Zeno’s bridge

Remember Zeno’s Paradox? Achilles gives a tortoise a head-start in a foot race, but can never overtake it. By the time Achilles has run to where the tortoise started, the tortoise has moved ahead a bit, and by the time Achilles covers that bit, the tortoise has moved further. And so on, ad infinitum.

Well, if you ever want to get a big infrastructure contract in Boston, like fixing the decaying Longfellow Bridge, you’d do well to keep Zeno in mind when you prepare your sales pitch.

Check out this super-slick animated presentation about the Longfellow Bridge rehabilitation project now underway in Boston. It’s a really cool look at how the engineers will accomplish it and every detail is covered in their plan, which they created at the time the project went out for bid.

After watching this thing, you will be 100% confident they know what they’re doing and have taken all eventualities into account. There can be no doubt they’ll complete the work on time and maybe even under budget.

Wrong again, suckers!

The project was begun in 2013 and was going to be completed in mid-2016. But guess what? When they started the repairs, they found out there were some problems that they hadn’t figured on. “Like what?”, you may ask, “that animation they did had everything covered”. Well, see, it turned out some elements of the steel supports were rusty!

rust

Now, I’m no engineer and I certainly have no experience making animated sales pitches, so naturally my first thought on hearing about the rust was, “No shit! That’s why we needed to fix the bridge in the first place.  Remember?”

Anyway, when the first deadline of three years passed, the engineers said, yeah, well, we’ll be done in a couple or three more years, maybe in late 2018. When they said that, they may have really believed they could do it (or not), and, anyway, it was so  far into the future that no one would remember when the time came.

Well, we’re six months away from 2018, so they better move fast. When I look at the bridge today, it seems about half done. They’ve got the Red Line tracks moved over to one side and the entire roadway on the other side is removed. I took this picture the other day.

update

In my lay opinion, and given the way things always work around here, there’s no way this project can be completed in 2018. Around September of next year, you can expect them to say, “We’re almost there. Only about 12 months left. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

To which Zeno will reply, “No worries, Achilles, you’ll probably pass that tortoise any day now”.

What’s the purpose of hearings?

Have you figured it out yet? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not to get answers to your questions.

Appearing before the Senate Intelligence committee last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers repeatedly said they would not discuss their private conversations with Donald Trump.

They said they didn’t feel that the public setting of the hearings was an appropriate venue. Democrats were stunned by this. They went back and forth about it, with the senators pointing out there was no basis on which they can legitimately refuse to answer, that Executive Privilege was not being invoked, demanding what the legal justification for refusing to answer is, etc. etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda.

But the bottom line is that if you’re called to answer questions before a congressional committee, and you don’t feel like answering, well, then don’t. No consequences for you. No charges of “Contempt of Congress”. Nothing.

Same thing yesterday when Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He just didn’t feel like answering, so he didn’t. No, he didn’t claim “Executive Privilege” or any other real reason,  only that,

 “It’s longstanding policy in the Department of Justice not to comment on conversations that the attorney general has had with the president of the United States for confidential reasons that really are founded in the co-equal branch powers of the Constitution of the United States.”

Chuck Schumer, a member of the committee  from  New York said,

“Unfortunately, the Attorney General repeatedly refused to answer pertinent questions from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee without offering a scintilla of a legal justification for doing so.

This is part of a repeated and troubling pattern from Trump administration officials who clam up and refuse to answer questions about the Russia investigation, even though cabinet officials have had no qualms talking about their conversations with the President.” 

That’s it. That’s all they have for you.  Hope it makes you feel better.

So what’s the purpose of such hearings? Well, it’s grandstanding, of course. It’s a chance for an otherwise powerless and locked-in-partisan Senator or Congressman to show the people back home what a gallant, incorruptible standard-bearer he or she really is, hopefully gaining some support at the ballot box in the process.

gowdy

The other day, I said Trey Gowdy, the U. S. Rep. from South Carolina’s fourth district, seemed more like a demented piranha then a lawmaker to me. To see some support for both that observation as well as today’s point about the purpose of hearings, and also to make yourself sick, check out his “questioning” of M.I.T. Professor of Economics, Jonathan Gruber. You’re welcome.

“The evil that men do lives after them.”

Stewie invited me to add my comments today, so here goes.

Thoughts about the Shakespeare in the Park controversy:

Donald Trump’s behavior is disrespectful, vicious and mean spirited. He is delighted to sink to the lowest level, demeaning former presidents, former candidates for president, government officials and helpless private citizens.

He selects his victims randomly for ugly attacks that inflame and infuriate. The bar for civilized behavior no longer includes “civilized” and is so low that even reasonable, ethical people jump into the fray and begin mimicking his despicable behavior. He has crossed the line so often that he has taken the rest of us firmly with him.

When he dismembered our government, did he take our common sense and respect for others away too? I think so.

A case in point is Shakespeare in the Park’s production of Julius Caesar. Delta Airlines and Bank of America have withdrawn their sponsorship because the current presentation “depicts the assassination of a Trump-like Roman ruler.”

If this is a metaphor for our times, and I believe it is, portraying Julius Ceasar as Donald Trump is unnecessary. I haven’t seen the production, but perceptions can often be more powerful than reality.   Creation of a violent image of a sitting President of the United States being assassinated is never appropriate. There are arguments on both sides of the question, “Does art inspire behavior?”, but the question I have is whether our society wants to own this image and whether it will be too late to leave all this behind A.T. (After Trump).

shakes

Rubber-necking the Trump-train

Everyone knows that Trump is a “ratings machine”, and he is very proud of that. Whatever show he appears on gets great ratings, and whatever event he attends becomes the center of news coverage, obscuring any other that might be happening at the same time, even a Presidential Primary debate.

It’s always struck me that he is discounting the “rubber-necking” effect. Have you ever been in a traffic jam on an Interstate, wondering what’s going on and speculating that there must an accident up ahead, only to find out that there was indeed an accident, but on the other side of the road that shouldn’t have impacted you at all? Everyone on your side slowed down to gawk. or rubber-neck, as they drove by, creating an annoying delay.

Well, I often tune in to see Trump as well, just to see what kind of accident he’ll cause, or to get my adrenaline going if I’m feeling lethargic. I’m contributing to his great ratings, but not in the way he thinks.  I’m just rubber-necking.

This Quinnipiac Poll, done on May 10, has a lot of interesting information about the man-baby’s approval ratings, for example:

  • 61 – 33 percent that he is not honest, compared to 58 – 37 percent April 19;
  • 56 – 41 percent that he does not have good leadership skills, little change;
  • 59 – 38 percent that he does not care about average Americans, compared to 57 – 42 percent April 19;
  • 66 – 29 percent that he is not level-headed, compared to 63 – 33 percent last month;
  • 62 – 35 percent that he is a strong person, little change;
  • 56 – 41 percent that he is intelligent, compared to 58 – 38 percent;
  • 64 – 32 percent that he does not share their values, compared to 61 – 35 percent.

From the text:

“There is no way to spin or sugarcoat these sagging numbers,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“The erosion of white men, white voters without college degrees and independent voters, the declaration by voters that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days were mainly a failure and deepening concerns about Trump’s honesty, intelligence and level headedness are red flags that the administration simply can’t brush away,” Malloy added.

approval

But of all the information in the poll, my favorite is the answers to the question, “What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?”

Before you check the result below, let’s play a quick game of “Family Feud”. Think about how you would respond to this question. How does your guess compare to the most popular ones in the survey?

poll1

What was it about?

In early 1963, most Americans could not find Viet Nam on a map of the world.  I’m pretty certain Donald J. Trump couldn’t do it on his first try even today.

southeast asia

The first time the words “Viet Nam” penetrated the consciousness of the average person here was in May, 1963 when Life Magazine published this picture of a Buddhist Monk named Quang Duc burning himself to death:

monk1

The government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, had been brutally repressing the country’s Buddhist majority, despite protests and pleas from the U.S. to liberalize their policy.  Quang Duc burned himself to protest the bad treatment, and other monks did the same shortly thereafter. Madame Nhu, the president’s sister-in-law, referred to the burnings as “barbecues” and offered to supply matches.

Diem and his brother were assassinated in a military coup in November, 1963. But these events are really secondary to U.S. involvement in the region.

Viet Nam had been part of  colonial “French Indochina” before World War II, after which increased nationalist feelings and a desire to escape colonialist rule led to the First Indochina War.  seen from the Vietnamese point of view as a war of independence

This ultimately resulted in the partition of the country in 1954, with the North being supported by China, which only five years earlier had its own revolution, which had resulted in communist rule of mainland China. It was the Chinese influence that got the interest of the U.S., which at that moment was beginning to base virtually all foreign policy on the need to resist the communist “aggression” worldwide. This policy led us into supporting every nutty military dictator we could find around the globe, as long as he was “anti-communist”, while ignoring the legitimate aspirations and rights of local populations. We are still feeling the blow-back from that policy today.  That, among other things, is why Iran hates us, for example.

President Kennedy was firmly committed to the Cold War policy of pushing back communists, but at first thought the Vietnamese army had to do it. He said,

“to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences.”

But after the failure at the Bay of Pigs, the development and success of the Russian space program, and the construction of the Berlin Wall, he figured the credibility of our military might was at stake.  Into the quagmire we went.

Our involvement is sometimes known as the Second Indochina War, or, to the Vietnamese, the Resistance War Against America. There had been only 900 American advisers in Vietnam when Kennedy took office, none serving in a combat role. But by November 1963, when he was assassinated, there were 16,000.

That’s how it began. From our point of view, we were fighting communism and from their point of view, they were fighting for independence from colonial powers. Lyndon Johnson didn’t know how to extricate us and, through steady escalation recommended by the generals, ultimately deployed 536,100 Americans on the ground in Southeast Asia.

By the time we finally understood the folly, and got out once and for all in 1975, the price we had paid was awful.  The war destroyed one presidency and contributed enormously to the destruction of another, and damaged our prestige worldwide. But that was the least of it. Over 58,000 American kids were killed fighting in Viet Nam, and over 304,000 wounded, many of whom are still being cared for in VHA hospitals today.

There were 1.3 million Viet Namese military and civilian deaths all told.

The “culture war” that took root at home during that period could be viewed as the greatest tragedy of all. The Red-Blue divide that poisons our society today is directly descended from the Viet Nam era divisions.

What was it all for? The “communists” won. We lost. So what? Do they threaten us more now? Did they threaten us at all then? Did our involvement there achieve anything positive? Are we better off for it in any way?

It is completely understandable that many families of those who lost their lives want to believe the cause was “just”, and that their loved ones served honorably and even heroically. You often hear it said, even now, that we “could have won” if we had only bombed the north, or deployed more troops, or whatever. But it should be clear now that there was nothing to “win”.  And the the honor and heroism of those who answered the call and paid with their lives or limbs is not diminished by the fact that the “cause” was illusory.

SS Arandora Star

On this day in 1940, Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. The Brits and French had been trying to get the Italian dictator to join their fight against the Germans, and he almost did. But after Paris was occupied by the Germans, he had second thoughts, mainly that he didn’t want to stand by and watch one country conquer the entire European continent.

About the Italians joining their side, Hitler groused that,  “First they were too cowardly to take part. Now they are in a hurry so that they can share in the spoils.” Mussolini explained that he wanted to join the fight before the complete capitulation of France, because fascism “did not believe in hitting a man when he is down.” Right. They were famous for that, as I recall.

Anyway, Britain responded to this by rounding up Italian residents between the ages of 16-70 who had been in the country less than 20 years and putting them in internment camps. Kinda like what the U.S. did with their citizens of Japanese descent, no? Only without all the recriminations and apologies for years thereafter.

When the war began in 1939, the British set up tribunals across the country, 120 of them in all, to evaluate resident aliens and classify them into three categories based on what kind of threat they seemed to represent: Category A meant internment, Category B was no internment but subject to restrictions, and C was no internment or restrictions. By February, 1940, all 73,000 or so cases had been evaluated, with about 66,000 designated as Category C.

In May, the Brits interned another 8000 Germans, and, after Mussolini made his choice, went to work on the Italians. The British internment camps were filled up, so Canada and Australia generously offered to take some of the internees. 7500 of them were shipped oversees, using a fleet of five passenger liners, including the SS Arandora Star.

Arandora Star

On Tuesday, July 2, 1940, the Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk, while en route to Canada, by a German U-boat, 75 miles west of the Irish coast.

According to this Wiki, the ship carried “734 interned Italian men, 479 interned German men, 86 German prisoners of war and 200 military guards. Her crew numbered 174 officers and men”.  805 people lost their lives before the Canadian destroyer, HMCS St. Laurent, arrived on the scene and rescued 868 survivors, of whom 586 were detainees. About a month later, bodies from the tragedy began washing up on the shores of Ireland and Scotland, and were buried there.

This account of the sinking begins by vilifying the British for their “callous disregard” of people based on their nationality, though it doesn’t mention the callous disregard of the Nazis who torpedoed a ship carrying civilian detainees who were allegedly their sympathizers. It notes that the loss of life, about half that of the Titanic sinking,

…”has no place in our common historical consciousness. It is, however, well known among the British-Italian population, and among the Scottish and Irish communities who tend the graves of the dead to this day.”

“Despite the impoverishment of their communities, over and over again these remote coastal villages paid and organised to bury the victims as if they were their own. In Scotland, these were not only enemy nationals but ones singled out for vilification by the government, but no matter; they were given the same reverence and respect as anyone else.”

This article on the sinking provides interesting background on the British internment policy as well as the sinking.

As the Germans often noted, krieg ist krieg.

 

 

“Have we learned nothing?”

Once again, the volcanic clouds of chaos-ash emanating from Mount Trump at all times have obscured real news that we should care about. But we’re all distracted, panicked, and immobilized by the tiny-handed “ratings machine” that leads the free world, and the unnecessary drama he thrives on.

While we were all glued to our TVs watching the Comey hearings yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 233-186 for a bill that would undo much of Dodd-Frank. The Comey hearings will ultimately have no effect on your life, but the repeal of Dodd-Frank will. If we were hoping to have our outrage validated, we were watching the wrong show.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, as we apparently no longer remember, was passed after the 2008 financial crisis to try to rein in the excesses of Wall Street that very nearly caused a worldwide economic collapse.

