inform delinquent borrowers of their eligibility for income-based repayment plans before demanding they make a payment
Requiring loan contractors to make vigorous efforts to contact borrowers at risk of default and walk them through their options
Creating teams of specially trained customer service representatives within each contractor that would immediately handle inquiries from struggling borrowers who call for help
Setting strict deadlines for loan companies to process borrowers’ applications for various repayment plans
Demanding that companies inform borrowers potentially eligible for loan cancellations about their debt discharge options before discussing repayment

But DeVos wants to undo all that and give the poor patriots at Navient a much-needed leg up. Consumer protections are apparently just socialism, or something, and we don’t want to put any constraints on a perfectly good racket designed to hasten the transfer of wealth from the many to the few. After all, what would a sterling pyramid scheme like Amway, from which DeVos’ own wealth derives, have been if they had to take ethics and honesty into account? And let’s not forget how DeVos directly benefits from the for-profit education industry either!

In her spare time, DeVos is also hard at work trying to undo Title IX protections against bullying, harassment, and discrimination. Joe Biden, someone who has been a champion in this area, has spoken out against DeVos’ stance on Title IX protections specifically on sexual assault. In a recent interview, he said,

Let me tell you, it bothers me most if Secretary DeVos is going to really dumb down Title IX enforcement. The real message, the real frightening message you’re going to send out is, our culture says it’s OK. You know, the major reason why women drop out of college when they’re a freshman is because of sexual assault. Not their grades, sexual assault. And so, it would be devastating.

No father or mother should drop their kid off this late August, early September at their first day at college and drive away worried [if she is] going to be safe. Most parents don’t drive away saying, Is she going to do all right in school? Is she academically qualified? Will she show up for class? How well is she going to do? That’s not the conversation going on. The conversation that’s going on is, is she going to be safe? That is an obligation of the school, and Title IX is the vehicle, and when Secretary DeVos by her silence didn’t affirm that rape and sexual assault are forms of sexual discrimination … God, if anything is sexual discrimination, it’s rape and assault. And that’s why schools have an obligation under Title IX to prevent this from happening.

Thanks for your service, Betsy.

She’s baaaack…

Hillary Clinton has now re-emerged from her self-imposed exile, and is blaming everyone but herself for the disaster her incompetent candidacy has wrought. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve said many times she would have been a perfectly fine executive and I would have loved to have her lead us. But as a candidate, she just never got the knack.

She’s now blaming the FBI for its role in the bogus email flap, Putin, Wikileaks, FoxNews, misogynist bigots, etc. etc. And it’s all true. But it misses the point, which is that if she can’t rise above those things to defeat an insane, toxic, incompetent, lying, racist, sexist, xenophobic con-man and clown, there’s really no excuse but that she was a poor candidate.

She figured she could just coast in as Trump self-destructed, and that simply running as Obama 2.0 was a great platform. It should have been enough. The scandal-free and ethics-first eight years of Barack Obama gave us a miraculous economic recovery from the 2008 precipice we stood on (hard to even remember now, isn’t it?), and gradually disengaged us from stupid and unwinnable military adventures in various parts of the world, particularly the Middle East.

But it wasn’t enough. The voters wanted a transformational candidate with a new message – someone who could break the politics-as-usual gridlock in Washington, and Hillary wasn’t that person. Neither is Trump, of course, but the electorate was fooled into mistaking his bullying, demagoguery, and chaotic doublespeak for something positive. The final price we’ll all pay for this deception is yet to be determined.

Bill Maher says Hillary should go away now, and that her re-appearance verifies all the bad things people think about the Clintons, i.e. that it’s always all about them. He points out she had her chance and she blew it.

I agree. It’s time for the Clintons to get off the stage. All of them, including Chelsea. Let Elizabeth Warren be the first female president.

The customer is never right

In corporate America today, the transformation is almost complete. The big ones are just about done eating the little ones. How many options does the consumer really have now when choosing a bank? Or an internet/cell/TV provider? Or an airline that flies a particular route? Even the grocery stores are coming under the the control of the increasingly few corporate parents.

As consumers have their choices reduced, and as companies who built their business on great customer service are acquired by companies that didn’t, the whole notion of trying to do right by the customer is becoming obsolete.

If you need to call Intergalactic Cable because they just added another $15 to your monthly bill for no apparent reason, you’ll soon realize the effort required to get that money back will cost you a lot more than $15 in time, effort and aggravation.

You wade through a maze of voice menus and finally arrive on “hold” listening to a recorded voice tell you repeatedly that your call is important to them. Your call is not important to them. It’s a giant pain in the rear end and they hope you just go away. But don’t forget to pay your bill promptly to avoid penalties.

When someone finally does answer, you soon realize they are entry-level employees in the Philippines or India or somewhere else where labor is cheap. They read from a script, often in an accent you have trouble comprehending. They have no authority to address your issue. They try to sell you additional “services”. Would you like to enroll in their auto-pay program? They’ll just go right into your account every month without you needlessly worrying about the details. So convenient!

You may be transferred and transferred again to other “customer service” people who also cannot help you. Sometimes you wind up back with the department you started with, but with a different person. Each step along the way requires you to provide extensive identifying information before you start all over trying to explain the problem. You’re fortunate if, after all this, you aren’t simply disconnected. And if you do achieve the goal you started out with – getting that $15 removed – you feel like you’ve won the lottery. But that $15 will reappear in two months and you can decide then if you’d like to repeat the experience.

If you’re dim enough to ask your insurance company to give you some money when you discover your car has been dented in the parking lot while you were shopping, your rates will be raised. The business model amounts to “you give us money, we give you nothing”.

The customer is not always right. The customer is a sucker to be fleeced.

The corporation has several constituencies that need to be served, and their interests conflict. First and foremost, management must be taken care of. The C-level few will get their obscene compensation packages whether the company does well or not, whether the products are faulty or not, and whether the customers complain or not.

After they’ve had their turn at the trough, the shareholders may or may not get some return on their investment, then the employees may or may not get some consideration, and then comes the customer. The customer gets nothing.

We’re supposed to feel good when we read a story like this one about Wells Fargo clawing back $75 million from two executives. Two! This is after six months of them “investigating” themselves about the fraud which saw two million fake accounts created and 5300 employees fired. See, it was the employees who were actually the guilty ones! Why did these two jokers get paid so absurdly in the first place? Why does it take a media firestorm to get rid of them, and another to get some of the loot returned?

Here’s a piece from last July that puts the nine-figure compensation of failed Yahoo CEO, Marisa Mayer, “in perspective”. She’s gone now. What would they have had to pay her if she actually did what they hired her to do, i.e. finally turn the company around?

You only get “accountability” from the guys at the top after they’ve exhausted all their other options. This week’s United Airlines fiasco is a case in point. First came the statements from the top about how procedures were followed and how proud they are of their employees. Then there was some talk about how they weren’t really the bad guys, because, see, it was actually law enforcement that screwed up. Then there was the obligatory blaming of the customer – he was “defiant” (as opposed to what?). Then there were some lukewarm “apologies” for having to “re-accommodate” some passengers (none of whom had actually been accommodated in the first place).

DC: Airline Industry CEO's Speak At Chamber Of Commerce

Only after it became clear that this wasn’t going away, that there would be lawsuits, that the paying customer was assaulted (lost his front teeth and was concussed!), that CEO Oscar Munoz is finally using some more-or-less appropriate language. As part of this mea culpa, he also said “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” Actually, after you’ve knocked out your customer’s teeth, it is a little late.

But if you believe for a minute that any of this is sincere, that it’s anything other than pathetic attempts at damage control, well, you’re the perfect customer for United Airlines and all the other mega corporations for whom competition in our “free-market” economy is not a worry.

Anyway, I started writing this because today I read something about the airlines overbooking policies that bothered me. I wrote the other day that it seemed to me that, since you pay for your ticket when “reserving” it these days, the airlines will have their money whether you fly or not, and that the overbooking policy now is nothing more than an opportunity for them to sell the same seat twice. The article I read today said no, not exactly, because when people who purchased a refundable ticket don’t fly, they might get their money back and then the airline loses.

First of all, I’m not worried about the airline “losing”. They’re doing fine. Second, I’d need to see some statistics about how many of the no-shows actually bought refundable tickets, because they often cost twice as much or more than the non-refundable ones. And third, the airlines have already protected themselves against the possibility of losing money on no-shows. The full-fare customers who did fly have simply paid an insurance premium for something that didn’t happen. It’s all profit for the airline, and loss for the customer.

So what’s the takeaway here? Uh, I’m not sure. We’ve gone pretty far down the road of corporate consolidation to turn that ship around at this point. And I think we can rule out hiring Marisa Mayer to fix things, or anyone at Wells Fargo. But, beyond that?

Bernie for President in 2020?

Hank to Hendrix, via the beach

Can you spot the genius in this picture?

dd1

Hint: he can play a Stratocaster upside down. And, if this picture is any indication, apparently without electricity!

The picture features Candy Johnson, famous for her shimmy in the ridiculous Beach Party pictures of the early sixties. But that guy with the guitar in back of her is Dick Dale, also known as King of the Surf Guitar. As a lefty, he had to turn the Strat upside down to play it.

He was born in Boston, and went to high school in Quincy. He started playing guitar as a kid, and, like virtually everyone who came after Hank Williams, Dale cited Hank as one of his early influences.

He moved with his family to the west coast after 11th grade, where he fell in love with surfing and wanted to make music that matched the sounds he heard in his head when he surfed. He quickly developed his own style, distinctive for its rapid-fire up-and-down staccato picking.

To get the heavily distorted, “thick” sound he wanted, he developed customized amps and pick-ups with Fender. He invented that instantly-recognizable “surf sound”, which had to be loud enough to be heard over the ocean. So he built the first-ever 100-watt amplifier.

Jimi Hendrix was also left handed, and that’s one of the reasons Dick Dale was an early influence on him. But the main thing was that Dale took the instrument to a new level, making it do things no one else had ever done, and creating a unique body of work that expressed who he was and what he felt. In other words, Dale created brilliant art – something Jimi understood well.

Dick Dale will be 80 years old in a couple of weeks, and he’s still going strong. Catch him if you can.

Paradise lost

I wrote a piece on Midway Island four months ago that no one read (so I should probably take the hint and not revisit the subject, but, hey, that’s why Stewie is Generis). It was about the ecological disaster happening there, in the middle of the Pacific where no one really lives. If you want to know what’s going on in the picture below, check this out.

birds3

Here’s an 11-minute video from National Geographic that explains a lot more about the big picture.

What made me think about this was a short video I saw the other day showing someone sifting a bucket of sand on Kailua Beach in Hawaii. A random, ordinary looking bucket of sand turns out to be filled with plastic debris. This means, of course, that every bucket of sand in Hawaii, and probably everywhere else, looks like this as well.

For technical reasons, I can’t display it on this site, but do yourself a favor and click on this link to be amazed.

What you can see on the surface in Hawaii is bad enough, as this next picture shows.

hawaii1

But even if you cleaned up everything you see on the surface, you wouldn’t have touched everything beneath the surface that the sifting video clip shows.

And it made me realize there’s nothing particularly unique about Hawaii or Midway – the whole planet is already deeply damaged, possibly beyond repair. It’s just that it’s more jarring when you see it in the places we expect to be pristine, i.e. in “paradise”.

But we’ve become accustomed to a very high level of ambient garbage everywhere in the cities. It occurred to me that if you sifted a bucket of dirt from the banks (or the bottom) of the Charles River, you’d have a huge amount of plastic and metal garbage as well, probably a lot worse than in Hawaii, but in the cities it’s no longer a shock.

Yesterday, I took a walk by the river and was struck by the debris everywhere, and the fact that it’s completely “normal”. No one thinks much about it, though there is an annual clean-up day that does make things look a little better, at least on the surface, and at least for a while.

There’s a Canada Goose in this picture, believe it or not. See if you can spot it.

goose

OK, this time United is wrong

The other day we wrote about internet outrage, and how it has a life of its own, even when it’s based on incorrect information. It was about United Airlines making some teenagers change their clothes before boarding, and the story blew up before people realized that there was another piece to the puzzle and maybe United wasn’t really wrong.

Well, today United is in the news again, and this time it looks like they really screwed up. They overbooked a flight as is their practice, assuming that some passengers will be no-shows. The concept is that they should be able to sell the seats when this happens, rather than lose revenue on the no-shows. Every now and then, they get caught if there aren’t enough no-shows, and they have to bribe someone to wait for another flight.

This happened in Chicago the other day, and they had four more passengers than seats on a flight to Louisville. Three people agreed to fly later, but one guy, who U.A. had determined should be the fourth, didn’t want to get off the plane. They would end up getting the police to come on the plane and physically drag the guy out of his seat and off the plane, literally kicking and screaming.

As we often say here at GOML, in the internet age there is usually more to the story than meets the eye. But there are three things about this whole deal that makes United look bad to me, if the story stands as is.

The first is the whole “overbooking” practice. In the old days, you used to be able to “reserve” a ticket and pay for it when you showed up at the airport. If you didn’t show, the airline didn’t get the money and the seat went empty. But now, you always pay for the ticket when you “reserve” it. In other words, you’re not reserving it at all – you’re buying it. If you don’t use it, the airline still has your money. Yes the seat goes unoccupied for that flight, but the airline hasn’t lost anything. Overbooking is now a way for the airline to get paid twice for the same seat. Am I wrong about this? Someone please correct me if so.

Second, the airlines’ ticketing agreement allows them to refuse boarding to passengers under lots of different scenarios, including overbooking. Fine, but they hadn’t refused boarding to this poor guy. He was already settled into his seat when the whole thing blew up. If you’re overbooked, you know it before boarding begins, and you can straighten it out in the gate area. No? You might have someone pitch a screaming fit there, but it beats a viral video of a guy being pulled out a seat that he paid for on a flight he needs to take. You would have thought they were taking him to the electric chair.

And third, this whole thing happened because United discovered they had four employees who they needed to get to Louisville. They were non-revenue-passengers (remember “nonrevs” from the whole dress-code incident?). So they throw off the paying customers to make way for their employees? This did not sit well with the other passengers who were seated near the “victim”, and they berated and shamed the U.A. nonrev employees who did fly.

Now there may yet be a twist that absolves United here – I have an open mind. Maybe the four employees were pilots who had to get to Louisville to fly a transplanted heart to its new owner. Maybe United knew that a plane-full of asthmatic orphans would be waiting on the ground for eight hours, or something, if they didn’t get this crew down there, and they figured “the greatest good for the greatest number”. I don’t know.

But, at first blush, this does seem like corporate greed and contempt for customers. To the barricades! Down with the Patriarchy!

Remember this movie?

It was called “Regime Change”, I believe. You remember it, right? A Brutal Dictator “gasses his own people”. He must be stopped. A clueless POTUS undertakes military action based on faulty intelligence and a poor grasp of regional politics, urged on by his generals assuring him that we’ll be welcomed as liberators. Remember?

The lead-up to the big action sequence is a lot of bickering among various factions, theories about the strength of the opposition (the fearsome “Republican Guard”, OMG), and finally a decisive gamble to go all in – Shock and Awe! A brief but heroic effort by our boys in uniform, and the day is won – the Brutal Dictator is rooted out from his spider hole, “tried”, and executed. Regime change is accomplished! A happy ending for all, as the U.S. is warmly embraced by the grateful “civilians” who devote their energies to baseball and car manufacturing , and the POTUS’ poll numbers shoot up as he rides a unicorn farting glitter over a huge rainbow. Remember? I actually don’t remember the ending too well, but I’m sure it was great.

There was some talk about a sequel. They were going to call it, “Regime Change – The Day After”, but no one had any idea what the plot might be, or who might replace the Brutal Dictator character, so they just forgot about it. They figured, let’s wait a few years and we’ll re-make the hugely successful original.

So our Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, is now saying Regime Change in Syria is “inevitable”. Assad must go. It’s now apparently a prerequisite to defeating ISIS. See, ISIS without their principle antagonist will wither away. The Brutal Dictator has gassed “his own people”, you see, and has thus crossed a line (“many, many lines” is what our beloved Man-Baby said), and the whole world thinks it’s time for us to exert our moral influence once more. Oh, and also, the dismal approval ratings of POTUS-45 could really use a boost.

I’ve already attempted to describe the complexity of the situation in Syria here before. Check this out for a refresher. Suffice it to say that it’s not something that can be “fixed” by a few well-crafted tweets followed by a few well-placed missiles. Especially not by a POTUS with the attention span of a gnat and no understanding of world affairs or history, and apparently no recollection of his own oft-repeated guidance on this issue, which has been a clear “Stay Out Of It” until now.

It boils down to this: there are no “good guys” to rescue here. And when Assad is gone, we’re not going to like whatever comes next, even a little bit. Oh, and ISIS will gain from this, as Putin has said.

And let me just say this once more about the whole “gassed his own people” thing. Saddam gassed some people who were living in what we’ve been calling “Iraq” since the end of World War I. The people he gassed were Shiite Muslims in the south, sometimes referred to as “Marsh Arabs”, and Kurds in the North. Neither of these were “his own people”, which were Tikriti Sunnis.

In that part of the world, there is no concept of liberal democracy, no protections of minority populations or their “rights”, no pluralistic, benevolent government of, by, and for the people. The model is and always has been, “Big Strong Man comes to power, stays for life, and uses the wealth of the country as his own, while taking good care of his own tribe and family and oppressing the hell out of everyone else.”

Before the Iraq war, Thomas Friedman asked in his New York Times columns, “Is Iraq the way it is because Saddam is the way he is, or is Saddam the way he is because Iraq is the way it is?”

Now we know, or at least we should know. The idea that getting rid of the dictator will give oxygen to all the Hamiltons and Jeffersons who have been hiding in the weeds all these years, just waiting to found a liberal democracy, is just fantasy.

But suddenly we want to try it all over again in what we’ve been calling “Syria” since the end of World War I. The Brutal Dictator has gassed some people that we’ve said are “his own”, but they aren’t. In this case, “his own people” would be members of the Shiite Alawite sect, the ruling minority clique around Assad. Of course he hasn’t gassed any of them, but that’s beside the point (though asserting it once again demonstrates our ignorance of the situation we want to “fix”). It’s the gassing of anybody at all that’s supposed to be our cue for action here.

The first movie wasn’t very good and certainly doesn’t need a re-make, but it did have one or two lessons that should have been learned. Learning lessons is apparently not the strength of the current administration.

Wilhelm Gustloff

The Soviet Union suffered far more than Germany did in World War II, and far, far more than the U.S. or even the U.K.

24 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, including 14 million civilians. They were invaded, bombed, starved, robbed, raped, enslaved, and executed en masse. To the Germans, they were subhumans, “üntermenschen”, and were treated thusly as only the Germans know how to do.

By contrast, the United States and Great Britain lost less than half a million people each, and, in the case of the U.S., almost no civilians. Japan lost a total of about 3 million, and Germany lost about 8 million, including 2 million or so civilians. Full stats by country here.

The U.S. mainland was not occupied or bombed. There was no siege that starved out any city. No enemy invaded to rob and rape. Life at home was as close to “normal” for the women and children there as you could expect during wartime.

And, until the last months of the war, you could have said the same about the German home-front, too (except of course, for the Jews).

In the closing weeks of the war, when the Red Army was advancing on Germany from the east and the allies from the west, the German people began to feel some of the blow-back from what their country had done in the east for the previous five years. The Russians exacted revenge in the most brutal and, it must be said, sometimes barbaric ways imaginable (though the limits of the German imagination are still unknown).

Over two million German women were raped, many again and again. In 2008 a movie based on the diaries of journalist Marta Hillers attempted to tell the story from the German point of view.

Stalin explicitly approved of all the rape and plunder, saying people should “understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle”, and “We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative.”

When everyone finally realized the war was lost, the primary objective of every German was to avoid being taken by the Red Army, and everyone tried as hard as they could to flee to the west where they knew they would get better treatment from the Americans and Brits.

In late January, 1945, “Operation Hannibal” was undertaken to evacuate German military and civilians from Courland, East Prussia. On January 31, some 10,582 passengers and crew crammed aboard the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. About 9000 were civilians, of which about 5000 were children. And some Gestapo, members of the Organisation Todt, were on board as well.

III.Reich: KdF-Schiffe - Jungfernfahrt der Gustloff

Once under way, the ship was spotted by Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko, who had sunk more German ships, measured by tonnage, than any other Soviet submarine commander. The sub followed the Wilhelm Gustloff for a couple of hours, and, when it was about 20 miles offshore, fired three torpedoes at it. Forty minutes later the ship was 140 feet deep in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea.

9,343 people lost their lives, including about 5,000 children. The death toll was six times that of the Titanic sinking, and was the largest single loss of life in maritime history.

According to Wikipedia,

Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and was thus deemed “not suitable to be a hero” for his actions and was instead awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Although widely recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the navy in October 1945. In 1960 he was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension. In 1963 Marinesko was given the traditional ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later from cancer. Marinesko was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

Also from Wikipedia,

Günter Grass, in an interview published by The New York Times in April 2003, “One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right …They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn’t. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war.

Maybe it was a war crime, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the victims were better off than if they had been taken by the Red Army, maybe they weren’t. Maybe the Russians were justified in giving the Germans this taste of their own medicine, maybe they weren’t.

As is often said, history is written by the victors.

Unmasking @ALT_uscis

Most of the disconcerting news out of Washington these days comes under the heading of “Further Proof of the Obvious”. Donald J. Trump is unfit for the office of President of the United States. A huge portion of it is depressing, some of it is actually a little funny, and every few days there is something that makes you wonder if we’ll get through these four years alive. Along the way, there has already been ample evidence that the country has changed for the worse in just a couple of months.

And then there is the odd story, a hardly noticeable speck in the whirlwind, that signals the descent into Darkness at Noon has actually begun in earnest.

This one came and went so fast you may have missed it, but its damage was already done. The Department of Homeland Security ordered Twitter to tell them the identity of the operator of the account called @ALT_uscis.

You see, tweets from this account have irritated the administration, even though there is nothing in them that in any way impacts our security. They are also not lies or libel, but merely facts which sometimes contradict the narrative that Trump would like us to accept. The tweets do not break any laws, they do not defame any public figures, they are not lewd or vulgar, they do not use intemperate language. They don’t do anything at all but mention a few facts. Here are a couple of examples of the objectionable content:

Hey #MAGAshit: Undocumented immigrants abandon10 billion in federal taxes a year, or 10 times @realDonaldTrump TAX loss.

— ALT🛂 Immigration (@ALT_uscis) February 19, 2017

ONCE AND FOR ALL : UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO FED SOCIAL PROGRAMS SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ELIGIBLE- BLACK ON WHITE.

— ALT🛂 Immigration (@ALT_uscis) February 22, 2017

Now, there is no question that the tone of some of the tweets is antagonistic toward Trump, but nothing said in the feed comes close to what, say, Keith Olbermann says, or Stewie Generis, for that matter. But the government is interested in this account because they believe the owner is an employee of the United States Citizen and Immigration Service, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. In our new Trumpian paradise, all 1.4 million federal employees must forego their rights to free speech, or be purged.

I probably shouldn’t point out that it is a very short hop from “anyone receiving a federal paycheck” to “anyone receiving federal benefits”, because that would just be the kind of alarmist speculation that would detract from the point here, which is that every American has First Amendment rights, even people who work in government. And, if you believe in the benefits of whistle-blowing, especially those who work in government.

Twitter, correctly and to its credit, turned around and sued the government, saying it is “unlawfully abusing a limited-purpose investigatory tool”. Free speech advocates said the order appeared to be the first time the government has attempted to use its powers to expose an anonymous critic — a development that, if successful, would have a “grave chilling effect on the speech of that account” as well as other accounts critical of the U.S. government.

The DHS quickly realized they had no defensible position here and would certainly lose a humiliating court case, so it dropped its “request”, and Twitter then dropped its suit. This all happened yesterday. The number of followers of the account has skyrocketed in the last day or so, so the visibility of the whole thing was becoming a little uncomfortable for DHS as well.

“Whew!”, I hear you exhaling. “Dodged a bullet, there!”

Not so fast. The “grave chilling effect” has already taken its toll. Last night @ALT-uscis pulled in its horns and gave up tweeting. Even though they “won”.

We are taking a break! The past few days have been extremely difficult and full of anxiety. Thank you again America!

— ALT🛂 Immigration (@ALT_uscis) April 7, 2017

Sturm und Drang

I’m sure we’d all like a break from politics, and particularly Trump, for a few days. But there is just too much going on to let it all go unremarked. Some of it is the crazy-clown chaos that we’ve already become inured to, some is hardball politics being played at a dangerous level, and some is actual news that everyone should be concerned about.

In the chaos category, you’ve got Devin Nunes, a truly pathetic and ineffectual lapdog, stepping down from his duties as Chairman of the House Russia-Trump investigation. His completely unprofessional sycophancy finally did him in.

At first glance, this seems like a positive thing because this guy was not going to do the job. The problem is that this means an elevated role for Trey Gowdy, so we’re replacing an ineffectual lapdog with a psychotic bulldog. You may remember the angry, hyper-partisan Gowdy as Hillary Clinton’s tormentor in the Benghazi “hearings”, which, by the way, led to her ultimately-fatal email problems. Gowdy did as much to sink Hillary as Comey, Wikileaks, and, of course, Hillary herself. Listen to him for five minutes and you’ll conclude he’s just nuts.

gowdy

Then you’ve got Steve Bannon losing his seat on the National Security Council. Apparently he butted heads with Jared Kushner once too often. This is a blow to hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and daughter Rebekah, who will have reduced influence and access now. Again, there is a cloud that comes with this apparent silver lining – Bannon will be replaced by Rick Perry of all people. Here we seem to be going the other way: from psychotic bulldog to ineffectual lapdog. Oh, well. The frying pan or the fire.

In the end, it will apparently be Kushner who calls the shots in the NSC area, too. Add it to his already impossible responsibilities: straightening out that pesky Israel/Palestine kerfuffle, negotiating trade deals with China, leading the SWAT team to re-organize the entire federal bureaucracy, fixing Iraq, solving the opioid crisis, etc. What am I leaving out?

kushner

In addition to being our shadow president, the woefully unqualified Kushner is also our shadow Secretary of State. Turns out Rex Tillerson couldn’t be less interested in the job. He flies home early from meetings because of “fatigue”, refuses to take the press with him (unprecedented!), and never makes a single statement about international affairs or foreign policy. Not that surprising, really, since he has no diplomatic experience whatever (and, no, heading an oil company does not count), and only took the job to please his wife.

Meanwhile, Kushner is making the high-profile trips and is being advised by Henry Kissinger. Unlike all the other Trump appointees, however, son-in-law Kushner can never be fired, no matter how incompetent. Unless Ivanka fires him, that is.

Back on Capitol Hill, Mitch McConnell has done what we knew he would – gone nuclear. How do we know Neil Gorsuch is not the right person to be a Supreme Court Justice? Simple – he didn’t bow out of this process when he saw that getting the job would mean permanently politicizing the legislature. And how do we know Mitch McConnell is a partisan hack? Well, just ask yourself: if a sitting democratic president was under FBI investigation for collaborating with the Russians to undermine our elections, would Mitch McConnell think it was OK for him to nominate a Supreme Court Justice who will remain on the court for decades?