The bill attempts to prevent predatory mortgage lending, restrict banks from making investments for themselves using your insured deposits, governs consumer lending by requiring clear disclosure of terms, separates the commercial and investment functions of a bank,  regulates derivatives such as the credit default swaps that were widely blamed for contributing to the 2008 financial crisis, and so on.

It was a bit like closing the barn door after the horses had gone, but trying to make it less likely that the barn door will be left open next time.

The House vote was, of course, along strict party lines. Walter Jones of North Carolina was the only Republican to vote against it. Maxine Waters of California said, “They are setting the stage for Wall Street to run amok and cause another financial crisis.”

This WaPo piece says,

Democrats defended the Dodd-Frank law, saying it has meant financial security for millions of people and that undoing it would encourage the kind of risky lending practices that invite future economic shocks.

They also oppose efforts to sharply curtail a consumer protection agency’s power to pursue companies that it determines have participated in unfair or deceptive practices in their financial products and services. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has returned $29 billion to 12 million consumers who were victims of deceptive marketing, discriminatory lending or other financial wrongdoing.

“All we’re doing is spending our time taking away protections for the American people and their futures. Have we learned nothing?” asked Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

Shortly after inauguration, Trump promised to do a “big number on Dodd-Frank”, calling it a “disaster”, the same term he uses to describe just about everything he doesn’t like. He’s attempting to deliver on yet another idiotic promise meant to accelerate the transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and the House of Representatives is proving a willing tool. Hopefully, the Senate will prevent Trump’s “big number” from doing further damage.

A lot of us were hoping Comey would do a “big number” on Trump. If only.

screw

Kansas snapping out of it?

Republicans don’t like taxes. Or government. But they could tolerate government if it had no money to do anything, i..e. if taxes were cut.

Every Republican running at the state or national level in recent memory has repeated basically the same idea: if you cut taxes and reduce regulations, you will unlock the creativity and potential of America’s entrepreneurs and thus unleash the greatest job-creation engine the world has ever known.

And, yes, a few hard-working and visionary people will become incredibly rich, fulfilling the “American dream”, but the rising tide will lift all boats and the benefits of this unrestricted free-enterprise will be better living for all our citizens as the newly-created wealth “trickles down”.

This has been repeated so often that it has become accepted as actually true, at least to the people repeating it.  To them, the tax-and-spend Democrats are crippling the economy, killing jobs, and ruining America. Cut taxes on the rich and all will be well.

The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence that it works that way and plenty of evidence that it doesn’t. The only part that ever actually works as expected is that a few people become incredibly rich. The trickling down part has never happened, but that doesn’t seem to impact the message or the messengers.

Kansas elected Sam Brownback as governor in 2010, and he took office in 2011. He had represented Kansas’ second congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1994 to 1996, part of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution, and then was elected to fill the Senate seat vacated by Bob Dole.

Brownback pursued deep reductions in tax rates early in his administration, calling them a “real live experiment” in conservative governance.

His Wikipedia entry sums him up this way:

He opposes same-sex marriage and describes himself as pro-life. As Governor, Brownback signed into law the largest income tax cut in Kansas’ history, eliminating state income taxes for business profits realized as non-wage income, affecting mainly IRS “S filers.” Brownback turned down a $31.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to set up an insurance exchange as part of the federal health care reform law, signed a bill that blocked tax breaks for abortion providers, banned sex-selection abortions, and declared that life begins at fertilization.

The income tax cut generated a substantial budget deficit, affecting core government service, particularly in education, and led many former and current Republican officials to criticize his leadership in the run-up to the 2014 gubernatorial election and endorse his Democratic opponent, Paul Davis. Polls taken in September 2016 gave Brownback an approval rating of 23%, the lowest rating of all 50 governors in the United States. Brownback was reelected in a close race with a plurality, a margin of 3.7%.

But life got better, right? Tons of new jobs were created by that entrepreneurial job-creation engine, right? The benefits trickled down as promised, didn’t they? The “real live experiment” showed that Republicans have been right all along, right?

No. Of course not.

From this WaPo article:

kansas economyThe legislature began this year’s session with the government in a deficit of $350 million, leaving lawmakers mulling more budget cuts. They have drained the state’s reserves of cash, diverting money meant for roads, delaying payments to pension funds and, in essence, forcing local agencies to make loans to the state government.

Last year, the governor pushed back the schedule for 25 construction projects planned around the state, the climax of delays intended to keep more cash on hand. In March, Kansas’s Supreme Court ruled that the lack of funding for public schools violated the state’s constitution, forcing lawmakers to act.

But Republican legislators in Kansas seem to be waking up a little bit.

In a decisive repudiation of conservative tax-cutting philosophy, Kansas Republicans voted this week to reverse deep tax cuts enacted by Gov. Sam Brownback (R), a move that lays bare the challenges of one-party control and the risks for Republicans in Washington pursuing a similar policy at the national level.

Kansas’s legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, but moderate GOP lawmakers joined with Democrats after it became clear that support for Brownback’s policies had become a major political liability. In last year’s election, a number of Brownback’s allies lost key races to Democrats or moderate Republicans opposed to the tax cuts. On Tuesday, 18 of the state’s 31 GOP senators and 49 of the 85 Republican members of the House voted against the governor.

If Republicans in Kansas are finally snapping out of this destructive trance, maybe there’s some hope for the rest of the country as well. Fingers crossed.

Trump “charity”

CNN is really milking this Comey testimony thing. For days, they’ve had a permanent “countdown” displaying how many seconds are left before the Big Show.  Ratings! Revenue! Spectacle!

countdown

It’s pretty pathetic. I’m going to risk my reputation as the present-day Nostradamus and predict that when we finally hear what Comey has to say, it will be absolutely nothing you don’t already know. Yes, the “news” outlets will go crazy all day tomorrow and for a few days after, assuming the man-baby doesn’t come up with some huge distraction, wilder even than “tapped my wires”. But, as for Comey,  there’s no there there.

First of all, Comey’s primary concern is his reputation for being incorruptible, non-partisan, fair,  and, above all, not vindictive. This requires him to make no overtly anti-Trump statements or statements that could be deemed to be self-serving in refuting what the man-baby has spammed us with for weeks, even including the made-up exculpatory verbiage in the termination letter he sent to Comey. Remember that stuff about having assured Trump on three occasions that he wasn’t under investigation?

Second, we already know Comey’s version of events from various other sources. And it’s a highly believable, even obvious, account. Trump tried to influence him to drop the Flynn/Russia investigation, thereby committing the crime of Obstruction of Justice, an impeachable offense. Shocker.

And last, his testimony can never live up to the absurd advance hype it’s getting, no matter what. Maybe it won’t be as disappointing and deflating as Rachel Maddow’s “We’ve got Trump’s tax forms, tune in at 10:00” debacle, but I can promise you it won’t be worth the wait. Stop licking your chops. You’re going to remain hungry after this feast.

But this doesn’t mean there isn’t a little red meat for you in today’s news to keep you satisfied, at least until lunch. Let’s try this one from Forbes: How Donald trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business.

The ABC News version says:

According to IRS filings, the Eric Trump Foundation in 2012 spent $59,085 on its annual Golf Invitational fundraiser held at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York — money that skimmed from donations to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. Those expenses ballooned to $230,080 in 2013 and to $242,294 in 2014, according to the filings. It is unclear from these tax forms how much of those payments went to the Trump Organization.

Forbes reported that in 2011, costs for Eric Trump’s golf tournament fundraiser tripled because his father realized that the organization had not been charging for the event and there were no bills to prove it. The Foundation declined to provide Forbes with an itemized list of expenses for the tournament.

Charity experts told Forbes that the amount paid to the Trump Organization for a golf tournament fundraiser for St. Jude’s “defy any reasonable cost.”

This, of course, is further proof of the value of seeing Trump’s tax returns, but I guess that ship has sailed. No one who understands this needs to see this new evidence, and anyone who does need to see it isn’t listening and doesn’t care.

It does remind me once more of what Michael Bloomberg, someone who certainly knows,  said about Trump: bloomberg

Trump is who he is. He wants and needs to stiff everyone. Even kids with cancer.

This can’t go on

It’s just not normal. How can we go on pretending it’s normal? Or that it’s OK in any way? Are we so stunned by the rapidity of the change? Are we so ignorant of our own history and principles? Are we so consumed by partisanship that we must ignore the bizarre and outlandish, the inappropriate and outrageous, when it comes from our “team”?

The President of the United States tweeted this on Monday:

courts are political

He was upset because his “Travel Ban” has to be ruled on by a court before it can be made law, and he indulged in one of his now-standard early-morning “tweet storms”, or maybe “twitter tantrums”  describes it better.

tweets

These outbursts do not serve his interests in any way, and certainly do not serve our country’s interests. He is discrediting our system of justice. Who does that help?

The President of the United States has declared that the courts are “political”.

Is this what should now be taught to schoolchildren?

The President cannot, must not, say this. Even if it were true, which, God help us, it better not be, he cannot say this.

He is saying that our system of checks and balances is a sham.

He is saying the idea of an independent judiciary is a sham.

He is saying that any judicial appointment he makes is political.

He is saying that he expects “Republican” judges (there better not be such a thing!) will rule against Democrat plaintiffs, and vice versa.

He is saying he expects any judge he appoints to rule in his favor no matter what the law says.

He is saying that decisions made in his favor are also tainted, just as those that he doesn’t like.

He is saying that any decision passed down by the courts is made not on the basis of legal precedent or constitutional law, but on political grounds.

He is saying that no court decision is justice, but rather politics, so you are right to question decisions you don’t like, or to simply reject and ignore them. They do not carry the weight of “law”, but only “politics”.

He is saying the power of the presidency is not tempered or augmented by the judiciary, but that it is in opposition to it.

He is saying the courts do not function to protect us and our principles, but, like the media and any other institution that questions him, are the enemy. Until you co-opt them for your own team.

He is saying the rule of law is a fiction.

He is saying he does not like or trust our system of government.

He is saying that the authority of the courts and judges is not real.

The President said this. The sitting President of the United States.

Those who admire and trust him will certainly modify their thinking based on his “teachings”, and some will modify their behavior as well. There will be consequences.

FoxNews will “debate” the merits of these statements. They will repeat and support them, perhaps with minor modifications and explanations, rather than go against their “team”, thereby amplifying the effect and compounding the damage.

Those who see Trump for the impulsive, ignorant, narcissistic jackass he is can only shake their heads, yet again, in dismay and wonderment. Or possibly speak out, only to then be accused of God-knows-what by the other “side”. Liberalism? Political correctness? Defeatism? Anti-Americanism? Terrorist sympathies?

Where’s the outrage?

News and drugs

The other day Scott Pelley got fired from his job as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. CBS has traditionally been thought of as the best and most important of the network news operations, the home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and the news anchor position has been the most prestigious in the business for decades.  A shake-up at that spot has always been huge news in and of itself, and there was a lot of hand-wringing and speculation this time as well, although almost entirely within the industry.

pelley

But CBS Nightly News ratings trailed ABC and NBC, and news, like everything now, is a profit center. Pelley is out. His presentation of the day’s events wasn’t selling as well as the competitors’, even though the content was virtually identical.

There are two reasons why this doesn’t matter to me at all. The first is just my own taste, I suppose, and I probably shouldn’t even mention it, as it will surely anger those who disagree and it’s really not that important. But, as I’ve said before, that’s why Stewie is Generis, so here goes: Scott Pelley and Ted Baxter are virtually indistinguishable to me. They both simply read what’s put in front of them, quite obviously without any real understanding of it. And they both cultivate the silver-haired, square-jawed, steely look of authority and competence which masks any sign of who they might really be off-camera, as well as that phony “newsman’s voice”, meant to instill confidence in the truth and gravity of whatever they’re reading, however silly it may be.

baxter

The second reason Pelley’s firing doesn’t matter to me, and shouldn’t matter to anyone else either, is that network news itself no longer matters. It’s nothing but a re-hash of stuff that you already knew from the internet. It’s stale by the time they serve it to you. It might be 24 hours old or older and you’ve already determined whether you care about it.

There is no “journalism” involved – CBS is not “breaking” any stories with a network of far-flung correspondents and investigators. They are simply repeating what’s been on Twitter all day long, or even what CNN ran 10-12 hours earlier. And their standard is that if there are no spectacular images to go with the story, well, it’s just not news as far as they’re concerned.

And the really pathetic thing is they try to “tease” their stale stories to keep you tuned in through 3-4 minutes of ads: “You’ll be shocked at what President Trump tweeted last night at midnight – we’ll tell you after this…” No, I won’t be shocked. I saw it when he tweeted it 18 hours ago, and it didn’t shock me then. It wasn’t newsworthy at the time and it’s already been covered to death by everyone else all day long, including by the crack reporting staff at Get Off My Lawn.

So who’s watching these network “news” programs? Only people who don’t have the internet. In other words, only old people. And the proof is right there before your eyes. Those ads they want you to watch are virtually all drug advertisements and all for ailments that affect older people primarily.

There are a zillion new drugs you never heard of a couple of years ago that you are now bombarded with ads about during the newscast.   The drug companies know exactly who’s watching.

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I’d never heard of any of these drugs before, and now I can’t avoid them: Latuda (depression), Harvoni (hepatitis C), Rexulti (depression), Lyrica (nerve and muscle pain), Eliquis (stroke prevention), Xeljanz (rheumatoid arthritis), Viberzi (irritable bowel syndrome), Invokana (Type 2 Diabetes), Humira (arthritis), Jublia (toe fungus),  Xarelto (stroke prevention).

Maybe you’re taking one or more of these, or maybe you’re a medical professional who has known all about them for years, but that’s not my point. My point is that I have as many ailments as the next guy and the only way I’m aware of these drugs is from direct-to-consumer advertising.  My thesis is that most people have had the same experience.

Over $5 Billion dollars in drug ads were purchased last year and it’s been trending up for some time.

Following graph from this site:

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The A.M.A. has called for a ban on direct-to-consumer ad spending. The only two countries that allow direct-to-consumer drug advertising are the U.S. and New Zealand.

 

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16 drugs accounted for more than $100 million in advertising last year.

This report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (obviously created pre-Trump) says prescription drugs accounted for nearly 17 percent of total health care spending in 2015, up from about 7 percent in the 1990s, due in large part to rising prices for brand-name treatments.

Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) introduced a bill to eliminate the tax breaks that drug makers can take to offset their spending on ad campaigns. He said it was a “common sense measure to help cut down health care costs.”

On the other side of this fight is the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. It’s the industry trade group and has rejected efforts to limit ads saying the ads are useful for informing patients about their treatment options and help them avoid health emergencies.

I’m tempted to agree that there is probably more new information transmitted in these ads than in the alleged “news” that surrounds them, but that would be ignoring the difference between information and advocacy.

Nine out of ten of the biggest pharmaceutical companies actually spend more on advertising than on R&D, which should tell you something about the whole process. Note that Jublia, the toe-fungus treatment, costs about $600 a bottle but is proven to work in fewer than 20 percent of users, according to Consumer Reports.

Which side do you think the Trump administration will support? I don’t know but I can guess – as with all crime stories, you’ll find the bad guys if you  “follow the money”.

Baseball strikes out

Baseball is boring. There, I said it. I don’t think it can survive the short attention-span and demand for non-stop action that are characteristic of life in the internet age.

The games can routinely stretch into four-hour long marathons of nothingness, punctuated by the occasional instant of action or excitement. Baseball games used to take no more than two hours. The average time to complete nine innings so far this year is 3:06, while in 1978 it was 2:28, and in 1930 it was 1:09. There are lots of factors that explain this:

TV advertising dollars.  As with everything else, ad revenue now rules baseball, and if they can sell more ads, they will. This translates to longer pauses between innings, so that TV viewers can be assaulted with ads.

Pitching changes. We are in an era of specialization. In the past, starting pitchers were expected to go all nine innings, and relief pitching was rarely used. Now, you hope to get five or maybe six innings from your starter, then go to your set-up man for the seventh and eighth, and finally your closer for the ninth. If any of the three have problems, you have to go back to the bullpen and change again. Before each change, the pitching coach has to come out to the mound to discuss things with the incumbent, everything from how he feels to peace in the Middle East, in order to give the next guy a chance to get loose in the pen. When the new pitcher finally does arrive, he has to adjust to the mound with a bunch of warm-up pitches. Tick tock.

Batters wandering around between pitches. This pernicious waste of time started in the 1970’s with one or two guys notorious for doing it – Mike Hargrove and Carlton Fisk come to mind – but now everyone does it. Step out of the batter’s box, look around, adjust your batting gloves, check the third base coach for signs, check the heavens for support or a weather change. It takes forever. Batters used to just stay put and wait for the next pitch.

Advanced metrics. There’s a new “science” called Sabermetrics that has come to rule baseball. It consists of analyzing everything that happens during a game and using computer models to figure out if it helps or hurts. And I mean everything. I won’t bore you with examples, but it’s become quite absurd.  Many aspects of the game that made it interesting have been devalued: stolen bases, bunting, good defense, for example. It has been determined that these things don’t contribute to winning.

There are a couple of Sabermetric measurements which contribute more than others to stretching out the game and making it more one-dimensional, i.e. boring.

One is that it has been determined that the more pitches you can force the opposing pitcher to make, the better your chances are of getting him out of the game. The sooner you get him out, the sooner you can start to work on their second-line bullpen pitchers. The more of them you can tire out, the better your chances of facing one who’s having an off-day and maybe getting some hits. And even if you lose the current game, your chances of winning tomorrow or the next day, when you’ll be playing this same opponent, have improved because their pitchers will all be tired. Pitchers can only throw so many pitches without several days of rest in between to be effective.

Sabermetrics has determined that starting pitchers, in particular, must be held to a precise pitch count for each outing, usually about 100 pitches, after which it has been determined they must sit down, no matter how well they’re doing. All this calculation means more pitching changes which translates to longer games.

The disciplined teams are “taking” more pitches (not swinging) to achieve this goal, so more pitches have to be thrown in each game to get to the end. Add in all the walking around between pitches and the effect is amplified.

All this leads into a discussion of the real problem that underlies the transformation of an already less than heart-stopping two hours into a four hour slog, a problem that not only contributes to the time needed to play the game, but also makes it intrinsically less interesting to watch:  it has been determined that striking out is not a bad thing.

There is no shame in striking out anymore, and, in fact, it can make you a lot of money if you do it right. Here are a couple of examples to help make this point.

Mike Napoli, currently with the Texas Rangers, has been a highly desired commodity in his 12-year major-league career, even though he is apparently a mediocre hitter with a life-time average of .249, somewhat less than the aggregate average of all players in history. He drives in a few more runners than many other players and hits a few more home-runs, but has never come close to leading the league in these categories.

Mike Napoli strikes out more per plate appearance than almost anyone who has ever played the game. He is painful to watch. But he’s better than everyone else at one thing, and that thing is highly valued by Sabermetricians: he sees more pitches per at-bat than anyone else, meaning that he “takes” more and “spoils” more (by fouling them off) before striking out. Time stands still when Napoli steps in to hit.

Napoli played on the 2013 World Series Champion Red Sox, and had three other teammates who also struck out more per plate appearance than just about anyone else: Jared Saltalamacchia, Jonny Gomes, and David Ross. That 2013 team struck out a lot, more than just about every other team in the league, and still won it all. But they were very boring to watch.

The Baltimore Orioles are paying Chis Davis $23 Million this year and for each of the next five. He hits a lot of home runs but strikes out way more than anyone else in a season. He’s leading the American League this year with 83 strikeouts as I write this, less than one third of the way through the season.  By contrast, in 1941, Joe DiMaggio struck out 37 times during the entire season. Davis led the league in strikeouts each of the last two years, striking out a total of 437 times over those two years. DiMaggio struck out only 359 times over his entire 13-year career.

Davis can be expected to hit a home run once every four games or so. The rest of the time he’s striking out.  Davis and Napoli are just examples. The strikeout is ruining baseball, which already has enough issues.

I wrote about Jim Bunning the other day, but I didn’t bother to mention that at the time of his retirement, he had struck out more batters, 2855 in his 17 years, than anyone in history except Walter Johnson. That was in an era when hitters would do anything to avoid striking out. Bunning mentioned how hard it was to face the likes of Yogi Berra, who struck out only 414 times over 19 years (less than Chris Davis in the last two years), and Stan Musial, who struck out 696 times in 22 years. The list goes on.

Striking out was something for a batter to try to avoid then, but not now. Bunning’s achievement is all the more impressive in this context. Today,  Bunning is only 17th on the list of career strikeouts. All those who have passed him have done so in the era of the re-evaluated strikeout, even though they are indisputably great pitchers.

The game itself has changed, and not for the better. Now, it’s just boring to watch.

 

 

Separate but Equal 2.0

Remember when “Separate but Equal” was an abhorrent racist euphemism? It used to refer to the legal doctrine, according to which racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted at the close of the Civil War, which guaranteed “equal protection” under the law to all citizens.

Using this doctrine, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, as long as the facilities provided to each race were “equal”.

 

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It was widely understood, though, that services and facilities offered to African Americans were almost never “equal” in any real sense. The repeal of laws that divided people by race, known as “Jim Crow” laws, was the focus of the Civil Rights movement, and in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education formally overturned the “Separate but Equal” doctrine.

But there was still a lot of work to do. Most black people understood that the only path to their rightful place in American society was full “integration”, and that was the basis of Martin’s message. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, he notes that 100 years after the Civil War, African Americans are still  “badly crippled by the manacles of segregation”.

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Of course, Malcolm had a slightly different message, and one that resonated at least as strongly as Martin’s, that focused more on independence than integration. But everyone understood that “Separate but Equal” was not the answer, and the focus of all our collective efforts over the years was to refute it.

But, with time, the odious phrase lost its bite and actually came to represent something desirable for some young people. It’s a bit disorienting to hear black high school students advocating for segregated proms, for example, using the that very same phrase. You can’t help but feeling they haven’t read their history when you hear this.

Yesterday, I wrote about events at Evergreen State College, where white people were asked to stay away from campus for a day. Today, I’m reading that Harvard has held separate commencements for students of color. At their request.

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Everything old is new again.

Equity Action Plan

Somehow, the word “equity” has come to replace the word “equality” in the pedagogic vernacular in discussions of racism on campus. Maybe it’s because my own concerns are so far removed from those of today’s college student, but when I hear the word “equity”, I think of this now-secondary definition:

“the money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it”

Indeed, the first definition in the online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary is now:

“justice according to natural law or right; specifically :  freedom from bias or favoritism”

It’s a little confusing to someone on the outside, but it feels a little bit like the goal of ensuring that everyone has the same opportunity to achieve has been replaced with the goal of ensuring that everyone achieves the same outcome.   And it’s not immediately obvious to the lay person what the deficiencies of the now obsolete term, “equality”, might have been.

Evergreen State College has an Equity Action Plan. It’s an impenetrable thicket of jargon, but the gist of it is that racism explains just about everything that’s wrong. It’s got different “goals” listed, including Content Goals, Process Goals, Outcome Goals, and a single Equity Goal, which is:

• Our equity goal, simply put but not simply achieved, is to substantially improve the experiences of underserved students on our campus so that we close equity gaps in student learning and student success. An “equity gap” is an unequitable difference—read “worse”— between the experiences, opportunities, and/or outcomes of underserved students. We choose “underrepresented” and “underserved” with intention, in recognition of the power of language to name the problem as one of historical exclusion from ‘the academe’ and its power and resources, eschewing language that sources the problem as the students themselves (“at risk”) or in a negative light (“minority”).

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Weinstein, a biology professor at the college, voiced his disagreement with the Plan.

The plan and the way it is being forced on the college are both deeply authoritarian, and the attempt to mandate equality of outcome is unwise in the extreme. Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn’t have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion.

This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan’s shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.

Weinstein also disagreed with the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen, where all white people have been asked to stay off campus. He wrote an email protesting the event which induced accusations of racism and ignited a campus firestorm.

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This has given outlets like Breitbart apoplexy.  To be honest, the concept of asking any group to stay away does seem a little over the edge, although the idea of being on the same side as Breitbart on this or any issue is dread-inducing at best.

The Washington Times reports some of the action this way:

A video of the confrontation, captured by Mr. Vincent, shows Mr. Weinstein attempting to reason with dozens of students who routinely shout him down, curse at him and demand his resignation.

When the professor tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him, one student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.”

Another protester asks the professor whether he believes “black students in sciences are targeted.”

After asking for a clarification, Mr. Weinstein says, “I do not believe that anybody on our faculty, with intent, specially targets students of color.”

That remark prompts shrieks of outrage.

Weinstein, a lifelong liberal, is now literally under siege and his resignation has been demanded. In a lengthy interview on the Rubin Report, he claims that student protesters threatened to kidnap him

Equity in action at Evergreen State College. Ugh.

Jim Bunning

A very small number of people have achieved great success at the highest level of professional sports and gone on to be elected to national office. Jack Kemp comes to mind, and Steve Largent, both of whom were great pro football players and served in the House of Representatives.  And, of course, NBA Hall-of-Famer and U.S. Senator Bill Bradley. Am I forgetting anyone? My sincere apologies if so.

Jim Bunning joined this small group when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1985.  He served six terms in the House, representing Kentucky’s 4th district. In 1998 he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 2004. He was 85 when he died last Friday.

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He led an interesting life, an impactful life, and ordinarily I’d feel happy to write a little about someone like that. But Jim Bunning did a lot of things as a congressman that make him an outlier, and not in a good way.  He often found himself at odds with fellow Republicans and often caused controversy.

In the Senate, he was routinely given the highest “conservative” score by those that calculate such things. He opposed Obamacare, of course. A Catholic with nine children, he was strongly anti-abortion. He made inappropriate remarks about his opponents and Supreme Court justices.

This NPR piece says,
As a politician, he was known as “blunt and abrasive,” according to Politico. “In 1993, for instance, he referred to President Bill Clinton as ‘the most corrupt, the most amoral, the most despicable person I’ve ever seen in the presidency.’ In 2009, he made headlines by predicting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be dead of cancer within nine months.”

Bunning single-handedly held up unemployment payments for millions of Americans during a two-day filibuster against $10 billion in stimulus spending.

According to this CNN piece, Bunning decided to leave the Senate in 2010 after tension with his own party.

“Unfortunately, running for office is not just about the issues,” Bunning said in a 2009 statement. “Over the past year, some of the leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate have done everything in their power to dry up my fundraising. The simple fact is that I have not raised the funds necessary to run an effective campaign for the U.S. Senate.”

The remark appeared to be a thinly veiled hit at fellow Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate minority leader at the time.

Bunning butted heads with McConnell more than once and called him a “control freak”.  “McConnell is leading the ship, but he is leading it in the wrong direction. If Mitch McConnell doesn’t endorse me, it could be the best thing that ever happened to me in Kentucky.”

Asked by The New York Times in March 2009 whether he felt betrayed by some Republican colleagues, Mr. Bunning replied, “When you’ve dealt with Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Stan Musial, the people I’m dealing with are kind of down the scale.”

Reading that made me think back to the first time the name “Jim Bunning” penetrated my consciousness.

On July 20, 1958, he took the mound for the Detroit Tigers in Boston’s Fenway Park and pitched a no-hit, no-run game against the Red Sox. That had only been done twice before in the 46-year history of Fenway, both times by Hall-of-Famers. Walter Johnson did it in 1920 and Ted Lyons in 1926.

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Fenway is noted for its “Green Monster”, the huge wall in left field that appears to be just a few feet beyond the infield, and its lack of foul ground – hitters can stay alive on fouls that would be caught for outs in other venues.

It’s a hitter’s paradise and a pitcher’s nightmare. The Red Sox always tailored their line-ups for Fenway and routinely produced batting champs. Of course their own pitchers had to pitch in Fenway as well, so it didn’t translate too well into actual wins.

The line-up Bunning faced that day included a bunch of guys who were hard to get out on any day, and who were hitting over .300 at the time: Frank Malzone, Jackie Jensen, Pete Runnels, and, of course, the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived,  Ted Williams, who Bunning retired for the final out of the game.

The 26-year old Bunning was coming off a great 1957 season in which he led the American League with 20 wins. He had a side-arm delivery that gave right-handed hitters the impression the ball was coming at them from somewhere around third base. He was known for his combative nature, burning desire to win, and willingness to throw a “purpose pitch” when he thought it was needed, i.e. to hit an opposing batter to make him a little less comfortable digging in against him.