Tired yet? I’ll just give you one more small story – Syria. Yesterday Trump did what he repeatedly warned Obama never to do, and what he predicted Obama would do if his popularity dropped – attacked Assad’s Syria. Of course, it also should be said that he blamed Assad’s poison gas attacks on Obama for not taking military action as well. As always with Trump, he’s on record as strongly advocating all sides of an issue – that’s how come he’s always “proven right”! And, as always with Trump, the one over-arching principle is “The Buck Starts Here”.

Remember Trump’s brilliant solution to the ISIS problem? No? He gave the generals 30 days to come up with a plan to quickly defeat them (Or what? He’ll fire them all?). That was seventy days ago. The man-baby may not realize this, but any attempt to punish Assad is tantamount to direct aid for ISIS. That’s one of the many reasons why the Syria problem is intractable, and why Obama didn’t do what Trump has now done. There are no good guys in this movie.

I’m sure there were a lot of factors that went into Trump’s impulsive decision – how to improve his record-low approval ratings (ratings always go up after military action), how to counter the claims he’s Putin’s puppet (attacking Assad is attacking Putin), how to show he is now responsible and prove it’s not just words.

But, really, what is the point of giving advice to others when you do the opposite yourself? Here’s a tiny sample of advice Trump gave Obama for your enjoyment. Have a nice day.

tweets

Remembering Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert died four years ago this week, after waging a long and harrowing battle with cancer. He was 70. He made an excellent film documenting his struggle called Life Itself, in which his courage, determination, and good humor are on ample display, despite being disfigured by surgery, and having to make innumerable concessions to the disease. He continued to work at that which he loved, writing about movies, under very difficult circumstances, until the end.

ebert

He wrote and talked about movies for over 45 years, mostly for the Chicago Sun Times, and was the first movie critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His early television series on P.B.S. with crosstown rival Gene Siskel, “Sneak Previews”, became the highest rated show ever on that network, and the “thumbs up or down” verdict they offered became a standard which has endured through the decades. This week, Netflix introduced it to their site.

The thing I liked most about Ebert’s writing was that he had not a molecule of the “critic’s disease” that seems to require most people to say something gratuitously negative about some part of the work, so as to show how smart they are. Or, perhaps, include obscure references that only a film historian would know or care about and which contribute little to the task at hand.

He wrote beautifully and his love of movies came through clearly. He was unpretentious in his tastes, and wrote from the point of view of the consumer of film, i.e. someone who had paid their money in the hopes of being entertained and engaged, and who was favorably disposed to the product by default.

Beyond that, his writing was extremely perceptive, and sometimes even prophetic. He helped you understand things you may not have noticed or were unable to articulate, and he whetted your appetite for seeing or re-seeing the movie he was writing about.

When Mike Leigh made his first movie in 1972, “Bleak Moments”, Ebert saw it and wrote,

I’ve never heard of Mike Leigh or his actors before. I don’t know where they came from, or what pools of human experience they were able to draw from. And I suspect that the sheer intensity of “Bleak Moments” may prevent it from getting a wide audience. Indeed, this particular story could never have been told in such a way as to appeal to everybody.

It is the task of film festivals to find films like this and give them a showing, so that they can survive and prevail. The 1972 Chicago festival has been filled with movies worth seeing and remembering. But if it had given us only “Bleak Moments,” it would have sufficiently exercised its mission.

What’s interesting to me about this is that Leigh did not make another movie for 17 years (he created screenplays only after improvising scenes with his cast, so he never had one to sell), but Ebert’s comments were correct, and correctly generous to an unknown talent. He makes you want to go find this movie and watch it, and to read more about Mike Leigh’s movies, an exercise that will certainly reward your effort.

If you want a break from current events or are bored with your regular reading diet, I recommend visiting this site, and choosing a movie you like, or perhaps one you never heard of, and reading what Ebert had to say about it. You’ll learn something and enjoy the time spent – what more could you ask from a critic?

Conscience and Compromise

Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed as the next Supreme Court Justice. This will be done by Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, invoking the “nuclear” option, meaning he will move to change the rules by which the Senate confirms justices.

Historically, 60 votes were required, which in today’s senate, would mean eight democratic senators would have to vote to approve a nomination. After the expected change, a simple majority of 51 senators will be sufficient to approve (actually, 50 plus Pence), so Republicans can install a judge of their choosing without requiring a broader consensus.

This is a very, very bad thing. It will mean that any incentive to work with colleagues “on the other side” will be more or less formally removed from the Senate, the last place where it existed. It will mean that Trump can now nominate any crazy person he wants for future picks, and given his public criticism of any judge that has correctly ruled against him, as well as his outrageously inappropriate picks for cabinet positions, one can only imagine what we’re in for now. And when you think of the thousands of lawsuits the man-baby has been part of, and his thin-skinned obsession with revenge, it’s just that much worse.

As Senator Blumenthal said, the reason they call it the “nuclear option” is because it has long-lasting negative impacts.

Though Gorsuch may be qualified based on his resumé, he has been evasive in answering questions – he hasn’t really answered any at all during his hearings – and is sure to vote the way conservatives want him to on virtually all matters. These things are reason enough for Democrats to oppose him, though in the past they might not have. This time is different and their opposition is less reasonable (but completely understandable, if that makes any sense).

As everyone knows, Merrick Garland was nominated to the Supreme Court last year by Barack Obama. Everyone also knows Garland was a great pick, qualified by any measure, and a non-ideological centrist who should have had no problems in confirmation hearings. But no hearings were held and no Republican even gave Garland the courtesy of a private meeting to get to know him.

Instead, they chose to have an 8-Justice Supreme-Court for a year, one that was divided along “party lines”, though the very idea of such a division in the judiciary runs counter to everything the founding documents intended. Republicans did this because they think that judges cannot be impartial, or because they want one who they know is not.

They felt completely justified in this absurd behavior because the Democrats managed to get the Affordable Care Act passed without any Republicans voting for it, basically by resorting to the same kind of tactic Republicans will now use to install Gorsuch. The reason for Republican opposition to the A.C.A. was that passing it would be a major success for Obama, something they just couldn’t tolerate. At that time, Mitch McConnell was furious about it, saying it was “absolutely clear that they intend to carry out all of their plans on a purely partisan basis. Look … we expect to be a part of the process.”

Republicans have never stopped suing, complaining, and campaigning against the A.C.A. and the Democrats’ tactics, and had pledged to repeal it the first day of the Trump administration. Interestingly, they were unable to do it, primarily because they had no alternative, which really does clarify their original motives to oppose it.

The Democrats only resorted to this tactic in the first place because of the now-infamous Republican obstructionism for any initiative or appointment at all made by Obama during his eight years. In other words, it was and is Republican intransigence that has brought us here, though I’m sure any Republican reading this will have exactly the opposite view. I would ask them to first have a quick look at this piece from the failing New York Times for some arguments that support my view of it. But then, it’s the NYT, so feel free to disregard as fake left-wing propaganda, amirite?

Compromise is dead. What about conscience?

To me, the most telling part of the whole Gorsuch debacle is that four Democrats have decided to break ranks and vote for Gorsuch. Aha!, I hear you exclaim. So reason is not dead, compromise is still possible, and some people do still vote their conscience even in the face of political pressure not to!

Not so fast.

The four Democrats who are voting for Gorsuch are all up for re-election in a state that was won by Trump. Their reason for this vote is even worse than those who have blind commitment to their “team” – it’s simple self-interest. They fear that if they oppose Gorsuch they will lose their job, and losing your job is now a much more important consideration than doing the right thing.

Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) are the four and they have been the focus of a $10 million ad campaign by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, which is pressuring Democrats facing reelection next year in states that Trump won in November to vote for Gorsuch.

The way out of this mess is for McConnell to accept a vote not to confirm and move on to the next nominee (Merrick Garland would be a fabulous choice at this point). The Republicans have a slap in the face coming, and they should just take it for the good of the country and to avoid negative consequences for the next three years and beyond. It’s the way to relieve the bitterness of partisanship rather than exacerbate it and cast it in stone, and it’s a way to claw back some of the authority granted to congress by our founding documents. This authority has been too swiftly, eagerly, and dangerously ceded to Trump and his itchy Twitter-finger.

That won’t happen though – it would require both conscience and compromise. McConnell is not the man for either.

Many secrets, no mysteries

If you want to hear some intelligent opinion and analysis about Trump, Russia, Putin, and the American political landscape, you can’t do better than this podcast, a conversation between Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum.

There are so many important insights and ideas therein, I shouldn’t try to summarize them. Give it a listen – you won’t be sorry.

A small sampling of what is covered and illuminated:

The audacity, scale, and frequency of Trump’s lying, meant, in the end, to discredit the very idea of truth.

The tactic of dividing the country into warring factions: those who agree with and supported him, and the losers who don’t and didn’t.

The distraction and misdirection that is the congressional hearings aiming to find the “smoking gun” of Trump campaign collusion with Putin.

The damage already done to American “soft power” in the world, i.e. the influence we exert by the examples of our free press, social discourse, and government institutions that have functioned for the citizens before the elites.

The moral equivalence seen and even stated by Trump between our system and the totalitarian, authoritarian, and oligarchical alternatives. If we are no better, why would people elsewhere in the world aspire to our system and values?

What can be said to Trump supporters to influence their views?

What can be said to Trump detractors to ease the pain?

“Many secrets, no mysteries” refers to the nature of Trump’s relationship with Putin’s Russia. In the end, it doesn’t matter if Trump is heavily invested in Russian businesses, whether Russia is heavily invested in Trump’s business, whether Flynn. Manafort, Bannon, Kushner, Gorka, or anyone else in the Trump inner camp actually coordinated anything with anyone in Russia. It’s an unimportant detail which may remain a secret.

But there is no mystery that Trump greatly admires Putin, and that is the important thing to understand. What is it that Putin has achieved? What makes him a figure for Trump to emulate? For starters, Putin has shown how to manipulate the media in Russia and abroad, and thereby mold public opinion in Russia and abroad. He has shown how to crush dissent.

But most importantly for Trump, Putin has shown how to blend politics and business to achieve personal enrichment. Putin may now be the richest man in the world. This is what Trump admires above all and wants to achieve for himself. This is why our democracy is at a critical inflection point. This is already understood by anyone paying attention. It’s not a mystery.

No Regerts

From this article in the Failing New York Times yesterday:

While conservatives often decry government spending in general, red states generally receive more in federal government benefits than blue states do — and thus are often at greater risk from someone like Trump

In the map below, the darker the shade of blue, the more dependent on government spending the state is:

map

The states that benefit the most from government spending are, in order of dependency, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, West Virginia, South Carolina, Montana and Tennessee. With the exception of New Mexico, all of these states went for Trump.

map The states with the lowest state and local tax burden are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Tennessee, and Idaho. All of these except Delaware went for Trump.

In other words, the people who complain the most about government spending are those that benefit from it the most and contribute to it the least. Go figure.

The NYT article cited a few people who have benefited greatly from government programs that Trump now wants to cut or delete funding for in his proposed budget.

One avid Trump supporter in Tulsa said that Tulsa Domestic Violence Intervention Services “saved my life, and my son’s”. Trump’s budget cuts their funding. “My prayer is that Congress will step in” to protect domestic violence programs, she said.

Billy Hinkle, a Trump voter enrolled in a job-training program that Trump wants to eliminate asks, “Why is building a wall more important than educating people?”. Hmmm. Good question, Billy.

Tarzan Vince, another Trump supporter in the program, says “If he’s preaching jobs, why take away jobs?”. We’ll get back to you on that one, Tarzan.

Navy vet Ezekial Moreno, a Trump voter was stocking groceries when he enrolled in the soon-to-be-eliminated WorkAdvance program, which enabled him to find employment in the Aerospace industry. As a result, he was able to move his family out of an apartment into a house, get one daughter violin lessons, and a math tutor for another daughter. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” Moreno said. Yes, Ezekial, you put your finger on the problem: it’s those other people that need to have their opportunities cut.

70 year-old Judy Banks voted for Trump to “get rid of illegals”, but now finds the Senior Community Service Employment Program, which pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs and which she depends on, will be cut. “If I lose this job,” she said, “I’ll sit home and die.”

But none of these people regretted their vote for Trump. All said they would vote for him again in 2020. The article says, “Some of the loyalty seemed to be grounded in resentment at Democrats for mocking Trump voters as dumb bigots, some from a belief that budgets are complicated, and some from a sense that it’s too early to abandon their man.”

This WaPo article talks about research they did showing that if Trump voters could do it all over again knowing what they know now, only 1% would vote for Hillary Clinton.

I get why people don’t like Hillary, I really do. And I proudly voted for Bernie in the Massachusetts primary. But when the alternative is a fraud and con-man who is manifestly unqualified for the job by experience and temperament and a million other measures? Come on.

Can it be that easy to get someone to vote against their own self-interest?

It seems like Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” remark bothered them more than anything, like the smartest girl in class was calling them stupid. I don’t know if anyone’s vote would have gone to Hillary if she hadn’t said that and some other things, but the response of many Trump voters like the ones in this NYT piece boils down to:

You think I’m stupid? You don’t know what stupid is! I’ll show you stupid – I’ll cut off my nose to spite my face! Now who’s stupid?!

No regerts, baby. No regerts.

tat

Art triumphs over fate

Henry James said, “One is touched to tears by this particular example which comes home to one so – of the jolly great truth that it is art alone that triumphs over fate.”

He was talking about the bronze tomb effigy of his friend, Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, that adorns her grave in Florence, where she died at age 41. He wrote about her and her home in Florence in his novels, Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl.

A marble version of the tomb effigy was commissioned by her father for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The effigy was made by her husband Frank Duveneck, as was the portrait of her, which hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum. Click below to enlarge.

“The Last Day of Pompeii” is a painting done in 1833 by the Russian artist Karl Briullov. He had visited Pompeii in 1828 and was inspired by the subject of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., which had destroyed the city and entombed its surprised residents in ash.

pompeii

When the Pompeii site was excavated, plaster casts were made of the cavities in ash left by the decomposed bodies of the trapped citizens, revealing their fate, i.e. how they were posed at the moment of their deaths.

Briullov exhibited his huge painting (21′ x 15′) in Rome to great acclaim, garnering attention that was unprecedented for a Russian artist abroad. He never made anything else that approached this success.

The painting inspired Alexander Pushkin to write a poem about it and Edward Bulwer-Lytton to write a novel, “The Last Days of Pompeii”, published in 1834. The book was very popular and had many memorable characters, including Glaucus, a handsome Athenian nobleman; Ione, a beautiful Greek aristocrat engaged to marry Glaucus; and Nydia, a young slave kidnapped from high-born parents who sells flowers to get money for her owners.

Nydia is blind and in love with Glaucus, but keeps silent about this because she knows he’s taken. When Vesuvius erupts, Nydia tries to lead Glaucus and Ione to safety, using her heightened sense of hearing, more useful than sight in the ashy chaos. She loses the two at one point, but somehow finds them again and ultimately leads them out. In the end, her unrequited love for Glaucus causes her to commit suicide.

The story of Nydia inspired Randolph Rogers to sculpt this piece in 1859, called “Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii”.

nydia

Rogers’ work became the most popular American sculpture of the nineteenth century and was replicated 167 times in two sizes, according to him, with many fewer of the full sized version. He did this by making a full-size plaster model, and then having skilled Italian masons cut and polish new examples based on the model.

Several important museums have a version, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I took the below picture of the MFA version yesterday with my phone, which may explain the poor quality.

Nydia (2)

Since 2012, admirers of Nydia in the MFA are often struck by the painting on the wall next to her, which is entitled “Museum Epiphany III”, done in a photorealist style by Warren Prosperi. It shows museum goers admiring art in the very gallery where the painting is hung. The woman at the left of the frame would be looking at the picture she’s in.

epiphany

So, to review: the eruption of Vesuvius and the excavations of Pompeii in the mid-eighteenth century inspired Briullov to create a brilliant painting, which inspired Bulwer-Lytton to write a widely read book, which inspired Randolph Rogers to make a greatly admired sculpture, which inspired Warren Prosperi to paint an extremely interesting picture, which inspired me to write this today.

This may or may not be what James meant by the triumph of art over fate, but it’s fun to think about it.

Resistance: Masha, Sophie, Mala

Masha

Masha Bruskina was hanged in German-occupied Minsk on October 26, 1941 at age 17, after being paraded through the streets carrying a sign saying, “We are partisans and have shot at German troops”. She wasn’t a partisan and had not shot at German troops. Her crime was that she helped captured Russian soldiers escape from an infirmary where she had volunteered as a nurse by bringing them civilian clothes.

masha

She was executed along with 16-year-old Volodia Shcherbatsevich and World War I veteran Kiril Trus, both members of the resistance. She liked to read, and had graduated from high school a couple of months earlier with good grades. When she was arrested, she wrote her mother, who she lived with, saying,

“I am tormented by the thought that I have caused you great worry. Don’t worry. Nothing bad has happened to me. I swear to you that you will have no further unpleasantness because of me. If you can, please send me my dress, my green blouse, and white socks. I want to be dressed decently when I leave here.”

masha2

Her body was left hanging for three days before being taken down and buried. All of her family members were murdered in the Minsk ghetto, and it is unlikely that Masha would have survived the war either.

A plaque at the site of the execution identified her only as “unknown girl” because Soviet authorities did not want to acknowledge her Jewish background. In 2009, her name was added to the monument, which now reads, in Russian, “Here on October 26, 1941 the Fascists executed the Soviet patriots K. I. Truss, V. I. Sherbateyvich and M.B. Bruskina”. There is also a street named for her in Jerusalem.

masha3

Sophie

After a “trial” lasting a few minutes, Sophie Scholl was sent to the guillotine and beheaded at age 22 on February 22, 1943 in Munich for the crime of treason, along with her brother, Hans. She had been a member of The White Rose, a handful of university students who had distributed some anti-Nazi leaflets. There were six leaflets in all and you can read them here.

The White Rose urged resistance to the Nazis, acknowledged their crimes and the complicity of all Germans, and saw that the war was lost, even in early 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad.

sophie1

Sophie had five siblings. She liked to draw, and, like Masha, she liked to read. Her group of friends liked hiking, swimming, skiing, concerts, art , music, and so on. Her father was sent to prison in 1942 for making a remark critical of Hitler. Sophie almost certainly would have survived the war had she not acted as her conscience demanded.

Sophie Scholl am See. Honorarfrei lediglich für Ankündigungen und VerÜffentlichungen im Zusammenhang mit obiger BR-Sendung bei Nennung: Bild: BR/Goldkind Film. Andere Verwendungen nur nach entsprechender vorheriger schriftlicher Vereinbarung mit dem BR-Bildarchiv, Tel. 089 / 5900 3040, Fax 089 / 5900 3284, Mail Pressestelle.Foto@brnet.de

A movie called “Sophie Scholl – the Final Days” was released in 2005, and got an Oscar nomination for the Best Foreign Film.

movie1

Malka

Malka (sometimes “Mala”) Zimetbaum was ordered to be burned alive in the crematorium at Auschwitz at age 26, on September 15, 1944. She may not have been alive when they threw her in, though, as she may have bled to death on the wheel-barrow that carried her there.

These pictures show Mala in 1941 in Antwerp, a sketch of her made in Auschwitz in 1944, and a couple of portrait photos.

She was born in Poland, the youngest of five children in a Jewish family, and had been raised in Belgium. In school, she excelled in math and languages. She was sent to Auschwitz in September of 1942. She survived for two years in the camp, mainly because of her proficiency in Polish, Dutch, French, German, and Italian. She worked as a translator and courier. She was very well liked and respected by both guards and prisoners, and performed hundreds of kind acts and tried to save as many lives as she could.

Her crime was that she managed to escape Auschwitz with another prisoner, Edward “Edek” Galiński, a Pole who was in love with her. On June 24th, 1944, Edek dressed as an SS guard using a uniform he had stolen, and escorted Mala through the camp gate under the pretense that she would be installing a sink which she was carrying. Their plan was to alert the outside world about what was going on in Auschwitz. They were free for 12 days and got about 50 miles away, where she was arrested trying to buy bread with gold they had taken from the camp. Edek was watching nearby and gave himself up as he had promised he wouldn’t leave her.

They were taken to the infamous Block 11 in the main camp at Auschwitz. They tried to pass notes to each other, and Edek tried to sing opera arias near a window where he thought Mala was. They stayed in Block 11 until September 15, when they were taken to Birkenau to be executed on the same day. Galiński was hanged, shouting “Long live Poland!” as he died.

Mala took a razor out of her hair and slashed the veins at her elbows. There are various accounts of the next moments, some saying she slapped a guard’s face with her bloody hand and he grabbed her arm and broke it, then taped her mouth shut. Some said she had shouted at the guard that she would die with dignity while he would die in disgrace.

The people who bandaged her arms tried to do it slowly, hoping she could die on the wheelbarrow taking her to the crematorium, before being thrown into the flames.

Mala had been convinced she would have survived Auschwitz, given her privileged position in the camp and many allies, but she risked everything for a cause greater than herself. The camp was finally liberated four months after her death. Information about these events came to light during the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann. You can read a little more about Mala here.

Tenuous relationship with the truth

If you google “Trump tenuous relationship with truth”, you get a ton of hits from all sorts of reputable publications over the last year or two. Click here to see what I mean.

This Washington Post piece lays out 317 falsehoods Trump has asserted and repeated, just since the inauguration.

Right. We get it. We’ve been over all this before. Tell us something we don’t already know.

Well, if you don’t already know that Trump’s tax returns show that he has business interests in Russia and China that should have disqualified him (and would have disqualified anyone else) from seeking the presidency, there ya go.

Do you remember all those times during the campaign that he said he would be happy to release his returns, that they’re “beautiful”, that he will release them as soon as his lawyers give him the green light, that we’ll “be very satisfied”, that he has “no objection”, etc. etc.? Here’s a refresher if you don’t.

Well, now that he’s fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone from seeing them, you can understand that all those statements, all made looking right into the camera in apparent good faith, were lies. He had no intention of ever releasing his tax returns, and has no intention of ever divesting the holdings that are conflicts of interest. And, if you want to take that one logical step further, every intention of enriching himself using the power of the presidency.

A few days ago, the House Ways and Means committee voted 24-16 along party lines to reject the Democrats’ resolution to get the returns. Republicans argued that it was a “political effort” (duh!) that “raises privacy concerns that could set a bad precedent.” (huh?). All that is being asked is what everyone who has come before has voluntarily done. That’s the precedent.

Why wouldn’t Trump want to clear the air once and for all? It would be so easy. But we already know why – as stated above, he’s a liar. But why is congress behaving in this idiotic way? Why wouldn’t they want to get on the right side of this? Just another proof that party affiliation is now more important than patriotism. Or doing the right thing.

Now that the investigation of the House Intelligence Committee into Russian meddling in our election has stalled (thanks, Devin!), the Senate will give it a try. There is again talk of demanding the returns. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you want to get out there and lend your voice to the effort to get Trump to do what everyone else has always done, you can march on April 15 in Washington.

tax

Faster than facts

Outrage in our time of universal connectivity and instantaneous communication is a fire than starts itself, is fanned by self-interested and ill-informed bystanders, engulfs the news cycle, and incinerates truth. By the time it emerges that some awful thing never actually happened, we’ve all moved on and the damage can’t be undone. You can’t un-fry the egg.

The other day, United Airlines allegedly told some teenage girls they couldn’t board their flight and had to change clothes, as the “leggings” or “yoga pants” they had on were inappropriate for travel. Another passenger waiting to board the flight overheard this, took to twitter, and, well, I’m sure you know the rest of the story, because you’re alive and have access to the internet (or else you’re reading this with some superpower that I need to get right now – these broadband fees are killing me).

ZOMG! How can this happen? Those poor teenage victims! That awful sexist corporate behemoth, always oppressing the righteous and free! Those old white men, at it again! Who are THEY to tell US? A boycott must be called and the Evil Empire that is United Airlines must be defeated! #leggingsgate

OK, everybody – slow your roll. Turns out none of it happened. At least not the way the Internet Justice League understood it. There’s more to it than the uninformed impression of the First Tweeter, which spontaneously ignited the conflagration. There usually is.

Turns out the two “victims” of this oppression were not told anything at all by the gate agent. Their family overheard the gate agent telling someone else they couldn’t fly and assumed it applied to them. Then yet another person took the non-existent cause of the outraged girls to the internet, and the rest is history.

OK, but what about that first oppressed leggings wearer, yearning to be free? Wasn’t she a victim? Isn’t the outrage still justified?

No. She was a “nonrev”, flying free. See, airline employees and their families can fly standby from anywhere to anywhere else for no cost. They are non-revenue travelers, or nonrevs. It’s really the only benefit worth having for a lot of those airline jobs, which are pretty awful and poorly paid when you get right down to it.

The only thing the nonrevs have to do for this valuable privilege is adhere to a well-understood and apparently reasonable dress code. Here is the full United Airlines code for nonrev travel.

– any attire that reveals a midriff

– attire that reveals any kind of undergarments

– attire that is designated as sleepwear, underwear or swim attire

– mini skirts

– shorts that are more than three inches above the knee when in a standing position

– form-fitting lycra/spandex tops, pants or dresses

– attire that has offensive and/or derogatory terminology or graphics

– attire that is excessively dirty or has holes/tears

– any attire that is provocative, inappropriately revealing or see-through

– bare feet

– beach type rubber flip-flops

The airline does this because the nonrevs are, in a way, representatives of the business and it’s thought they should look professional, or at least, not offensive to the average paying flyer. It’s bad enough when you’re crammed into that middle seat in Coach to find out someone is up there in First who hasn’t paid a thing. And if their demeanor, including their appearance, is somehow objectionable, well, you’re an unhappy flyer and we don’t want that.

Now, perhaps you want to keep your outrage going despite this new evidence, and get on United’s case for their neanderthal nonrev policy. Well that’s a subject for another blog, the title of which might be, “Do employers have the right to demand anything at all from employees?”, or, maybe, “Is the concept of vulgarity obsolete?”

Today’s point is that journalism is dead. Fact-checking is dead. We prefer the internet, where everyone’s verison of things is as good as anyone’s, and, best of all, it’s faster than facts.

You better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone.

It’s all happening so fast, now. You don’t see it coming. Or maybe you do, but there’s nothing you can do about it. And the weird, dystopian reality is that millions of people think it’s a good thing.

Just yesterday, three huge steps in the wrong direction were taken while our attention was focused elsewhere.

Maybe you were busy watching the Devin Nunes shit-show. Or maybe you were pondering Trump’s brazen abdication of responsibility to his daughter and son-in-law, neither of whom is any more qualified for any of it than the man-baby himself, and neither of whom was elected, vetted, or approved by anyone but daddy. Or maybe you’ve been marveling at Trump’s voracious appetite for spending our money on golf. After criticizing Obama for playing too much golf and asserting he wouldn’t have time for it, he’s spending money on golf at a rate eight times that of Obama.

No, none of that. Here are three other outrages that took place virtually unremarked just yesterday, and I’m not even sure they are the only three.