Bunning led the league in hit-batsmen four years in a row, and had 160 for his career. That’s more than anyone else in the last 90 years except for Tim Wakefield and Charlie Hough, both knuckle-ball pitchers who really didn’t know what was going to happen to the ball after it left their hands.  And if the knuckle-ball did hit a batter, everyone knew it was an accident and getting hit by the floater didn’t hurt a bit in any case.

Tiger team-mate Frank Bolling said, “If he had to brush back his mother, I think he’d do it to win.”

Bunning didn’t appreciate opposing players talking trash at him, either. He once threw at the always-talkative Red Sox center-fielder, Jim Piersall, for jawing at him too much. That one was a little unusual because Piersall wasn’t batting at the time, but waiting his turn in the on-deck circle.

Team-mate Larry Bowa told a story about Bunning’s approach, which is quoted in this NYT Obit, about a game that he pitched at Montreal in the early 1970s.

“The Expos had Ron Hunt, a guy who loved to get hit. Well, Bunning threw him a sidearm curveball, Hunt never moved, and it hit him. The ball rolled toward the mound, and Bunning picked it up. He looked right at Hunt and said: ‘Ron, you want to get hit? I’ll hit you next time.’ And next time up, bam. Fastball. Drilled him right in the ribs. And he said to Hunt, ‘O.K., now you can go to first base.’”

Bunning thoughtfully described pitching the no-hitter this way:

“For most pitchers like me, who aren’t overpowering supermen with extraordinary stuff like Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan, a no-hitter is a freaky thing.  You can’t plan it.  It’s not something you can try to do.  It just happens. Everything has to come together – good control, outstanding plays from your teammates, a whole lot of good fortune on your side and a lot of bad luck for the other guys.  A million things could go wrong – but on this one particular day of your life none of them do.”

He was traded to the Phillies in 1963, and was as effective in the National League as he had been in the American.  He pitched a “perfect game” (retired all 27 men he faced) against the Mets in New York on June 21, 1964, the first one pitched in the National League in 84 years, thereby revealing his previous comments about pitching a no-no to be overly modest.

To get elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, you need to get 75% of the votes from the Baseball Writers Association of America, and you have only 15 years of eligibility after retirement. Bunning came close, but never got the nod from the writers. But in 1996, 25 years after he retired, he was voted in by the Veteran’s Committee, which included many players who had tried unsuccessfully to hit his pitching. “The writers never faced him,” Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio said at Bunning’s induction ceremony.

As a Boston baseball fan and someone who thinks government can actually solve problems once in a while, I always dreaded it when my team had to go up against Bunning. I didn’t like to see him standing on the pitcher’s mound opposing us and I didn’t like to see him standing in Congress opposing us either.

But give the devil his due: Jim Bunning knew what he wanted to do, did things not because they were politically expedient but because he believed in them, went about achieving his objectives in his own unique way, always fought hard, and never backed down.

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride

It had to happen.

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Is there no one who can get Trump to stop tweeting? We’ve been asking this question since long before the election, and for a long time the answer has been quite clear. No, there is no one can who convince the man-baby that he would be much better off, and even enjoy higher approval ratings, if he could just control himself a little better. Not Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, or Sean Spicer.  Not even Jared or Ivanka, those two phantoms who allegedly have the strongest influence on him.

But he just can’t do it. Saying that he’s “impulsive” doesn’t describe what we’re seeing here. It’s more like a schizophrenic toddler with Tourette’s.

It’s often been noted that his tweets are craziest when he’s alone. At night before bed or when he’s just woken up in the morning is the real danger zone. There’s no one around to stop him then. Maybe it would be different if his spouse lived with him. Who has a greater interest in keeping your foot out of your mouth and the power to do it? Remember the strong and effective influence exerted by  Rosalynn Carter or Nancy Reagan?  It wasn’t a bad thing.

Sooner or later, Trump was going to make an international joke out of himself (and, thereby, all the rest of us), with some completely incoherent or accidental tweet. Last night was the night.

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Obviously, he hit “Send” before he meant to, probably while trying to correct what he’d written, but that’s exactly the point. He’s the President of the United States. Every word he says has the potential to move markets, dominate the international news, impact global alliances, or even start wars. He can’t be carelessly, accidentally, or even impulsively hitting “Send” any more than he can “Launch” or “Strike” or “Detonate” or whatever it actually says on that red button on the “nuclear football”.

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And he didn’t delete it for hours, prompting speculation that maybe he’d had a medical episode of some sort.

Almost immediately, #COVFEFE was trending on social media and all kinds of great jokes and memes were speeding around the internet. Check some of them out here. Trump is an international laughingstock. Again.

Coincidentally, the talent pool for new hires is also running dry. No one wants to work for this guy. Would you? Not knowing whether what you say today will be contradicted or undermined tomorrow? Knowing for sure that you’ll be fired at some point? The number of people who are willing to sign up for Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride now is tiny, and few competent pros are among them. Trump only really trusts family members, and they’re already all on the payroll.

What a mess.

Trump women honor the fallen

The Trump women set an appropriately respectful tone over the Memorial Day weekend, honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our freedoms. Each woman rose to the occasion in her own unique way.

Melania chose to set a somber example by donning a $51,000 jacket by Dolce & Gabbana in Sicily, where the average annual income is $23,400.

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I’m certain she was thinking of the Allied Invasion of Sicily the whole time, in which 2811 American soldiers lost their lives and 6471 were wounded. The loss of American life there exceeded the losses on D-Day, when the allies landed in Normandy. About 5000 Canadian and British troops were also killed in Sicily, or missing in action, and 6500 wounded.

I didn’t read anything about a visit to the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery where 7861 of our dead are buried, but she must have gone there, right?

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To add a bit more perspective to Melania’s wardrobe choices, consider that the CBO scoring of the revised Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act mentions some interesting figures:

Older Americans who make little money and buy individual insurance would see their premiums climb far beyond what they would be under Obamacare. A 64-year-old making $26,500 would pay $1,700 in premiums annually under Obamacare. In a state making those “moderate” changes to its market, that 64-year-old would pay $13,600, and in a state with no waivers, the cost would be $16,100. That’s more than nine times that person’s premium under the Affordable Care Act.

Ivanka, too, got into the right spirit over the weekend. Her blog suggested these activities as a way to honor the fallen:

Pack your basket with summer noodles and watermelon coolers

Heed Jamie Oliver’s ten tips for grilling the perfect feast

Wear all white. If we’re following the rules, it’s the first day we can wear it

Blast some tunes with this road-trip playlist

Cap the night off with a champagne popsicle.

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The champagne popsicle is a Memorial Day tradition here at GOML, the perfect way to respect and remember.

Meanwhile, the ever-sincere and never-exploitive Kellyanne Conway just about broke the internet with this tweet:

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Lots of appropriate responses to this in the above link, including,

“Our brave @POTUS got 5 draft deferments, attacked a gold star family, took a vet’s Purple Heart, and sent men to die in Yemen over dinner.”

“Grossly grossly embarrassing and disrespectful hearing this from conway Disgusting.”

“No it isn’t, if that were true you and @Potus would feel some sense of shame when denigrating one of their ranks.”

“Gold Star families are very special & I will never forget how rude and disgusting @realDonaldTrump @POTUS was to Khizr Khan and wife.”

 

 

 

Angry Germans on the move

This article in the Washington Post yesterday describes Angela Merkel giving a speech in which she says that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.”  She’s the leader of the most powerful country in Europe and is saying that, based on Trump’s behavior and words on his recent trip, they can no longer rely on U.S. support, that those days were  “over to a certain extent. This is what I have experienced in the last few days.”

Trump managed to piss off the Germans and all the other members of NATO on this trip, as only he can do. Here at GOML, we have mixed emotions about all this.

Our first, visceral reaction is, “yeah, good idea – fight your own battles for a change”. But then I realized I was taking a baby step towards falling under the spell of the man-baby’s populist, history-averse, fact-free, bullying, Make-America-Great-Again, ignorant blathering.

Hang on, I thought, I’m looking at the leader of Germany advocating German strength to over a thousand closet übermenschen in a Munich beer hall, and getting a prolonged standing ovation. We’ve seen this picture before,  and should understand where it can lead.

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Today’s German loves to think of himself as an environment-respecting, tolerant, pacifist and conscientious objector, or, if he’s of a certain age, a heroic member of The Resistance. But scratch the surface and add a couple of liters of Weizenbock, and you’ve got, well, the same old German we’ve all learned to admire so much over the years. For 70-some years, they’ve been keeping their heads down and channeling all their energy into building expensive cars and whatnot, but now the man-baby has them stirring again.

In the comment section of the WaPo piece, someone calling himself AngryGermans, starts by rightly pointing out that the Germans have promised to spend 2% of their GNP on NATO by 2024 and they are not in arrears, as Trump has bloviated (is there no one who can correct him on these things?), and so on. But he finally works himself up to:

Everyone in Germany hates the thought to have nuclear weapons. That said, i don’t think we would hesitate to build them if needed. Yeah and Germany won’t take years for it, like North Korea or Iran. We can do that in weeks.

To which someone who sounds suspiciously like Stewie Generis replies,

The proof that Trump is an idiot: he’s now got AngryGermans bragging that they can build nuclear weapons in weeks and their leader getting a standing ovation in a Munich beer hall for advocating German strength (sound familiar?). Angry Germans have shown themselves, repeatedly, to be the greatest threat to peace and sanity the world has ever seen. Thanks, President Crazypants. Wait till you get a load of what angry Germans will do to the rest of us as soon as their economy turns south.

Anyway, how does it serve our interests to undo decades of European/American diplomacy intended to keep the Russian bear out of Europe and the Germans under our military control?

It doesn’t. But you know whose interests it does serve? Wait for it…

I’ll give you a clue: his name begins with “P” and rhymes with shootin’.

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Fritz Knöchlein

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1940 Massacre at Le Paradis, in northern France. Trying to reach boats waiting at the port at Dunkirk to evacuate them, about 100 soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, part of the British Expeditionary Force fighting alongside the French, retreated to a farmhouse at Le Paradis, about 40 miles from the port.

They held off units from Germany’s SS-Totenkopfdivision (Death’s Head division) until they ran out of ammunition, and then tried to surrender. Two soldiers came out of the farmhouse waving a white flag and were mowed down by machine-gun fire from the Germans.

When they tried again, they were led to an open field where all their property was taken from them, then stood up against a barn wall where machines guns on tripods had been placed and where a pit had been dug.  Fritz Knöchlein was the SS-Haupsturmfuhrer and commander of SS-Totenkopf-Infanterie-Regiment 2 who gave the order to shoot the British soldiers. The Germans, as was their custom, then bayoneted any that were not yet dead.

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The massacre site

Miraculously, two soldiers survived. Albert Pooley and William O’Callaghan waited in the rain until dark then crawled out and hid for a couple of days in a pig-sty. They managed to get their wounds tended to, but they had no way to escape and again surrendered to the Germans. This time they were held as POWs, and, in April 1943, Pooley, who had a badly injured leg, was exchanged for some German POWs. When he got back to England, his account of the events was not believed.

But when O’Callaghan returned after the war and confirmed the story, an investigation was opened. A British military tribunal in Hamburg found Captain Fritz Knöchlein guilty of a war crime, and he was hanged at age 37 on January 21, 1949.

In this video, at about the 1:30 mark, you’ll find a story that includes the recollection of Bill Pooley who returned to the site.

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Fritz Knöchlein

Fritz always proclaimed his innocence with the usual progression of Nazi reasoning that went, more or less, along these lines: It never happened. OK, it happened, but I wasn’t there. OK, I was there but not in charge. OK, I was in charge, but I had no choice under the circumstances. OK I had a choice, but I followed orders. OK, I did it on my own, but you did worse and deserved it. You tortured me while in custody. Spare me because I have a wife and family.

Knöchlein was held in the infamous London Cage, and wrote letters of complaint about his treatment there.

In the internet age, it is always possible to explore all “sides” of any issue. This site for example, reiterates Knöchlein’s version:

Knöchlein alleges that because he was “unable to make the desired confession” he was stripped, given only a pair of pyjama trousers, deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved. The guards kicked him each time he passed, he alleges, while his interrogators boasted that they were “much better” than the “Gestapo in Alexanderplatz”. After being forced to perform rigorous exercises until he collapsed, he says he was compelled to walk in a tight circle for four hours. On complaining to Scotland that he was being kicked even “by ordinary soldiers without a rank”, Knöchlein alleges that he was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs, and beaten with a cudgel. Later, he says, he was forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit before being confined in a shower which sprayed extremely cold water from the sides as well as from above. Finally, the SS man says, he and another prisoner were taken into the gardens behind the mansions, where they were forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs.

  “Since these tortures were the consequences of my personal complaint, any further complaint would have been senseless,” Knöchlein wrote. “One of the guards who had a somewhat humane feeling advised me not to make any more complaints, otherwise things would turn worse for me.” Other prisoners, he alleged, were beaten until they begged to be killed, while some were told that they could be made to disappear.

That piece goes on to give a long “proof” about how Knöchlein was the wrong guy, and how the real culprit was already dead, and the Brits just needed someone to hold accountable, and poor Fritz was elected, and so on and so forth.

It’s like everything else nowadays. You get to decide for yourself which side of the story you like best, and one is no better than another.

#FireKushner

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As I write this, the hashtag #FireKushner is trending on Twitter. I have no idea what this actually means – for all I know,  the marketing department at Twitter has figured out that I want to hear this and they’re showing it only to me, because somehow someone will make some money if I see it.  The internet works in mysterious ways.

But something does seem to be happening out there. I’ve said many times that Trump has nothing to fear from the fact-based world as long as his “No Regerts” legions remain in their bizarre self-imposed hypnotic trance. And nothing will change for them until their beloved FoxNews changes something.

Every time I get a hopeful text or email from someone exclaiming that some incriminating piece of evidence has been uncovered that will finally sink the toxic tiny-handed man-baby, I tell them to wake me up when they see it on FoxNews.

But Roger Ailes died last week, and I can still hear someone singing “Ding dong the witch is dead” from the direction of Harvard Square every time I open a window. And Bill O’Reilly is gone, a casualty not so much of his horrible behavior, or of management’s desire to bring their organizational culture in line with the accepted norms of the rest of the world, but rather of the decline in advertising revenue he was bringing in.