1. President Trump Risks the Planet.

With a stroke of his pen, Trump undid all Obama’s climate change initiatives in the name of bringing back jobs to the coal industry. Oy vey. Where to begin on this one? I suppose you could start with my observations of just a few days ago.

As we’ve said before, those jobs aren’t coming back in any case. But at least now the operators won’t have to spend any money on compliance, so, you know, finally they’ll be able to afford those solid gold toilet seats on their Gulfstream G5’s. Nice, right?

jet

The miners that are still on the job can get back to work on that black lung thing they’ve got going, and, if Trump has his way, do it without health insurance. And the rest of us can laugh at how we didn’t fall for that Chinese hoax called “climate change”.

2. Congress blocks effort to get Trump’s tax returns.

Why? How does this make sense? Wouldn’t the Republican lawmakers want to assert just a little independence? Grab back just a little piece of the power assigned to the legislative branch that they’ve so eagerly abandoned? Clear the air on that Russia thing and other conflicts once and for all? Set and maintain a precedent that we’ve followed for decades so that future abuses, perhaps by their opponents, would be made less likely? Nah.

And all for fear of an attack-tweet from a toxic clown who’s going to drag them down anyway.

3. Your internet browsing history is now for sale without your permission or knowledge.

Huh? Wasn’t this something law enforcement needed a warrant to obtain? Wasn’t this the kind of thing the whole Snowden exposé was about?

It’s bad enough that all those lowly wage-slaves at your I.S.P. can chuckle about how you downloaded a movie illegally, or googled your high-school crush, or “anonymously” commented on some anti-Trump blog, or purchased sex-toys. Or whatever the hell you did that you assumed other people wouldn’t know about. Medical or financial information you thought was yours? No, it now belongs to them and anyone they sell it to.

Yes, they have every search term, every mouse click, every everything already packaged up and ready to go. In the past, they couldn’t do it without your permission. Now they can. Now it’s a profit center for them to grow. Better think twice next time you press “enter”.

The Times They Are A-Changin’.

What, exactly, didn’t she know?

And when didn’t she know it?

This article in the Failing New York Times, entitled “I Loved My Grandmother, But She Was a Nazi”, really annoyed me.

The granddaughter writing the piece, Jessica Shattuck, is trying to understand what her German grandparents were thinking when they joined the Nazi party in 1937, before it was mandatory. Didn’t her beloved grandmother know what was happening to the Jews?

It boils down to,

My grandmother heard what she wanted from a leader who promised simple answers to complicated questions. She chose not to hear and see the monstrous sum those answers added up to. And she lived the rest of her life with the knowledge of her indefensible complicity.

Jessica forgot to mention her grandmother didn’t give a rip about the Jews, who, if you believed everything the Führer said (as she explained that she did), were sub-human parasites responsible for Germany’s economic problems and defeat in WWI, and who were trying to drag Germany into another war.

The implication of the “indefensible complicity” thing is that the grandmother regretted her decisions and would have acted differently “had she known”.

First of all, the grandmother never says anything like that at all – the granddaughter invented the “indefensible complicity” idea on her own and is projecting it on her grandmother. The grandmother’s regret is that Germany didn’t win the war, and Hitler’s promises didn’t come true. Oh, and also that everyone thinks she’s a monster. See, they wouldn’t think that if Germany had won – she’d just be the same sweet old grammy Jessica has always loved.

Secondly, the idea that she would have done something different “had she known” is preposterous. Done something like what? Joined the White Rose? Hidden a family of Jews under her bed for eight years in defiance of the Gestapo? The fact is, the overwhelming majority of Germans were perfectly fine with Hitler’s idea of a Germany free of Jews. The less they had to “know” about how it would be done, the better for everybody.

Even the people who tried to kill Hitler, like Claus von Stauffenberg, didn’t do it because they objected to the murders of the Jews. They did it because they saw that Hitler was crazy, that the war was lost, and that they could salvage something of Germany if they got rid of the guy who was ready to sacrifice everyone and everything for his drug-addled fantasies.

Lastly, the main thing to understand is that when a German of that generation says “we didn’t know”, they’re lying.

Maybe it’s true that they didn’t know the precise manner in which the Jews met their demise after they were arrested and disappeared, or after they saw them packed into the transports for “resettlement”. But this would be a tiny last detail in a twelve-year-long progression of insults and crimes that every German saw going on right before his eyes, every hour of every day from 1933 on.

When you accept someone’s excuse of their ignorance of that last detail, you are agreeing that everything that went before, all of which they certainly did know about, was OK with them. And OK with you.

Shattuck asked her grandmother about Hitler’s endless inspirational speeches vilifying the Jews – didn’t grammy listen to those? Grammy replied, “Hitler said a lot of things” and anyway she had her own concerns to think about – making ends meet, etc. OK, fair enough. It’s not quite “not knowing”, though. But I won’t quibble about it.

Did she “not know” of the incessant headlines and cartoons in Der Stürmer harping on the Jews being Germany’s enemy and calling for their execution? Everyone in Germany saw this publication and its circulation absolutely skyrocketed during the years of the Reich. The publication was obscene in its Jew-hate (and Hitler thought didn’t go far enough!)

Anti-semitic cartoons in Der Stürmer

Did grammy “not know” of the removal of Jews from their residences to “Jew houses”, the confiscation of their property, the daily scenes of Jews being made to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes or having their beards ripped off their faces? Grammy said she didn’t see those things out by where she lived. OK, I get it. Grammy lived in the suburbs with blinders on and ear plugs in for twelve years. And she joined a political movement whose principal goal was the “purification” of Germany without seeing what this meant for the “impure”. Fine. She’s just a sweet little old lady, so why go on about it?

But here’s what every German knew, including grammy – what every German was required to know to keep their own teutonic hides intact: they were required to know the laws of the land. These laws prevented them from patronizing Jewish businesses, providing Jews with food, socializing with Jews and much much more.

The punishment for Jewish violation of any rule was arrest, interrogation by the Gestapo, and a trip to a concentration camp. If a German helped a Jew in any way or failed to report a Jew who violated a rule, that German was as bad as any Jew and would be punished accordingly.

And to know these laws was to know they were nothing but a pretense for the persecution, impoverishment, and immiseration of all Jews in Germany. This is something every German understood and accepted, even if they didn’t “know about ” the end game.

What follows is a list of some of the laws and decrees that all Germans saw published in the newspapers and heard on radio, and were required to “know” from 1933 on.

March 31, 1933 – Decree of the Berlin city commissioner for health suspends Jewish doctors from the city’s charity services.

April 7, 1933 – Law for the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service removes Jews from government service.

April 7, 1933 – Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession forbids the admission of Jews to the bar.

April 25, 1933 – Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limits the number of Jewish students in public schools.

July 14, 1933 – De-Naturalization Law revokes the citizenship of naturalized Jews and “undesirables.”

October 4, 1933 – Law on Editors bans Jews from editorial posts.

May 21, 1935 – Army law expels Jewish officers from the army.

September 15, 1935 – Nazi leaders announce the Nuremberg Laws. Jews could not be German citizens and Jews could not marry Germans. Jewishness was defined a racial characteristic, not a religion.

April 3, 1936 – Reich Veterinarians Law expels Jews from the veterinary profession.

October 15, 1936 – Reich Ministry of Education bans Jewish teachers from public schools.

April 9, 1937 – The Mayor of Berlin orders public schools not to admit Jewish children.

January 5, 1938 – Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names forbids Jews from changing their names.

January 11, 1938 – Executive Order on the Reich Tax Law forbids Jews to serve as tax-consultants.

February 5, 1938 – Law on the Profession of Auctioneer excludes Jews from this occupation.

March 18, 1938 – The Gun Law excludes Jewish gun merchants.

April 22, 1938 – Decree against the Camouflage of Jewish Firms forbids changing the names of Jewish-owned businesses.

April 26, 1938 – Order for the Disclosure of Jewish Assets requires Jews to report all property in excess of 5,000 Reichsmarks.

July 11, 1938 – Reich Ministry of the Interior bans Jews from health spas.

August 17, 1938 – Executive Order on the Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names requires Jews to adopt an additional name: “Sara” for women and “Israel” for men.

October 3, 1938 – Decree on the Confiscation of Jewish Property regulates the transfer of assets from Jews to non-Jewish Germans.

October 5, 1938 – The Reich Interior Ministry invalidates all German passports held by Jews. Jews must surrender their old passports, which will become valid only after the letter “J” had been stamped on them.

November 11, 1938 – Jews are not allowed to own or carry arms.

November 12, 1938 – Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life closes all Jewish-owned businesses.

November 12, 1938 – Jews may not attend cinemas, theaters, concerts and exhibitions anymore and are also forbidden to manage shops and workshops. Jews may buy food in special shops only.

November 15, 1938 – Reich Ministry of Education expels all Jewish children from public schools.

November 23, 1938 – All Jewish-owned businesses are dissolved.

November 28, 1938 -Reich Ministry of Interior restricts the freedom of movement of Jews. They may not stay in specified areas open to the public anymore.

November 29, 1938 – The Reich Interior Ministry forbids Jews to keep carrier pigeons.

December 14, 1938 – An Executive Order on the Law on the Organization of National Work cancels all state contracts held with Jewish-owned firms.

December 3, 1938 – Driving licenses and vehicle registration documents owned by Jews are confiscated. Jews are forced to sell their businesses and to deliver all jewelry and securities to the authorities.

December 6, 1938 – Jews in Berlin are prohibited from entering specified streets, squares etc.

December 8, 1938 – Jewish professors are forbidden any kind of work at higher schools.

December 13, 1938 – Jews are forced to sell houses, shops and factories for extremely low prices to Non-Jews.

December 21, 1938 – Law on Midwives bans all Jews from the occupation.

December 31, 1938 – Jews may not possess automobiles anymore.

January 1, 1939 – All male Jews are forced to carry the additional given name “Israel”, all female Jews the name “Sara”.

February 21, 1939 – Decree Concerning the Surrender of Precious Metals and Stones in Jewish Ownership without compensation.

April 30, 1939 – Legal preparations for aggregating Jewish families in “Jew Houses”. Eviction Protection is abolished: Landlords may cancel contracts of Jewish tenants anytime.

August 1, 1939 – The President of the German Lottery forbids the sale of lottery tickets to Jews.

September 1, 1939 – Curfew for Jews, in summer after 9 pm, in winter after 8 pm.

September 29, 1939 – Jews are not allowed to own radios anymore; all wireless receivers must be delivered to the police.

October 17, 1939 – Jews may not participate in civil air raid exercises anymore.

October 28, 1939 – Jews must fix a Star of David on their front door.

October 23, 1939 – Jews in occupied Poland have to wear the “Jew Star” visibly on their clothes.

February 6, 1940 – Jews do not get a purchase permit for rationed clothes and no purchase permits for any woven fabrics anymore.

July 4, 1940 – Jews in Berlin may only shop between 4 and 5 pm.

July 29, 1940 – Jews are not allowed to have telephones anymore.

June 12, 1941 – Jews may declare themselves only as “without belief” when asked for the religion on documents.

July 31, 1941 – Jews may not borrow books from public libraries anymore.

September 1, 1941 – All Jews older than six years of age must permanently wear the yellow star visibly on their clothes. They are not allowed to leave their place of residence without permission of the police anymore.

September 18, 1941 – Jews may not use public transport anymore.

December 18, 1941 – The ID cards identifying Jews wounded as soldiers in World War I as severely disabled are confiscated

December 26, 1941 – Jews may not use public telephones anymore.

January 4, 1942 – Jews must deliver all fur coats.

January 10, 1942 – Jews must deliver all their woolen clothes.

February 15, 1942 – Jews may not own pets anymore. They may not give them to Germans. They must kill them.

February 17, 1942 – Jews may not get newspapers by mail anymore.

March 26, 1942 – Apartments of Jews must be marked by a Star of David next to the name plaque at the entrance door.

April 1942 – Jews may not visit Non-Jews in their apartments and houses anymore.

May 15, 1942 – Jews are forbidden to own bicycles.

May 29, 1942 – Jews may get their hair cut by Jewish hairdressers only. June 9, 1942 – Jews must deliver all clothes not belonging to their basic needs.

June 11, 1942 – Jews may not possess tobacco and cigarettes anymore.

June 19, 1942 – Jews must deliver all electrical and optical equipment and similar items, such as heating ovens, boiling pots, vacuum cleaners, water heaters, hair driers, irons, record players and records, typewriters, binoculars, cameras, films etc. Jews may not enter most shops anymore.

June 20, 1942 – All Jewish schools are closed.

July 17, 1942 – Blind and deaf Jews may not wear signs identifying them in street traffic anymore.

September 18, 1942 – Jews may not have meat, eggs, white bread, sweets, fruit, canned fruit and milk.

I forgive you if you just scanned or even skipped the above list – it’s a heavy, depressing slog. If you didn’t read them all, just have a quick look at February 15, 1942. To me that one sums up the German character, the German desire to taunt and inflict needless pain on the Jews, and the sadism and cruelty that every German either reveled in or was complicit with during those years. Including Shattuck’s grammy.

A really excellent first-hand description of daily life for a Jew in Germany during this period is Victor Klemperer’s diaries, “I Will Bear Witness”, finally published in 1995. Klemperer was a Romance language scholar who beautifully and dispassionately described the torments inflicted on the Jews for years before the ultimate outrage.

The decrees were incremental, and just as you got used to one “law”, another was issued to tighten the noose. First, you were arrested for walking through the park, then for walking on the sidewalk outside the park fence, then for walking on the other side of the street bordering the park, etc. etc. etc.

Interestingly, he says that none of the decrees were as bad as the routine visits of drunken “police” to the Jew houses, during which their meager possessions were turned upside down, and everything from their meals of rotten potatoes to postage stamps, sewing needles, paper, and anything else, of however little value or comfort to the Jews, was stolen or destroyed. And, of course, the already frail and starving residents were kicked, spit on, screamed at, and slapped around for good measure.

Klemperer also objected to Zionism, because it implicitly identified Jews as a distinct group, apart from Germans. He thought himself to be a German to the end.

I think I’ll send a copy of Klemperer’s book to Jessica Shattuck’s grandmother. Maybe it will jog her memory.

There once was a union maid…

Clara Lemlich was born in 1886 the town of Gorodok in what is now Ukraine. She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned to read Russian over her family’s objections, paying for her books by sewing buttons and writing letters for illiterate neighbors.

In 1903, when she had just turned 17, there was a murderous pogrom in the city of Kishinev . The new York Times described it this way:

The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews,” was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews

The pogrom became a pivotal event for hundreds of thousands of Jews in the region, who saw the tacit approval of the authorities, and their lack of response, as a signal that life under the Tsar would be more and more intolerable from that point forward. A poem describing the Kishinev pogrom by H.N. Bialik, In the City of Slaughter, was widely read and served as the catalyst that ignited a wave of immigration of Russian Jews to the United States.

Clara Lemlich was among the first, and arrived with her parents in New York in 1903. She went to work in the garment industry, like many others, making women’s blouses, or “shirtwaists”.

clara

The advent of the sewing machine had actually contributed to worsening working conditions in the garment industry. Workers often had to supply their own machines, carrying them to and from work, while making extremely low wages, typically $2 per day for 14-hour days in the busy season, with only a short break for lunch, and in oppressive conditions. Workers were locked in overcrowded rooms, denied bathroom breaks, and abused by their bosses who demanded more and more production.

Lemlich joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and rose quickly because of her intelligence, charm, and beautiful singing voice. She became known even outside the industry after a Nov. 22, 1909 meeting in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York. The meeting was to support striking workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, and Lemlich, after hearing a few uninspiring speeches from leaders of the American labor movement, including Samuel Gompers who counseled against striking, demanded to speak. She said,

I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike!

A lone podium stands on stage in view of a painting of President Abraham Lincoln, hanging on a rear wall in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Tuesday April 20, 2010, in New York. President Barack Obama is expected to deliver a speech on Thursday in the Great Hall, pushing for a financial overhaul package, from the stage where President Lincoln delivered his famous Cooper Union address that help elect him to the presidency. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Cooper Union then and now

Her words inspired the crowd to action, and, led by the 22-year-old Lemlich, 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days, in what became known as the Uprising of the 20,000.

Management was unimpressed. One manufacturer was quoted in the New York Times, November 25, 1909, saying:

“We cannot understand why so many people can be swayed to join in a strike that has no merit. Our employees were perfectly satisfied, and they made no demands. It is a foolish, hysterical strike.”

They hired scabs and thugs to intimidate the strikers and Lemlich endured beatings and six broken ribs, but this just strengthened her resolve. Although she probably wasn’t, she could have been the model for the Woody Guthrie song, Union Maid.

The strike lasted for three months, ending in February 1910, and won the workers better wages and some improvements in conditions. Union contracts were also implemented at many shops, but not Triangle Shirtwaist, where conditions remained terrible. One year later, it was the scene of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of what is now an N.Y.U. building at 23–29 Washington Place in Greenwich Village. This week was the 106th anniversary of the unconscionable, preventable fatal fire there.

Triangle factory then and now

On Saturday, March 25th, 1911, at 4:40 P.M., someone apparently threw a cigarette into a scrap bin and a fire began. Within half an hour 146 people were dead: 123 women and 23 men. They died from burning, smoke inhalation, falling from collapsed fire escapes, or jumping to their deaths.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire escape collapsed during the March 15, 1911 fire. 146 died, either f

Collapsed fire escape

triangle2

Police look up at jumpers, some already dead at their feet

The stairwells and exits had been locked to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks from work. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who themselves had immigrated from Russia ten years earlier, were in the building when the fire started and escaped by jumping from the roof to an adjacent building.

Blanck and Harris

The victims were predominantly girls and young women, mostly 18-22 years old, with the youngest only 14. About half of them were recent Jewish immigrants from Russia, much like Clara. About a third were Italian immigrants. This interesting website at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school gives a biographical sketch of each of the victims and links to more info, even death certificates.

Clara went to the armory where the bodies of the workers had been taken in order to find a missing cousin. A newspaper reporter said she broke down into hysterical laughter when she couldn’t find her.

body identification

Waiting in line to identify bodies

In the aftermath, hearings were held about factory safety and working conditions, and thirty new safety and workplace laws were passed.

Harris and Blanck were tried for manslaughter, but acquitted as it couldn’t be proven they knew the doors were locked.

Clara remained an activist throughout her life. From this piece about her:

As for Clara, she left the ILGWU because of disgust with its conservative leadership and her inability to work in the industry. She joined the women’s suffrage movement. However, her working class roots conflicted with the upper class movement and she was fired less than a year later. Eventually she got married, had children, and became a housewife and consumer advocate, but she never drifted far from the union movement. She led eviction protests and organized relief for working strikers. To her dying day she was an unapologetic communist.

At the end of her life she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. She organized the orderlies into a union and prodded the management to join the United Farm Worker’s boycott of grapes. Clara Lemlich passed away on July 12, 1982 at age 96.

Check out this PBS documentary made at the 100th anniversary of the fire. About 53 minutes, but lots of interesting background and detail.

Coffee is for closers

So it turns out the Dealmaker-in-chief can’t really close a deal after all. Surprise, surprise.

Yup, it turns out that months of publicly insulting and belittling the people whose support you need doesn’t really put them in the mood to buy what you’re selling. And, of course, it doesn’t help that nobody really wants what you’re selling to begin with.

Today Summed Up Perfectly!! #ObamaCare pic.twitter.com/aLxfSGsb1f

— Impeach Donald Trump (@Impeach_D_Trump) March 26, 2017

Lost in the failure of the Republican effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act is all the lying the man-baby did about the great health plan he was going to put forward. Everybody would be covered, you see, and it would be cheaper and better than what they have now. It was going to be “beautiful”. It was just about finished (this was a couple of months ago) and it only needed final touches and would be revealed “early next week”. But like everything Trump, it was all in his mind – there was never a plan at all! Why isn’t this the bigger story?!

The bill they tried to ram through was ginned up in a couple of days behind closed doors, while Trump was at the beach playing golf, by the same Republicans who, for the previous seven years, couldn’t agree on a plan. What they came up with was just the usual tax breaks for the rich and cutting benefits for everyone else – eventually taking insurance away from 24 million who now have it (and who are mostly Trump voters). Of course the silver lining to this bungled theft-in-healthcare’s-clothing plot is that some of those 24 million might actually live a little longer.

first

All of this means nothing to Trump, who of course blamed the fiasco on everybody else, mainly Democrats. He complained that it was “unheard of” that the bill did not get a single vote from the opposition. Huh? Obamacare was passed in the first place without a single vote from the opposition. And Obama worked tirelessly for sixteen months trying to get support for the bill, while Trump made a few phone calls over seven weeks between golf shots, none to any Democrat.

And, true to form, he was “very presidential” about it all, crowing about how the Democrats own it and he’s been saying for a year and a half that the best thing to do politically is let Obamacare “explode”. Man-baby, listen – try to understand: you’re president of all the American people now. It makes you look like a jackass to be smirking about how great it will be for you if they lose access to health care.

Next-up: yesterday the American military confirmed it screwed up bigly, killing hundreds of Syrian civilians in Mosul. According to the Washington Post:

the March 17 incident would mark the greatest loss of civilian life since the United States began strikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in 2014

I’ll be listening intently to find out whose fault this really was. Crooked Hillary maybe? The Generals? Obama? One thing for sure is that you can bet the “Arab Street” will be accusing us of doing this purposely, and, after all Trump’s vitriol directed their way, why wouldn’t they think it?

Make America Great Again.

The original is still the the greatest

The other night, I was flipping channels and came across the original King Kong (1933). I remembered what “richard” said about it in our discussion of movies we watch over and over:

“King Kong (1933) is one that draws me in every time. Great noir-ish NYC scenes in the beginning, and the entire movie is so atmospheric. It goes without saying that the animation and special effects were great for that period. Some slightly corny stuff near the end but nothing’s perfect.”

kong

So I watched it and it did draw me in and I did really enjoy it. King Kong has been re-made a couple of times: the 1976 version with Jeff Bridges, and the 2005 version with Jack Black. I’ve seen parts of both the re-makes but I can’t really say whether they were “good” or not, because the re-makes didn’t hold my attention well enough to stay with them. I’ll just go out on a limb and say the original is still the greatest.

I guess it makes sense to re-make Kong or some other classics to try to take advantage of improvements in technology, e.g. to re-make a black-and-white movie in color, or use new special-effects tools like CGI. It makes sense particularly for the “horror” genre where you can now create more realistic and scary monsters.

But “updating” with better tech cannot a great movie make. You still need a great story with a great script and great performances.

I can also see why you’d want to re-make a movie that wasn’t very well made the first time around, but might have some box-office appeal if executed a little better. I know how you all like a movie quiz, so here’s an easy mini-quiz – these flicks were entertaining and watchable as re-makes, but pretty much stunk the first time around. Here ya go:

"Ocean's Eleven" Cast Bernie Mac,Casey Affleck,Li Dian Feng,Scott Caan,George Clooney,Brad Pitt,Matt Damon,Elliott Gould,Don Cheadle,Edward Jemison,Carl Reiner © 2001 Warner Bros. Photo by Sid Avery

In my judgement, good movies generally don’t cry out to be re-made. The re-make is a solution looking for a problem, and that problem typically turns out to be, “How can I improve my cash flow by ripping off someone else’s success?”

Today’s challenge is for you to think of a pair of movies where the original was good or great, and the remake was even better. It’s not easy to do. I’ll start you off with a handful of candidates that almost make it but not quite. I like both versions, but the original is still the greatest, IMHO.

1. Mutiny on the Bounty – 1935 vs. 1962

mutiny 1935

Mutiny 1962

Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard are both convincingly despicable as Bligh. The difference for me is Marlon Brando’s foppish Christian vs. Clark Gable’s “man’s man”. Brando just seems a little off to me, though still magnetic.

The original is still the greatest.

2. The Heiress (1949) vs. Washington Square (1997)

heiress 1949

washingtonsquare

I mentioned both of these in this post and I don’t want to repeat myself too much. I think Montgomery Clift is a bit miscast as Morris Townsend, the fortune hunter, in the 1949 version, but I’m not completely convinced by Ben Chaplin in 1997 either, so that’s a wash.

Olivia de Havilland and Ralph Richardson are perfect as Catherine Sloper and her father, particularly de Havilland. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney are great as well, particularly Finney. The original performances are a little stronger in my view. For me, the original screenplay is a tad sharper as well, though, again, both are very good.

The original is still the greatest.

3. Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 vs. 1941)

hyde 1931

hyde 1941

Fredric March in the title role in 1931 is amazing. Spencer Tracy is very good in 1941 as well, but nothing like March. Tracy’s performance in 1941 redeems the flick and makes it eligible for inclusion in today’s challenge, but the 1931 version really is just a better movie. I find the stunt work in particular to be amazing, and the make-up is better as well.

It’s not completely clear to me why this movie had to be re-made only ten years after the original, but I’m too lazy to research it – maybe one of the GOML readers can tell us.

The original is still the greatest.

4. Cape Fear (1962 vs. 1991)

Cape Fear 1962

Cape Fear 1991

Robert De Niro is excellent in 1991 as Max Cady, the psycho revenge-seeker, but so was Robert Mitchum in the original. I give the edge to Gregory Peck’s lawyer over Nick Nolte’s, but again, both are good. We’re pretty close to a draw here, I think, so I’ll just fall back to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and say the original is still the greatest.

5. The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 vs. 1999)

thomas crown 1968

thomas crown 1999

I’m a big Rene Russo fan, and she’s good in 1999. I’m not a big Pierce Brosnan fan, and here he’s playing the usual Pierce Brosnan type. Can he be anyone else? Where’s the “acting”? Steve McQueen, on the other hand, is playing completely against type in 1968 and is completely believable. And the young Faye Dunaway? Wow. All the Boston locations also put the 1968 version way ahead in my estimation, though I realize that’s just my parochialism talking.

The original is still the greatest.

Oil is spilled and tigers killed

Today is the 28th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The Exxon Valdez was a huge oil tanker that ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil into the water.

ship

The result was an ecological nightmare that has taken decades to recover from, and the recovery is not complete yet. Many species of animals suffered, most of all sea birds, of whom 250,000 were killed and their habitat completely ruined. Also killed were 2800 sea otters, 300 seals and 900 bald eagles. Salmon and herring egg losses were extensive. Populations of killer whales and many other species are still smaller today than at the time of the spill.

The ship was being piloted by Third Mate Greg Cousins at the time of the accident, as the Captain, Joseph Hazelwood, was in his quarters. He was accused of being drunk at the time, though this was not proven in court. He was convicted of negligence. His punishment was a fine (paid by Exxon), and some community service.

Thirteen hundred miles of pristine shoreline were damaged.

map1

Click on any of the thumbnails below for a full-sized image.

ARCHIVE PHOTO 1989 , NORTH PACIFIC, ALASKA, USA Oiled sea otter at rehabilitation centre in Valdez after oil spill. Alaska Accession #: 0.89.173.002.05

Some laws and regulations were created in the aftermath of the disaster, mainly the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which “streamlined and strengthened EPA’s ability to prevent and respond to catastrophic oil spills”.