And now Sean Hannity, the craziest of them all and the last of those who were there from the beginning,  has been given a “time out” for his reckless non-stop hawking of yet another fake Democrats-are-murderers conspiracy story, oblivious to the damage he was doing to the family of Seth Rich.

Those of us who pretend to understand how this works realized right away that the reason for this particular horror-show was to allow Hannity to avoid mentioning the unfolding Trump/Russia story for days at a time. That’s on page one of the Fox/Hannity play book. But, amazingly, FoxNews actually retracted the story, something they never do.

And as I mentioned yesterday, a FoxNews reporter was among the first to debunk Greg Gianforte’s slanderous fabrication that he strangled a Guardian Reporter because the guy had been aggressive with him. That’s a version that, in the past, FoxNews might have put out there and hammered on for a few days until the “Who can ever know the real truth” smoke-screen descended over it and neutralized the assault. But they didn’t.

And when I click on foxnews.com this morning, I’m surprised to see them featuring two stories that , on the surface, seem anti-Trump. The first was about John Boehner saying Trump’s administration has been a “complete disaster”, and the second is about how Jared Kushner tried to get a secret communications channel with Russia.

Mind you, I haven’t actually read either of these stories, or turned my TV to FoxNews – I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find out if I do. Maybe that Hillary Clinton impersonated Kushner and is the real culprit? Maybe that Boehner was actually quoting some “extreme left-wing” critic of Trump’s and went on to rebut the whole thing? Don’t know and don’t care.

The point is that something does seem to be happening out there. Maybe you can wake me up now.

“Not in our minds!”

Yesterday, Montana elected multimillionaire businessman Greg Gianforte to its one seat in the House of Representatives in a closely watched special election. Gianforte was hand-picked by the Republican party to run against Democrat Rob Quist, a folk-singer and musician, for the seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, who became President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior.

Assault charges had been filed against Gianforte earlier for throwing a reporter from The Guardian to the ground and strangling him after the reporter asked him about the new Congressional Budget Office scoring of the latest Republican health care bill, which, if passed, would mean 23 million people would ultimately lose health care coverage.

As he grabbed the reporter, Ben Jacobs, by the throat, Gianforte screamed that he was “sick and tired of you guys … get the hell out of here.”

Gianforte has often been compared with Trump. “Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,”one observer in Monatana said.  “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.” Nancy Pelosi called him a wannabe Trump.

In true Trump style, Gianforte first made up some nonsense about how Jacobs had been aggressive with him, but that story was quickly debunked by witnesses. FoxNews, remarkably, was among the first news organizations to set the record straight. Their reporter, Alicia Acuna, was there and said,

To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.

Three of the largest newspapers in Montana had endorsed Gianforte, but retracted their endorsements after the incident. None endorsed Quist, however. Gianforte has a history of Trump-like interactions with the press. The Independent Record said in an editorial,

We are also sick and tired – of Gianforte’s incessant attacks on the free press. In the past, he has encouraged his supporters to boycott certain newspapers, singled out a reporter in a room to point out that he was outnumbered, and even made a joke out of the notion of choking a news writer, and these are not things we can continue to brush off.

They also said,

We do not want this to be construed as an endorsement for any of Gianforte’s opponents, however. And we encourage all voters to review the information available, listen to their conscience, and vote for the best candidate for Montana at the polls today.

This is what passes, in Republican circles, for “taking the high road”. Paul Ryan, always a leader on Republican expeditions up the high road, also suggested Gianforte should apologize. Of course, a large percentage of the votes had already been cast before the assault took place, and Ryan was well aware that the House seat in question would remain under his control.

So courageous, Paul!  And we just love that serious expression of moral authority and disdain for indecorous behavior that you cultivate just for occasions like this.

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Some people, by which I mean yours truly, Stewie Generis, figured all this would just help Gianforte solidify his base and prove his bona fides as a warrior against America’s greatest enemy, the media, and also validate his ticket on the Trump-Train from Montana. If a Jew reporter from some liberal rag gets his hair a little mussed up, well, what can we say – ya gotta break some eggs if ya wanna make an omelette.

Anyway, with the win in hand, Gianforte was ready to move on from all this. At his victory rally, he said to a laughing crowd,  “I shouldn’t have treated that reporter that way. I made a mistake.”

“Not in our minds,” someone shouted back.

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Trash heap at the top of the world

It’s that time of year again. Each May,  there is a brief window of opportunity, granted by the seasons and local conditions, when you can attempt a visit to the top of the world.

Climbing Mt. Everest has become one of the world’s most expensive, deadly, and destructive hobbies. Every year thousands of hopeful climbers and tourists descend on the area, many of whom really shouldn’t be there at all.

And, of course, a lot of them die. There have been about 300 or so deaths on Everest over the years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first summited in 1953, and the Sherpas who guide the adventurers have died more often than anyone else. The last year without known fatalities on the mountain was 1977.

This year, the death toll has already reached ten, including an 85-year-old guy who was trying to reclaim his record as being the oldest to do it.

An industry has grown up around getting the clients to the summit one way or another, even if it means cutting some corners. The paying customers expect it, having put up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there.

In 2014,  Wang Jing, the 41 year old owner of a large Chinese outdoor clothing firm, defied a Sherpa strike by taking a helicopter to 21,000 feet, drawing some scorn from the mountaineering community.  She was trying to get to the “seven summits”, the highest point on each continent. The Sherpas were striking to redress many grievances they had about their treatment. This article covers the subject well.

The 1996 case of socialite Sandy Hill, who brought her cappuccino machine along,  got a lot of attention when Jon Krakauer wrote about her in Into Thin Air, his excellent account of the disaster on Everest she was part of.  He describes her as essentially being carried to the summit,

“the Sherpa, huffing and puffing loudly, was hauling the assertive New Yorker up the steep slope like a horse pulling a plow”

Hill became the focus of disdain and ridicule, a caricature of the rich and demanding westerner, and a self-promoter who put others in danger. She has her own version of the story, of course.

Everest is maxed out. It’s getting so there’s a traffic jam near the top, as people wait their turn to try for the summit.

everest line

A good deal of attention is at last being put on the environmental impact of all this activity.

This article talks about how people are leaving shit all over the place. Literally. It says

At base camp, visitors annually produce about 12,000 pounds of human waste each year, which often ends up in the waterways that nearby villages rely upon. “It’s getting notorious — people getting sick from water contaminated by dumping human waste,” Alton Byers, director of science and exploration at the US-based Mountain Institute, expained. “The place is getting covered with landfills, creating an environmental hazard for humans and animals.”

Here’s a good one from Outside Magazine with a lot more detail on the defecation problem. Gross, I know, but actually very interesting. Human laziness is the biggest part of the problem. It’s hard work removing stuff at those altitudes. Dead bodies are a particular challenge, and many have been there for decades.

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Nepal is trying to address the trash situation with a rule that everyone has to pack out 18 pounds of trash. Literally tons of spent oxygen tanks have been hauled out, but trash generation is far outpacing trash removal.

Pictures from base camp:

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Is there any place on this planet that we haven’t yet ruined? Please keep it a secret if you know of one – maybe it can remain free from our intrusions for a little while longer.

Trillion dollar infrastructure plan

Remember that one? At the end of March, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (a.k.a. Mrs. Mitch McConnell), assured us that the Trump administration would be unveiling its $1 Trillion dollar infrastructure plan in 2017.

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No details, though.

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Welp, the Trump team has come up with its proposed budget, and guess what? There are $200 Billion in infrastructure cuts in it. Huh?

Yeah, it’s shocking. Or it would be if you’re still capable of being shocked by anything these idiots do. Given Trump’s limited attention span and minimal grasp of public policy, I think we can assume the budget reflects Steve Bannon’s wish list  as much as anything else.

This short video clip is kind of funny I think. Trump actually seems to be reading about his priorities for the first time when explaining them to some governors in February. He seems genuinely surprised by what’s written down for him. “Can you imagine that”, he marvels when reading about our $20 trillion debt.

In this budget, there are deep cuts for Medicaid and anti-poverty efforts, huge cuts for science and medical research, the complete elimination of 66 programs, a historic reduction in federal employees, a huge increase in military spending, and so on.

Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and top economic adviser to President Obama, says the whole thing is built on an egregious accounting error.

Anyway, about that infrastructure program. Turns out the plan is for states and municipalities to sell off their “assets” – you know, bridges, airports, stuff like that –  to “unlock” their value.  Trump (or someone who has his ear) wants to spend $200 billion over 10 years to “incentivize” private, state and local spending on infrastructure. They sell their assets to private investors and the government pays them a bonus for doing it! Chao explains it this way: “You take the proceeds from the airport, from the sale of a government asset, and put it into financing infrastructure”.

Get it? Easy peasy.

They’ve figured out that privatizing public property turns out to create a better world.   Sell the airports to the Russians. The ports to the Chinese. The roads to the Kochs. What could go wrong?

A question of stamina

“She doesn’t have the stamina to be president.” That’s what Trump repeatedly said of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail back in September.  Click on this for a smile:

Hillary replied,

“As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee he can talk to me about stamina.”

This week, the man-baby ventured out of Mar-a-Lago for his first trip abroad, a perfect opportunity to impress us with his superior stamina. Well, as with all things Trump, it didn’t quite work out that way.

In Trump’s inspirational speech to the Muslim world, he stupidly referred to “Islamic extremism” when he should have said “Islamist extremism”, a difference his predecessor Barack Obama understood well.

Obama refused to use the expression “Islamic terrorism” for very good reasons, and FoxNews and Trump never stopped criticizing him for it. “How can we address the problem if we can’t even name it?” they howled. He won’t say the words because he romanticizes Islam, they said.

In using this expression that he has used so often before, Trump thereby offended the entire Muslim world (again!), something which his predecessor tried not to do. It isn’t helpful, Obama often explained. It makes things worse.

Well, now Trump’s White House is back in damage control mode as usual. Why did Trump use this foolish phrase? Does he not understand the distinction between “Islamic”, which describes things related to the religion, and “Islamist”, which describes an often violent political movement? No, no, of course he understands that. All that criticism of Obama was months ago. Ancient history. You can’t seriously be bringing that up now, can you?!

Well, why then? Are you ready? He was “exhausted”!  Apparently he lacks stamina! Unbelievable.

After one lousy plane ride, in which he had an entire 747 to himself with a full Trump-size bed to sleep in.

On Sunday night, a senior White House official said Trump’s decision to say “Islamic extremism” instead of “Islamist extremism” as written in his prepared remarks was not intentional but the product of exhaustion brought on by the rigorous travel schedule.

 

“Just an exhausted guy,” the senior White House official said.

 

If it’s too much to expect him to not make an idiot out of himself, and further incite the already insane,  because flying in total luxury and serenity for 14 hours is too difficult, well why send him in the first place?

 

We could just let good ol’ Rex take care of it. He’s got some stamina, doesn’t he? At least the stamina of any other Secretary of State. And a lot more than that tired old Crooked Hillary, right?

 

Asked on Air Force One about the President’s fatigue, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Monday, “He’s doing better than I am. And he’s got a few years on me.”

 

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“I’m Tired”

 

If you’re hoping that maybe someone in the Trump camp will say either that they were wrong to criticize Obama for trying to avoid intemperate language, or that they were wrong to be so strident in their attacks on Hillary’s stamina, well, we don’t have anything for you. It’s all old news, but thanks for the trip down memory lane, as Kellyanne Conway would say.

“Not a big media press access person”

That’s how Rex Tillerson, your Secretary of State, describes himself.  He was explaining his decision not to allow a pool reporter to travel with him on his trip to Asia in March.

Tillerson claimed the decision not to allow more reporters had to do with a desire to save money, saying the plane “flies faster, allows me to be more efficient” with fewer people on it.

That’s just science – everyone knows that planes fly faster with fewer reporters on them.

True to form, Tillerson yesterday held a press conference in Riyadh that excluded the U.S. press. No worries, though – he later provided a transcript of  the questions and answers given to the Saudi press.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, oversaw the process and stood alongside Tillerson throughout. He wanted to make sure that the free and independent press that Saudi Arabia is famous for had, you know, total discretion to ask and print what they want. I think that’s in the First Amendment to the Saudi Constitution, but I’ll have to double-check that.

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Transparency. That’s what the Trump administration is all about.

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Bird in a gilded cage

I generally have no sympathy for Melania Trump. Like the other Trump wives, she’s made her choices and can now live with them. She actually seems to have things pretty much her way, though, so no tears for her in any case. Doesn’t have to go to that backwater, D.C., doesn’t have to live with the man-baby, shops and gets her hair done at will.

I’m not aware if she has any “interests” beyond that, but that’s probably because I pay as much attention to Melania as I do Pippa Middleton, whoever that is.  All I know about Pippa is that he or she is in today’s Google news feed, and has something to do with being “royal” or whatever. It’s therefore probably not fair for me to have too many opinions about either of them – though being on everyone’s radar does seem like part of their shtick.

I do think it’s strange that on the one or two occasions that Trump has returned to New York since inauguration, he has actually stayed at his golf club in New Jersey, rather than Trump Tower with his lovely wife. Saving the taxpayers money, he explains. By creating yet another security nightmare at yet another location. Well, I guess he knows what he’s doing.

This picture is a bit sad, though. Even I have to admit that.

bird in a gilded cage

We’re used to seeing The First Lady walking dutifully behind The First Man-Baby, but Jesus Christ! Can’t these effing Saudis find one person who will talk to her? Or walk next to her? Or look at her? Isn’t there some American diplomat somewhere that could make this a little easier on her? How about a little dab of multiculturalism for the visiting dignitaries?

No. The women must remain as invisible as possible in the Kingdom. This is achieved in part by refusing to look at them when the infidels bring them along.

For the evening’s entertainment, the man-baby took part in a male-only traditional sword dance. So much fun.

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I’m not clear on where Melania spent the evening. Comparing nail polish with some of the wives somewhere out of sight? Couldn’t say.

Melania seems to me to be a bird in a gilded cage. I don’t know why anyone would aspire to this life or envy anyone in her position. Unlike the Saudi wives, however, it’s a role she chose for herself.

Mazel tov, fegelah.