But there has been little advancement in the technologies available for clean-up, as became evident after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.

Aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. The picture was taken in the vicinity where the platform sank from an altitude of 3200 ft. A BP leased oil platform exploded April 20 and sank after burning, leaking an estimate of more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day from the broken pipeline to the sea. Eleven workers are missing, presumed dead.

Ecological threats from offshore drilling, oil shipping, and oil pipeline expansion are at least as serious today as they have always been. And it’s the consumption of fossil fuels that’s the greatest contributor to global warming, which is causing huge changes and destruction for living things everywhere on earth. The largest living thing of earth, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is dying.

Dendronephthya Soft Corals, Acropora Coral and Fairy Basslets. Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia

This undated handout photo released on April 20, 2016 by XL Catlin Seaview Survey shows a diver checking the bleached coral at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst coral bleaching ever recorded with 93 percent impacted, scientists said on April 20, 2016 as they revealed the phenomenon was also hitting the other side of the country. / AFP PHOTO / XL CATLIN SEAVIEW SURVEY / STR / —–EDITORS NOTE — RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY CREDIT “AFP PHOTO / XL CATLIN SEAVIEW SURVEY” – NO MARKETING – NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS – NO ARCHIVES

And of course the creation of billions of tons of plastic from petroleum products, much of which ends up in the ocean, also is killing wildlife. See this previous post for a description of what’s going on in these pictures:

And the pressure on habitat caused by human expansion, encroachment, and recklessness threatens big parts of the planet. Almost 300 square miles the Amazon rain forest has already been lost. The pressure on large animals is the greatest, and many species that were familiar to us for thousands of years now face extinction. Their loss of habitat is a disaster and it has become increasingly common for them to wind up in captivity, and that captivity is now often in private hands of individuals, not zoos, wildlife parks and the like.

The animals rarely flourish in these settings, often stop breeding, and live a pretty horrible life in any case. And they’re more and more at risk from various other human activities while in our “care”. Two weeks ago, a rare four-year-old white rhinoceros named Vince was killed in a zoo in France by poachers who wanted his horn.

rhino

To me, this one fact tops them all: there are more tigers in captivity in Texas than there are alive in the wild.

And here’s how it can end for them:

tigers

These animals were shot by sheriff’s deputies in 2011 in Zanesville, Ohio when the owner of a private “animal farm” opened their cages and then committed suicide. The 48 animals killed included 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions.

The Trump administration will not be moving to improve the situation. They have swept aside objections to the Dakota Access Pipeline, installed the former CEO of ExxonMobile as Secretary of State, and proposed slashing the budget of the Environment Protection Agency while installing a climate-change denier as its chief.

At a crucial point in the fight to slow down the destruction of our environment, we have elected a man oblivious to environmental protection, and who is seemingly determined to achieve the opposite. Actually “oblivious” isn’t the right word – he’s aware of the issues, but regards them as a hoax.

In other words, the battle is already lost. We’ve lost our way.

We’ve lost our way, and we’ve apparently lost our minds as well.

Time illuminates the moral high ground

The Summer Olympics of 1980 took place in Moscow, capital of the (then) Soviet Union. But prior to the games, in March, President Jimmy Carter shocked and deeply disappointed the U.S. team by informing them that the U.S. would be boycotting the games.

1980 water polo

1980 Olympic Water Polo Team

Sixty-six other countries joined the U.S. boycott, while seven countries participated in the games but not the opening ceremonies, and five countries allowed their athletes to participate under the Olympic flag rather than their own national flag (great idea – this should be the standard!).

All in all, it was a gigantic mess. And it reverberated for years – the Soviets, in turn, boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles because of U.S. “chauvinism” and “anti-Soviet hysteria”.

I’m guessing most of the people reading this are old enough to remember this event, but I’ll also bet most of you can’t remember what the fuss was all about. You win the standard GOML prize, an honorary Bachelor’s degree from Trump University, if you can explain why we boycotted without first looking it up. Tick tock.

Give up?

We boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics, destroying the dreams of more than 450 of our athletes, and rendering pointless their sacrifices and years of training, because the Soviets sent their military into Afghanistan, who they then shared a border with, to overturn the unpopular regime there.

map

We asked, “Who but an arrogant, belligerent nation of monsters would send their military into Afghanistan to overthrow a legitimate government?” Unacceptable! We, of course, occupied the moral high ground and had to act to end this outrage.

Naturally, the Soviets weren’t about to pull in their horns and say the equivalent of , “Well you got us – maybe we really are immoral”, so they held the games without us and stayed in Afghanistan for eight years.

It was a fight that resembles all the other fights in the region and in many other regions as well: liberal and tolerant urban interests versus conservative and less tolerant rural interests, modernity versus tradition, believers versus apostates, kleptocrats versus suckers, sect versus sect, gang versus gang, family versus family, and so on. Just like always and forever.

Some background from this wiki:

Prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took power after a 1978 coup, installing Nur Mohammad Taraki as president. The party initiated a series of radical modernization reforms throughout the country that were deeply unpopular, particularly among the more traditional rural population and the established traditional power structures. The government vigorously suppressed any opposition and arrested thousands, executing as many as 27,000 political prisoners. Anti-government armed groups were formed, and by April 1979 large parts of the country were in open rebellion. The government itself was highly unstable with in-party rivalry, and in September 1979 the president was deposed by followers of Hafizullah Amin, who then became president. Deteriorating relations and worsening rebellions led the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, to deploy the 40th Army on December 24, 1979. Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup killing president Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from a rival faction.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Is anything really different now? Have any of the factions been defeated or converted or even withdrawn from the fight all these years later? Were any of the issues different then than they are today? Were any of them ever resolved? Does a foreign power, whether the Soviets or the U.S. or anyone else, installing a “loyalist” regime ever actually solve anything? Does anyone ever actually govern?

Our own brilliant assessment of the situation in 1980 was that we should support the good guys in Afghanistan against the Russians, which we did. We figured we could at least bog the Soviets down, make them deplete their resources, and keep them out of our hair elsewhere for a while. And maybe they’ll lose some support and credibility worldwide.

The good guys called themselves the Mujahideen and were led by an inspirational young lunatic called Osama bin Laden.

muja

Afghan Mujahideen, 1989

bin laden

Their Leader

When the Soviets finally threw in the towel, bin Laden figured, “We beat the Soviets and we’ll kick the Americans’ asses, too. They’re all infidels and have it coming.” And we all remember what happened next.

Bin Laden has been gone six years now, but our military is still in Afghanistan, and our boys are still in harm’s way. It’s been 16 years, now, with no end in sight. And that same arrogant, belligerent nation which caused all that commotion in 1980, now known as Russia, is not entirely disinterested in our involvement. They figure we’ll at least be bogged down, deplete our resources, and it will keep us out of their hair elsewhere for a while. And maybe we’ll lose some support and credibility worldwide.

From this piece:

On 9 February 2017, General John W. Nicholson, Jr told Congress that NATO and allied forces in Afghanistan are facing a “stalemate” and that he needed a few thousand additional troops to more effectively train and advise Afghan soldiers. Additionally, he also asserted that Russia was trying to “legitimize” the Taliban by creating the “false narrative” that the militant organization has been fighting the Islamic State and that Afghan forces have not, he asserted Russia’s goal, was “to undermine the United States and NATO” in Afghanistan.

But we’ll prevail, by which we mean that we’ll win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, who, at the end of the day, want all the same things we do: “freedom”, to send their kids to school, to buy stuff like we have, etc. etc. In short, to enjoy the western lifestyle just like we do. Right? Who wouldn’t want all that? It’s just their pesky culture, religion, and leaders that are standing in the way.

And after all, we have the moral high ground.

Thomas, Garland, Gorsuch

On February 29th, 2016, exactly ten years since last time Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said a thing during oral arguments, he broke his silence. It had been some 45 years since any other justice went even a single term without asking a question, so it seems pretty certain that Thomas has set a reticence record that will never be approached.

He didn’t offer any explanations about why he broke his silence or why he maintained it for ten years. In the past, he’s given a variety of excuses for not speaking, but in recent years seems to have settled on “it’s just rude”, something the other justices are apparently unaware of.

thomas

Although he has been silent in session, he has been a prolific opinion writer and has frequently dissented with the other justices. But one should not confuse this dissent with open-mindedness. Thomas has been the most reliably conservative voice on the court and has consistently expressed a more “conservative” (“right-wing” or even “reactionary” actually describes it better) view than even the other conservatives on the court.

This has been particularly noteworthy in cases where racism was part of the issue – the other justices have often agreed it had been a factor when Thomas did not. Here is just one example. Do I need to mention here that Thomas is our only black justice?

When George H. W. Bush appointed Thomas in 1991, he was hoping to add a conservative voice to the bench, score some points “on race”, and avoid a bitter confirmation process. He got the first two but not the third (remember Anita Hill?). The end result is we have in Thomas a justice whose vote can always be relied on, and is always a forgone conclusion.

This is the Republican dream. In the Republican worldview, there is no such thing as “unbiased”. In their view, everyone is biased, especially journalists. They may not know it or admit it, but they’re biased. Judges, too. The Republican project is to identify the “right” bias and find a way to promote it.

The real reason that the Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, disgracefully refused to even meet with Merrick Garland, Obama’s March 2016 Supreme Court nominee, was exactly that they thought his bias had to be wrong, since Obama was appointing him.

garland

In fact it was the Republican worldview that was wrong – a judge can and indeed must be unbiased, and Garland almost certainly was. But the very fact that he didn’t have (their) bias, meant that he might decide an issue the way they wanted but he might not. This uncertainty was what they objected to. They want another Thomas, someone whose vote is known and in the bag, even while he considers all sides of every issue “fairly”.

When McConnell opposed Garland, he was rolling the dice, assuming that a Republican would be elected and would appoint the “right” kind of judge. There was a chance the whole gamble could backfire. His stated argument was that the American people should have a voice in the decision, meaning that since an election was on the horizon, the new president would have their mandate. Ridiculous, as the American people had already stated their preference when electing Obama, who had their mandate to appoint judges for all four years of his term. Anyway, McConnell gambled and won, but in the process really pissed a lot of people off.

So now they’ve got their man in Neil Gorsuch, who, on paper, has unimpeachable credentials. No one can argue about whether he’s “qualified”. Columbia, Harvard Law, Oxford. What’s not to like? Especially if your name is Coors.

gorsuch

The Democrats would be well within their rights to block Gorsuch, just to make a point. But they probably won’t because, at the end of the day, they’re just not as mean, small-minded, and vindictive as the Republicans. As William Butler Yeats put it so well, the worst are full of passionate intensity. And there’s always the chance that McConnell will have the rules changed if the Democrats resist, so that the 52 Republican senators can approve the appointment by themselves (as it stands, 60 votes are needed). Would anyone put that past him?

Also, Trump would unleash his Twitter-wrath upon the Democrats if they blocked Gorsuch, and, let’s face it, at this point no one needs that.

But during the hearings, they can make their points. While the Republicans lob their softballs, like “What’s the largest trout you’ve ever caught?”, the Democrats are hammering on Gorsuch to swear he’ll defy Trump if necessary, retain independence, etc.

Lindsey Graham tried to put a lid on all that by asking Gorsuch how he would have responded had Mr. Trump asked him to vote to overrule Roe during his interview at Trump Tower.

Ready and prepped for his Gary Cooper/John Wayne/Charles Bronson moment, Gorsuch leaned forward, silver hair flashing, steely eyes narrowed, Colorado square jaw jutted, and intoned in his signature vocal fry,

“Senator, I would have walked out the door.”

Applause! Music! Curtain! Let’s all just approve him right this second! Such integrity! What a guy! What a hero!

What a bullshitter.

For Gorsuch to convince us that he is independent at this point is meaningless. Who cares if he is “independent” or “unbiased” when it is known in advance exactly how he’ll vote on any issue?

Roe is in jeopardy. Citizens United is not. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will not be subject to our nepotism laws. Trump’s “travel ban” will be upheld. As with Thomas, Gorsuch’s vote is already counted before the case is heard. It’s in the bag.

He is a Republican dream.

Treason shmeason

There’s really nothing that the hearings on Russian interference in the 2016 election are going to reveal that we don’t already know. They interfered. They did it to benefit one candidate and hurt another. They used a third party, Wikileaks, to release information acquired by their own cyber-thieves in order to achieve this. The candidate that was helped openly encouraged them, supported them, reveled in their help, and asserted over and over that our elections were rigged (if he lost).

The Russian motives were to decrease the authority and power of America on the world stage in order to increase their own, to de-legitimize and diminish the very idea of democratic governments, and to install a president that they could easily manipulate through flattery and favorable business dealings while preventing the election of a candidate that would oppose their ambitions.

We’ve known all these things since before the election. The Russians have been spectacularly successful in attaining their objectives.

The situation is further complicated by events abroad that can have terrible consequences for the U.S. and its allies, and in which the Russians are heavily invested as well. North Korea is on the verge of acquiring the capability of striking the U.S. with nuclear weapons, and the Assad regime in Syria is providing sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah which will drastically change things on the ground for Israel.

Before this election, most Americans would have agreed that any president who defended Russia over information provided by his own intelligence agencies is a traitor and is committing treason. Some Americans still do, but it doesn’t matter because their elected representatives don’t.

This is the moment that Republicans in congress can recognize the wrong turn we have taken, seize back control from their unhinged “leader”, assert their own moral authority and integrity, and impeach Trump.

But they showed no interest in questioning the intelligence heads on the mountain of circumstantial evidence showing the direct collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russians. Instead, they were only interested in those who leaked the evidence of such collusion, i.e. Obama administration holdovers in the “deep state”, who are discrediting Trump with their leaking. Or getting it on the record that the Russians didn’t tamper with voting machines (a crime no one has accused anyone of committing), and repeating this request for each state. Thanks for nothing.

comey

James Comey (F.B.I.) and Mike Rogers (C.I.A.)

There will be no impeachment, even if treason has been committed. The victory has already been won: Dark Money has defeated Deep State.

Instead, there will only be 2020 “campaign” events, in which the hearings are ignored, focusing instead on the fact that free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick has not been signed by any team, and celebrating the fear apparently expressed by the N.F.L. of being on the wrong end of one of Trump’s famous attack-tweets. Two months in to an administration with no accomplishments (but tons of outrageous controversies) and he’s already “campaigning” for 2020? By using the power of the presidency to attack a football player?

Treason shmeason.

trumpouisville

Trump “campaigning” in Louisville hours after hearing

There will be no apology for the preposterous lies defaming the previous president. Although he repeatedly promised that there will be “big things” revealed “very soon”, nothing is revealed. There is nothing to reveal. His accusations have been fully repudiated by everyone who could actually support them. Instead, Sean Spicer will go on repeating that nothing has changed and that Trump stands by his accusations.

There will be no public mention of the great success the “Obama tapped my wires” tweets actually achieved: knocking the scandal that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to congress under oath off the internet, perhaps permanently.

There will be no mention of the fact that F.B.I. Director Comey would not acknowledge until now that this investigation has been taking place since July (Eight months? What takes eight months? Maybe it will take four years, and we can all just forget it!). No, you see, they are forbidden from acknowledging an investigation of “an American person” until it has concluded. Except if it is Hillary Clinton, that is, in which case you can make the investigation public, and then open another one two weeks before the election and make that one public as well.

In the meantime, Judge Andrew Napolitano, the very talented legal mind who divulged that Obama used GCHQ to “tapp Trump’s wires”, has been taken off the air. FoxNews doesn’t like the heat he brought down on them with his nonsense, though the President of the United States thinks the nonsense was just swell.

A couple of days before Napolitano’s idiotic “news” about GCHQ, Tucker Carlson was interviewing Trump and asking him why he wasn’t producing any evidence for his claims about Obama tapping his wires as the intelligence agencies and congress had none. Trump said he “will be submitting things” to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “very soon.”. He didn’t submit anything, of course. And then Napolitano took the stage. It seemed perfect cover for Trump: of course the FBI and CIA would deny knowledge of the “tapping”, because Obama went over their heads (in violation of the Five Eyes requirements) directly to GCHQ. That explains it! See? Trump was right all along!

Except it doesn’t explain it. If he were relying on this particular bit of fabrication, he would have had to have known about it at the time of the original March 4 tweets. He only heard Napolitano’s story weeks later. What are the options (other than Trump is a psychotic liar)? That he got the “information” from Napolitano weeks before it went public? That he planted the story with Napolitano when it started to go bad for him? That FoxNews was complicit in the lie and sidelining Napolitano is part of the show so they can retain credibility as a “news” outlet (as if!)? Heads I win, tails you lose.

And what if the Republican congress did come to its senses and impeach rather than just circling the wagons? Does anyone think Trump would just roll over and let it happen? He’d just ignore the whole thing, play some golf, tweet out a few choice words about something his base really cares about, say Arnold Schwarzenegger and his crappy ratings. The “impeachment” story was a fake. It never happened. It was fake news put out by the Failing New York Times and that loser, Crooked Hillary, to cover up their losing loserness.

Onward.

Let them eat diamonds

Monday today – I’m too lazy to write something thoughtful. So, instead, here is some random anti-Trump sentiment for your enjoyment.

The Meals on Wheels program could be saved if Melania Trump would stay at the White House for just 20 days.

trump lion

diamonds

Another way to put the NEH cuts in context:

trump wall

Trump on 60 Minutes: “There’s just so much to be done, so I don’t think we’ll be very big on vacations, no.”

Trump’s golf trips in his first two months cost the same as funding Meals on Wheels for over four years.

Jerry: “He wasn’t a pigman, was he?” Kramer: “No! Just a fat little mental patient!”

trumpgolf

Trump aid Sebastian Gorka turns out to be a Nazi.

trumpnazis

Bloomberg sums it up nicely:

bloomberg

Tell Tchaikovsky the news

The other day I was reading something on a local news blog I follow about what a mess we’re in, and someone commented that America would not be able to move forward, or solve even one problem, until the last baby-boomer was dead. I was really taken aback by this, as I could not recollect a single thing I had done to impede our progress as a nation. And yet here was someone asserting, earnestly and without irony, that I had to die before things would get better.

I figured, OK, there’s always one idiot who needs to stand out with an inflammatory remark. I know there’s a lot of boomer-hate out there, but this guy is clearly a troll. People will put him in his place with their replies, I thought. But I soon realized that everyone who reads this blog thought exactly the same thing, and they were all “liking” the boomers-must-die comment. One or two brave souls piped up to put in a good word for my generation and cite an accomplishment or two, but they were quickly and loudly shouted down.

It made me realize, yet again, that everyone always thinks the older generation caused all their problems and the younger generation is a bunch of spoiled brats who don’t know what they’re talking about. Unless you’re a pandering crypto-douchebag, like, say, a Noam Chomsky, once you reach a certain age you’re pretty much useless and/or invisible to everyone who comes behind.

Which brings me to the subject of popular music. Remember how you thought your parents’ taste in music was so awful? I’m not just talking about the obvious “Doggie-in-the-window” kind of awful, but everything they listened to, even the stuff that you now realize was pretty damn good – from Benny Goodman to Miles Davis. Or Les Paul, who, it turns out after all, was a God.

Everyone loves the music that was in the air when they came of age. And everyone holds on to that peculiar love as they get older, insisting that their music is the only really great music. It’s painful to hear the generation after us dismiss or make fun of our music. How can they not see the brilliance?

Chuck Berry died yesterday.

You can go swimming in an ocean of words about him on the internet today, so I’m not going to write about why he was so important to us, except to say that he was.

You can read about how weird it was that a black kid from St. Louis became an important icon for white teenagers, while black kids weren’t much interested in him at all.

Or you can read about how eccentric and difficult he was to work with, how he wanted to control all aspects of his “product” and the revenue stream it produced, and how this ultimately hurt and diminished him.

Or you can read about his brushes with the law, including some things he shouldn’t have been doing with underage girls. ZOMG! Monster! I can hear all you Millennials and gen-whatevers screaming, “His music must be banned!”

Do as you like. Think what you will. It doesn’t matter to me, just as my ramblings will likely not matter to you. Chuck Berry was and is a lot more important to me and many others like me than you young geniuses can ever understand.

Andersonville vs. Belsen

Camp Sumter was the official name of the Confederate military prison at Andersonville, Georgia. It opened for business in late February of 1864 and remained in operation until the end of the Civil War, 14 months later.

Andersonville was needed to hold prisoners of war after the prisoner-exchange agreements between North and South were abandoned for lack of consensus on how to handle black soldiers.

Andersonville quickly became known for its inhumane conditions and high death rate – 13,000 Union soldiers died there in the short time it operated.

It was originally designed for 10,000 prisoners, but the population quickly exceeded 30,000. Plans called for wooden barracks, but none were built as the cost of lumber was too great, so the Union soldiers imprisoned there lived out in the open, using only bits of cloth and whatever sticks of wood they could scrounge for makeshift shelters.

camp sumter

A small stream ran through the 16-acre site that was supposed to provide drinking water, but it quickly became a cesspool and source of disease, and in the summer it dried up. Rations were barely starvation-level and often over half the inmates reported ill.

Andersonvillesurvivor

Andersonville Prisoner

The commander of Andersonville, Captain Henry Wirz, was convicted of war crimes and hanged shortly after the war. In his closing statement, the Judge Advocate General, Joseph Holt, said of Wirz,

“his work of death seems to have been a saturnalia of enjoyment for the prisoner [Wirz], who amid these savage orgies evidenced such exultation and mingled with them such nameless blasphemy and ribald jest, as at times to exhibit him rather as a demon than a man.”

wirz_001

Henry Wirz

Wirz was executed in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1865 at the age of 41. His last words, spoken to the officer in charge, were, “I know what orders are, Major. I am being hanged for obeying them.”

Wirz execution

Execution of Wirz

Here’s a sketch, made by a prisoner, showing some forms of punishment at Andersonville:

andersonville punishment

The “Andersonville Raiders” were inmates who preyed on others by stealing their possessions, terrorizing, and sometimes murdering them. They were a loosely organized group whose numbers have been estimated by various sources to be between 50 and 500, and who were led by a handful of “chieftans”. As a result of their activities, the Raiders were better fed and situated than other prisoners, and had weapons as well, assuring that they could continue their activities with ease.

The activities of the Raiders were ultimately halted by an internal police force organized by Wirz, called the Regulators, and the six Chieftans were executed.

andersonville execution

Execution of Raiders

There are a lot of similarities, I think, between Andersonville, and some of the Nazi-era concentration camps. In particular, Andersonville and Bergen-Belsen seem to me to share many characteristics.

About 50,000 people died at Belsen, perhaps most memorably Anne Frank and her sister Margot, just days before liberation. Like Andersonville, it was originally set up as a prisoner of war camp, and was expected to hold prisoners to be exchanged.

When the British walked into the camp in 1945, they discovered some 60,000 still barely alive, many lying on the ground among the thousands of unburied dead, and hardly distinguishable from them. Over 13,000 people alive at liberation were too ill to recover.

After liberation, the camp was burned to prevent the spread of Typhus. Belsen had been a much larger operation than Andersonville, of course, and persisted for years longer. It was the last year or so of operation that, for me, echoes Andersonville the most.

From July 1944 onward the population of the camp swelled from 7300 to the 60,000 at liberation, as Jews still alive in some of the big eastern camps were forced to march into Germany’s interior. These people were already weakened by years of persecution, and arrived in Belsen to find meager rations, no sanitation, little shelter and rampant disease.

They had already been robbed of all their possessions, but the equivalent of the Andersonville Raiders were certainly well-represented among them.

As with Andersonville, there were trials after the war and eleven of the Belsen staff were sentenced to death, including the Commandant, Josef Kramer, who was executed on December 12, 1945. Kramer’s previous post had been Lagerführer at Auschwitz, in charge of managing the gassing of newly arrived transports from May-November, 1944.

kramer under guard

Kramer under guard

Kramer, like Wirz, had a clear conscience, and thought of himself as a scapegoat. He explained to the British interrogating him,

“The camp was not really inefficient before you [British and American forces] crossed the Rhine. There was running water, regular meals of a kind – I had to accept what food I was given for the camp and distribute it the best way I could. But then they suddenly began to send me trainloads of new evacuees from all over Germany. It was impossible to cope with them. I appealed for more staff, more food. I was told that this was impossible. I had to carry on with what I had.

Then as a last straw, the Allies bombed the electric plant that pumped our water. Loads of food were unable to reach the camp because of the Allied fighters. Then things really got out of hand. During the last six weeks I have been helpless. I did not even have sufficient staff to bury the dead, let alone segregate the sick… I tried to get medicines and food for the inmates and I failed. I was swamped. I may have been hated, but I was doing my duty.”

There are similarities between Andersonville and Belsen, but also many differences – too many to address in this post. Are they morally equivalent? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

U.S. formally apologizes to U.K.

It’s getting ridiculous. Not to mention dangerous and psychotic.

Again, something blathered on FoxNews is immediately re-blathered by the Trump administration, and, again, causes big problems. No vetting, no consultation with anyone who would know, no counting to ten before repeating it. If it comes from FoxNews, it’s true and good enough to be instantaneously repeated to the world, backed by the full faith, gravitas, and power of the President of the United States, also known as the guy who could press a button and blow us all up (assuming someone on FoxNews “reported” that it would be a good idea).

Judge Andrew Napolitano, on FoxNews, asserted that Barack Obama used GCHQ, (Government Communications Headquarters, the signal intelligence agency of the U.K.) to spy on Donald Trump before he became president.

gchq_poppy_air_9233_large

GCHQ

Yesterday, Sean Spicer repeated the claims:

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command – he didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI and he didn’t use the Department of Justice – he used GCHQ. He’s able to get it and there’s no American fingerprints on it,”

GCHQ immediately repudiated the claim as “nonsense, utterly ridiculous, and should be ignored.”

Spicer and General H. R. McMaster, who replaced the disgraced foreign agent Michael Flynn as US National Security Adviser, have now apologized to the GCHQ about this.

First, it should be Donald Trump doing the apologizing, not his surrogates. He could easily say something like, “Sean means well, but sometimes gets too enthusiastic in his loyalty and commitment to us. I fired him today. Please excuse the faux pas. Kiss kiss, are we all good now?”

Second, when will Spicer throw in the towel on his own? When does defending the indefensible become too difficult? Or too amoral?

Finally, is there no one in the White House to tell Trump we’d like to be friends with the U.K.? Or Germany? Or Australia, Mexico, and all our other historic allies? Or is it just going to be Putin all the way down?

Today, Trump will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and attempt to put “their differences” aside. What differences, you ask? Well, the man-baby has said she was “ruining Germany”, that she would lose her election despite being the heavy favorite, and that “the German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman. I don’t know what the hell she’s thinking.”

Merkel, for her part, would like to preserve the important alliance between the U.S. and Germany.

What would prompt the tiny-handed one to say such egregiously stupid things?

I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2015

Yup. That’s it. Definitely a good reason to totally screw up our relationship with one of our most important allies.

Two months in, three years and ten months to go. Make America Great Again.

Calm down, shut up.

trump

So the man-baby’s Muslim travel ban 2.0 has once again been blocked by a federal judge, this time in Hawaii. US District Court Judge Derrick Watson pointed out that the intent of the ban is clear from the statements Trump made as a candidate, i.e. to stop all Muslims from coming into the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Trump is furious and lashed out, as is his wont. In a speech in Nashville yesterday, he (again) vowed he’ll go to the Supreme Court, insisted the courts are political, claimed Our Country is unsafe, yadda yadda yadda.

For good measure, he whipped up the crowd for some lusty and prolonged chants of that old favorite, “Lock Her Up”.

Here’s the thing: Do we really want a president who is routinely furious when something doesn’t go the way he’d like? Do we want a president who is always lashing out? Don’t we want a president who is calm at all times and keeps his angrier thoughts to himself?

In short, Mr. President, it would be a blessed relief to all of us, and perhaps do you some good as well, if, for at least one day, you would just calm down and shut up.

Gummint regs

Sometimes the anti-government people actually have a good point – regulations can be stupid and costly. And sometimes the anti-PC people have a point – political correctness can go too far. And sometimes there is a really good example that shows what happens when the two meet.

The Appalachian Mountain Club maintains a string of eight “high huts” in the White Mountains, each about a day’s hike from the next, that enables you to complete a trek across this most spectacular 56-mile length of the 2190 miles of the Appalachian Trail without going below tree line.

In 1999, the AMC wanted to rebuild its Galehead Hut, which can accommodate 38 people overnight. The hut is 3800 above sea level, and four and a half fairly difficult trail miles from the road.

Because the AMC leases the land for the huts from the U.S. Forest Service, their renovations would have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. They had to provide a wheelchair ramp into the hut to comply. This and other requirements would increase the cost of the project by about $50,000, and everyone knows the AMC does not have very deep pockets.

But is it really necessary to build a wheelchair ramp to a hut that has never been visited by anyone in a wheelchair? Can’t we get an exception in this case? Yes, they were told, it’s necessary, and no, no exceptions. So, despite the loud murmur of disapproval from the fairly reasonable among us, the club went ahead and built the wheelchair ramp, which is prominently featured in the above picture.

To make the point that people confined to wheelchairs could do anything that other people could do, a wheelchair hike to Galehead was undertaken in 2000, after a year of planning. Teams of friends worked together to try to get the wheelchair hikers to the hut. There were three people in wheelchairs, two on crutches and a support team of twenty.

Some details from the above link:

Simple wooden planks proved useful in crossing broken-up sections of the trail, but a rope pulley system failed to live up to expectations. Sometimes pure grit and muscle from the entire team were still needed to power through some of the trail’s steeper sections like Jacob’s Ladder, a challenging bit of trail with large boulders and slick facing rocks two-thirds of the way up.

At one point, Gray abandoned his chair, literally hopped onto the trail and climbed the mountain backwards — using his arms, shoulders and hands to push up each stone step, while a teammate held his legs in a fabric sling.

Twelve hours later — some eight and a half hours more than it takes most able-bodied climbers — Krill and his crew arrived at the Galehead hut in the glow of the setting sun, followed by Murray, Gray, Haley and Marzouk. Cruising up the ramp, the group headed inside for Philly cheese steaks and champagne. After a day of resting sore muscles and repairing equipment, the group would head back down with the same grit and grace they exhibited on the ascent.

Here’s another account of the effort. The New York Times also published an excellent piece about the whole thing.

The “hikers” and their support teams claimed that the exercise was a great success and validated the government requirements and the cost to the AMC to build the ramp.

In fact, it proved the opposite. People confined to wheelchairs cannot climb mountains. Obviously.

Yes, if you plan for a year and get twenty people to carry you up the trail and deposit you at the doorstep of the hut, the group has succeeded at something difficult. So what? And the whole thing begs this question: if your team can carry you for 12 hours up a difficult trail, can they not also hoist you up the last 18″ onto the porch of the hut without needing a $50,000 ramp?

The NYT piece ends with this question:

Would the hut’s ramp ever really be used again? Would they ever, really, want to do this again, after all the almost-tipping and rib-bruising and grueling labor? Sure, said Mr. Krill, 29. ”Next time I can get enough people to do it with me.”

Tax cuts for the rich

That’s all it is.

The non-partisan (soon to be known as “deep state”, “fake”, and/or “enemy”) Congressional Budget Office has determined that if the Republican replacement for Obamacare is passed, 14 million currently-insured people will become uninsured in the first year, 21 million by 2020, and 24 million by 2026, at which point a total of 52 million Americans will lack health insurance.

Although Trump ran on a promise of not cutting Medicaid, the proposed bill does exactly that, and the reduced numbers of insured are mainly older and low-income Americans who will no longer be able to afford the coverage they now have through Medicaid. They are mostly Trump voters, by the way, who, one hopes, are beginning to understand what a Trump “promise” is actually worth.

All of these reductions in coverage will produce $600 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy.

Why would they do it? Because the Kochs want them to get rid of Obamacare . Actually the Kochs don’t like the replacement plan either, because it offers tax credits as incentives to buy coverage, which the Kochs say is just another government subsidy. But they do want Obamacare gone in any case, because they can’t understand why their tax money should be used to help others.

But how can it pass – how can such a cruel measure become law? Well, who’s going to stop it – Republican congressmen with a conscience?

David Mamet laid it out for you in Glengarry Glen Ross. You are Dave Moss and your congressman is Blake.

Dave Moss: What’s your name?
Blake: Fuck you. That’s my name.
Dave Moss: [laughs]
Blake: You know why, mister? ‘Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight; I drove an eighty thousand dollar BMW. That’s my name.

Mamet puts it another way in “House of Games”. Joe Mantegna (your congressman) explains that his marker is good. He lives in the United States, after all.

Forgotten but not gone?

It’s only been a week, and yet it’s ancient history, completely irrelevant, and apparently totally forgotten. Believe it or not, it was just over a week ago that it was revealed that Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath during his January confirmation hearing for the job of Attorney General.

In answering Senator Franken’s question about whether Sessions had had any contact with Russia, Seesions said, “I did not have communications with the Russians.” In fact, he had met twice with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

According to 18 U.S. Code § 1001, the crime of perjury requires four elements to be present: the statement must be under oath, material or significant, false, and the speaker must know it’s false.

Sessions committed perjury, the penalty for which is up to eight years in prison. Dozens of Democrats have gone on record saying that he should resign.

Nancy Pelosi said,

“Jeff Sessions lied under oath during his confirmation hearing before the Senate. Under penalty of perjury, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.’ We now know that statement is false.”

Al Franken said,

“He answered a question that he asked himself, which is, did I meet with any Russians? And he answered it falsely. He said no. I hadn’t. Listen, I’ve been cutting him a lot of slack. I’ve been refusing to say that he lied. I wanted to wait for this letter to come out. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than he just perjured himself.”

It’s interesting to note that Sessions himself has very strong opinions about this part of the law. In 1999, he voted to impeach Bill Clinton for lying under oath about whether or not he’d had sex with Monica Lewinsky.

So, this is pretty serious stuff. Impeachable stuff if you’re a president. Resignation stuff if you’re the Attorney General. Prison-time stuff either way if you’re guilty. This isn’t going to go away any time soon, right?

Wrong. President Donald J. Trump waved his magic twitter over it and made the whole thing disappear in the blink of an eye.

All he had to do was tweet:

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

It only took a second, and the whole Sessions resignation question took a back seat for a day or two, and now has apparently gone away. In its place, the headlines and talking heads are all about various branches of government scrambling in a circus of powerlessness to get some accountability out of Trump for this new craziness. And guess what – in a few days even this will be set aside and placed in the attic toy box of old craziness to gather dust undisturbed.

Say what you will, when it comes to deflection, blame-shifting, and “Trumping” the outlandish with the preposterous and the preposterous with the apparently-insane, the man-baby knows what he’s doing. He’s the best.

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head and admit defeat.

Purge the saboteurs

It has now been pointed out by many that the President of the United States watches hours of FoxNews every day, and that his favorite show is “Fox and Friends”. He often responds in real time with tweets to things he sees on FoxNews. Sometimes this creates a weird kind of public conversation between the POTUS and the on-air personalities, e.g. this two-hour interaction recently.

He also checks the Breitbart web site often, though this is hardly necessary as his Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, is nearby to tell him what he needs to know about the site. Trump regards everything on Breitbart as true and news, which has gotten him into trouble recently with the whole “Obama tapped my wires” thing. Read what Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, has to say about Bannon’s time at Breitbart, including his turning the comment section into “a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”

All in all, it’s a real problem for America. Trump does not trust or consult subject-matter experts, professional bureaucrats, or really anyone but a few close confidantes, and then only when what they say matches his worldview and mood. Whoever had his ear last before he picks up his twitter will have the most influence on what he says.

He is impulsive, given to conspiracy theories, and largely ignorant of world history and current events, apart from what he chooses to absorb from “the shows.” He doesn’t read, and it’s been speculated that, in fact, he cannot read above a fourth grade level. This shifts a huge responsibility to the outlets he trusts, as what they assert, or even speculate about, may quickly become the basis for Executive Orders and national policy. How has FoxNews responded to this new reality?

Recklessly.

The other day, Sean Hannity, referring to “deep state holdovers” from the Obama administration (i.e. anyone in a government job that might not have voted for Trump), said,

“It’s time for the Trump administration to begin to purge these saboteurs before it’s too late.”

Bill O’Reilly, referring to the recent cache of CIA documents released by Wikileaks and emphasizing that the leaks took place during the Obama administration, said,

“Treason is in the air”.

And, almost immediately, the purge began. I have no problem with any administration choosing their own people and firing, with cause, those who they have a legal right to fire. But I have a huge problem with the idea that anyone who ever worked in the Obama administration is, by definition, actively trying to “sabotage” Trump, and is an enemy to be “purged”. This kind of intemperate language (and thought) is exactly what we don’t need in public discourse, particularly given the mercurial nature of our commander-in-chief.

Which brings me to the dilemma facing every citizen who understands that the man-baby is profoundly unfit and unqualified for the job he has won. Do we wish for the “success” of President Trump? And, if in some sense we do not, does that make us un-American?

I can say that I wish for the success of America.

I hope everyone who needs a good job can get one, and can support themselves and their families.

I hope everyone gets the health care that a citizen of a rich, industrialized country deserves (and already has in every other rich, industrialized country).

I hope everyone who wants an education can get one. I hope science can stand on its own without being politicized.

I hope we can avoid wars and, that if we are called upon to deploy our military somewhere, the cause makes sense and the objectives are clear. I hope there is a an exit strategy from any conflict, as well as a morning-after plan for those who will have to live with the consequences of our policies.

I hope we all recognize the importance of working towards cleaner air and water, developing renewable energy sources, and repairing the damage that has been done to the planet over the last century.

I hope that we can continue to enjoy the freedoms that have made our country unique, that civil discourse is restored, that dissent is tolerated or even valued, that no one needs to fear the consequences of speaking or thinking something different than those charged with running our government, and that the line between “leaders” and “rulers” remains clear and bright.

If these measures of success for America also define success for Trump, then I wish him all the success in the world.

I do not want to live in a kleptocracy, a one-party-state, or a country where loyalty to an individual is more important than loyalty to principles or country.

I do not want to live in a country where, if you are unlucky enough to have voted for the losing candidate, you will be purged as a saboteur or accused of treason. Those who use their powerful megaphone and deep pockets to distort and exaggerate and appeal to our worst instincts, and who have the audacity to do so during times of peace and prosperity, are the enemies of our American ideals and way of life.

Maybe it is Hannity and O’Reilly who should be purged.

Michael Flynn, foreign agent

In 2014, President Obama fired Michael Flynn as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for freelancing on foreign policy. Flynn held different ideas about “Radical Islam” and other things than the president, and had been acting on his own.

His ideas were sometimes referred to as “Flynn Facts” (also known as “falsehoods”) by those who worked with him, for example his assertion that Iran has killed more Americans than al Qaeda in the 21st century. Flynn tweeted links to fake new stories (created by his son!) that reported Hillary Clinton was running a sex slavery ring out of the back room of a Pizzeria in D.C., which was later shot up by a true believer in such things. In short, Flynn’s a little nutty.

After being fired, he receded into the world of mid-level defense contractors and international influence peddlers. In December 2015, he appeared with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Moscow banquet.

Flynn’s style has been described as “Kiss up, kick down”. No one loves the “Kiss up” part more than our very own man-baby, and no one is more easily taken in by it. This speech, given by Flynn at the Republican convention in July, is loaded with it.

In the opening minutes, he says, “the destructive pattern of putting the interest of other nations ahead of our own will end when Donald Trump is president”. If ever there has been a more hypocritical load of bullshit exclaimed with more patriotic conviction (at least in the English language), I am unaware of it.

Flynn became one of Trump’s closest advisers during the campaign and was ultimately appointed National Security Adviser, a controversial pick that did not require Senate confirmation.

During the campaign, Flynn had been discussing the Obama administration’s sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. and he then lied about those discussions to the Vice President, Mike Pence, which caused a problem for the Trump White House.

On February 13th, Kellyanne Conway said on TV that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn enjoyed the full confidence of President Trump.

Later that day, twenty-four days after being appointed, Flynn resigned.

The next day, February 14th, Sean Spicer insisted that Flynn did not resign, but that Trump fired him, after losing faith in his honesty.

On February 15th, Trump said Flynn was a wonderful man, apparently forgetting about the honesty thing.

“Gen. Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media, as I call it, the fake media in many cases. And I think it is really a sad thing that he was treated so badly.”

This week, Flynn registered as a Foreign Agent, for doing $530,000 worth of lobbying work for Turkey during the campaign, i.e. at the same time he was talking about not putting the interests of other nations ahead of ours. Also at the same time that Trump was talking about “draining the swamp”, which, it’s hard to remember now, referred to getting rid of lobbyists and the moneyed interests they represent.

Spicer said he was a private citizen during this time. Yes, Sean, we got that. Thank you so much for the unneeded clarification – a lobbyist is a private citizen. And as such, he was exactly the kind of swamp-thing that needed a heavy draining.

Mike Pence said this affirms Trump’s decision to fire him.

We’re still waiting for some affirmation on the decision to hire him in the first place. In any case, if the swamp-draining is still going on, it’s going on out of public view.

It’s our fault for listening

By far the worst “defense” yet offered for Trump’s crazy accusation that Obama illegally “tapped” his phones comes from Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. It amounts to, “The media should be ignoring this clown.” Asked about the accusations, Nunes said,

“The president is a neophyte to politics — he’s been doing this a little over a year. I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally.”

First of all, I wish someone would explain to me what the options are for “taking” a 140-character message from the President of the United States, if we aren’t to take it literally. Figuratively? Allegorically? Ironically? Medically? Also, we’ll need some guidelines to help us apply the correct method to any given tweet.

Just for the record, here again is the thing we’re not supposed to take literally.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Second, the idea that we need to cut Trump a little slack on this kind of thing because he has only been in politics for a year is preposterous. How many years does it take to learn not to blurt out paranoid fantasies like a deranged toddler? Ten? If the guy hasn’t learned it by age 70, guess what?

But what I really love is the Republican double-speak of taking something that is obviously a major weakness and presenting it as a strength, at the same time as blaming others for not correctly understanding it as a strength in the first place.

Trump continues to place his supporters in Congress and elsewhere in the position of having to defend the indefensible. And, for some reason, no one seems to mind very much. All part of Making America Great, I guess.

Ya just gotta laugh. Here’s something that will help. It’s a clip from five months ago, which, in Trump-time, is the Paleolithic period:

Why does he do it?

Trump has lately gone on a binge of tweeting craziness and lies about his predecessor. It doesn’t serve any purpose other than to de-legitimize our own government, rattle the world, and make himself small in the eyes of virtually everyone.

A couple of days ago, it was Obama “tapped my wires”. Yesterday he invented a bogus statistic about Gitmo prisoners that have been released:

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017

In his impulsiveness, and with his alarmingly itchy twitter-finger, he couldn’t take a minute to learn that the overwhelming majority of those people were actually released by Bush. Not that knowing this would have changed his tactics.

Of course the bigger question is why tweet about Obama at all? He’s not running for anything and, for lots of good reasons, no president has ever done anything like this before. Obama himself certainly could have said a few things about his own predecessor, but there is absolutely no reason to do it. It helps nothing and solves no problem.

To paraphrase a recent Nobel Prize winner, “The answer, my friends, is polling in the wind.”

As we have pointed out many times before, Trump has no principles. He is a dangerous narcissist whose oxygen is flattery. He cannot function without the upvotes, “likes”, and followers that social media, especially Twitter, provides. He can’t stop gloating that Schwarzenegger’s ratings on The Apprentice weren’t as good as his own, referring to himself repeatedly as a ratings machine.

The reason Trump can’t stop insulting Obama is because Obama (and every other former president) is absolutely killing him in the polls. Trump, the most prolific “winner” of all time according to himself, is actually a loser! Trump is trying to drive the public’s opinion of Obama as low as his own, so he can “win”.

gallup averages

trump poll

It’s all a ridiculous game he’s playing and using really dangerous tactics. If you doubt it, have a look at this chart, which shows how a well-timed terrorist attack, like the one on 9/11, can boost your ratings. If you think Trump can’t possibly be considering this, well, I just hope you’re right.

George W approval

So this is how it will be

There will not be a single normal day in the next four years.

Each and every day will be consumed by controversy and acrimony. There will be no time to hash out whether something Trump tweets is actually true before the next spectacle begins, and no point in doing so.

If you think a tweet is nuts and clearly untrue, you are a “cuck” and you need to get out of the way of the TrumpTrain, which is accomplishing things much faster and better than any administration ever, and running like a finely tuned machine.

No one who really needs to hear that something wasn’t true after all is listening or cares. It’s just fake news from the lying enemy media. America will be great again very soon. In fact, it’s already great again.

The President of the United States made up a crazy, paranoid lie about his predecessor, and impulsively tweeted it out to the world. Having done that, he says only, “No further comment until a Congressional investigation has been done” to avoid having to elaborate or clarify or justify.

He sends Sean Spicer into the predictable fire, but Spicy’s got nothing. When asked about the crazy tweets, he says only, “If we start down the rabbit hole of discussing some of this stuff, I think that we end up in a very difficult place.” No shit!

Spicer seems to be forgetting it was the POTUS that started us down the rabbit hole and put us in this very difficult place. But why? Why in the world would he do it? Is there any up-side other than getting Jeff Sessions’ lying under oath off the font page? Is that all there is behind this unbelievable breach of protocol, etiquette, and sanity? Just the gaining of a day or two of political cover?

But, amazingly enough, it doesn’t matter at all. It seems there will be no consequences to putting the lie out there where it marinates, unverified, and becomes true for millions just for having been said by “President” Trump. Republicans simply shrugged.

Anyway, it’s day-old news now which means it’s not news at all. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are focused on their new health care bill, which should, in a normal world, be the focus of the news. There is no mention on my Google news feed today about yesterday’s outrage.

So what’s next from President Crazypants?

Today we’re on to the new, “revised” Muslim travel ban. It has already made us forget all about Obama “tapping”.

Which made us forget all about the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, lying to Congress under oath.

Which made us forget all about the imagined “Swedish terrorism last night”.

Which made us forget all about the absurd Mar-a-Lago security circus.

Which made us forget about the botched Yemen raid and how “They lost Ryan”.

Which made us forget all about the enormous cost to taxpayers for Trump family travel.

Which made us forget all about the unconscionable exclusion of the Failing New York Times, CNN, and others from a press briefing.

Which made us forget all about the anti-democratic “Media is the enemy of America”.

Which made us forget all about the stupefying “Legal system is broken” for ruling against the original travel ban.

Which made us forget all about the loony and incompetent Flynn lying about Russian meetings and resigning.

Which made us forget all about the delusional “three million illegal votes cast”.

Which made us forget all about the unprecedented Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka crap during a FoxNews interview.

Which made us forget all about the xenophobic and silly provocation of the original travel ban on Muslims.

Which made us forget all about the fictional “electoral landslide”.

Which made us forget all about how we’ll be paying for the alleged “wall” after all.

Which made us forget all about the spectacle of a sitting president refuting and diminishing the intelligence agencies over Russian hacking.

Which made us forget all about the fanciful “record crowds” at the inauguration.

Which made us forget all about the disheartening Conway saying Trump wouldn’t release his taxes after all.

I know I probably have the order of these events wrong, and I know I left out many, many others that had their turn completely preoccupying the media for a day or two. I can’t help it – my head is spinning. I have no desire to thoroughly research all the craziness, chaos, controversies, and straight-up bullshit we’ve endured in the first few weeks of Trump.

I’m not even going to go back to before the election when there was so much to digest/refute that we never actually got to ask Trump a real policy question. I suppose the answer would have been drowned out by the chants of “Lock Her Up” anyway.

And of course all the scandals of Trump’s business career are just irrelevant ancient history now. For the masochistic among you, here’s a summary from The Atlantic.

The force and weirdness of the Trump hurricane since winning the election is just too much. It’s a completely unprecedented (unpresidented?) perversion of perhaps the most critical of our three branches of government, the Executive, and it has greatly accelerated the disappearance of cohesion and decency in our political life.

Each day we think, OK this is it – this is the one that’s so crazy we all have to stop, sort through it, and take action on it while everything else is on hold. But then tomorrow comes and we have to put it aside for the new one.

It has finally dawned on me that this is how every day of the next four years will be. There will not be one Trump-free day. Not one day in which we can just relax and try to forget what’s happening and what’s happened.

We’re already exhausted. God help us when the first real international crisis hits, or the first big terrorist attack, or another financial implosion, or an ecological disaster, or anything else that cries out for a real president to actually lead us.

The answer: Trump’s tax returns

The question: How can we better understand Trump’s dealings with Russia?

Every Republican presidential nominee for the last nine elections released his tax returns. Before that, Gerald Ford (1976) released a summary showing total income and tax paid, though not the detailed return.

Nixon (1972) did not release his returns at first, but released a lot of information, including the previous four years of tax returns, in December of 1973, after the I.R.S. began an audit based on allegations of his trying to game the tax code with questionable charity donations, according to a paper prepared for the United States Capitol Historical Society

Nixon tried to quiet criticism by asking that a congressional committee examine the returns as well. Unfortunately, that committee found that Nixon owed $476,431 in unpaid taxes and accrued interest, which in today’s dollars is over two million.

Note that Nixon released his returns while under audit. Trump’s favorite excuse for not releasing his returns was that they were under audit, which as has been pointed out over and over, is a completely made-up smoke screen.

Trump repeatedly promised during the campaign to eventually release his returns. Some quotes from the campaign trail:

February 25, 2015: “I would release tax returns….I would certainly show tax returns if it was necessary….I have no objection to certainly showing tax returns.”

January 24, 2016: “We’re working on that now. I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful, and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time….We’re working on it right now, and at the appropriate time you’ll be very satisfied.”

February 25, 2016: “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

May 10, 2016: “I’ll release. Hopefully before the election I’ll release.”

September 26, 2016: “I don’t mind releasing—I’m under a routine audit. And it’ll be released….As soon as the audit’s finished, it will be released.”

October 9, 2016: “As soon as my routine audit is finished, I’ll release my returns. I’ll be very proud to. They’re actually quite great.”

Here’s a more complete list, pre-dating the campaign, which includes a promise to release his returns when Obama releases his long form birth certificate.

OK, so Trump is a liar. Big whoop. Tell us something we didn’t already know.

But what exactly is in those tax returns that makes the man-baby hang onto them like grim death? Wouldn’t it be easier to resolve all the Russia questions just by releasing them? Is it so awful that he’d rather start a democracy-destabilizing Twitter war over made up wire-tapping accusations before showing them?

There are several things that Trump really doesn’t want you to know, that would be revealed in his taxes.

One of the less consequential is that we’d see how really uncharitable he has been, especially compared to other national figures, for example Barack Obama, who in 2009 gave over 30% of his income away, including the entire $1.4 million Nobel Prize.

But we kind of already knew Trump was not a generous or compassionate person. Small potatoes.

Much more interesting would be the revelation that he doesn’t actually own much property at all, just partial stakes in three buildings, and he has 500 million in debt obligations on those. Everyone would finally see that he isn’t what he claims to be in this area.

But the big revelation would be where his money actually comes from, and the huge scam he’s been running for years. Remember the scam in “The Producers”? You sell a 50% stake in a show you knew was going to fail to as many people as you can. You pocket the money and hope the show fails right away. Then you tell the investors, “Aw, tough luck, partner – we’ll get ’em next time.”

Well that’s what Trump did with the banks during his casino-failure heyday. He was Max Bialystock times a million. When they finally wised up and stopped lending him money in the 1990’s, he turned to Russia and China, and now is deep in debt to them. Just how much is what we might learn from his tax returns.

Maybe someone in the “deep state” will help us out here. It’s our best chance at getting rid of this toxic clown. Where is Wikileaks when you really need them?

Performance Artist POTUS

As everyone knows by now, your president yesterday accused his predecessor of “Tapping his wires”. The #wiretapping hashtag blew up on Twitter with at least as many people calling for Obama’s arrest as those pointing out how absurd it all is.

It is unclear where exactly the man-baby got this idea, but many have suggested he was re-acting to this piece on Breitbart, in which Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of using “police state” tactics to undermine the Trump campaign.

Of course, in the true Trump style, there was no vetting of the information, no consultation with the security agencies, no thought of the consequences of tweeting, not even a quick call to Jared or Ivanka to see what they thought. Just a direct, impulsive pipeline from the Breitbart website to the President’s twitter. It’s a pretty scary situation.

There’s really not much more to be said about this incident, shocking as it may be. To the rational among us, there are two possibilities: Trump believes this nonsense implicitly and lets the tweets fly, in which case he is stupid and insane, or he doesn’t believe it and lets the tweets fly anyway, in which case he is evil and insane. In all cases, this business is further proof of the obvious: Donald J. Trump is not fit to possess the nuclear codes.

But the weird thing is that from a political perspective the whole thing affirms Trump’s brilliance as a demagogue. First, he correctly assumed that it made no difference to his admirers whether the nonsense in question was true or not. It was true enough the second it came out of his twitter. The pitchforks and torches were brought out instantaneously.

Second, it had the desired effect of getting the Jeff Sessions lying-under-oath problem off the front pages, at least for a few days. As Trump has so often shown, the easiest way to get past a scandal is to create a bigger one.

And finally, it further serves to divide the populace and entrench their already dug-in loyalties, and his faction is powerful enough to get him the presidency. He also knows that there were more people who voted for him just to punish Hillary Clinton and the “libtards” than there were people who thought he would do anything that actually needed doing. This is what they meant when they said they “wanted their country back”, and this is why political discourse in this country is ruined and will stay that way for decades.

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that the incident proves that Trump is completely unfit for the role of Chief Executive, not simply because he’s crazy/dangerous and insane, but because his “management style” is never going to change. That style never actually succeeded in business and can’t possibly succeed in government.

This article lays it out beautifully, and can be summarized by this quote:

“He’s not a great manager. He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

The Trump “organization” has never been an organization in the business sense at all. There was no board of directors, no hierarchical organization chart, no independent auditors – just Donald surrounded by a very small clique of family members. As his interests grew internationally, nothing changed, and no new levels of management were created. Trump made all decisions impulsively, and they often went wrong.