Donald of Arabia

Can’t wait to find out what kind of problems Trump will be causing for us and for himself on his first trip abroad. He’ll be visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, of course, has put forward many nonsensical opinions about both in the past.

He is supposed to be giving an “inspirational” speech to the Saudis about moderate Islam. Last year, his Facebook page said, “Saudi Arabia wants women as slaves and to kill gays.”  And during a presidential debate, Trump said Saudis were “people that push gays off buildings” and “kill women and treat women horribly.”

As we have often been told in recent months, Trump is not “ideological”, but “transactional”. This is supposed to be a good thing for us because it frees him from the constraints of protocol and history, and allows him to exercise his purported greatest strength, that of master negotiator.  He’s a businessman, you see, not a politician. What a crock!

In fact , this “transactional” nonsense is just another way to say he has no principles, doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about from minute to minute, and certainly can’t be held to any past statements because he didn’t really mean them the way you thought and anyway they were just opening gambits in some fantastic negotiation he was conducting on our behalf.

Trump reverses course and contradicts himself so often that he ultimately takes all sides of every question. The beauty of this approach is that you can brag that you were “right” all along when whatever happens happens. It also helps him to speak in a weird kind of gibberish, never using complete sentences, and ignoring the usual subject-and-verb conventions of English language communication. He can rightly say that everyone misunderstood what he was really saying,  got it all wrong, and are criticizing him for political reasons and because they’re all losers.

Part of being “transactional” is to criticize every action and statement of your perceived enemies, the list of whom becomes longer every day. During the Obama administration, there was basically nothing that happened, big or small, that Trump didn’t find fault with. The simple explanation for this, of course, is that his “views” are just the parroting back of whatever he sees on FoxNews.

Anyway, when Obama went to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to attend the funeral of Saudi King Abdullah , Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf. Many people applauded her for this, including both yours truly, Stewie Generis, and my cousin Screwie. There are limits to how far the First Family of the Free World should have to go to accept customs that are in opposition to our own values, and maybe we should be “leading” in this area by setting an example.

Of course,  citizen Trump was outraged by the First Lady’s “insult”. He was worried about creating enemies, a subject about which he is truly an expert. He tweeted,

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Can’t wait to see Melania and Ivanka in head-scarves.

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Screwie speaks: Multiculturalism

My cousin Screwie came over the other day with a couple of six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon to watch the Celtics get crushed by the Cavaliers. He was flipping through channels after the game and landed on an episode of “All in the Family”.

It was the one where they flashed back to the time Gloria, the budding flower-child daughter, first introduces Michael, her long-haired leftie boyfriend, to Archie, her old-school working-class father.  Archie and Michael (or “Meathead”) are left alone to get acquainted.

Archie: What kind of a name is Stivic?

Meathead: Huh?

A: Where you from?

M: Oh, uh, Chicago.

A: I mean what’s your nationality?

M: (A little baffled) I’m an American.

A: I mean, where are your people from?

M: They’re from Poland.

A: (Rolls eyes) That would make you Polish, then.

Screwie’s had three or four PBRs at this point and says. “See? See how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction? This is why I hate St. Patrick’s Day. And Columbus Day”.

“What are you babbling about?”, I politely inquire.

He explains that in 1971, forty-six short years ago, this joke was on Archie. He was unenlightened and bigoted, and wanted to impose some sort of negative stereotype on Michael for being “Polish” when Michael wasn’t Polish at all, but a proud American, indeed every bit the American that Archie was.

Archie’s impulse was to “other” the Meathead, to assert his own right as a “real” American to decide who else had the Bona Fides to join the club. This was the definition of small-mindedness at the time – the opposite of what it meant to be “progressive”. Archie didn’t understand that everyone in this country (except the indigenous peoples, the “real” Americans) was an immigrant or the child of immigrants, all aspiring to be “American”. The audience roared. Archie was an idiot.

So I say, OK cousin, but what does this have to do with St. Patrick or Columbus?

Screwie says, “Look at this recent St. Patrick’s Day parade we just had. It was the usual cast of characters from Southie, having their one big moment to assert their “superiority” by keeping others out, namely gay people. None of them were “Irish”, any more than the Meathead was “Polish”. They were all Americans, the same as you, me, Archie, and Meathead. I’ll bet you none of them has ever even been to Ireland.” Even the Boston Globe writes, “The St. Patrick’s Day parade is the embarrassment that never goes away.”

“Same with Columbus Day. Columbus stumbled onto the “new world” while trying to do something else entirely, and ‘discovered’ a continent of people who were doing just fine for ten thousand years without him. And now all the “Italians” here want to have a parade. But they’re not “Italian”, they’re American.

And their antecedents, like the Irish, Polish, and all other immigrants before them, were desperately trying to scrape a few cents together to leave whatever hell-hole they were living in to come here and be ‘Americans’. Only generations later does that old country become something to hang your hat on and brag about, no matter how horrible it really was. And how horrible would it have to be for you to want to escape it without any money, prospects, English language skills, or anything else? Pretty bad.”

“Huh”, I reply, incisively.

But now Screwie is on a roll. “The problem is this crazy idea that’s taken root called ‘Multicuturalism’. The old idea of accepting the ‘tired poor huddled masses yearning to be free’ has morphed into ‘bring all your crazy shit over here and pretend you’re still in Beirut or Guadalajara or Mogadishu or wherever.’ Don’t bother learning English or Baseball or anything else – we’ll just accommodate you no matter what because that’s just how ‘progressive’ we are. Never mind that if you keep doing what you were doing over there, pretty soon life for you will be the same over here.”

“The very thing we saw as regressive and bigoted in Archie Bunker is the thing we now celebrate – no one wants to be just an ‘American’ now like Meathead and all the other enlightened people of 1971 did.”

Screwie is an organized thinker, and likes to make lists to clarify his points. The subject of multiculturalism is no exception, and he forges ahead, opening yet another PBR.

He says,
“1) Multiculturalism is an American obsession – no one else cares about it or thinks it’s a good idea. That’s because we’re the only country founded on the principle that everyone is welcome to jump into our melting pot. It makes a big stew called ‘American culture’ from all the ingredients brought here from everywhere else. Lately, we’ve forgotten about the melting pot and have become a Tapas place, where everyone has their own identity and ‘culture’, and ‘American’ culture, if it exists, is something to scorn.

2) It’s a one-way street. When I travel to Malaysia for business, I first read “Culture Shock – Malaysia”, because I don’t want to offend anyone. When in Rome, I try to do as the Romans do.  I learn that in Malaysia you don’t shake a woman’s hand when we meet in the office, because they’re Muslims and it’s not cool. When our diplomats travel to the Arabian peninsula, the women wear head-scarves to be respectful of their culture.

But when the Malaysians or Saudis come here, the women don’t shake my hand here either (and their men don’t shake the hand of the women here, even the CEOs), and their women still wear the veil here.  No one is reading “Culture Shock – America” when they come here, hoping to fit in. We defer to their ‘culture’ when we are there, and we defer to it when they are here. No one defers to American culture.

3) Multiculturalism marginalizes and even denies American culture, even though it pervades the world. When the Iranians refer to the ‘Great Satan’, they are not talking about our politicians or our foreign policy or our Christians and Jews. They are talking about American ‘culture’, that siren song of temptation – the movies and music, sexual freedom, gender equality, consumerism, pornography, hedonism, atheism, etc. etc. All of it. It threatens them and their culture (at least they worry that it does). I’m not saying American culture is better than anyone else’s or even that it’s good. I’m saying it exists, but that when we elevate and aspire to ‘multiculturalism’, we are denying it.

4) It re-enforces identity politics and grievances and gives old prejudices sustenance. That’s what Archie was doing with Meathead, and we used to understand it as a bad thing.

Remember that news story in Cambridge the other day? The one about the high school kids on the bus that were acting up and playing their music way too loud and annoying the other passengers? They were kids being kids and being inconsiderate and annoying, as kids will be. The driver tells them to pipe down, and that’s when the story becomes ‘news’.

See the driver was Whatever-White-American and the kids were African-American. So a seventeen year old girl starts in on how this is a ‘micro-aggression’ and racism because in her ‘culture’, music and sound and blah blah blah.  Not too long ago, the kids would have said “sorry” or “fuck off, old man” or whatever, but insisting that their right to annoy others is based in their ‘culture’? And that the driver is a racist? This is what they’re now taught in school. Wow.

5) Multiculturalism perpetuates and accentuates what divides us at the expense of what unites us. Another example from school: the kids have access to video equipment so they can create stuff to be shown on their own little TV station, which other citizens of Cambridge can watch. Kinda cool.

So I’m watching this perfectly charming piece made by a girl about her neighborhood and family and what she likes about school, etc. And she says, ‘On my street, there are about half American families and half Muslim families’.  Holy shit, I think. This is a problem.

A couple of months later, the Boston Marathon bombing happened.  A little punk named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, along with his older brother, did the crime. He went to the same high school as the video-maker girl, where he was given a college scholarship by his Cambridge neighbors, wrestled on the school team, smoked some dope, and appeared to be like any other kid. He lived just a couple of streets over from the girl who made the video in which the distinction between Americans and Muslims was casually and innocently asserted, and not corrected or edited out by any teacher. You do the math.

6) It weakens our position in foreign policy matters when our own people are hyphenated. I don’t think we’ll be going to war with Ireland any time soon, though with President Crazy-pants you never know. But if we do, should we send our Irish-American troops?  Or just our British-American ones?

Remember the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor? It is now recognized as one of the worst things we ever did – rounding up Americans with Japanese antecedents because we couldn’t trust them to be ‘Americans’. Just when we got to the point where we realized that mistake, we are now reversing direction and glorifying and encouraging everyone to maintain their real ‘identity’, i.e membership in some group that is not ‘American’.

7) People no longer come here to be ‘American’. They come here to remain what they were, but with political stability, economic opportunity, and social equality. This cannot sustain. And it’s un-American, There. I said it.

8) If we insist on everyone’s right to maintain their own culture, we are ignoring the many areas of conflict between what we want our culture to be and what you insist yours is. Should we encourage ‘culture’ hostile to homosexuality or women’s rights? Or one that includes genital mutilation, polygamy, or honor killing? We say we want to honor the other cultures, but some other cultures are built on what we abhor, and some are downright hostile to ‘American’ culture. See point 2 above.”

By this time my head is spinning. Screwie’s a lot smarter than I am, so I never just dismiss what he rants about. But after all those PBRs, I’m not sure he really means it all, and he’s starting to slur his words a little. I figured it was time to kick him out.

Anyway, it was time to fix dinner for my house-mates, who are proud Feline-Americans.

cats

Ransomware and Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a “cryptocurrency” invented in 2009. It is an alternative to hard currency that exists only in the form of computer data stored in digital “wallets” that can be exchanged for goods and services (i.e. transferred to someone else’s wallet) with any party that accepts it as a form of payment.

Bitcoin has gained significant traction and acceptance in the last few years, and given rise to hundreds of competitors, collectively known as “altcoin”. Bitcoin is now legal in most countries, with these exceptions: Ecuador, Bangladesh, Bolivia & Kyrgyzstan.

Cryptocurrency has the advantages of anonymity, speed, and de-centralized control. It is very attractive to criminals as a great new way to launder money and avoid prosecution.

The value of a Bitcoin fluctuates and many have speculated in the currency, most notably the Winkelvoss twins, who have by far the largest hoard, and who recently filed S.E.C. papers to create an Exchange Traded Fund in Bitcoin, with an initial offering of $100 million.  The S.E.C denied the offering, giving Bitcoin and the Winkelvii a major headache. They said they thought it was too susceptible to fraud because of the unregulated nature of Bitcoin.

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The value of a Bitcoin today is $1820, up from $75 less than four years ago. Gains in the value of Bitcoin holdings are taxed in the U.S. like any other Capital Gain.

bitcoin

The huge “ransomware” attacks experienced in over 150 countries this week, in which victims had all the files on their computers encrypted by attackers, relied on Bitcoin for payment. The hospitals, utilities, government offices, and all kinds of other industries that were victimized could not use their computer systems until they paid a ransom in Bitcoin.

Some people think the only reason Bitcoin has any value at all is its use in criminal activity. From the link:

If we could flip a switch and eliminate all illegal uses of Bitcoin, there would be nothing left of the cybercurrency.

It may be possible to eventually track down the source of the attacks by following the money, as some tracing of transactions is possible, but it seems unlikely that this will result in the prosecution or even identification of particular individuals.

This week’s ransomware code had three hard-coded bitcoin wallets specified that would receive payments.  An up-to-the minute record of Bitcoin transactions in the three accounts can be found on Twitter by following @actual_ransom. So far, not all that much has been paid into these accounts – less than $85,000 as of this morning. It’s not yet clear whether anyone who has paid the ransom has gotten their files back.

The Guardian had a nice explanation of the whole phenomenon this week, so to learn some more background, check it out.

The GOML summary: Bitcoin is a great innovation for criminals and Winkelvii.

 

Partisanship will prevail

This FiveThirtyEight article breaks down the three biggest scandals of the last 50 years to try to illuminate what might happen with the Trump presidency. The article stops short of saying it, but the take-away is that party loyalty will save even this toxic clown. Those of us who believe that Trump is clearly unfit for office and has already committed impeachable offenses, and who are wondering why in the world Republicans can’t see this, will have no satisfaction.

The article analyzes the Watergate, Iran/Contra and Lewinsky scandals, and points out that virtually every step of the way, only a handful of lawmakers of the incumbent’s party ever voted against him, and that those few who did were “centrists”, an obsolete designation in today’s G.O.P.

The piece notes that,

Even as Nixon aides resigned and the Watergate controversy grew around the president in 1973, many congressional Republicans were arguing that the investigations of the president were overly aggressive. Two future GOP presidents, George H.W. Bush (then chairman of the Republican National Committee) and Reagan (then governor of California), called Nixon and assured him that he could get through the scandal.

Reagan counseled Nixon to hang on because “this too shall pass”.

Even after the Saturday Night Massacre, which many see as the fatal blow for Nixon’s presidency, Republicans stood by him:

The House Judiciary Committee held a series of votes about recommending Nixon’s impeachment in July 1974. All 21 committee Democrats, and six committee Republicans, voted for the first article of impeachment, which essentially accused Nixon of obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in. The other 11 Republicans voted against that article. There were three articles of impeachment against Nixon. Nineteen Democrats voted for all three articles of impeachment. Just one Republican did. A majority of the Republicans on the committee, 10 of the 17, voted against all three articles.

Note that the committee consisted of 21 Democrats and 17 Republicans, and that Democrats controlled the House, unlike today, and only a simple majority is required to send Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. Today’s House is controlled by Republicans, 246-187.

house

What finally killed Nixon was that there were a handful of principled Republican Senators who were willing to do the right thing, notably Howard Baker, the top Republican of the three on the Senate Watergate Committee. Even he let party loyalty cloud his judgement, as he let his aides discuss progress with the Nixon White House.

The Senate at the time of Watergate was controlled by Democrats 56-42. A two thirds vote in the Senate is needed for impeachment, so the task at hand wasn’t as difficult as it is today, where Republicans control the Senate 54-44-2 (2 independents).

But today’s political landscape is completely different than those good old days of simple partisan divisions. Cable news, the internet, gerrymandering, Dark Money, Citizen’s United, and many other factors have produced a state of hyper-partisanship which really has little resemblance to the Watergate era.

This Wapo article, entitled “Only Republicans can stop Trump right now. History suggests they won’t.” says,

Recent history also justifies fears that Republicans will not stand up to Trump. Flake, McCain, Sasse and other senators have all clashed publicly with the president before. But those are just words, and talk is cheap. With the occasional exception when Republicans have been able to spare one or two votes, GOP senators have marched in lockstep with the Trump White House. McCain in particular has continued his years-long pattern of tut-tutting Republican leaders and then voting with his party anyway.

If Flake, McCain and others want to show us they are truly troubled, then they will need to do more than put out a statement. They need to join with Democrats and refuse to vote for a new FBI director (and perhaps even other Trump appointees or legislation) until a special prosecutor is appointed. Nothing short of that is acceptable.

It’s fun to watch Trump’s “disapproval” ratings go up each week and his “approval” ratings go down, but we need to remember (and the man-baby is constantly reminding us) that these numbers do not matter and that those who predicted the election based on such numbers were completely embarrassed.

What matters is that Trump’s approval rating among those who voted for him has not changed at all. It’s holding steady at 88% and will edge up whenever he does something “big”.

What matters is that the electoral map of Trump’s victory remains the same.

county

Obstruction of Justice + Treason = ?

A few days ago, the President of the United States admitted to the crime of Obstruction of Justice on national television. In an interview, he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired the Director of the F.B.I., James Comey, because he was frustrated by the investigation into Russian meddling in the election, which he said wasn’t real but rather made up by Democrats who lost an election they should have won.

This is Obstruction of Justice, an impeachable offense.

He left out the part about how it was the very same Comey’s timely revelations about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails that tipped the scales of the election. It’s hard to remember now, but the reason everyone was so upset about which email account Clinton used was that she might reveal classified information to our nation’s enemies, e.g. Russia. Even though no such information was revealed, Trump repeatedly called for Clinton to be “locked up” for her imagined crimes.

But with Trump, Obstruction of Justice is like everything else. Nothing. Republicans in Congress said he had a right to fire whoever he wants (not if it’s Obstruction, he doesn’t), that it’s all smoke and no fire, and so on.

Only four days ago, I wrote,

By next week it will all be forgotten, replaced in the “news” by stories about the selection of the new F.B.I. director, who, by the way, will certainly be loyal to Trump. Or by some other craziness, maybe the new investigation into voter fraud, led by a proponent of Voter ID laws. Or more likely by something we just can’t see coming right now. Your assignment: come back here in a week and add a comment about what it turned out to be!

Well, don’t bother. It didn’t take a week and we already have the answer. Yesterday, we learned that the President revealed highly classified information to the Russians in that meeting that only the Russian news agency was allowed to cover. He was bragging to the Russians about all the “great intel” he gets every day (Really? Who’d have imagined?). The WaPo article says,

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

This is Treason, also an impeachable offense.

To summarize, Trump wanted to lock up Crooked Hillary Clinton because she couldn’t be trusted to keep our secrets out of Russian hands, and applauded James Comey for revealing that the F.B.I. was investigating her handling of emails, an investigation which ultimately resulted in nothing.

In a fit of petulance, he then fired Comey for investigating the Russian hacking of the very emails we’re talking about, because it might be revealed that his campaign staff colluded with the Russians. Such a firing is unjustified, improper, and completely without precedent.

He then disclosed highly classified information directly to our enemies on his own. Personally. To the Russians. While standing in the Oval Office. With the Russian State News Agency present.

Does any of this matter to the “No Regerts” crowd? Nah. As everyone knows, Trump is Draining the Swamp and Making America Great Again. Lock Her Up. That’s what matters. When his current 88% approval rating with those who voted for him starts to drop, then maybe something will be done about all this. But there’s apparently nothing that could ever have that effect, so don’t hold your breath.

Obstruction of Justice + Treason = Nothing.

hat3

The internet is forever

We mentioned it as kind of a throwaway at the end of this post the other day, but it actually merits a lot more attention: all of Trump’s campaign promises have been deleted from his website, where they had been prominently featured since before the election.

The website still invites you to buy merchandise and sign up to join his “movement”, but it’s no longer clear exactly what that movement stands for. Other than firing people, of course.

merch

Since nothing is ever really deleted from the internet, his nutty campaign promises can still be found elsewhere, in archives, mirrors and the like. Although the man-baby would like us to forget all about it, we still have what we need to remember. Not that anyone was really going to hold him to any of this nonsense to begin with.

He deleted the call for a ban on Muslims entering the country “until we figure out what the Hell is going on”. That’s been a mainstay of the “movement” since 2015.

He deleted the promise that a southern border wall would be built and that Mexico would pay for it. That one was huge.

His boasting about his “very good” economic speech is gone.

His campaign speech to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare is gone. That’s the one where he said,  “No one even read the 2,700-page bill”, and promised to convene a special session of congress to get it done:

When we win on November 8th, and elect a Republican Congress, we will be able to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. I will ask Congress to convene a special session.

“Donald J. Trump’s New Deal For Black America” is also gone. That’s the one that had a “10-point plan for urban renewal”, including:

3. Equal Justice Under the Law. We will apply the law fairly, equally and without prejudice. There will be only one set of rules – not a two-tiered system of justice. Equal justice also means the same rules for Wall Street.

The “America First Energy Plan” is gone. That’s the one where he promises,

“We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

The “Drain the swamp” plan is gone. That’s where he promised to propose a Constitutional Amendment to set up term limits on members of Congress.

It goes on and on. You can read more about it here.

The thing that stays on the site, though, is the opportunity to contribute to the “movement” because “together, we are re-building our nation”.

And if you want to hear more about the inspiring story of the people that made the “Make America Great Again” hats, they’ve got you covered.

I’m thinking maybe it’s time for a GOML “movement” hat, as well, but I’m having trouble figuring out the best slogan. Right now, I’m leaning towards this one:

hat3

It’s been said that there are three captions that you could apply to any cartoon in the New Yorker that would make it funny in cases where you don’t get the original joke. Maybe one of them would make a good hat for our new GOML “movement”:

hat2

hat3

hat

Do you have another idea? Let’s hear it.

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

It was 54 years ago this week that a little-known folk singer named Bob Dylan told the most important figure in prime time television, Ed Sullivan, to take a hike.

In May of 1963, Dylan had a small following based on playing clubs around Greenwich Village and the release of his first album a year before, called “Bob Dylan”, which contained only two original songs. His second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, which would change  everything, had not come out yet.

freewheelin

Freeweheelin’ had a bunch of  soon-to-be-classic Dylan compositions on it, including “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Masters of War”, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.

Before Freewheelin’ dropped, Dylan was like a lot of other people struggling to be heard. Unlike almost everyone else, though, he got a huge break in the form of an invitation to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, which at that time was the biggest thing anyone could hope for. It was the country’s highest rated variety show – a guarantee of a huge national audience.

But on May 12, Dylan walked off the show because network censors rejected the song he planned on performing, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”. The song lampooned the loony right for its tendency to see a “Communist” everywhere they looked, and the network worried they’d be sued because the song equated the views of the Birchers with those of Hitler.

They asked Dylan to choose a different song and he told them to choose a different singer.

As you may know, The John Birch Society was co-founded by Fred C. Koch, the father of David and Charles Koch, who have been doing their best for some time now to ruin this country with their Dark Money.

An excerpt from Amazon’s description of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right”, by Jane Mayer:

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
     The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against “big government” led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. 
     The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.
     The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights. 

The Kochs have changed the face of Congress by bankrolling candidates that can be relied upon to support their views, and by attacking their opponents with all manner of fake news, made-up scandals, and assorted dirty tricks.

One of the beneficiaries of the Koch largess has been Trey Gowdy, a partisan hack from South Carolina, who has been nicknamed “Hillary Slayer” for his absurd and relentless persecution of Hillary Clinton when he was chairman of the Benghazi hearings, a two-year long waste of the taxpayers’ money. His behavior more closely resembled that of a demented piranha than a U.S. Congressman.

pir1

Guess who Trump’s first choice for the next Director of the F.B.I. is?

trey1 Trey Gowdy

Just when you think Trump can’t top himself, he surprises you. At least this time we don’t have to fret about whether Trump will again be so clueless as to ask Gowdy for his loyalty. Everyone already knows the answer to that one.  And it’s another big day for the sons of the Birchers – the Kochs are smiling about this.

As Dylan said all those years ago, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”

hardrain

“Who would do this?”

Remember last June when Bill Clinton met privately for a couple of minutes on a plane in Phoenix with Attorney General Loretta Lynch after realizing they were both on the same tarmac? Remember what a scandal it was?

lynch

The House Benghazi Committee was going to release its report on how Hillary Clinton had personally murdered thousands of people (or maybe that she had personally drowned thousands of puppies – I don’t really remember whatever it was supposed to be about, because it was all made-up nonsense), and the Justice Department was conducting an investigation of her email server.

The “optics” of Bill Clinton speaking privately to the AG confirmed that the independence of the Justice Department was “compromised”, according to Donald Trump, FoxNews, and virtually all Republicans, who all howled about “Crooked Hillary” for days.  It was a significant blow to her campaign.

Trump said to conservative talk show host Mike Gallagher, “It was terrible.  It was really a sneak. You see a thing like this and, even in terms of judgment, how bad of judgment is it for him or for her to do this? Who would do this?”

Republican John Cornyn called for a “Special Counsel” to take over the email investigation, reading an impassioned speech about this corruption into the Congressional Record.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group that has sued for access to records pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while leading the State Department, is asking for the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the meeting. They said:

“Attorney General Lynch’s meeting with President Clinton creates the appearance of a violation of law, ethical standards and good judgment. Attorney General Lynch’s decision to breach the well-defined ethical standards of the Department of Justice and the American legal profession is an outrageous abuse of the public’s trust. Her conduct and statements undermine confidence in her ability to objectively investigate and prosecute possible violations of law associated with President Clinton and Secretary Clinton.”

Well, less than a year has passed, and all talk of “the appearance of violation of law”,  “ethical standards”, “abuse of the public trust”, and “Who would do this?” has mysteriously ceased.

Trump has no problem calling in the head of the F.B.I. to an unprecedented private dinner while the Bureau was conducting an investigation of his election, and demanding his loyalty. Who would do this?

And the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions,  has demonstrated more than just the “appearance” of being compromised. He had recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his own meetings with Russians during the campaign (which he then lied about, under oath). In violation of this recusal, he recommended that Trump fire the head of the F.B.I. (apparently after Trump requested him to do this). This recommendation was the first of four stories about why Trump fired Jim Comey.

Trump soon enough gave other explanations through his surrogates, finally throwing them all under the bus, as usual, with his own interview, in which he said he had been thinking about firing Comey for a long time, because the Russia/Trump connection was fake news made up by Democrats. He thereby confessed to obstruction of justice.

He also said that he didn’t see why asking for Comey’s loyalty “would have been a bad question to ask”, thereby revealing once again that he doesn’t understand that he is not Emperor or King or Führer, but merely President.

But according to Republicans across the land, it’s all smoke and no fire. Ya gotta love their consistency, right?

You know what? I don’t even care about Trump and his lies and craziness anymore. I mean, of course I “care”, because he just might get us all killed while trying to distract us, but I don’t care about these stories – it’s all more evidence of the obvious. Trump is unfit to be president, and may well be deranged. It’s all been amply demonstrated many times before.

And I don’t care because no one else cares and therefore nothing will come of it and it doesn’t matter. Everyone already knows the Russians meddled. Everyone already knows Trump benefited and is happy about it. Everyone already knows he’s unfit for the job.

I admit I’m befuddled about why the Republican Congress keeps ignoring all these golden opportunities to get rid of this toxic clown. I mean they’d still have everything they want with Pence, no? But I guess they have their reasons.

The thing that keeps gnawing at me, though, is how quickly the Republicans cast aside their own words and their own alleged principles. How they go on as if there is no record of what they’ve said and the positions they’ve taken. Is there no one other than John McCain and, occasionally Lindsay Graham, to push back? Not that they don’t have their own motives, I’m sure, quite unrelated to “integrity”.

Why do people who should know better stand by this crazy clown so predictably?

Who would do this?

 

Trump has a different account of it

As always.

There is never a case where someone gives an account of a meeting or discussion with Trump that reflects negatively on him that Trump doesn’t give a completely opposite account of it. Essentially, he constantly is calling everyone else a liar. And even if you know he always does it, it still puts you in the position of playing, “Who you gonna believe: it’s he said, she said”. The actual truth is no longer clear. It’s now a question of belief.

One week after Trump became president,  he summoned James Comey to a private dinner with him. After some small talk, Trump asked Comey if he would “pledge his loyalty to him”.  Wow. Is this something any other president, even Nixon, would ever do? A führer, maybe, but not a president. The F.B.I., as everyone knows, is supposed to be independent and fair, and take pride in that. In fact, if anyone else was asking, you’d be tempted to regard it as a trick question, meant to test your integrity.

trump&comey

According to the NYT, Comey “declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others that he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.” They went back and forth on this point with Trump finally extracting a pledge of “honest loyalty”.