His true genius is in deflecting blame onto others.

Trusting your own gut and never consulting experts may or may not serve a family business, particularly as failure affects so few people. But it can’t possibly work in the job we’ve given him now. He is now charged with directing the largest organization in the world, and his lack of management expertise is really showing.

From the article:

Trump’s company, despite his grandiose portrayals of a sprawling empire, always at base was a mom-and-pop entity, and what Trump managed throughout his lengthy professional career was principally a core group of barely more than a dozen executives housed on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. Until now. As president, Trump sits at the top of a massive bureaucracy not of his own making, a complex hierarchy designed to help him handle the most information-intensive, crisis-driven job in the world. He appears to be struggling to adapt. Hundreds of positions remain vacant, key posts have been declined by wary nominees, poorly vetted picks have withdrawn or been rejected, and the day-to-day functioning of the West Wing has become its own running news story.

He’s kidding right?

So the moment of Trump being “presidential” has passed. It didn’t last very long and, really, was anybody fooled? You’re setting the bar for “presidential” pretty low when all the guy has to do is read some complete sentences off a teleprompter. The hard part, actually writing the complete sentences, has already been done by someone else, Stephen Miller I suppose.

Anyway, Trump almost immediately snapped out of the uncomfortable role of “leader” with some tweets about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer meeting with Russians, and, as could be expected, demanded an investigation. This is the usual thing of Trump distracting from and attempting to neutralize something real, in this case Jeff Sessions lying under oath, with something either totally made-up or totally inconsequential.

We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

I hereby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it. https://t.co/qCDljfF3wN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

It works well enough to galvanize his 60 million into accepting the false equivalence and thereby changing the dynamic of the whole thing. But if that’s all there was to say about his “pivot”, I wouldn’t bother writing anything.

No, this morning he really outdid himself. At 6:35 A.M, he was up and already tweeting absurd conspiracies theories. We’re all getting used to the POTUS tweeting everything now. He’s already been told the obvious: that he could take a giant step towards being “presidential” while greatly reducing the chances of shooting himself in the foot just by putting the stupid Twitter down. Permanently. Not gonna happen.

And doing it before breakfast? He’s kidding, right? I mean, there was a moment when we thought that maybe the people around him would filter and vet his tweets. Maybe Hope Hicks? Someone. Then the use of Twitter might at least seem like a new tech version of real executive communications. But first thing in the morning? No, clearly Trump was thrashing around in a sleepless torment over how to deal with his enemies, who are many and surround him at all times. He got up and reached for his phone and blasted this out:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

It’s really just too ridiculous. He’s kidding, right? Please tell me he’s kidding.

In the Bizarro world

The other day, Trump gave a very newsworthy speech to Congress. I didn’t watch the speech because I can’t stand listening to the guy, but I read about it the next day. It was apparently newsworthy not for the things he said in the speech, because, as usual, he didn’t say anything. The speech was light on policy and details, and long on slogans and self-congratulation. This is Trump as expected, so nothing newsworthy there. The best part, for me, was Trump imploring others to put aside “petty fighting”. Hilarious. Coming from a guy who has done nothing but petty fighting for years, this sage piece of presidential wisdom can only be offered in the Bizarro world.

No, it was newsworthy because Trump seemed, finally, to be “presidential”. Maybe this is the long hoped-for “pivot”, the pundits said. Maybe there really is another Trump who is actually qualified to do this job. In the Bizarro world, it is headline news when the President of the United States does not appear to be a petulant, incompetent, vulgar clown for twenty minutes.

Things that have been considered real news in the past are getting a little harder to find, but I was able to tease out a paragraph or two about the U.S. participating in the re-taking of Palmyra from ISIS. It is certainly good news to free this treasure trove of antiquities from barbarians. But what struck me is that we are now apparently in a coalition with Russia, the Assad government, Hezbollah, and, by association, Iran. I guess it’s expected at this point that we would be in bed with the Russians, but probably most people overlooked the fact that it means being on the same team as Hezbollah, the Iranian client, as well. After all Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric, wouldn’t you think he’d be the last guy to authorize this? Not in the Bizarro world.

Everyone knows that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did certain things that Clinton tried to say were not “sexual relations”. His otherwise excellent eight years of peace-and-prosperity were just about ruined by this unfortunate parsing of words. The crime he was impeached for was not these relations, sexual or otherwise, but lying to Congress about them under oath – the greatest sin you can commit in our government. Remember? Well, now comes Jeff Sessions who, it turns out, lied to congress under oath about conversations he had with Russians during the campaign. He has recused himself from the Trump administration’s investigation of itself (Bizarro!), but, really, shouldn’t he resign from his position as the nation’s top law enforcement official after committing the greatest sin you can commit? Not in the Bizarro world.

Hillary Clinton also committed an unpardonable sin, for which she was investigated repeatedly by the FBI and hauled up before congress on multiple occasions: she used a public email account while Secretary of State. It might have been hacked, her opponents howled. There might have been Top Secret info in those emails! It wasn’t and there weren’t, but it was enough to derail her presidential aspirations. Now comes Mike Pence, who, you may remember, was one of Clinton’s harshest critics on this matter. Guess what? He also used a public email account while Governor of Indiana. And it was hacked. And there was confidential information in his emails. And he’s fighting tooth and nail in the courts to make sure the emails are not made public. Will there be any consequences for Pence? Not in the Bizarro world.

And, then there’s the beloved Kellyanne Conway. I personally do not care if she puts her shoes on the furniture in the Oval Office or anywhere else, but I just love the hypocrisy of those who condemned Obama for doing the same. Remember?

In the Bizarro world, only one of these acts is outrageous. But, as I said, ho hum. More important is the sanctioning that Conway will or will not receive for improperly hawking Ivanka Trump’s crap while being interviewed on TV. You can’t do that, Kellyanne. The Office of Government Ethics (remember that thing Congress tried to do away with overnight a while back?) recommended disciplinary action against Conway, but, in the Bizarro world, you know how that’s gonna work, right? From the Washington Post:

Stefan C. Passantino, who handles White House ethics issues as deputy counsel to President Trump, wrote in a letter Tuesday that his office concluded Conway was speaking in a “light, offhand manner” when she touted the Ivanka Trump line during a Feb. 9 appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

In the Bizarro world, the appearance of misconduct is just fine. And the appearance of being “presidential” is just awesome.

Where the jobs went

Are you old enough to remember the days when someone else pumped your gasoline? A guy came out and asked you whether you wanted regular or hi-test and how much. While he was pumping it, he washed your windshield, checked your oil and maybe put air in your tires.

At some point, the “self-serve” option appeared and you could save some money by foregoing the “full-serve” extras. In New Jersey, this was never allowed because, allegedly, the motorist was more likely to set himself on fire than a “professional”. It seems to me that the “full-serve” option is getting harder to find, at least in my neck of the woods, and New Jersey is now the only state where it’s illegal to pump your own. Truth be told, it’s kind of a pain in the butt for most visitors who are accustomed to a quick visit for gas.

One of the big advantages of the pump-your-own model was that you could get the customer to do a job for free that you had been paying someone else to do previously. Other businesses saw the potential, and the result has been that there are a lot fewer jobs of a certain kind now to be had. Fewer bank tellers, retail check-out people, postal clerks, and so on. The customer can do the work.

With the rise of the internet, whole professions were obsoleted seemingly overnight: stock broker, travel agent, and so many others. Technology has enabled the elimination of middle-men of all descriptions. When you think of it, it’s just the natural progression of things. Labor-saving, time-saving, and of course, money-saving are big drivers of a lot of technological change.

And the globalization of labor just made it a lot cheaper to do most manufacturing elsewhere.

The final blow will be the rise of robotics in the workplace. Assembly line work is an obvious example we’ve had for a while now. Warehouse pickers, baggage handlers, and lots of others as well have already experienced this . With the advent of self-driving cars, another whole class of jobs will soon wither away.

The bottom line is this: those coal-mining jobs Trump has promised to restore are not coming back, and neither are most blue-collar jobs that have already disappeared. Robotics is the main culprit, not the E.P.A. To get a glimpse of what’s coming, check this out:

Giordano Bruno

The Campo de’ Fiori is a lovely little square in the oldest part of Rome. A lively market for fruits, vegetables, flowers and more still flourishes there every day, just a couple of steps from the spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death. At night it’s filled with diners, strollers, and tourists soaking in the beauty and atmosphere, and exploring the boutiques and restaurants on the adjacent side streets.

Click anywhere on the picture below to see a live cam of what’s going on there right now.

A couple of days ago, there was a small crowd gathered on this spot and a few speeches were given to remember what happened there on February 17, 1600. On that day, Giordano Bruno was led to the square on a mule, stripped naked, had his tongue bound, and was burned alive.

That’s a statue of Bruno, erected in 1889, in the center of the picture.

bruno

What crime had he committed? Heresy, of course. The Roman Inquisition found him to be a Pantheist. The Inquisition accused him of denying some basic Catholic tenets like the divinity of Jesus, the idea of eternal damnation, the virginity of Mary, and so on.

Bruno was a philosopher, mathematician and poet. He theorized about the cosmos, coming up with the ideas that the universe might be infinite and have no “center”, and that the stars were other suns perhaps with their own planets like ours, some possibly even supporting life. He figured all this out decades before Galileo, and, over the centuries, he has come to be regarded as a martyr for science.

Here is a nice little aggregation of reviews of the 2008 book, “Giordano Bruno – Philosopher, Heretic” by Ingrid D. Rowland, that provides some more insight about him.

Three gynocentric flicks

The French journalist, critic, and novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, famously observed, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Antisemitism is on the march again. In Europe, it’s the same old story – right-wing nationalism is resurgent. But there are a few new elements in the mix, including the condition of rising Muslim populations and their catch-all grievance of Palestinian victimhood. They are abetted by the “intellectual” left, which has increasingly lost the ability to distinguish between vilifying Israeli policy (OK, if you want to split hairs, “Zionist” policy), and vilifying Jews.

In this country, though, something new seems to be happening. The rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers (60 so far this year), and the recent vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia has us all on edge. There can be no doubt that Trump’s embrace of Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right is a major contributing factor. It’s pretty clear Bannon doesn’t like Jews.

Is this what it felt like in 1933? Just a couple of news stories, but nothing to get panicky over? We don’t want to over-react, but we don’t want this to go unremarked either. What to do?

But you’re tired of hearing me rant about Trump, right? I get it. Man, he really sucks the oxygen out of normal daily life and social discourse, doesn’t he? It’s exhausting.

I know – let’s go to the movies!

You know how everyone is always complaining about how there are no good roles for women, and how no movies pass the Bechdel-Wallace test any more? Well, here are three fairly recent movies I can recommend, each with a strong female character at its center.

And the best part is they’re all about surviving the Nazis! Let’s go watch a couple of these and then we can reflect on Alphonse Karr’s aphorism. D’accord?

Ida (2014)

Phoenix (2014)

Sarah’s Key (2011)

If you haven’t seen these, I won’t spoil them for you (except maybe a little). In each case a young Jewish girl or woman survives the war against all odds. But, to me, the unifying theme of the three is the death not just of the Jews of Europe, but the death of Jewishness itself. Though the women survive, at least for a time, their Jewishness does not.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Europe of today very closely resembles the Europe of Hitler’s dreams. It’s hard to understand the enormity of the crime that was committed: one out of every three Jews alive in the world in 1941 was murdered by 1945. And in some swaths of The Pale, every single last Jew was killed.

Of course, the persecution and killing of the Jews is the thing that shocks and engages us, but it is the death of Jewishness itself that may be the larger crime, and therein lies the ultimate victory of the Germans. Yes, I said Germans. Despite all the retroactive claims of heroism and “resistance” that you hear about from today’s oh-so-liberal Teutons, in the 1930’s trying to separate the “good Germans” from the Nazis was a pointless exercise. It was a distinction without a difference – some people actively participated and others “only” watched.

It’s true that there may be a stray “Jew” here or there that has persevered in Europe, but not one Hitler would ever recognize. That stray doesn’t dress “like a Jew”, isn’t part of a synagogue’s congregation, doesn’t speak Yiddish (an entire language and literature extinguished!), doesn’t read the “Jewish press”. All those trappings of Jewish life and culture have disappeared. “The Jews” are not a political force, not a cultural force, or really any kind of force, except in the paranoid fantasies of the right, which have survived the decades completely intact, also against all odds.

In the east, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and elsewhere, young people are completely unaware of the history of the Jews or even that Jews ever lived there, much less comprised 50% of the population in many places. The small town or “shtetl” of Shalom Aleichem, once the center of Jewish life, is no more. And, more significantly, there is no trace it ever was there to begin with. There are no Jewish schools or libraries, no Jewish businesses, no buildings with Jewish iconography, no birth, death or marriage records.

And almost every Jewish cemetery is gone as well. Like today’s antisemites, the Nazis and their collaborators loved to harass the living Jews, and could not let the Jewish dead rest in peace, either. But unlike today’s antisemites, they didn’t stop at merely turning over the headstones and scrawling their messages of hate. They carted off the stones and used them to pave roads, latrines and basement floors, a practice finally halted in Ukraine in 2013. All traces of Jewish life, and death, were obliterated.

As I read the news of the day, I wonder when will it be time to sound the alarm, and when will it be too late? And, this time around, will the righteous be able to stop it?

Alphonse Karr also said, “Every man has three characters – that which he has, that which he thinks he has, and that which he exhibits.”

Do not obey in advance

In the days just after the election, Timothy Snyder, the Yale history professor who writes so well about Eastern European history, observed that “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism.”

He was worried about what a Trump presidency would do to our democratic institutions, and hoped that the lessons that should have been learned from the rise of Hitler and Stalin would keep us from repeating the same mistakes again. He offered a list of things that any citizen could do to try to resist the terrible possibilities.

All of the 20 suggestions on the list are good, but a couple stand out for me:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

The problem I see with the list, and why the cause is already lost, is that it speaks only to those who both understand what is happening and think it’s a bad thing. In other words, it’s a list for people who already knew that Trump would be bad for the country. It’s the other 60 million that need to be convinced, and it just ain’t gonna happen.

Some examples:

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

Really? There is absolutely no way the people who love to hear the man-baby finally say the words “radical Islamic terrorist” and repeat the “Make America Great Again” slogan are ever going to act on this advice. FoxNews built a commercial empire (and now a political one) by betting that their viewers couldn’t do this. That’s exactly why we’re here.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Okay, Professor Snyder, I’m going to give you a bye on this because you wrote it before we learned about “Fake News” and “alternative facts.” The problem is that the Trump supporters apparently do not have the tools or the will to distinguish facts from nonsense. In the internet world, everything is just as true as everything else, and they’ve already made their choices.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

Yeah, no. Even this blog entry is too long already for most people to get through. The digital assault on our senses is so heavy that you really can’t ask people to read/study/investigate anything more -they’re already being sprayed by a fire-hose of information that they can’t sort out or interpret. (Except for a very few voracious readers and lifelong students. I’m looking at you, faithful subscribers to GOML.)

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

Too late again. The people you’re talking to here are already beyond this suggestion and have chosen to violate suggestion #1 as well: they’re obeying in advance. If you doubt it, glance at this article from yesterday’s Failing New York Times about how Immigration Agents have been set free by Trump’s tweeting, and aren’t really waiting for the courts to sort it out.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

We’ve talked before here about how Trump seems to be goading the bad guys into attacking us in the hopes that he can consolidate his power, marginalize the courts, and, above all, become the most up-voted, liked, favorited, highest-ratings president ever.

I almost didn’t bother including #5 here, but I wanted an excuse to link to this other Snyder article on the Reichstag fire of 1933. If you don’t know about the fire, brush up with this article. Snyder says, “The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime.”

Setting the agenda

By now it should be frighteningly clear that Trump’s knowledge of history, current events, foreign policy, and just about everything else comes directly from FoxNews, which he watches religiously. Or Breitbart, if the situation requires. When asked early in the campaign what his foreign policy and military expertise was, he said “I watch the shows”.

If he sees Tucker Carlson interview some guy who wrote a book on how Sweden is dealing with problems caused by its liberal immigration laws, the next morning he gives a speech about terrorism and says “look at what’s happening last night in Sweden”. Of course, he’s so inarticulate that this phrasing leaves plenty of room for clarification and deniability, and his surrogates must fan out the next morning to put out the fires.

If Trump sees Herman Cain on FoxNews talking about how the deficit decreased by $12 Billion in Trump’s first month vs. an increase of $200 billion in Obama’s first month, the next day the man-baby is tweeting about how the Fake News Failing New York Times isn’t covering this wondrous achievement. No point in mentioning how meaningless the statistic is and how Cain could just as easily have noted that the deficit increased under Trump.

From this piece:

Using the same logic, for example, you could claim that after four days in office Trump increased outstanding public debt by more than $10 billion, and that Obama had reduced it by $6 billion.

But there is no need for Trump to vet anything with advisers or experts, no need to think about the implications of his response, no need to moderate his interpretation or language. It was on FoxNews and that’s good enough for the man-baby. Let the tweets fly and the devil take the hindmost.

All during the Obama administration, Fox, Breitbart and other”news” outlets excoriated Obama and then Hillary Clinton for not using the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when talking about the threats we face. It was their daily mantra, meant to show how soft and misguided liberals and democrats were. Obama answered the criticism by correctly pointing out that it wouldn’t help solve the problem to use those words, and would almost surely exacerbate it.

But Fox and Breitbart are all the man-baby needs. He’s all about “radical Islamic terrorism” now. The problem is, there are people around him that know Obama was right all along, including his new National Security Adviser, H.H. McMaster. It just isn’t helpful to talk that way.

We’ll see how long McMaster lasts or whether Trump just ignores him. This much is certain: when FoxNews says it would be better to use different language, Trump will use different language.

Given the direct and almost instantaneous path from Trump’s favorite media outlets to his Twitter, can anybody seriously argue that Fox and Breitbart are not setting the national agenda at this point?

When will enough be enough?

I’ve just about forgotten all about Trump’s many and various displays of petulance, incompetence, ignorance and insanity of the last week or two. Something about no security precautions at Mar-a-Lago, I believe. Maybe a terrorist attack in Sweden? Kellyanne Conway said something or other that resulted in a week-long time-out. Signed something that’s going to screw up the environment, I think. Flynn something something. “See you in court” over what, now? A few others I just can’t remember at all.

It’s just exhausting. At least one outrage a day that, in normal times, would have blown up the media for six months, 24/7. But with the man-baby, if it’s more than a day old, it doesn’t count anymore. Never happened. Never said it. Don’t need you Soros-funded political hacks rooting around trying to dredge up ancient history. It hurts Our Country.

Today’s craziness tops them all (until tomorrow, that is). Yesterday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the tiny-handed clown amped up his attacks on the press (and threw in the FBI for good measure), repeating that they are “the enemy of the people” and criticized as “fake news” any anonymously-sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. Note that anything that reflects positively on him is real news.

He backed this up later with another of his Executive Tweets:

FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2017

OK, we’ve heard all this before. Nothing new to see here, people. Just move along. But the CPAC blast was quickly followed by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, barring the Failing New York Times, CNN, and other organizations Trump doesn’t like from his daily press conference.

Folks, we’re in uncharted waters here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Really, how long until the Brownshirts are in the streets?

Trump just does not understand how this country is set up. He quite obviously has never read the constitution and has no idea what the limits of presidential power are meant to be. Or the importance of an independent judiciary. Or a free press. This is what happens when you elect a businessman-in-chief who has never held elective office of any kind ever. You get a guy who cannot tolerate any sort of disagreement and feels he can punish anyone who doesn’t toe the line.

He’s warring with the courts, the intelligence agencies, the press, our historic allies, business executives that don’t praise him sufficiently, all members of either party in congress that show any hesitation. Everyone who doesn’t praise and flatter him.

It’s almost funny. Trump has vowed to punish “leakers” now, though he loved and encouraged Wikileaks just a few months ago, and openly invited the Russians to hack away at his opponents.

To me, what really illustrates Trump’s lack of understanding about the role of the press is his saying that news organizations should not publish stories with anonymous sources. Journalists have fought this battle many times over the years and always won. It’s quite obvious why no one would ever talk to the press about any wrongdoing if they had to have their name revealed. In the Trump era, this is more important than ever, since you would immediately lose your job and be attacked relentlessly on the internet.

Here’s a deal for you, man-baby: you reveal the name of your special investigators that found all that “unbelievable evidence” in Hawaii about Obama’s real birth certificate, and we’ll consider having this idiotic discussion about anonymous sources again for the millionth time.

Standing by…

Shame upon the legal profession

Fifteen law professors specializing in legal ethics from around the country have filed a complaint against Kellyanne Conway. They come from Georgetown, Yale, Duke and other premiere institutions of legal study. The letter was filed with the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel and alleges “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation”. It says, in part,

“We do not file this complaint lightly. We believe that, at one time, Ms. Conway, understood her ethical responsibilities as a lawyer and abided by them. But she is currently acting in a way that brings shame upon the legal profession.”

Conway was admitted to the D.C. Bar in 1995, but is currently suspended for not paying her dues. The maximum penalty that could result from this action is disbarment. Conway is not practicing law in D.C. and has no intention of doing so. In other words, none of this is going to matter one bit.

And if someone still thinks that an action like this will result in any shame or remorse on Conway’s part, well, they haven’t been paying attention – that ship sailed months ago. More likely we’ll be hearing about “a politically motivated attack by so-called lawyers”, or “lawyers being paid by George Soros, blah blah blah”.

The Trump team is not bound by the rules and conventions that every previous administration has held themselves to, and that every previous congress has required. This letter is just another whisper soon to be lost in the hurricane of chaos surrounding Trump.

All bets are off, folks. There is a new standard in play: if Trump or someone in his circle does it, it’s OK.

If you doubt it, just think about what we’d be enduring now if the tables were turned. Imagine Hillary Clinton had been elected while receiving 3 million fewer votes than Trump, that there was evidence that the Russians had actively aided her campaign, that she refused to reveal her taxes (a historic first!) which might reveal her Russian business interests, etc. etc. etc.

This hypothetical is posed by David Frum, a neoconservative political commentator and former speech writer for George W. Bush, in a podcast discussion with Sam Harris, entitled We’re All Cucks Now. Give it a listen – it’s well worth it.

Well-poisoners win again

In this post from before the election, I was marveling at the willingness of Trump’s inner circle to support and tirelessly explain any idiotic half-baked bullshit that suddenly and without warning erupted from the man-baby’s twitter. From the post:

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

When I wrote that, I didn’t really believe that anyone would actually take a job actually poisoning an actual well. Especially their very own actual well. How wrong I was.

Last week, the tiny-handed one signed legislation that would roll back the “Stream Protection Rule”, to prevent it from “further harming coal workers and the communities that depend on them.” See, Obama, or as most apparently know him, the illegitimately-elected Kenyan Muslim devil, thought he’d try to curtail the coal industry’s long-time practice of freely dumping their mining wastes down the hillsides of Appalachia, creating a hellish moonscape of many of the towns below. And poisoning their water.

With his characteristic impulsiveness, thoughtlessness and boasting, Trump claimed the rule had been costing “many thousands of jobs” because of the expense incurred cleaning up the mess.

This Failing New York Times editorial lays it out, but the gist is that the rule may have cost 260 mining jobs a year, but that those were offset by new jobs created to assure compliance.

It’s just an outrage, not just because it’s exactly the kind of thing you knew this idiot was going to do, but because it was done essentially out of sight as the massive clouds of chaos emanating outward from Trump at all times block the sun and the real news. There’s just no time or energy to pay attention to many of the things that we really should.

This comment on the piece hits the nail on the head,

The good news? You get to keep your job. The bad news? Your job is going to poison your family. Welcome to the Art Of The Deal. Maybe you should have read the book before you voted.

The fact is that the coal jobs won’t be coming back anyway, because there has been a gradual shift globally towards natural gas and the coal market has shrunk. From the editorial:

Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.

The point of today’s screed is that we got the government we deserved. Just like everyone else all over the world that stands by and lets the worst have their way.

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care about the environment or jobs or abortion or immigration or anything else. The only thing he cares about is adulation, up-votes, attention, flattery, and “winning”. If there were more of those things to be had in imposing tighter restrictions on the coal industry, that’s what he’d do.

I don’t know how it can ever happen and I’m not optimistic, but for this disastrous course we’re on to be changed, Trump must be made to believe there are more of us that will love him if he behaves differently than if he doesn’t.

Verdun

101 years ago today, the first shots in the battle of Verdun were fired. It was to become the longest and most destructive battle in what was then known as The Great War (World War I), and in all of history. By the time the battle was over 10 months later, there had been 377,231 French and 337,000 German casualties.

The battle was meant to start nine days earlier, and thousands of Germans were ready in their “stollen”, or tunnels. But snow, wind, rain, and poor visibility kept them in place. The tunnels had no heat and were flooded, and the condition of the troops deteriorated with hunger and medical issues. During the delay, the French had some time to move their troops into position.

stollen

Germans waiting to start

At 7:15 A.M. on February 21st., the fierce German bombardment began. 80,000 heavy grenades fell at a rate of 40 per minute on an area of half a square kilometer. The French trenches were blown up and men were ripped to pieces, buried under the earth or disappeared into the air. Trees are uprooted and body parts hung in the branches. The bombardment lasts nine hours.

The Germans emerge from their stollen at 5:15 P.M. expecting to find no-one alive, but the bombardment was less effective then they hoped, and the French are there to resist. The Germans use flamethrowers as an offensive weapon for the first time.

The battle continues for four days before the Germans are able to capture their primary objective, Fort Douaumont.

douaumont

Fort Douaumont at war’s end

The French at Verdun are under the command of Henri-Philippe Petain, later the Chief of State of Vichy France. Retreat was not an option for him, and he orders the defense of a line between the remaining fortifications at Verdun “at all costs”. The battle for the village of Douaumont continues for days, and ultimately the Germans prevail on March 2nd, taking many prisoners, including Charles de Gaulle.

This was the battle of the Anthill. It is re-created in Kubrick’s superb anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, which has an unforgettable opening tracking shot of Kirk Douglas, as Colonel Dax, moving through the French trenches. See this movie again soon.

But Petain has achieved his objective, which was to delay the German advance for a couple of days while French reinforcements could be assembled. The battle for Douaumont bogged down, and the battlefield became a muddy swamp where neither army advanced for months. Fort Douaumont was finally re-taken by the French in October.

The overall battlefield itself was tiny, less than 10 square kilometers. Men on both sides lived in trenches and were fighting for just a few yards of territory at a time.

World War One Battle Of Then

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Now

The Hell of Verdun

A French captain reports: …I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud – kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane….

The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: …They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!…

A German soldier writes to his parents: …An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries….

Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as:
…a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over….

A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower attack: …Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with bewildered eyes….

A German eye-witness: …The losses are registered as follows: they are dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are occupied day and night – the holes are filled with slime and blood…

A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of Verdun. Since a hundred days – day and night – the sons of two European people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the most appalling mass murder of our history…

ossuary

15,000 French rest at Douaumont

Melania fired!

For disagreeing with the tiny-handed man-baby on matters of etiquette.

Well, OK, not yet.

Or maybe she’ll quit first. Stay tuned.

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Sweet Home Chicago

Eric Clapton called Robert Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived”.

Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27 near Greenwood, Mississippi. It’s not clear how he died and some legends have grown up around the subject, e.g. that he was poisoned by the husband of a woman he had flirted with. On his death certificate, the county registrar wrote that the man on whose plantation Johnson died was of the opinion he died of syphilis.

Just as the details of his death are murky, so are many of the details of his life. Again, there are a number of legends about it, the most important of which is that he made a deal with the devil at a crossroads near the Dockery Plantation (or near Hazelhurst or Beauregard, Mississippi, depending on the version). He met the devil at midnight and handed him his guitar. The devil tuned it and played a few tunes then handed it back. At that instant Johnson attained full mastery over the instrument and gave his soul for the fame he would receive as a musician.

Only a couple of pictures of Robert Johnson exist, and a few recordings.

robert-johnson

When you listen to his music, you may not be struck at once by its greatness or power.

I think it’s like trying to understand how the first moving pictures or first “talkies” were received by the audiences of the day. They had never seen anything like them before and their minds were blown. To the contemporary movie audience, bored even with 3D or CGI magic, those early innovations now seem like nothing at all. Maybe it’s the same with the early music innovators.

During his life and even twenty years after his death, Johnson was virtually unknown. He got the recognition he deserved after the 1961 release of the Columbia album, “King of the Delta Blues Singers”, and a much wider and mostly white audience heard his music. Many of the greats of Rock and Roll and R&B claim Johnson as a primary influence.

“Sweet Home Chicago” was one of four of his tunes included by the Rock and Roll all of Fame in their list of 500 that shaped the blues genre. This is the 1936 recording:

I was thinking about all this after stumbling on this version of Sweet Home Chicago, in which Barack Obama helps out the immortal Buddy Guy (and a constellation of other extremely bright stars). Obama could do it all and make you feel good, too. No Executive Order or even Executive Tweet can roll back this part of his legacy.

Some other modern members of the “27-Club”, important and highly original musicians who died at age 27:

Jimi Hendrix “Smoking” taken in early 1967 in Gered’s Masons Yard studio in London.

Our enemy

It’s getting scarier.

I don’t see how this ends well for anyone. Even impeachment means violence in the streets and a further shredding of the fabric of our democracy. The man-baby will go down swinging, inciting the crazies directly via Twitter. We’re never going to be free of this lunatic, and the damage he causes will be permanent.

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

And we all know who controls the media, right?

jews

After he mobilizes the military to deport everyone that looks different from him, perhaps the media will be next. They should be, after all, if our tiny-handed president says they’re the enemy.

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Well, at least he’s getting the right guidance from his trusted advisers. They’ll surely put him on the right course.

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Maybe a little rest and relaxation will clear his head.

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I inherited a mess

No. You inherited a fortune. You’re creating a mess.

Anyone who watched Trump’s “press conference” yesterday should be able to see now that the man is unhinged and almost surely ill. When I say “anyone”, I mean anyone who isn’t in some FoxNews-induced trance.

There is no question you can ask him that will be answered directly. Instead, the response will always be about his own greatness, the hugeness of his victories, the failings of his critics, or the conspiracies aligned against him. No-one who disagrees with him does so in good faith – all are lying, crooked, failing, losers, sad, fake, and so on.

Ask him what explains the rise in antisemitic incidents since the election, and he’ll answer that he’s the least antisemitic person anyone will ever meet and also the least racist. That is, if you can tease out an “answer” from the incoherent word salad he serves up. OK, we believe you – now answer the question if you would.

I can’t think of a single thing he’s ever said that wasn’t an exaggeration or distortion of the actual facts. And if you call him on one, he will insist he was right or tell you that you misunderstood, or, if absolutely necessary, say the words came from someone else. In this last resort, his favorite locutions are some form of “A lot of people are saying…” or “This is what I’ve been told…”, etc.

In short, there is no use challenging him. You will never get a satisfactory answer and, if your words or ideas gain enough traction with others, you will be personally attacked, possibly sued, and made a sworn enemy of the lunatic fringe. Who needs it?

Of all the crazy shit he blathered about yesterday, the thing I find the most insulting is the idea that he inherited a mess. The Obama presidency, in addition to being the most ethical and scandal-free we’ve had in decades, made tremendous progress cleaning up a real inherited mess. Do you even remember the financial crisis of 2008?

Here are a few facts about the nature of the “mess” Trump has inherited.

mess

One of the things Trump bragged about in the presser was how well the stock market is doing since he was elected. Obama knew better than to brag about it because it could easily come back to bite you if you did, though he really did have something to brag about. But Trump’s bragging is especially funny if you remember that during the campaign he said stock prices were artificially high due to incompetent and biased Federal Reserve policy. He said Janet Yellen was “doing political things” by keeping interest rates low.

But what bothers most people, I think, is that we’re starting to realize there will be no actual governing over the next four years, only “campaigning”, by which I mean Trump ceaselessly proclaiming his greatness, denigrating others, and making up “facts” along the way.

Today’s twaddle

The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

Also, buy Ivanka’s stuff. It’s great, too!

Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

There is a highly secure “Situation Room” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he and his aides can figure out how to respond to fast-breaking crises like North Korea test-firing a missile in the neighborhood of Japan. It’s cleverly disguised as a public dining room. So seemingly blatant breaches of security are not breaches at all, but the normal kind of activity to be expected in any highly secure area. Or something.

As should be obvious to all at this point, Trump is an insane clown who has no knowledge of how the government works, or diplomacy, or security, or, really, anything other than how to be the center of attention at all times. It’s pointless to criticize an insane clown or attempt to hold an insane clown accountable for the insane things he does because, after all, he’s insane. Also, the miasma of free-flowing insanity around the clown at all times is so dense, you couldn’t possibly pick a good starting place or even prioritize it all or try to respond to any of it in a rational manner.

This Failing New York Times piece points out that Democrats are lamenting “the fact that the national security incident played out in public view”. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Nancy Pelosi tweeted.

In this one, the scene at the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room is described and Trump is likened to the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack: “a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention.” It goes on, “But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.”

From the article:

The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

None of this surprises me, or probably anyone else, at this point. It’s Trump being Trump. And by tomorrow, we’ll be on to the next insanity and this will be tossed on the heap of scandals never to be revisited.

I just want to point out one quick thing here before we move on to God-Knows-What: when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email account to send her aides information like changes to her calendar. She is therefore unqualified to be president and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and, if Trump’s “base” has anything to say about it, hanged.

Is there a double standard at work here? No, of course not. You can’t seriously compare the actions of a sane competent woman to those of an insane incompetent clown.

In other news, the fees to join the Mar-a-Lago “club” have doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the election, but he is absolutely not benefiting financially in any way from holding office. Or something.

Let There Be Light

There are three main reasons that the Scopes Trial didn’t really settle the issue of whether the Theory of Evolution should be taught in schools, and why we’re still arguing about “Creationism” almost a century later.

The first is that (really stupid) people thought Darwin was saying something like “your grandmother was a monkey”, and they knew that to be a priori false.

The second is that very religious people thought that it contradicted the Bible, which taught that God created Adam and Eve, etc., and that therefore Darwin’s theory was untrue and also heresy.

The third is that various politicians saw that what mattered in all this was not the science, but rather the votes of the really stupid people, so there was no real margin in going against the grain on this.

Isn’t that always the way.

In reality, Darwin doesn’t contradict the Bible at all, if you just think a little bit about the word “day”. If I said, “Back in my day, music was really music”, most people would understand that “my day” meant “my youth” or “my era” or “my time”, and not some particular 24-hour period.

From Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ²Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.⁵God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

OK, we have light and darkness on the first day. But it isn’t until the fourth day that we have the sun and the moon. Just a few verses later, Genesis says:

¹⁶God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ¹⁸to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

So the question is, how long was the first “day” if the sun didn’t exist? Well it wasn’t 24 hours long, that much is clear. It was an “era” long, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s a million years or something else. It’s all a blink of an eye to God. Or maybe He hadn’t invented “time” yet.

My point is that you can stick to a literal translation of the Bible and still understand that evolution was merely the tool that God used to create things in the first “days”, and Darwin was not a heretic. If you’re not really stupid, that is.

I’m thinking about this today because on this day, February 13, in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy. His mathematical and astronomical observations had led him to support the Copernican idea that the earth revolved around the sun, and the Roman Inquisition was pissed about it. It was heresy and that made Galileo an enemy of the state.

Trial of Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition, 1633.

Trial of Galileo

It was heresy because it contradicted various biblical passages which “proved” the earth was the center of the universe. For example, 1 Chronicles 16:30 says:

30     tremble before him, all the earth.

    The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.
Of course, the translated word “moved” here could be taken in other ways.  You could have taken it in the sense of “changed”, and this would have avoided a lot of trouble, and (intelligent) people may have seen there was no conflict here between scripture and science.
Galileo pleaded guilty to the charge in exchange for a reduced sentence and lived out the remainder of his life under house arrest. In 1992, only 359 years later, the Vatican acknowledged its mistake. So much for infallibility.
One thing to understand here is that, as with creationism, the politicians had something at stake here beyond what was true. And by “politicians”, I mean Popes and Cardinals. The Catholic church was the “state” and the wealthy and influential had the highest offices in the church.
It was vitally important to them that their “constituents” believed that they were the agents of God, or else their authority and influence would be undermined. Science and truth were secondary.
Isn’t that always the way.
A couple of other things to think about as long as we’re thinking about whether science can help explain things or solve problems, and whether politicians will be speeding up the process or slowing it down:
The Larsen C Ice Shelf is cracking in Antarctica. Ice shelf A and B already cracked in the last few years.
New Zealand has just experienced its largest whale stranding in decades.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch now covers 8.1% of the Pacific Ocean. There will be more plastic than fish  in the ocean by 2050.

Woman in Gold

This beautiful painting by Gustav Klimt, “Bauerngarten”, will shortly go on auction at Sotheby’s in London. It’s been appraised at over $56 million dollars, but Sotheby’s expects it to go for much more.

bauerngarten

Klimt is one of the most important artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, a leader of the Vienna Secession movement, and revered by Austrians. His primary subject was the female body and some of his work, particularly a ceiling he painted at the University of Vienna, was controversial for being “pornographic”.

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Today, all his work is much sought after by both collectors and speculators. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey paid $88 million for “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II”, and last summer sold it to a buyer in China for $150 Million.

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In his “golden period”, Klimt used gold leaf in his work, creating some very striking multimedia works, one of the most famous of which is “The Kiss”.

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The most iconic work of this period was known for years as “The Woman In Gold”, which took three years to complete. It hung in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna for some sixty years beginning in 1941, and was regarded as one on the great treasures of Austria and a symbol of Austrian culture.

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You might notice the resemblance of the subject here to the one in Oprah’s oil painting. It is, of course, the same woman, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the title of the painting, before the Austrians enshrined it, was “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer”. It was commissioned by Klimt’s most important patrons and friends, the Bloch-Bauer family of Vienna.

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna in 1881, the youngest of seven children. Her father was the General Director of the Viennese Bank association and the president of the Orient railway company. She married at eighteen to the 35-year-old Ferdinand Bloch, the son of a Prague sugar producer. He grew the sugar business into an important European industrial concern. Adele’s sister was already married to his brother. They had no children and both couples combined their names to Bloch-Bauer.

Adele made their home a salon for intellectuals and artists, and the Bloch-Bauer patronage contributed greatly to the flourishing of Austrian art in the period. The two Klimt portraits Adele commissioned were a small part of their legacy. Adele died suddenly at age 44 of meningitis.

Shortly after the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, the Germans barged into the Bloch-Bauer home and took all their possessions, including the Klimts.

Ferdinand fled and died in Zurich in 1945. He had willed the art to his nephew and nieces including Maria Altmann (née Maria Victoria Bloch). Maria married Fredrick “Fritz” Altmann who was taken to Dachau shortly after their honeymoon in 1938 as a hostage to get the Altmanns to transfer their textile factory to the Germans. Maria and Fritz were able to flee with their lives to the U.S. All the property they left behind was taken by Hermann Goering.

Maria became a naturalized citizen in 1945 and worked in the clothing industry. Fritz died in 1954. The story of how Maria was able to reclaim ownership of the Klimts, despite the determined efforts of the Austrians not to return them, is told in the film, “Woman in Gold”. Check it out on Netflix.

Both the Klimt portraits of Adele are currently on display at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Ave. at 86th in NYC. They’ll be there until September when the oil will go to its new owner in China. You have a few months to see them together. See you at the Neue.

Dartagnan beat me to it

You’re assignment today is to read this short piece on the Daily Kos.

I was going to write something along the same lines, but there’s no need – Dartagnan beat me to it and laid it all out perfectly.

It starts by pointing out that 9/11 turned Bush’s presidency around. His popularity early in his term was terrible, but soared after the attacks. 9/11 gave him cover to launch a disastrous war that had been planned before the attacks, and also to throw off constraints on presidential power.

It goes on to say that everyone knows an attack is coming at some point now, and Trump is doing everything possible to provoke it while laying the groundwork for blaming others (the courts).

It will be much worse this time around for a variety of reasons including the fact that Trump conflates national interest with his own self-interest.

Anyway, just go read it and report back here tomorrow.

L’état, c’est lui.

The man-baby’s hands seemed even tinier this morning.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court panel of three judges unanimously refused to reinstate Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim countries. The bleating and tweeting began immediately.

SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

Trump quite clearly does not understand our tripartite system of government and the separation of powers it requires. He does not recognize the authority of any person or institution to question his “mandate” or even his judgement as President/Emperor/King.

Anyone who dares question him obviously has “political” motives.

If the U.S. does not win this case as it so obviously should, we can never have the security and safety to which we are entitled. Politics!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

All I can say here is that I really hope this does go to the Supreme Court and that they unanimously uphold the appeals court. Any other result certainly will be evidence of politics destroying our system.

In recent days, we have seen that we can’t rely on the republican congress to assert its own power, independence or integrity (ha!). The approving of all Trump’s cabinet picks so far, as preposterously unqualified and inappropriate as they may be, shows this clearly.

The press has been neutralized, including, and perhaps especially, the newspaper of record, the Failing New York Times.

There’s really nothing left between us and idiocracy but the courts. Maybe a supreme court decision defining the limits of presidential power, or, as everyone would certainly refer to it, “a rebuke”, would stem the awful tide of Trump’s bullying.

See you in court.

“Trump Lashes Out”

Google it.

The man-baby is always lashing out. If you google it today, you’ll find a few new “lashing out” stories on the first page. This is just the lashing out of one day.

First, he “lashed out” at Nordstom department store for dropping Ivanka’s line of whatever the fuck she has a line of. Really, didn’t we just hear about how he was going leave the running of all the family’s businesses to his kids? See, he didn’t have to divest any of his holdings because there would be no conflicts of interest as long as the kids took care of all the business. He’d stay completely out of it.

Apart from the conflicts of interest, though, there is the issue of using the bully pulpit to attack or praise individual businesses based on whether he thinks they support him enough. It’s an entirely new thing for a president to be doing. Trump has praised L.L. Bean (board members contributed to him), caused some firings at Wynn casinos (someone said something about Melania), has continued to criticize “Celebrity Apprentice” after promising not to (Schwarzenegger didn’t support him), and on and on and on. Anyway, let’s all go on a shopping spree at Nordstrom today.

Then there’s the story of Trump “lashing out” at Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that the man-baby’s Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, said Trump’s war on the judiciary was disheartening and demoralizing. This one’s kind of funny not just because it’s a great example of Trump shooting the messenger, but because this particular lashing was attacking Blumenthal for misrepresenting his Viet Nam service (Trump was a draft dodger).

Sen.Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie),now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

Then there’s the link to Trump “lashing out” against the judge who ruled against his Muslim travel ban. You know, the “so-called” judge that was appointed by W. At least he didn’t accuse this one of being a “Mexican”.

If you go past the first page of search results, you’ll find links to Trump lashing out at Vanity Fair because they published a negative review of his restaurant, Trump lashing out at John Lewis, lashing out at “professional anarchists” who joined protest against him, lashing out at the Failing New York Times, CBS, and even FoxNews for suggesting Steve Bannon is calling the shots, lashing out at the Australian P.M. in a phone call, etc., etc. etc.

One that didn’t make the list today, but should be there by tomorrow is Trump lashing out at McCain for questioning the “success” of the Yemen raid.

As Trump himself has told us, he’s the best at many things. But when it comes to lashing out, no one even comes close.

So unifying. So presidential. So insane.

Rule 19: Democrats can’t speak

I was starting to feel like Nostradamus the other day, when I looked back at my inauguration day post. I made a bunch of predictions about the coming Trump administration, including,

“Polls will be discredited when unfavorable, and embraced when supportive.”

“From here, there will be only pre-approved interpretations of events, statistics, economic indicators, battlefield successes or failures, climate change, science.”

Two days ago, your president tweeted:

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017

And today, Yemen withdrew permission for any further U.S. anti-terror ground missions because of the recent raid that produced civilian casualties that outraged Yemenis, while the man-baby is repeating that it was a great success.

The thing is, it’s all happening so fast that it doesn’t really feel like “predicting” anymore. Trump is seizing all power by discrediting, mocking, and attacking all who disagree or criticize. And I’m not talking about Meryl Streep or Alec Baldwin here. And I’m not talking about all the incendiary nonsense of the campaign.

I’m talking about the things he’s said and done in his three weeks of being president. I’m talking about his war against the other branches of our own government, and against other governments.

When Trump referred to Judge James L. Robart, a Bush appointee who ruled against his Muslim travel ban, as a “so-called judge”, it was actually shocking to me to see the judiciary discredited in such a manner. In a tweet, of course. From the President of the United States.

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017

I started to compose a few paragraphs of outrage but then I couldn’t figure out how to begin or how to place it in context. It wasn’t the beginning of anything and there isn’t any rational context. It wasn’t an isolated incident. It wasn’t something that was so out of character and unexpected that we all had to stop and debate about it.

No, it was just another drop of venom-flecked spittle in a continuous fire-hose of venom-flecked spittle that has blasted from this insane clown and his posse for a couple of years now.

As president, Trump has railed against our free press (of course), our independent judiciary, the loyal opposition in congress (meaning even Republicans who dare take a step back), our intelligence agencies, corporate leaders, our treaty partners, our historic allies, and everyone else who might serve as a check or a balance or even a headwind to the power he wants to consolidate as president.

And it’s not just those in positions to oppose him now, but also those who might dare to oppose him in the future. The absurd Kellyanne Conway felt obligated to tweet (!) on behalf of the administration against Chelsea Clinton, of all people, who had said something about Conway’s invented “Bowling Green Massacre” .

Bosnia lie a Great reminder. And 2 @ChelseaClinton & others, you can’t “invent” quality candidates either. I misspoke; you lost the election https://t.co/7TwnX2b5yA

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 3, 2017

Why respond at all? Why dredge up some ancient “lie” that Chelsea’s mother once told? And the idea that “you” lost the election is telling. Chelsea Clinton didn’t lose the election any more than Barron Trump won it. But, see, Trump can’t stop campaigning against his enemies, even after victory, and needs to throw red meat to his “base”. Chelsea Clinton might run for something some day. But the main idea is that those who “lost” have no right to speak now.

Yesterday, the latest, and really most disheartening, thing was added to the mix. That ever-so-American American, Mitch McConnell, invoked the obscure Rule 19, to stop Elizabeth Warren from reading into the record her objections to the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

Warren was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King that called Sessions a racist, and one from the late Ted Kennedy saying he was a “disgrace to the Justice Department.” McConnell invoked Rule 19 to silence her. The rule says senators may not “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

When you think of what’s coming out of the Oval Office now, this move and this rationale are just unbelievable. And that congress would so quickly and completely submit to and abet Trump’s crazy desire for all power and zero criticism makes no sense to me. Don’t they want any power for themselves?

For months, I was reassuring myself that Trump would get a rude awakening when he found out that being President was not the same as being Emperor. What fun it would be to see his face when congress pushed back or the courts ruled against him.

But the joke is on us. All hail His Imperial Majesty, Donald J. Trump.

Dreyfus, Zola, Herzl

On this day in 1888, the trial of Emile Zola for criminal libel began in Paris. He had published an open letter to the President of France, Félix Faure, accusing the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew.

Dreyfus was a loyal career soldier sentenced, for treason, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy, though evidence had been discovered and brought to the attention of authorities that another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was actually the guilty party.

jaccuse

Zola’s intention was to be prosecuted for libel so that he could present the exculpatory evidence about Dreyfus during the trial. Zola was convicted of the libel charge, removed from the Legion of Honor, and faced imprisonment.

He fled to England to avoid prison, but returned after eight months. He was offered a choice between a pardon which would allow him to go free if he admitted to being guilty, or facing a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again and sent to prison. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon.

Zola said of the affair, “The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it.” In 1906, Dreyfus was finally exonerated by the Supreme Court.

The sensational Dreyfus case divided France, but provided proof that the intellectual class could shape public opinion and influence state policy. This was not lost on Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian-born secular Jew, who was a writer, journalist, and political activist working in Paris at the time. Herzl was witness to mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial and stated that he was particularly affected by chants of “Death to the Jews!” from the crowds.

Herzl is often thought to be the father of Zionism, though some scholars dispute this. He was certainly one of the strongest early promoters of the Zionist idea in any case. What Herzl took away from the Dreyfus affair is that a Jew could never truly assimilate into any other national culture. No matter how French or German or American, or “un-Jewish” he might think himself to be, other Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans always would see him as a Jew.

As a young law student, Herzl had become a member of the German nationalist fraternity, Albia, which had the motto “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland”. He later resigned in protest at the organization’s antisemitism.

He concluded that a Jew would not be accepted as a real Frenchman or German, despite any efforts or displays of patriotism or heroism in the name of that nation. He was always an outsider, the “other”, and always would be seen to have “Jewish interests” that would come before and conflict with French or German interests. Herzl concluded, presciently it would soon be shown, that the Jews could not rely on the protection or beneficence of their “host”governments. To be safe in the world and regarded as citizens in full, they must have their own state.

Herzl worked hard to organize Zionist conferences, lobby European governments, and so on. In 1896, Herzl published “The State of the Jews”, a book which argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe either for Argentina or for Palestine, their historic homeland. The Jews possessed a nationality, he said, and all they were missing was a nation and a state of their own. It was the only way they could avoid antisemitism, express their culture, or practice their religion freely.

Herzl died in 1904, and his descendants all suffered tragic fates.

His daughter Paulina struggled with mental illness and died of a drug overdose in 1930 at age 40.

His son Hans had converted from Judaism to being first a Baptist, then a Catholic, and then flirted with various other Protestant denominations. He shot himself at 39 on the day of Paulina’s funeral. He left a note that said:

“A Jew remains a Jew, no matter how eagerly he may submit himself to the disciplines of his new religion, how humbly he may place the redeeming cross upon his shoulders for the sake of his former coreligionists, to save them from eternal damnation: a Jew remains a Jew. … I can’t go on living. I have lost all trust in God. All my life I’ve tried to strive for the truth, and must admit today at the end of the road that there is nothing but disappointment. Tonight I have said Kaddish for my parents—and for myself, the last descendant of the family. There is nobody who will say Kaddish for me, who went out to find peace—and who may find peace soon.”

Herzl’s third child, his daughter Trude, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Trude’s son, Stephan Theodor Neumann, was Herzl’s only grandchild, and became an ardent Zionist. He was working in Washington D.C. in August 1946, when he learned how his mother had perished. He was despondent about her fate and his inability to help the Jewish people. He jumped to his death from the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Washington, D.C. on November 26, 1946.

bridge

G.O.A.T.

For decades, I hated the New York Yankees. Actually I still hate them, although most of the justifications for the original hatred have long since disappeared.

I hated them because every situation seemed to favor them, because they always had the best players, because they always had the most money, because they always had the most luck. And, most of all, because they always broke the hearts of lifelong Red Sox fans who repeatedly saw their heroes come so close before the Yankees invoked the inevitable luck/skill/magic/whatever required to kill their hopes and dreams for yet another year.

And the Red Sox fans weren’t the only ones who hated New York. All the fans of all the other teams felt pretty much the same way. New York was the Evil Empire. They bought wins. They stole the best players from all the other teams, turning them into Yankee farm teams. They cheated. They were cheaters.

All the while, the Yankee fans could not have cared less. The Yankees were always playing when everyone else had gone home for the winter. The championships flowed into New York and their players were seen as the Greatest Of All Time, the G.O.A.T., whether they really were or not.

It must have been great to be a Yankee fan. You spent all those hours watching the games for six months and all that money at the Stadium to see them in person, but, in the end, it was all worth it. When the team won, you won. Your prayers were always answered. God liked you best.

Last night, the Patriots, my Patriots, completed the greatest and most improbable comeback in Super Bowl history. Everything had to fall their way, our way, in the end. And, of course, everything did. Records were broken and opponents’ dreams were shattered. All the detractors who were gloating when it seemed out of reach found that the joke was on them. Again.

In my old age, I finally know how it feels to have been a Yankee fan all those years. All my time and all the attention paid over the last six months was totally worth it. Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T. I’m a good person. God likes me best. Everyone else hates us.

The Patriots won it all. Again.

The Rose Kennedy Median Strip

The North End is Boston’s oldest and arguably most interesting neighborhood. It was settled in the 1630’s and has been a residential neighborhood continuously since then.

“North End Aerial with Rooftops”

Click to enlarge

Paul Revere’s house is still standing, as is The Old North Church.

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Paul Revere slept here. Every night.

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One if by land, two if by sea…

In more recent times, it was where the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 happened. And the Brinks robbery. It was the home of Honey Fitz, JFK’s grandfather, and Charles Ponzi, inventor of the you-know-what scheme. At various times it was the neighborhood of Boston’s African-American, Irish, Jewish, and, most recently, Italian populations.

brinks

This is where the Brinks robbery happened

molasses

Some say you can still smell the molasses in summer

For fifty years, the North End was physically separated from the rest of Boston by the monstrosity known as the Central Artery, an elevated highway that sliced through downtown Boston, blocking out the sun and creating a daunting obstacle for any pedestrian who was bold enough to try to reach the North End on foot. In the picture below, you can see a couple of foolhardy tourists risking their lives walking from downtown on the left to the North End on the right.

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In 1991, the Big Dig started, a huge infrastructure project that completely changed Boston. It added a new tunnel under the harbor to carry I-90 traffic to the airport and beyond, a new bridge to carry I-93 traffic across Charlestown, and lots of other stuff. The centerpiece of the project was the removal, finally, of the Central Artery, and the building of a network of tunnels under Boston to carry all the displaced traffic.

Click to enlarge

All of this meant 15 years of chaos and disruption for downtown Boston and even more isolation of the North End. It’s been a decade since it’s been completed, and, by and large the traffic objectives were met. The 24-hour traffic jam that had existed in Boston was greatly mitigated and the monstrosity that had divided the city was removed. It was once again possible to walk to the North End.