Trump, as always, has a different account of the dinner. Interviewed on NBC yesterday, he  said Comey requested the dinner and the subject of loyalty never came up. Comey’s apparently a liar. The NYT article goes on,

Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Comey’s associates said that the new president requested the dinner he described, and said that he was wary about attending because he did not want to appear too chummy with Mr. Trump, especially amid the Russia investigation. But Mr. Comey went because he did not believe he could turn down a meeting with the new president.

Who you gonna believe?

Anyway, none of it matters. With Trump, it never does. Consider:

1. By next week it will all be forgotten, replaced in the “news” by stories about the selection of the new F.B.I. director, who, by the way, will certainly be loyal to Trump. Or by some other craziness, maybe the new investigation into voter fraud, led by a proponent of Voter ID laws. Or more likely by something we just can’t see coming right now. Your assignment: come back here in a week and add a comment about what it turned out to be!

2. Trump’s supporters out there in Trumpland DO NOT CARE. Last night, amidst all the Comey coverage, tons of Trump voters in state after state were interviewed about Comey and the Russia investigation. They asked the question, “If it turns out that the President colluded with the Russians during the campaign, does it change your view of him?” Guess what they all answered? Every one of them.

These are the people that Republican Congressmen have to please in order to keep their jobs, and if these people don’t care, Congress doesn’t care. If Congress doesn’t care, the “media” is howling in the hurricane, and it’s all further evidence that they are the enemy of the American people.

 

Hunkering down or flipping us off?

It’s hard to know how to describe Trump’s behavior these days. Is he in a defensive crouch? Or is he Thor,  atop a mountain, laughing and hurling thunderbolts down on his enemies?

thor

A couple of months ago, we were all outraged when reporters from the New York Times, CNN, and others were excluded from a White House press briefing. It came on the heels of one of the man-baby’s regular episodes of “lashing out”, in that case against his “unfair” treatment in the media.

At the time, Dean Baquet, executive editor at the NYT,  said that “nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties.” The Wall Street Journal was allowed in, but said they hadn’t known about the exclusions, and “had we known at the time, we would not have participated, and we will not participate in such closed briefings in the future.”

In other words, Trump crossed a line that no other president had ever come near.  And, of course, he was unrepentant, shrugged it all off, and ignored the howls from critics, who, after all, he had already identified as the enemy of the American people.

The precedent was set, and yesterday he upped the ante. It was unfortunate timing, coming on the heels of the shocking firing of F.B.I. director James Comey, but Trump entertained Russian officials at the white House, including Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States.

Not wanting to answer any potentially embarrassing questions, Trump decided to exclude all American media, even FoxNews, and allow only the Russian media in to record the event. To repeat: the event was covered by the Russian state-controlled media, while the  independent American media was shut out.

russians

TASS photograph

I’m pretty sure there is now nothing Trump could do that would cause his supporters to demand that he follow any of the conventions of the presidency, or of a democracy for that matter.

It’s as if the country is now divided not between Republicans and Democrats, or Liberals and Conservatives, but between two opposing tribes who are locked in an all-out battle for supremacy. On the one hand, you have people who believe in the rule of law, the tripartite system of checks and balances, a free press, minority rights, and a government working for the benefit of all its citizens.

On the other, you have people who don’t care about any of that, or about conflicts of interest, or officials using their power for self-enrichment, or to benefit the few at the expense of the many. They only want to punish the other side, even if it means their own lives will be diminished as their “leaders”  enjoy the spoils. Every abandonment of normal behavior or slap in the face to a perceived enemy is fully justified and a triumph.

The two sides can no longer agree on facts, or even history.

Until very recently, just months ago in fact, Americans understood their enemy to be the totalitarian or authoritarian governments around the world, with the Russians at the head of the line, and were united in our struggle to protect the “American Way”.  But now, overnight, our government has aligned with the Russians and has identified the enemy as the American system itself, and those who want to protect it.

And the truly befuddling thing about it is that half the American people seem to be cheering it.

In related news, this week all of  Trump’s campaign statements have quietly been removed from his web site. You can still buy his merch there, though.

merch

Cox and Comey

Last night, our unhinged president fired the head of the F.B.I., James Comey, allegedly for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, something Trump had often praised Comey about even in the very recent past. Is there anyone who actually believes this nonsense?

Comey is currently leading an investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russian hackers, and everyone understands that the reason he was fired was to put a chill on that investigation.

It’s pretty funny that Trump was “acting on the advice” of the Justice Department, i.e. on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the very Trump Campaign people who apparently colluded with the Russians (and then lied about it under oath). You may not remember that connection, because the whole “Obama tapped my wires” thing blew it right off the internet, and therefore off of all other news sources, as well.

The best part is the short letter Trump sent to Comey telling him he was gone. It contains just three paragraphs, the second of which is truly bizarre:

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau. 

Huh?

Anyway, the entire world immediately saw the parallel here to the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was  leading the Watergate investigation. This led to the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus on October 20, 1973. This was the turning point for the Nixon Presidency and he resigned from office some months later, when he saw his impeachment was certain.

ARP 12 1974, APR 14 1974; Archibald Cox; Among Harvard visitors.; (Photo By Ernie Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The hashtag #TuesdayNightMassacre blew up on social media with many people exulting that this was certainly the beginning of the end for the man-baby, and that, like Nixon, he would ultimately be on the road to impeachment.

trump-nixon

Not so fast, kids.

There is a huge difference between the Saturday Night Massacre and the Tuesday Night Massacre, and it is one that means Trump will not be impeached. Not until after 2018, anyway. At the time of the Cox firing, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives.

Impeachment happens only if a simple majority of the House votes for “Articles of Impeachment”. And then a two-thirds majority of the Senate must vote for impeachment, after hearings presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. All of these offices are controlled by Republicans, and all their constituencies love Trump.

A second somewhat less important difference is that, back then, there were also a handful of Republicans who understood that our country and the rule of law are, in fact, more important that partisan politics. That’s not the case today. Virtually every Republican congressman who was asked about the firing last night, said something like it was “time for a change” or “the F.B.I. head serves at the pleasure of the President.”

Even the ones that have in the past demonstrated some independence, like Maine’s Senator Susan Collins, who said,

“The Justice Department was really understaffed for a long time, it took a while for the attorney general to be confirmed and his deputy was just confirmed I believe a week or so ago, and it’s the deputy who is a career prosecutor who had been designated to do the analysis so the FBI director’s actions and came up with the recommendation.

“The president did not fire the entire FBI. He fired the director of the FBI. And any suggestion that this is somehow going to stop the FBI’s investigation of the attempts by the Russians to influence the elections last fall is really patently absurd. This is just one person, it’s the director, the investigation is going forward both at the FBI and in the Senate Intel Committee in a bipartisan way. SO I don’t think there’s any link at all.”

But, on the bright side, assuming there is anything left to salvage of our government two years from now, and assuming Democrats can regain the House, Trump’s impeachment is now inevitable. Big assumptions.

The mid-term elections are more important now than ever before. I hope all the Bernie voters and Jill Stein voters can grasp all this and do the right thing.

 

Why no one is reading this

Spoiler Alert: it’s not because the content is less than brilliant 😉

Yesterday, I had an errand to do which required me to take a short subway ride on the Red Line during the morning rush. I went from Harvard to Charles/M.G.H. – in other words from one of the world’s most elite institutions to another, stopping at a third (M.I.T.) on the way.

I started thinking that more than a few people in the car were certainly involved in solving the problems of the present, and also predicting and solving the problems of the future. And then I thought about what a lousy job of predicting things the “futurists” have done in the past.

The futurists of the 1950’s completely whiffed on so many of the things they figured we’d have by now: flying cars made out of Saran-Wrap, elegant dinners consisting of a steak pill and a potato pill and a vintage wine pill, jet-packs we’d strap on for a short trip, a geodesic dome over the city ensuring clean air and perfect climate for all, and a million other things. But, OK, it was the 1950’s – of course they were wrong. Everyone then thought DDT, radium-dial watches, and a carton of Lucky Strikes would make life better for everyone, so you couldn’t really expect much accuracy from their predictions.

But the people who were predicting how the future would be just ten years ago completely missed the most important, pervasive, and life changing development of all: the “smart phone”.  On my brief subway ride, there were, I don’t know, maybe 150-200 people in the car I rode in, give or take.  Not one was reading a book or (gasp!) a newspaper, and not one was just looking blankly at nothing or taking a nap. Every one of them was absorbed in viewing a 5″ screen one foot from  their face.  Every. Single. Person.

phones

Get Off My Lawn is not very phone-friendly. Yes, you can read it on your phone and I know some of you do – but the format is different from what you’d see on a laptop or desktop. You may not see the “categories” links and you may not see the list of day-by day entries. There’s not much opportunity to select another article if you want to keep reading.

It’s rare for anyone to follow any of the links included in many GOML pieces. Clicking on links while using a phone is more cumbersome, and would take you to a different site from which it might not be that easy to return, rather just opening another tab or window as would happen on a desktop screen. And if you like what you’re reading, you are much less likely to email someone a link or forward it using the phone – cutting and pasting is out of the question, and even the usual “share” options are too much trouble. The “comments” that the regulars leave may not be seen on a phone without some determined effort, and you might not even think of leaving your own comment when using the phone.

But the real problem is the “long-form” nature of GOML. The reason people prefer Twitter to anything longer is partly that their attention span has been eroded by all the stimuli of our connected world, and partly because they’re busy and only read stuff on their phone while on the go. Long form + smart phone = meh.

Hell, I get bored just writing this stuff half the time – I totally understand why someone wouldn’t take the time to read it on a larger screen, much less a hand-held.

I had lunch the other day with an old friend from school days who said he’d been reading the blog and enjoyed it (Hey, Mouse, that’s you!).  I asked him if he shared any of it with his wife and he said she was so busy that she hardly had time even to talk to him, and that something like GOML just wouldn’t fit in. It’s too much of a commitment for most people.

I’ve had people tell me “I don’t read much any more” when I’ve tried to interest them in GOML. I suppose that could just be a polite way of saying they don’t really care about my particular take on things, but I’d rather blame smartphones.

Anyway, I’m sick of writing this now – I think I’ll go flip through Twitter for five minutes.

 

Trump attacks knowledge

The Environmental Protection Agency, under its new head, climate change denier Scott Pruitt, has explained that it  wants “to take as inclusive an approach to regulation as possible.”

To make this happen, they have dismissed five academic scientists from a major scientific review board and will replace them with representatives from the industries whose pollution the E.P.A. is supposed to regulate.

epa

Pruitt, Trump, and Coal Miners – life is good

According to the Failing New York Times,

President Trump has directed Mr. Pruitt to radically remake the E.P.A., pushing for deep cuts in its budget — including a 40 percent reduction for its main scientific branch — and instructing him to roll back major Obama-era regulations on climate change and clean water protection. In recent weeks, the agency has removed some scientific data on climate change from its websites, and Mr. Pruitt has publicly questioned the established science of human-caused climate change.

Ken Kimmell, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, “This is completely part of a multifaceted effort to get science out of the way of a deregulation agenda.”

Just a quick reminder to you all: we’re only about 6% through the first four years of this nightmare clown-show.

In other news, former president Barack Obama accepted a “Profiles in Courage” award at the J.F.K. Library in Boston on Sunday.

profiles

He has chosen to refuse the many requests he’s had to directly confront Trump on his agenda of reversing every initiative of the Obama administration, most importantly the recent idiotic “Repeal and Replace” effort now underway to deny tens of millions of Americans access to healthcare, so that the very rich can be just a little richer.

He explained that “To weigh in would be a violation of his duty as a past president to let his successor operate without hindrance from him.” If only his successor would grant him the same consideration!

In accepting the Profiles in Courage Award, which has also been given to George H.W. Bush, John McCain, and Gerald Ford, among others, Obama did say,

“It takes little courage to aid those who are already powerful, already comfortable, already influential, but it takes great courage to champion the vulnerable and the sick and the infirm.”

Courage and knowledge vs. cowardice and ignorance? Dignity and composure vs. dishonor and vulgarity? Competence vs. ineptitude?

The American people have made their choices.

Vive La France

“There is not a French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse.”

That’s what Emmanuel Macron, the centrist candidate favored to be the next President of France, said at a rally in Lyon the other day.  Both the extreme right and the extreme left in France hate globalization and its effects, including the dilution of what they think being “French” entails, so the centrist position amounts to “there is no “French'”.

Yeah, no.

I think we all understand that to be a meaningless slogan designed to garner votes by appealing to recent immigrants, those who would prefer not to be labelled “racist”, or those who want to send a message to Marine Le Pen by rejecting her position that there is a “French culture” and that she’ll decide who’s in and who’s not.

 

marine

Either way, tomorrow France will have a new President with no prior experience and no base of support in government. As the NYT puts it,

Neither has ever held national elected office. Each lacks any real base of support in Parliament and will be trying to build one from the ground up. The president of France is powerful only if he or she has a majority in Parliament to help push through his or her party’s program.

There are a lot of similarities between this election and our recent election, most disturbingly the revelation last night of massive Russian hacking of Macron organization emails, apparently with the goal of aiding Le Pen and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the whole electoral process.

You can also point to a lot of similarities between Le Pen’s candidacy and Trump’s in terms of what she’s been saying and who she appeals to. Maybe she’ll be a surprise winner like Trump, and maybe she’ll have trouble implementing her ideas without more support, like Trump. Unlike Trump, who doesn’t actually believe in anything except himself, she does seem to be a “true believer”. I’m not really sure which is scarier.

And, as with our election, many voters are voting not for one candidate but against the other.

Another thing that is similar is the disaffection of many younger voters. This quote reminds me of one I highlighted in this early blog entry about Bernie voters:

 “I didn’t know about the (email) leaks but now that I know about it, it won’t change my vote,” said Audrey Payet, a 33-year-old day care worker, in central Paris. She said she planned on abstaining because she did not want to choose between “a racist party and a banker party.”

Good thinking, Audrey. You shall have the government you deserve, just like the rest of us.

À demain!

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.

school2

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.”

school4

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

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.

sid4

 

 

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.

gw2

 

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

gw3

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”?

af1

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.

pats

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.

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

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:

promises

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.

manuscripts

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

petain2

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”.

ted landsmark

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.

rings

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.

winners

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:

pink1

pink 2

birds2

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.

headphones

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.

devos

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:

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”.

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.

mapThe 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

chuck1.jpg

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?

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:

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.

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:

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.