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The Central Artery, before and after the Big Dig

All throughout the project, one of the most interesting questions was what would be done with the open space created by the removal of the Central Artery. As usual, everyone in Boston had an idea, but most agreed it should be green space in some form. In 2008, The Rose Kennedy Greenway was finally opened. The slogan on their website is “Boston’s Ribbon of Contemporary Parks”

OK. Finally to the point of today’s post. The Rose Kennedy Greenway is not all that green and not in any sense a “way”. It is, rather, a more-or-less contiguous chain of 23 parcels of land, each developed separately with no real over-arching theme or cohesion. You’ve got the Armenian Park, the Chinatown Park, the Dewey Square Park, and so on. And while it does reduce the danger of reaching the North End on foot, it does little to “invite” you to do so.

It is a failure and a perpetual finalist for the Stewie Award.

The biggest problem with the Greenway is that it replaced the car-centric planning of the Central Artery with a car-centric open space. To be fair, it at least does have a few blades of grass growing on it. And it looks good from a helicopter.

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The Greenway is bounded by a three lane road on each side of it, and the 23 parcels are divided by active cross streets, each with a set of traffic lights that has Greenway users begging for a few seconds to pass from one rather bland and joyless parcel to the next. The car is still king, and therein lies the problem.

greenway2

As the above photo clearly demonstrates, the more accurate name for the Rose Kennedy Greenway is certainly the Rose Kennedy Median Strip. Or perhaps the Rose Kennedy Lost Opportunity.

Three of the twenty-three parcels are shown in this particular picture, and the one in the top left reminds us of the car-centricity of the Median Strip. It is a ventilation tower for the tunnels below, and gives off the expected “keep out” vibe when passing close by. There are also several other of the parcels that are nothing but on- or off-ramps to the tunnels.

Ramps: click to enlarge

This next before-and-after composite gives you an idea of what the Greenway really achieved for pedestrians and “park” users. Not all that much.

composite

It’s better, of course, but think of what it might have been! Other big cities have dealt with similar challenges and have come up with ideas that really do invite the pedestrian in and keep the automobile out. New York’s High Line comes to mind.

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In Paris, you have the Promenade Plantée, the “first elevated park in the world”.

paris

But we’re talking about Boston here, not Paris or New York. In Cambridge, right across the Charles, we know how to make life better for pedestrians. All you have to do is set aside a few hours every week, say Sunday afternoons, and prohibit cars from the place you want to enjoy. Check it out:

It would be so easy to improve the Rose Kennedy Median Strip, too. Just close off a few of those pointless cross-streets to traffic on Sundays. That would be a start. The traffic on Atlantic Ave. is practically nothing then, and everyone could still get where they want to go just by driving an extra block or two to make their turns.

All those businesses in the North End would be happy about it. They waited half a century to be re-connected with the city they started, and we didn’t really deliver on the promises made. But, again, we’re talking about Boston. Not gonna happen.

That’ll Be The Day

The day the music died was 58 years ago yesterday. On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) died in a small plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa.

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They were on a tour of 24 cities in 24 days called the Winter Dance Party. They were travelling by bus, but the bus was having heating problems, so Holly chartered the plane to fly his band, which then included Waylon Jennings, from Clear Lake to Moorehead, MN, where the 12th date of the tour would be.

Most people know the story of how Richardson asked to take Jennings’ place because he was sick. Holly joked to Jennings that he hoped that old bus broke down, and Jennings joked back that he hoped the plane crashed, a remark that haunted him his whole life.

And most people know that Valens “won” the last seat on a coin flip with Dion (of the Belmonts), though that story has been disputed. Apparently the $36 price of the plane ride was an important disincentive.

The Big Bopper was 28 years old. He was on the tour because of the success of his one hit record, Chantilly Lace, which elevated him from the menial jobs he had up until then. He was broke when he died, with only $8 in a savings account.

Hard to believe, but Ritchie Valens was only 17 years old! He’d already had several big hits including the immortal “La Bamba”, and was certainly destined for greatness. His work is still an important influence today. Seventeen. Wow.

valens

At 22 years old, Buddy Holly was an old man compared to Valens, and was by far the biggest star of the three. He had recorded dozens of great tunes at that point, and wrote them all himself. It’s hard to overstate his influence on those that came afterward. That’ll Be The Day was the first song ever covered by the Quarrymen, John Lennon’s first skiffle band that morphed into the Beatles. But everyone listened to Buddy Holly and everyone wanted to be like him.

Most of the tunes were simple, using just three chords and about two minutes in length, as the AM radio format of the day required, but Holly’s brilliance was to show how much could be done within those primitive boundaries.

Holly basically invented the modern rock band. The original “Crickets” had Holly on lead and vocals, along with rhythm guitar, base, and drums. But the rhythm guitar, Niki Sullivan, quit the band after a year to go back to school, so the iconic line-up was lead, bass, and drums.

It’s all that was needed to make great Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Buddy Holly was one of the most important pillars of 20th century popular culture, and his music is as exciting today as it was all those years ago.

An ignorant piece of work

I’m often struck by how much more people in other parts of the world know about what’s going on here than we do ourselves. And how seriously they take the blatherings and tantrums of President Man-baby, while we, here in the U.S., are becoming inured to them.

Want to know how we’re doing in Australia? A good friend of the blog in Melbourne emailed us his thoughts under the subject heading, “An ignorant piece of work”:

Stewie,

Your President is clearly an ignorant piece of work. His real weakness however is arrogance. He seems to think Allies and others will do what ever he wants them to do, i.e. what ever suits him politically. He has no concept of respect and give and take in a relationship. I would have said it would be hard to disrupt the Aust / US alliance especially with a Liberal (rightish) govt here. But he has done that already.

Most Australians viewed his election with some amusement – happy to see a country that is weirder than us and makes for interesting newspaper reading. He never had much support here but now he would have a popularity rating of way less than 20%. I don’t suggest he try and visit here anytime soon – there would be large and active demonstrations. There would certainly be very little respect. Even the far right that were all over his win have disappeared – no mileage in being associated with him. The Govt had been taking a fairly conciliatory line to things up to now. “The American alliance is an enduring one and we will work respectfully with whoever the American people chose” sort of thing. Now I hear people ask “why would I go to the US for a holiday?”. All he has managed to do is drive people away and make it politically difficult for our govt to support the US in anything. So when they need support he will have to give back way more than he will want. And our Prime Minister was a pretty successful business man and has a healthy ego so he is going to give as good as he gets. The satire on TV here makes Saturday night live look tame!

The Government here has a 1 seat majority in a 144 seat House of representatives and a minority in the Senate. And its polls are not great. The opposition is a real disciplined opposition looking for any opportunity to have a go.

So the real issue for the US is its become exceptionally hard, if not impossible, politically for the Australian Government to support the US in anything substantive. China is already our major trading partner and there has been a long held view, and a slow reality, that we need to be much closer to Asia and especially China. Turnbull (not Trumball!) has everything to lose by standing up for the US.

I would have thought someone would have briefed the US president on these fairly basic facts before he gets cranky on a call and then has it leaked to show how tough he is!

Binyamin Appelbaum of the Failing New York Times, @BCAppelbaum, made this great map showing the countries Trump has pissed off in his first two weeks. Don’t want to think about what it might look like four years from now. If we’re still here, that is.

map

Tweeting towards Bethlehem

Three weeks ago, #Trump told us his health care plan was just about ready – “all but finished”, he said. “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon. We will have insurance for everybody. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better and much lower deductibles”.

Sounds great, man-baby!

It all came as a big surprise to Republicans in congress. They hadn’t heard word one about it, apparently. Not to worry, though. We’ve forgotten all about it now. Three weeks ago is the paleolithic era in the sped-up world of the man-baby. Promises, accusations, recriminations, Executive Orders, feuds – they all fly by at the speed of Twitter and are immediately lost in the ether, replaced by some new craziness.

Does anybody really care? Does anybody expect the “truth”? Will anybody ever hold him to any of it? No, no, and no way.

Did a health care plan even exist, other than in his own imagination? Who can say. Remember, in his “Birther” heyday in 2011 he said with complete sincerity and conviction that he had investigators in Hawaii that had found unbelievable evidence regarding Obama’s real origins. “They cannot believe what they are finding”, he said on TV. He’d reveal it all in a couple of days, he said.

He never revealed anything. “They” found nothing because there was nothing to find and because “they” didn’t exist, any more than the P.R. man “John Miller” did. It’s hard to know whether it’s all “lying” or something else. Does a delusional person “lie”?

Anyway, I started writing this because I was reading about our recent “successful” raid in Yemen, where a Seal Team 6 member was killed and three were injured, where civilians including some children were killed, and where we purposely abandoned a $75 million aircraft. Mind you, I read about it in the “failing New York Times” so it’s “fake news” to begin with.

But the man-baby tells us it was a success, so it I guess it was. From the article:

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world.”

“Important intelligence” sounds good, maybe even better than his health care plan or his birther evidence. Maybe he’ll tell us what it is soon. Or maybe we’ll forget all about it after a few more crazy tweets.

Here are some candidates from this morning:

tweets

A Deal with the Devil

If there actually were any real “Christians” in the Republican electorate, they abandoned their religious convictions to vote for Trump, an amoral con-man with no religious convictions at all. Everyone knew what he was, but they threw away all the “family values” and other holier-than-thou rhetoric and litmus tests that were applied to all presidential candidates over the last several decades.

Many have said all along that what was really at stake in this election was the ability to nominate Supreme Court justices, particularly for the seat left open by the death of Anton Scalia a year ago. Since that time, the Republicans have behaved in an unconscionable way, refusing to even meet with a highly qualified middle-of-the-road Obama nominee, Merrick Garland. The ninth seat has remained vacant, leaving the court split 4-4 on ideological issues. Of course, there should be no “ideological” issues at all for the SCOTUS, but rather only legal issues. But we’re way past that now.

And the reason the Supreme Court pick is so important to them is that their fondest hope in the world, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is now possible. This was their deal with the Devil: we’ll elect even the preposterously unqualified and manifestly dangerous Donald J. Trump if it means the end of legal abortion in our country.

In selecting Neil Gorsuch for the court, the man-baby has delivered. Gorsuch will be approved even though the current rules require 60 senators to vote for the approval and there are only 52 guaranteed republican votes. Democrats would be well justified in resisting this after l’affaire Garland, and perhaps they will. There are ten among them who must run for re-election in states won by Trump, so their calculus is a bit different. Maybe they’ll give in.

But it doesn’t matter – even if the Republicans can’t convince eight democratic senators to vote with them, they will simply change the rules to require a simple 51-vote majority for confirmation. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.

The first two weeks of Trump have been a vertigo-inducing amusement park ride, but without the amusement. I can’t imagine anyone in congress looking forward to four, or perhaps even eight more years of it.

At this point, I would gladly accept a different deal with the Devil: we give you the SCOTUS and the overturning of Roe. You give us impeachment for Trump’s blatant conflicts of interest. We’ll have President Pence for four years, and a return to some sense of normalcy.

Whaddya say? Deal?

Shake, stir, fire. Repeat

It’s getting worse.

Remember when the Republicans criticized Obama for not “working with them” (as if that was possible!), not compromising, and doing things on his own? Those were the good old days.

The man-baby isn’t going to work with anyone, not even Republicans. He stirs up his base and looks for fights. What he loves more than anything else is fighting – he constantly pokes his finger in the eyes of his “opponents”, i.e. anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep behind him. Obviously, ridiculing and intimidating critics is not a strategy meant to win people to your cause. It’s a strategy meant to silence any form of dissent and consolidate power.

Less than two weeks in and it’s getting scary.

According to Press Secretary Sean Spicer, “career bureaucrats”, like acting Attorney General Sally Yates, “should either get with the program or they can go.” She’s fired.

And, for Trump, it’s not enough just to fire someone who disagrees with you. In the corporate world, you thank someone for their service, make up some bullshit about how they want to spend more time with their family, give them a nice letter of recommendation, and walk them to the door. In Trump’s world, you use the office of the presidency to call them a traitor in the hopes that their lives will be made miserable forever and that no further criticism from them will be possible.

It’s fascinating to watch the people around Trump regrouping and doubling down every day. I just can’t decide who the biggest problem is here. I mean, apart from Trump himself. Some are just enabling him by nodding, some are whispering new craziness in his ear, and some clearly have no courage and no soul. There are quite a few to choose from. You tell me.

Check out our previous thoughts on Trump’s love of firing.

Oh, and now you can follow @StewieGeneris on Twitter.

Conflicts, shmonflicts

Many have noted that Trump’s wild flurry of executive orders and personnel changes is actually the implementation of every nutty thing he promised during the campaign. He’s fulfilling his mandate and doing the things he said he’d do, we’re told. Only a lot faster and more recklessly than anyone had imagined.

So no one should be surprised about the “Extreme Vetting” travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This is something he campaigned on heavily from the beginning. “Something’s going on” he said more than a year ago, and he vowed to prevent Muslims from entering the country “until we figure it out”.

On Trump’s web site in December, 2015, he states his intention of curtailing Muslim immigration.

“…it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again”

His supporters loved this fresh new talk after years of FoxNews criticizing Obama for refusing to say the words “radical Islam”.

And he’s never deviated from the intent or the specific language. “I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” Trump said during the signing at the Pentagon after the swearing-in of Defense Secretary James Mattis. “We don’t want them here.”

But after all this explicit talk and action about keeping Muslims out, the Trump team is walking it all back a bit. There was so much outrage and chaos resulting from the ban, and so much criticism from even some of his own supporters, that they felt it was necessary to now explain that the ban wasn’t about religion at all. See, there are several Muslim countries not affected by the ban, so the critics are just full of it and creating fake news.

Here’s a map showing countries affected by the ban.

trump-business

As everyone knows, Saudi Arabia is the beating heart of “radical Islam”. Apart from being the location of the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, it’s where the poisonous Wahhabi orthodoxy was born and allowed to flourish. It’s where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from. You’d think Saudi would be number one on the extreme vetting priorities list.

The usual explanation here is that our oil interests override our security interests, and the Saudi Royals are actually our allies in the fight against terrorism (some allies!), since Al Qaeda regards them as apostates and the ultimate obstacle to establishing their “caliphate”.

But in the Trump era, none of that matters. What matters is where Trump’s business interests are. What’s notable about the big Muslim countries not affected by the ban is that Trump has business interests in all of them, and no interests in the seven countries affected.

In Saudi Arabia, Trump has several LLCs, according to his most recent financial filings (four of nine have apparently been closed) , and two in Egypt. Also omitted from the list are Turkey, India, and the Philippines, all countries where Trump has businesses. Same with the U.A.E. where Trump’s name is on a golf course and residential developments.

People are completely sick of Trump already. His approval ratings, according to Gallup, dropped eight points in his first week in office.

When the inevitable impeachment proceedings finally begin, they will focus on these conflicts of interest and others. The fact that Trump is manifestly unfit for office by temperament, qualifications, experience, and mental health are the underlying causes, of course, but it will be the conflicts of interest that bring him down in the end.

Just as Trump was unable to “pivot” from being a candidate to a president, he is also unable to change from being a businessman to an elected representative. To him, the business of America is just another profit center for the Trump organization. He just doesn’t get it.

Extreme vetting for armed toddlers

Just keepin’ it real: in America, you are ten times more likely to be shot by an armed toddler than by an illegal Islamic jihadist immigrant.

deaths

At 4:42 P.M. yesterday, your president signed one of his beloved executive orders. This one prevented all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Green card holders from those countries would also be denied re-entry pending a case-by-case review.

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J.F.K. Airport

At international airports, hundreds of people who had unknowingly boarded their planes hours earlier were denied entry to the U.S. on landing. Families were separated, people with legitimate and important business we’re placed in custody. Demonstrations erupted and lawsuits were filed. The Department of Home Security issued statements. Judges issued temporary rulings. No one really understands what it all means at this point.

Well done, man-baby. Your insatiable desire to be the center of attention and to see your name on every media outlet all day every day has been satiated for a couple of hours. You have given the giant snow-globe we all now live in a vigorous shake, and you can rest for a while while others float about and try to regain control of their lives.

Chaos, the essential ichor without which the man-baby cannot function, is abundant for now. How, exactly, making everyone in the world hate us more every day will result in increased safety for Americans at home and abroad is anyone’s guess.

Watching the coverage on MSNBC, one got the idea that there might be riots in the streets and that perhaps impeachment was possible by the end of the day. If you flipped over to FoxNews, however, you would be unaware of the crises – they just weren’t covering it.

In any case, the president will do what he wants. Those closest to him know him to be an honorable, wise, intelligent, prudent guardian of American values. They love him unconditionally, and trust him to do what’s best for all of us. If you doubt it, just watch this short clip to glimpse the devotion.

Ronald McNair

Thirty-one years ago today, Ronald McNair died.

He was only 36 years old and had already accomplished more than most do in a full lifetime.

In an NPR interview a couple of years ago, his brother, Carl, said Ron saw possibilities where others only saw closed doors. Carl told this story about the nine-year-old Ron:

Ron, without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts, decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library. The library was public, but not so public for black folks, when you’re talking about 1959 in South Carolina. As he was walking in there, all these folks were staring at him — because they were white folk only — and they were looking at him and saying, you know, ‘Who is this Negro?’

So, he politely positioned himself in line to check out his books. Well, this old librarian, she says, ‘This library is not for coloreds.’ He said, ‘Well, I would like to check out these books.’ She says, ‘Young man, if you don’t leave this library right now, I’m gonna call the police.’

So he just propped himself up on the counter, and sat there, and said, ‘I’ll wait.’

The librarian called the police — and McNair’s mother, Pearl. When the police got to the library, two burly guys come in and say, ‘Well, where’s the disturbance?’ And she pointed to the little 9-year-old boy sitting up on the counter. And the policeman says, ‘Ma’am, what’s the problem?’

By then, the boys’ mother was on her way. She comes down there praying the whole way there: ‘Lordy, Jesus, please don’t let them put my child in jail.’ And my mother asks the librarian, ‘What’s the problem?’ “He wanted to check out the books and, you know, your son shouldn’t be down here,” the librarian said.

And the police officer said, ‘You know, why don’t you just give the kid the books?’ And my mother said, ‘He’ll take good care of them.’ So, the librarian reluctantly handed over the books. And then, Carl says, “my mother said, ‘What do you say?’

And Ron answered, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Ron ultimately earned a PhD. in Physics from M.I.T. He was an accomplished saxophonist and a black belt in karate.

In 1978, he was selected as one of thirty-five from a pool of 10,000 for the astronaut program at NASA. He was a mission specialist on the Challenger in 1984, only the second African-American to fly in space, and the first of the Bahá’i faith.

He had composed a piece of music to be played on his second Challenger mission, STS-51-L, which lifted off January 28, 1986. It would have been the first piece of original music recorded in space.

mcnair3

mcnair-3

This Land Is Your Land

If you have visited any of the National Parks, you know what a treasure they are and how important their protection is. I suppose it’s possible to visit one of the parks and not be impressed and awed, but not for me.

There are more than 20,000 people who work for the National Parks Service. As far as I can tell they are almost universally dedicated and underpaid, and are just really outstanding individuals. I’m sure there are the same number of bad apples in that group as in any other, but I’ve never run across a single one.

The parks are under pressure from people who want to cut funding to them and exploit the resources within them. They are public property in an era where that very idea is anathema to the powerful, and their education mission is threatened by those for whom all education is an expression of partisan politics, as we have seen in recent days.

It’s too depressing to think of what will be lost if the parks system succumbs, so today I’ll reminisce in advance of any loss by posting a random few of my own photos.

Click on pics to enlarge. Also, please send Stewie some of your own pics or memories of the National Parks.

Acadia (via Elaine)

Carlsbad Caverns

Crater Lake

Denali

Glacier

Grand Teton

Grand Canyon

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Mt. Hood

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Olympic

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Mt. Ranier

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Redwoods

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Great Smoky Mountains

Yellowstone

Zion

As good as true

So the man-baby is calling for a “major investigation” about the imaginary voter fraud that’s been bothering him. He claims there were 3 -5 million votes cast illegally for Hillary Clinton in the election (and none cast illegally for him).

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As with most of what Trump blathers and tweets, there are absolutely no facts on which to base these fantasies. There are no “studies”, no news reports (other than a couple of instances where people voted twice for Trump), and certainly no real support from other Republicans, who once again have to either nod their heads at his crazy assertions or hunt down a molecule or two of honesty or courage. Always a challenge for them.

And, of course, it immediately came to light that Trump’s daughter Tiffany was registered to vote in two states, as was senior strategist Steve Bannon, and Treasury Secretary pick Steve Mnuchin. Oh, and also son-in-law and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner as well as Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

There have already been nine investigations on this issue, and none have found any problems. In fact, the opposite was found: only four verifiable cases of voter fraud out of 130 million votes cast. I guess maybe those investigations weren’t “major” enough.

If you believe Trump is actually playing chess at the Grand-master level, you might think that what this is really about is the creation of more stringent voter ID laws down the road, which everyone understands will benefit Republican candidates in future elections.

If you believe, as I do, that the man-baby doesn’t have the attention span needed for chess, and that there’s actually no evidence he knows how to play checkers either, then you’re left with a couple of possible explanations for this weirdness.

One is that it’s just inconceivable to him that people don’t love and respect him as much as they should, so he creates a narrative that explains the apparent disconnect, usually involving crimes or conspiracy, and always involving “unfair” treatment.

Another is that this is yet another example of the Master Distracter at work. Today we’re not talking about Russian shenanigans, conflicts of interest, nepotism, or anything we should be. Dilbert was on point today.

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I think that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as well as one other thing: once you assert it and repeat it a few times, it’s as good as true. We’ve talked about Trump’s use of the Big Lie before, and also how he’s not tweeting at you or me but at his base of 60 million believers. For them, it doesn’t matter if there are actually any studies, or, if there are, what they might find. For Trump’s minions, voter fraud is already a real thing because Trump said it was.

It’s already as good as true.

Lysenko echoes

Trofim Lysenko was a geneticist (of sorts) who rose to become the head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which was the broad network of plant and cattle breeders, academicians, and research facilities operating in the Soviet Union from 1929-1992. Lysenko and his ideas, now known as “Lysenkoism”, dominated the organization for 30 years, and led to the formal ban on teaching “Mendelist” genetics (i.e. real genetics) in the Soviet Union, which lasted until the 1960s.

According to Lysenko, acquired traits could be inherited. In other words, if you grafted a branch of a plant of one species onto a plant of another, you’d be creating a new hybrid plant whose characteristics would be passed on to its descendants. Or if you plucked the leafs off a plant, its descendants would be leafless. In other words, Lysenko was not a scientist at all.

Lysenkoism was very attractive to the Soviets because it was “politically correct”, a term invented by Lenin, meaning that it was consistent with the underlying Marxist view that heredity played a limited role in behavior, and that a new “breed” of citizen, a selfless Soviet Man, would be created as generations lived under socialism. Lysenkoism also held promise for addressing the famines created by the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. And Lysenko himself had risen from the peasantry and developed his theories “practically”, i.e. without scientific experimentation. All good, right?

The control of politics over science got to the point where Stalin personally “corrected” Lysenko’s draft of his 1948 opening address to the Academy, “On the Situation in Biological Science”.

Looking back from our advanced and enlightened 2017 perspective, we can see the absurdity of it all, and appreciate the harm it all did, not just to science and “truth”, but to the millions who might have been properly fed without it.

And we can easily see that the real problem was the cult of personality around Stalin. That one individual had the power to say what was science and what wasn’t, and that lives could be destroyed by such a pronouncement, is the ultimate indictment of the totalitarian model. And when you add in the personal limitations of that individual – paranoia, insecurity, superstition, the willingness to embrace nonsense as fact – you know it will end in catastrophe.

Lucky for us we live in a democracy with checks and balances, where one man cannot determine what science is, and one man cannot silence dissenters with the stroke of a pen. We live in an open society where the scientific method is understood, even with the occasional Inconvenient Truth it reveals. Right?

Wrong, suckers!

Your new president has banned expressions from within any part of the federal government of thoughts on climate change that conflict with his own nutty mindset. And just to remind you what exactly that mindset is, here’s what he said in 2012:

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Tweets from Badlands National Park with actual facts have now been deleted by Man-baby-fiat. Of course nothing is ever actually gone from the internet once it gets there, so, for the curious, here they are:

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The Interior Department had its Twitter account shut down as well after two re-tweets regarded as unsympathetic to Trump during the inauguration. They’re back now, for the moment anyway.

Web pages about climate change, LGBT rights, civil rights and health care have disappeared from whitehouse.org. Archived Obama-era pages here.

Did we think this was possible? Could Obama or anyone else in the past have gotten away with this? Where’s Congress? Where’s the outrage? Who will say “no” to this guy? It hasn’t been a week and free speech has been happily thrown out the window.

We’ve seen the climate change denial among Republicans for years. Here’s a 2013 opinion piece from Forbes on Lysenkoism and climate change. But it took the election of the man-baby to make all their dreams come true.

Screw facts, truth, science and the liberal elite horse they rode in on.

Disappointing, predictable

So the first few days of the Trump administration are in the books and it’s pretty much what we knew it would be.

In meeting with lawmakers, he repeated the preposterous nonsense, or, if you prefer, “lie”, that he actually won the popular vote, and that it only seems like he didn’t because of the millions of illegal immigrants who voted for Hillary.

Sean Spicer, the new press Secretary, had a couple of meetings with the press that gave us a pretty clear indication of how it’s going to be. In the first, he asserted that the crowds for Trump’s inauguration had been the biggest ever (more preposterous nonsense) and, gave us a clear indication of Trump’s highest priority: constant affirmation of his popularity, legitimacy, and greatness. Who beside the man-baby really cares about the size of the crowd?

The second Spicer performance was the first actual “press briefing” (full summary here). It was notable for some revelations about how we’re ready to fight in the South China Sea, how we’ll be working with Russia in Syria, how they’re actually serious about moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (not just posturing like everyone before them), and so on.

It was also notable for who he called on and in what order. Tradition requires the first question to go to the Associated Press, seated in the front row, center. But it didn’t. The first question went to the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid of little journalistic repute. The New York Times was finally called on at the end of the session. In other words, screw protocol, it’s my way or the highway. CNN better shape up or suffer the consequences.

Spicer also basically stuck to his guns about the crowd sizes. He said the unfair coverage of Trump in the press was “demoralizing”. Actually it’s the fair coverage of who Trump is and what he says that’s demoralizing, but never mind.

Where’s the fantastic Trump health plan that was “almost ready” last week? No one actually believed there was a health plan (there wasn’t), so we’ve moved on from that, apparently.

The first few days of Trump included no softening or reconciliation for those he trashed and railed against during the campaign. No indication that he understands the campaign is over and he is now president of all of us, not just his Twitter followers. It’s as if he’s starting his re-election campaign now by hardening the appeals to his base. Make America Even Greater in 2020.

There was plenty of repetition of the “America First” slogan in the first few days. Not only is Trump now the president of all of us, he is, in a very real sense, now the President of the World. But just as he doesn’t care what the Americans who didn’t vote for him think, he also doesn’t care what the concerns of others around the world might be.

It might be fun to revisit the political cartoons from around the world that we collected before the election. But, to get an idea of what some of our friends think of Trump now, check out this Dutch video, made in the Trump style so as to better resonate with him: