The answer: Trump’s tax returns

The question: How can we better understand Trump’s dealings with Russia?

Every Republican presidential nominee for the last nine elections released his tax returns. Before that, Gerald Ford (1976) released a summary showing total income and tax paid, though not the detailed return.

Nixon (1972) did not release his returns at first, but released a lot of information, including the previous four years of tax returns, in  December of 1973, after the I.R.S. began an audit based on allegations of his trying to game the tax code with questionable charity donations, according to a paper prepared for the United States Capitol Historical Society

Nixon tried to quiet criticism by asking that a congressional committee examine the returns as well. Unfortunately, that committee found that Nixon owed $476,431 in unpaid taxes and accrued interest, which in today’s dollars is over two million.

Note that Nixon released his returns while under audit. Trump’s favorite excuse for not releasing his returns was that they were under audit, which as has been pointed out over and over, is a completely made-up smoke screen.

Trump repeatedly promised during the campaign to eventually release his returns. Some quotes from the campaign trail:

February 25, 2015: “I would release tax returns….I would certainly show tax returns if it was necessary….I have no objection to certainly showing tax returns.”

January 24, 2016: “We’re working on that now. I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful, and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time….We’re working on it right now, and at the appropriate time you’ll be very satisfied.”

February 25, 2016: “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

May 10, 2016: “I’ll release. Hopefully before the election I’ll release.”

September 26, 2016: “I don’t mind releasing—I’m under a routine audit. And it’ll be released….As soon as the audit’s finished, it will be released.”

October 9, 2016: “As soon as my routine audit is finished, I’ll release my returns. I’ll be very proud to. They’re actually quite great.”

Here’s a more complete list, pre-dating the campaign, which includes a promise to release his returns when Obama releases his long form birth certificate.

OK, so Trump is a liar. Big whoop. Tell us something we didn’t already know.

But what exactly is in those tax returns that makes the man-baby hang onto them like grim death? Wouldn’t it be easier to resolve all the Russia questions just by releasing them? Is it so awful that he’d rather start a democracy-destabilizing Twitter war over made up wire-tapping accusations before showing them?

There are several things that Trump really doesn’t want you to know, that would be revealed in his taxes.

One of the less consequential is that we’d see how really uncharitable he has been, especially compared to other national figures, for example Barack Obama, who in 2009 gave over 30% of his income away, including the entire $1.4 million Nobel Prize.

But we kind of already knew Trump was not a generous or compassionate person. Small potatoes.

Much more interesting would be the revelation that he doesn’t actually own much property at all, just partial stakes in three buildings, and he has 500 million in debt obligations on those. Everyone would finally see that he isn’t what he claims to be in this area.

But the big revelation would be where his money actually comes from, and the huge scam he’s been running for years. Remember the scam in  “The Producers”? You sell a 50% stake in a show you knew was going to fail to as many people as you can. You pocket the money and hope the show fails right away. Then you tell the investors, “Aw, tough luck, partner – we’ll get ’em next time.”

Well that’s what Trump did with the banks during his casino-failure heyday. He was Max Bialystock times a million. When they finally wised up and stopped lending him money in the 1990’s, he turned to Russia and China, and now is deep in debt to them. Just how much is what we might learn from his tax returns.

Maybe someone in the “deep state” will help us out here. It’s our best chance at getting rid of this toxic clown. Where is Wikileaks when you really need them?

Performance Artist POTUS

As everyone knows by now, your president yesterday accused his predecessor of “Tapping his wires”.  The #wiretapping hashtag blew up on Twitter with at least as many people calling for Obama’s arrest as those pointing out how absurd it all is.

It is unclear where exactly the man-baby got this idea, but many have suggested he was re-acting to this piece on Breitbart, in which Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of using “police state” tactics to undermine the Trump campaign.

Of course, in the true Trump style, there was no vetting of the information, no consultation with the security agencies, no thought of the consequences of tweeting, not even a quick call to Jared or Ivanka to see what they thought. Just a direct, impulsive pipeline from the Breitbart website to the President’s twitter. It’s a pretty scary situation.

There’s really not much more to be said about this incident, shocking as it may be. To the rational among us, there are two possibilities: Trump believes this nonsense implicitly and lets the tweets fly, in which case he is stupid and insane, or he doesn’t believe it and lets the tweets fly anyway, in which case he is evil and insane. In all cases, this business is further proof of the obvious: Donald J. Trump is not fit to possess the nuclear codes.

But the weird thing is that from a political perspective the whole thing affirms Trump’s brilliance as a demagogue. First, he correctly assumed that it made no difference to his admirers whether the nonsense in question was true or not. It was true enough the second it came out of his twitter. The pitchforks and torches were brought out instantaneously.

Second, it had the desired effect of getting the Jeff Sessions lying-under-oath problem off the front pages, at least for a few days. As Trump has so often shown, the easiest way to get past a scandal is to create a bigger one.

And finally, it further serves to divide the populace and entrench their already dug-in loyalties, and his faction is powerful enough to get him the presidency. He also knows that there were more people who voted for him just to punish Hillary Clinton and the “libtards” than  there were people who thought he would do anything that actually needed doing. This is what they meant when they said they “wanted their country back”, and this is why political discourse in this country is ruined and will stay that way for decades.

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that the incident proves that Trump is completely unfit for the role of Chief Executive, not simply because he’s crazy/dangerous and insane, but because his “management style” is never going to change. That style never actually succeeded in business and can’t possibly succeed in government.

This article lays it out beautifully, and can be summarized by this quote:

“He’s not a great manager. He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

The Trump “organization” has never been an organization in the business sense at all. There was no board of directors, no hierarchical organization chart, no independent auditors – just Donald surrounded by a very small clique of family members. As his interests grew internationally, nothing changed, and no new levels of management were created. Trump made all decisions impulsively, and they often went wrong.

His true genius is in deflecting blame onto others.

Trusting your own gut and never consulting experts may or may not serve a family business, particularly as failure affects so few people. But it can’t possibly work in the job we’ve given him now. He is now charged with directing the largest organization in the world, and his lack of management expertise is really showing.

From the article:

Trump’s company, despite his grandiose portrayals of a sprawling empire, always at base was a mom-and-pop entity, and what Trump managed throughout his lengthy professional career was principally a core group of barely more than a dozen executives housed on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. Until now. As president, Trump sits at the top of a massive bureaucracy not of his own making, a complex hierarchy designed to help him handle the most information-intensive, crisis-driven job in the world. He appears to be struggling to adapt. Hundreds of positions remain vacant, key posts have been declined by wary nominees, poorly vetted picks have withdrawn or been rejected, and the day-to-day functioning of the West Wing has become its own running news story.

 

He’s kidding right?

So the moment of Trump being “presidential” has passed. It didn’t last very long and, really, was anybody fooled? You’re setting the bar for “presidential” pretty low when all the guy has to do is read some complete sentences off a teleprompter. The hard part, actually writing the complete sentences, has already been done by someone else, Stephen Miller I suppose.

Anyway, Trump almost immediately snapped out of the uncomfortable role of “leader” with some tweets about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer meeting with Russians, and, as could be expected, demanded an investigation. This is the usual thing of Trump distracting from and attempting to neutralize something real, in this case Jeff Sessions lying under oath, with something either totally made-up or totally inconsequential.

It works well enough to galvanize his 60 million into accepting the false equivalence and thereby changing the dynamic of the whole thing. But if that’s all there was to say about his “pivot”, I wouldn’t bother writing anything.

No, this morning he really outdid himself. At 6:35 A.M, he was up and already tweeting absurd conspiracies theories. We’re all getting used to the POTUS tweeting everything now.  He’s already been told the obvious: that he could take a giant step towards being “presidential” while greatly reducing the chances of shooting himself in the foot just by putting the stupid Twitter down. Permanently. Not gonna happen.

And doing it before breakfast?  He’s kidding, right? I mean, there was a moment when we thought that maybe the people around him would filter and vet his tweets.  Maybe Hope Hicks?  Someone. Then the use of Twitter might at least seem like a new tech version of real executive communications.  But first thing in the morning?  No, clearly Trump was thrashing around in a sleepless torment over how to deal with his enemies, who are many and surround him at all times. He got up and reached for his phone and blasted this out:

It’s really just too ridiculous. He’s kidding, right? Please tell me he’s kidding.

In the Bizarro world

The other day, Trump gave a very newsworthy speech to Congress. I didn’t watch the speech because I can’t stand listening to the guy, but I read about it the next day. It was apparently newsworthy not for the things he said in the speech, because, as usual, he didn’t say anything. The speech was light on policy and details, and long on slogans and self-congratulation. This is Trump as expected, so nothing newsworthy there. The best part, for me, was Trump imploring others to put aside “petty fighting”. Hilarious. Coming from a guy who has done nothing but petty fighting for years, this sage piece of presidential wisdom can only be offered in the Bizarro world.

No, it was newsworthy because Trump seemed, finally, to be “presidential”. Maybe this is the long hoped-for “pivot”, the pundits said. Maybe there really is another Trump who is actually qualified to do this job. In the Bizarro world, it is headline news when the President of the United States does not appear to be a petulant, incompetent, vulgar clown for twenty minutes.

Things that have been considered real news in the past are getting a little harder to find, but I was able to tease out a paragraph or two about the U.S. participating in the re-taking of Palmyra from ISIS. It is certainly good news to free this treasure trove of antiquities from  barbarians. But what struck me is that we are now apparently in a coalition with Russia, the Assad government, Hezbollah, and, by association, Iran. I guess it’s expected at this point that we would be in bed with the Russians, but probably most people overlooked the fact that it means being on the same team as Hezbollah, the Iranian client, as well. After all Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric, wouldn’t you think he’d be the last guy to authorize this? Not in the Bizarro world.

Everyone knows that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did certain things that Clinton tried to say were not “sexual relations”.  His otherwise excellent eight years of peace-and-prosperity were just about ruined by this unfortunate parsing of words. The crime he was impeached for was not these relations, sexual or otherwise, but lying to Congress about them under oath – the greatest sin you can commit in our government.  Remember? Well, now comes Jeff Sessions who, it turns out, lied to congress  under oath about conversations he had with Russians during the campaign. He has recused himself from the Trump administration’s investigation of itself (Bizarro!), but, really, shouldn’t he resign from his position as the nation’s top law enforcement official after committing the greatest sin you can commit? Not in the Bizarro world.

Hillary Clinton also committed an unpardonable sin, for which she was investigated repeatedly  by the FBI and hauled up before congress on multiple occasions: she used a public email account while Secretary of State. It might have been hacked, her opponents howled. There might have been Top Secret info in those emails! It wasn’t and there weren’t, but  it was enough to derail her presidential aspirations. Now comes Mike Pence, who, you may remember, was one of Clinton’s harshest critics on this matter. Guess what? He also used a public email account while Governor of Indiana. And it was hacked. And there was confidential information in his emails. And he’s fighting tooth and nail in the courts to make sure the emails are not made public. Will there be any consequences for Pence? Not in the Bizarro world.

And, then there’s the beloved Kellyanne Conway. I personally do not care if she puts her shoes on the furniture in the Oval Office or anywhere else, but I just love the hypocrisy of those who condemned  Obama for doing the same. Remember?

In the Bizarro world, only one of these acts is outrageous. But, as I said, ho hum. More important is the sanctioning that Conway will or will not receive for improperly hawking Ivanka Trump’s crap while being interviewed on TV. You can’t do that, Kellyanne. The Office of Government Ethics (remember that thing Congress tried to do away with overnight a while back?) recommended disciplinary action against Conway, but, in the Bizarro world, you know how that’s gonna work, right? From the Washington Post:

Stefan C. Passantino, who handles White House ethics issues as deputy counsel to President Trump, wrote in a letter Tuesday that his office concluded Conway was speaking in a “light, offhand manner” when she touted the Ivanka Trump line during a Feb. 9 appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

In the Bizarro world, the appearance of misconduct is just fine. And the appearance of being “presidential” is just awesome.

Where the jobs went

Are you old enough to remember the days when someone else pumped your gasoline? A guy came out and asked you whether you wanted regular or hi-test and how much. While he was pumping it, he washed your windshield, checked your oil and maybe put air in your tires.

At some point,  the “self-serve” option appeared and you could save some money by foregoing the “full-serve” extras. In New Jersey, this was never allowed because, allegedly, the motorist was more likely to set himself on fire than a “professional”. It seems to me that the “full-serve” option is getting harder to find, at least in my neck of the woods, and New Jersey is now the only state where it’s illegal to pump your own. Truth be told, it’s kind of a pain in the butt for most visitors who are accustomed to a quick visit for gas.

One of the big advantages of the pump-your-own model was that you could get the customer to do a job for free that you had been paying someone else to do previously. Other businesses saw the potential, and the result has been that there are a lot fewer jobs of a certain kind now to be had. Fewer bank tellers, retail check-out people, postal clerks, and so on. The customer can do the work.

With the rise of the internet, whole professions were obsoleted seemingly overnight: stock broker, travel agent, and so many others. Technology has enabled the elimination of middle-men of all descriptions. When you think of it, it’s just the natural progression of things.  Labor-saving, time-saving, and of course, money-saving are big drivers of a lot of technological change.

And the globalization of labor just made it a lot cheaper to do most manufacturing elsewhere.

The final blow will be the rise of robotics in the workplace. Assembly line work is an obvious example we’ve had for a while now. Warehouse pickers, baggage handlers, and lots of others as well have already experienced this . With the advent of self-driving cars, another whole class of jobs will soon wither away.

The bottom line is this: those coal-mining jobs Trump has promised to restore are not coming back, and neither are most blue-collar jobs that have already disappeared. Robotics is the main culprit, not the E.P.A. To get a glimpse of what’s coming, check this out:

Giordano Bruno

The Campo de’ Fiori is a lovely little square in the oldest part of Rome. A lively market for fruits, vegetables, flowers and more still flourishes there every day, just a couple of steps from the spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death. At night it’s filled with diners, strollers, and tourists soaking in the beauty and atmosphere, and exploring the boutiques and restaurants on the adjacent side streets.

Click anywhere on the picture below to see a live cam of what’s going on there right now.

campo-de-fiori

A couple of days ago, there was a small crowd gathered on this spot and a few speeches were given to remember what happened there on February 17, 1600. On that day, Giordano Bruno was led to the square on a mule, stripped naked, had his tongue bound, and was burned alive.

That’s a statue of Bruno, erected in 1889, in the center of the picture.

bruno

What crime had he committed? Heresy, of course. The Roman Inquisition found him to be a Pantheist. The Inquisition accused him of denying some basic Catholic tenets like the divinity of Jesus, the idea of eternal damnation, the virginity of Mary, and so on.

Bruno was a philosopher, mathematician and poet. He theorized about the cosmos, coming up with the ideas that the universe might be infinite and have no “center”, and that the stars were other suns perhaps with their own planets like ours, some possibly even supporting life. He figured all this out decades before Galileo, and, over the centuries, he has come to be regarded as a martyr for science.

Here is a nice little aggregation of reviews of the 2008 book, “Giordano Bruno – Philosopher, Heretic” by Ingrid D. Rowland, that provides some more insight about him.

Three gynocentric flicks

The French journalist, critic, and novelist,  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, famously observed, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Antisemitism is on the march again. In Europe, it’s the same old story – right-wing nationalism is resurgent. But there are a few new elements in the mix, including the condition of rising Muslim populations and their catch-all grievance of Palestinian victimhood. They are abetted by the  “intellectual” left, which has increasingly lost the ability to distinguish between vilifying Israeli policy (OK, if you want to split hairs, “Zionist” policy), and vilifying Jews.

In this country, though, something new seems to be happening. The rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers (60 so far this year), and the recent vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia has us all on edge. There can be no doubt that Trump’s embrace of Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right is a major contributing factor. It’s pretty clear Bannon doesn’t like Jews.

Is this what it felt like in 1933? Just a couple of news stories, but nothing to get panicky over? We don’t want to over-react, but we don’t want this to go unremarked either. What to do?

But you’re tired of hearing me rant about Trump, right? I get it. Man, he really sucks the oxygen out of normal daily life and social discourse, doesn’t he?  It’s exhausting.

I know – let’s go to the movies!

You know how everyone is always complaining about how there are no good roles for women, and how no movies pass the Bechdel-Wallace test any more?  Well, here are three fairly recent movies I can recommend, each with a strong female character at its center.

And the best part is they’re all about surviving the Nazis! Let’s go watch a couple of these and then we can reflect on Alphonse Karr’s aphorism. D’accord?

Ida (2014)

Phoenix (2014)

Sarah’s Key (2011)

If you haven’t seen these, I won’t spoil them for you (except maybe a little). In each case a young Jewish girl or woman survives the war against all odds. But, to me, the unifying theme of the three is the death not just of the Jews of Europe, but the death of Jewishness itself. Though the women survive, at least for a time, their Jewishness does not.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Europe of today very closely resembles the Europe of Hitler’s dreams. It’s hard to understand the enormity of the crime that was committed: one out of every three Jews alive in the world in 1941 was murdered by 1945. And in some swaths of The Pale, every single last Jew was killed.

Of course, the persecution and killing of the Jews is the thing that shocks and engages us, but it is the death of Jewishness itself that may be the larger crime, and therein lies the ultimate victory of the Germans. Yes, I said Germans. Despite all the retroactive claims of heroism and “resistance” that you hear about from today’s oh-so-liberal Teutons, in the 1930’s trying to separate the “good Germans” from the Nazis was a pointless exercise. It was a distinction without a difference – some people actively participated and others “only” watched.

It’s true that there may be a stray “Jew” here or there that has persevered in Europe, but not one Hitler would ever recognize.  That stray doesn’t dress “like a Jew”, isn’t part of a synagogue’s congregation, doesn’t speak Yiddish (an entire language and literature extinguished!), doesn’t read the “Jewish press”. All those trappings of Jewish life and culture have disappeared. “The Jews” are not a political force, not a cultural force, or really any kind of force, except in the paranoid fantasies of the right, which have survived the decades completely intact, also against all odds.

In the east, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and elsewhere, young people are completely unaware of the history of the Jews or even that  Jews ever lived there, much less comprised 50% of the population in many places.  The small town or “shtetl” of Shalom Aleichem, once the center of Jewish life, is no more. And, more significantly, there is no trace it ever was there to begin with. There are no Jewish schools or libraries, no Jewish businesses, no buildings with Jewish iconography, no birth, death or marriage records.

And almost every Jewish cemetery is gone as well. Like today’s antisemites, the Nazis and their collaborators loved to harass the living Jews, and could not let the Jewish dead rest in peace, either. But unlike today’s antisemites, they didn’t stop at merely turning over the headstones and scrawling their messages of hate. They carted off the stones and used them to pave roads, latrines and basement floors, a practice finally halted in Ukraine in 2013. All traces of Jewish life, and death, were obliterated.

As I read the news of the day, I wonder when will it be time to sound the alarm, and when will it be too late? And, this time around, will the righteous be able to stop it?

Alphonse Karr also said, “Every man has three characters – that which he has, that which he thinks he has, and that which he exhibits.”

Do not obey in advance

In the days just after the election, Timothy Snyder, the Yale history professor who writes so well about Eastern European history, observed that  “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism.”

He was worried about what a Trump presidency would do to our democratic institutions, and hoped that the lessons that should have been learned from the rise of Hitler and Stalin would keep us from repeating the same mistakes again. He offered a list of things that any citizen could do to try to resist the terrible possibilities.

All of the 20 suggestions on the list are good, but a couple stand out for me:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

The problem I see with the list, and why the cause is already lost,  is that it speaks only to those who both understand what is happening and think it’s a bad thing. In other words, it’s a list for people who already knew that Trump would be bad for the country. It’s the other 60 million that need to be convinced, and it just ain’t gonna happen.

Some examples:

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

Really? There is absolutely no way the people who love to hear the man-baby finally say the words “radical Islamic terrorist” and repeat the “Make America Great Again” slogan are ever going to act on this advice. FoxNews built a commercial empire (and now a political one) by betting that their viewers couldn’t do this. That’s exactly why we’re here.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Okay, Professor Snyder, I’m going to give you a bye on this because you wrote it before we learned about “Fake News” and “alternative facts.” The problem is that the Trump supporters apparently do not have the tools or the will to distinguish facts from nonsense. In the internet world, everything is just as true as everything else, and they’ve already made their choices.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

Yeah, no. Even this blog entry is too long already for most people to get through. The digital assault on our senses is so heavy that you really can’t ask people to read/study/investigate anything more -they’re already being sprayed by a fire-hose of information that they can’t sort out or interpret. (Except for a very few voracious readers and lifelong students. I’m looking at you, faithful subscribers to GOML.)

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

Too late again. The people you’re talking to here are already beyond this suggestion and have chosen to violate suggestion #1 as well: they’re obeying in advance. If you doubt it, glance at this article from yesterday’s Failing New York Times about how Immigration Agents have been set free by Trump’s tweeting, and aren’t really waiting for the courts to sort it out.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

We’ve talked before here about how Trump seems to be goading the bad guys into attacking us in the hopes that he can consolidate his power, marginalize the courts, and, above all, become the most up-voted, liked, favorited, highest-ratings president ever.

I almost didn’t bother including #5 here, but I wanted an excuse to  link to this other Snyder article on the Reichstag fire of 1933. If you don’t know about the fire, brush up with this article. Snyder says, “The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime.”

Setting the agenda

By now it should be frighteningly clear that Trump’s knowledge of history, current events, foreign policy, and just about everything else comes directly from FoxNews, which he watches religiously. Or Breitbart, if the situation requires. When asked early in the campaign what his foreign policy and military expertise was, he said “I watch the shows”.

If he sees Tucker Carlson interview some guy who wrote a book on how Sweden is dealing with problems caused by its liberal immigration laws, the next morning he gives a speech about terrorism and says “look at what’s happening last night in Sweden”.  Of course, he’s so inarticulate that this phrasing leaves plenty of room for clarification and deniability, and his surrogates must fan out the next morning to put out the fires.

If Trump sees Herman Cain on FoxNews talking about how the deficit decreased by $12 Billion in Trump’s first month vs. an increase of $200 billion in Obama’s first month, the next day the man-baby is tweeting about how the Fake News Failing New York Times isn’t covering this wondrous achievement. No point in mentioning how meaningless the statistic is and how Cain could just as easily have noted that the deficit increased under Trump.

From this piece:

Using the same logic, for example, you could claim that after four days in office Trump increased outstanding public debt by more than $10 billion, and that Obama had reduced it by $6 billion.

But there is no need for Trump to vet anything with advisers or experts, no need to think about the implications of his response, no need to moderate his interpretation or language. It was on FoxNews and that’s good enough for the man-baby. Let the tweets fly and the devil take the hindmost.

All during the Obama administration, Fox, Breitbart and other”news” outlets excoriated Obama and then Hillary Clinton for not using the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when talking about the threats we face. It was their daily mantra, meant to show how soft and misguided liberals and democrats were. Obama answered the criticism by correctly pointing out that it wouldn’t help solve the problem to use those words, and would almost surely exacerbate it.

But Fox and Breitbart are all the man-baby needs. He’s all about “radical Islamic terrorism” now. The problem is, there are people around him that know Obama was right all along, including his new National Security Adviser, H.H. McMaster. It just isn’t helpful to talk that way.

We’ll see how long McMaster lasts or whether Trump just ignores him. This much is certain: when FoxNews says it would be better to use different language, Trump will use different language.

Given the direct and almost instantaneous path from Trump’s favorite media outlets to his Twitter, can anybody seriously argue that Fox and Breitbart are not setting the national agenda at this point?

 

When will enough be enough?

I’ve just about forgotten all about Trump’s many and various displays of petulance, incompetence, ignorance and insanity of the last week or two. Something about no security precautions at Mar-a-Lago, I believe. Maybe a terrorist attack in Sweden? Kellyanne Conway said something or other that resulted in a week-long time-out. Signed something that’s going to screw up the environment, I think. Flynn something something. “See you in court” over what, now? A few others I just can’t remember at all.

It’s just exhausting. At least one outrage a day that, in normal times, would have blown up the media for six months, 24/7.  But with the man-baby, if it’s more than a day old, it doesn’t count anymore. Never happened. Never said it.  Don’t need you Soros-funded political hacks rooting around trying to dredge up ancient history. It hurts Our Country.

Today’s craziness tops them all (until tomorrow, that is). Yesterday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the tiny-handed clown amped up his attacks on the press (and threw in the FBI for good measure), repeating that they are “the enemy of the people” and criticized as “fake news” any anonymously-sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. Note that anything that reflects positively on him is real news.

He backed this up later with another of his Executive Tweets:

OK, we’ve heard all this before. Nothing new to see here, people. Just move along.  But the CPAC blast was quickly followed by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer,  barring the Failing New York Times, CNN, and other organizations Trump doesn’t like from his daily press conference.

Folks, we’re in uncharted waters here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Really, how long until the Brownshirts are in the streets?

Trump just does not understand how this country is set up. He quite obviously has never read the constitution and has no idea what the limits of presidential power are meant to be. Or the importance of an independent judiciary.  Or a free press.  This is what happens when you elect a businessman-in-chief who has never held elective office of any kind ever. You get a guy who cannot tolerate any sort of disagreement and feels he can punish anyone who doesn’t toe the line.

He’s warring with the courts, the intelligence agencies, the press, our historic allies, business executives that don’t praise him sufficiently, all members of either party in congress that show any hesitation. Everyone who doesn’t praise and flatter him.

It’s almost funny. Trump has vowed to punish “leakers” now, though he loved and encouraged Wikileaks just a few months ago, and openly invited the Russians to hack away at his opponents.

To me, what really illustrates Trump’s lack of understanding about the role of the press is his saying that news organizations should not publish stories with anonymous sources.  Journalists have fought this battle many times over the years and always won. It’s quite obvious why no one would ever talk to the press about any wrongdoing if they had to have their name revealed. In the Trump era, this is more important than ever, since you would immediately lose your job and be attacked relentlessly on the internet.

Here’s a deal for you, man-baby: you reveal the name of your special investigators that found all that “unbelievable evidence” in Hawaii about Obama’s real birth certificate, and we’ll consider having this idiotic discussion about anonymous sources again for the millionth time.

Standing by…

Shame upon the legal profession

Fifteen law professors specializing in legal ethics from around the country have filed a complaint against Kellyanne Conway. They come from Georgetown, Yale, Duke and other premiere institutions of legal study. The letter was filed with the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel and alleges “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation”. It says, in part,

“We do not file this complaint lightly. We believe that, at one time, Ms. Conway, understood her ethical responsibilities as a lawyer and abided by them. But she is currently acting in a way that brings shame upon the legal profession.”

Conway was admitted to the D.C. Bar in 1995, but is currently suspended for not paying her dues. The maximum penalty that could result from this action is disbarment. Conway is not practicing law in D.C. and has no intention of doing so. In other words, none of this is going to matter one bit.

And if someone still thinks that an action like this will result in any shame or remorse on Conway’s part, well, they haven’t been paying attention – that ship sailed months ago. More likely we’ll be hearing about “a politically motivated attack by so-called lawyers”, or “lawyers being paid by George Soros, blah blah blah”.

The Trump team is not bound by the rules and conventions that every previous administration has held themselves to, and that every previous congress has required. This letter is just another whisper soon to be lost in the hurricane of chaos surrounding Trump.

All bets are off, folks. There is a new standard in play: if Trump or someone in his circle does it, it’s OK.

If you doubt it, just think about what we’d be enduring now if the tables were turned. Imagine Hillary Clinton had been elected while receiving 3 million fewer votes than Trump, that there was evidence that the Russians had actively aided her campaign, that she refused to reveal her taxes (a historic first!) which might reveal her Russian business interests, etc. etc. etc.

This hypothetical is posed by David Frum, a neoconservative political commentator and former speech writer for George W. Bush, in a podcast discussion with Sam Harris, entitled We’re All Cucks Now. Give it a listen – it’s well worth it.

Well-poisoners win again

In this post from before the election, I was marveling at the willingness of Trump’s inner circle to support and tirelessly explain any idiotic half-baked bullshit that suddenly and without warning erupted from the man-baby’s twitter. From the post:

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

When I wrote that, I didn’t really believe that anyone would actually take a job actually poisoning an actual well. Especially their very own actual well. How wrong I was.

Last week, the tiny-handed one signed legislation that would roll back the “Stream Protection Rule”,  to prevent it from “further harming coal workers and the communities that depend on them.” See, Obama, or as most apparently know him, the illegitimately-elected Kenyan Muslim devil,  thought he’d try to curtail the coal industry’s long-time practice of freely dumping their mining wastes down the hillsides of Appalachia, creating a hellish moonscape of many of the towns below. And poisoning their water.

With his characteristic impulsiveness, thoughtlessness and boasting, Trump claimed the rule had been costing “many thousands of jobs” because of the expense incurred cleaning up the mess.

This Failing New York Times editorial lays it out, but the gist is that the rule may have cost 260 mining jobs a year, but that those were offset by new jobs created to assure compliance.

It’s just an outrage, not just because it’s exactly the kind of thing you knew this idiot was going to do, but because it was done essentially out of sight as the massive clouds of chaos emanating outward from Trump at all times block the sun and the real news. There’s just no time or energy to pay attention to many of the things that we really should.

This comment on the piece hits the nail on the head,

The good news? You get to keep your job.  The bad news? Your job is going to poison your family.  Welcome to the Art Of The Deal. Maybe you should have read the book before you voted.

The fact is that the coal jobs won’t be coming back anyway, because there has been a gradual shift globally towards natural gas and the coal market has shrunk. From the editorial:

Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.

The point of today’s screed is that we got the government we deserved. Just like everyone else all over the world that stands by and lets the worst have their way.

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care about the environment or jobs or abortion or immigration or anything else. The only thing he cares about is adulation, up-votes, attention, flattery, and “winning”. If there were more of those things to be had in imposing  tighter restrictions on the coal industry, that’s what he’d do.

I don’t know how it can ever happen and I’m not optimistic, but for this disastrous course we’re on to be changed, Trump must be made to believe there are more of us that will love him if he behaves differently than if he doesn’t.

Verdun

101 years ago today, the first shots in the battle of Verdun were fired. It was to become the longest and most destructive battle in what was then known as The Great War (World War I), and in all of history. By the time the battle was over 10 months later, there had been 377,231 French and 337,000 German casualties.

The battle was meant to start nine days earlier, and thousands of Germans were ready in their “stollen”, or tunnels. But snow, wind, rain, and poor visibility kept them in place.  The tunnels had no heat and were flooded, and the condition of the troops deteriorated with hunger and medical issues. During the delay, the French had some time to move their troops into position.

stollen

Germans waiting to start 

At 7:15 A.M. on February 21st., the fierce German bombardment began. 80,000 heavy grenades fell at a rate of 40 per minute on an area of half a square kilometer. The French trenches were blown up and men were ripped to pieces, buried under the earth or disappeared into the air. Trees are uprooted and body parts hung in the branches. The bombardment lasts nine hours.

The Germans emerge from their stollen at 5:15 P.M. expecting to find no-one alive, but the bombardment was less effective then they hoped, and the French are there to resist. The Germans use flamethrowers as an offensive weapon for the first time.

The battle continues for four days before the Germans are able to capture their primary objective, Fort Douaumont.

douaumont

Fort Douaumont at war’s end

The French at Verdun are under the command of Henri-Philippe Petain, later the Chief of State of Vichy France. Retreat was not an option for him, and he orders the defense of a line between the remaining fortifications at Verdun “at all costs”. The battle for the village of Douaumont continues for days, and ultimately the Germans prevail on March 2nd, taking many prisoners, including Charles de Gaulle.

This was the battle of the Anthill. It is re-created in Kubrick’s superb anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, which has an unforgettable opening tracking shot of Kirk Douglas, as Colonel Dax,  moving through the French trenches. See this movie again soon.

But Petain has achieved his objective, which was to delay the German advance for a couple of days while French reinforcements could be assembled. The battle for Douaumont bogged down, and the battlefield became a muddy swamp where neither army advanced for months. Fort Douaumont was finally re-taken by the French in October.

The overall battlefield itself was tiny, less than 10 square kilometers. Men on both sides lived in trenches and were fighting for just a few yards of territory at a time.

World War One Battle Of Then

verdun3

Now

The Hell of Verdun

A French captain reports: …I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud – kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane….

The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: …They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!…

A German soldier writes to his parents: …An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries….

Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as:
…a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over….

A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower attack: …Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with bewildered eyes….

A German eye-witness: …The losses are registered as follows: they are dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are occupied day and night – the holes are filled with slime and blood…

A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of Verdun. Since a hundred days – day and night – the sons of two European people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the most appalling mass murder of our history…

ossuary

15,000 French rest at Douaumont

Sweet Home Chicago

Eric Clapton called Robert Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived”.

Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27 near Greenwood, Mississippi. It’s not clear how he died and some legends have grown up around the subject, e.g. that he was poisoned by the husband of a woman he had flirted with. On his death certificate, the county registrar wrote that the man on whose plantation Johnson died was of the opinion he died of syphilis.

Just as the details of his death are murky, so are many of the details of his life. Again, there are a number of legends about it, the most important of which is that he made a deal with the devil at a crossroads near the Dockery Plantation (or near Hazelhurst or Beauregard, Mississippi, depending on the version).  He met the devil at midnight and handed him his guitar. The devil tuned it and played a few tunes then handed it back. At that instant Johnson attained full mastery over the instrument and gave his soul for the fame he would receive as a musician.

Only a couple of pictures of Robert Johnson exist, and a few recordings.

robert-johnson

When you listen to his music, you may not be struck at once by its greatness or power.

I think it’s like trying to understand how the first moving pictures or first “talkies” were received by the audiences of the day. They had never seen anything like them before and their minds were blown. To the contemporary movie audience, bored even with 3D or CGI magic, those early innovations now seem like nothing at all. Maybe it’s the same with the early music innovators.

During his life and even twenty years after his death, Johnson was virtually unknown. He got the recognition he deserved after the 1961 release of the Columbia album, “King of the Delta Blues Singers”, and a much wider and mostly white audience heard his music. Many of the greats of Rock and Roll and  R&B claim Johnson as a primary influence.

“Sweet Home Chicago” was one of four of his tunes included by the Rock and Roll all of Fame in their list of 500 that shaped the blues genre. This is the 1936 recording:

I was thinking about all this after stumbling on this version of Sweet Home Chicago, in which Barack Obama helps out the immortal Buddy Guy (and a constellation of other extremely bright stars).   Obama could do it all and make you feel good, too. No Executive Order or even Executive Tweet can roll back this part of his legacy.

Some other modern members of the “27-Club”, important and highly original musicians who died at age 27:

Jimi Hendrix “Smoking” taken in early 1967 in Gered’s Masons Yard studio in London.

Our enemy

It’s getting scarier.

I don’t see how this ends well for anyone. Even impeachment means violence in the streets and a further shredding of the fabric of our democracy. The man-baby will go down swinging, inciting the crazies directly via Twitter. We’re never going to be free of this lunatic, and the damage he causes will be permanent.

And we all know who controls the media, right?

jews

After he mobilizes the military to deport everyone that looks different from him, perhaps the media will be next. They should be, after all, if our tiny-handed president says they’re the enemy.

generals

Well, at least he’s getting the right guidance from his trusted advisers. They’ll surely put him on the right course.

manbaby3

Maybe a little rest and relaxation will clear his head.

vacations

I inherited a mess

No.  You inherited a fortune. You’re creating a mess.

Anyone who watched Trump’s “press conference” yesterday should be able to see now that the man is unhinged and almost surely ill. When I say “anyone”, I mean anyone who isn’t in some FoxNews-induced trance.

There is no question you can ask him that will be answered directly. Instead, the response will always be about his own greatness, the hugeness of his victories, the failings of his critics, or the conspiracies aligned against him. No-one who disagrees with him does so in good faith – all are lying, crooked, failing, losers, sad, fake, and so on.

Ask him what explains the rise in antisemitic incidents since the election, and he’ll answer that he’s the least antisemitic person anyone will ever meet and also the least racist. That is, if you can tease out an “answer” from the incoherent word salad he serves up. OK, we believe you – now answer the question if you would.

I can’t think of a single thing he’s ever said that wasn’t an exaggeration or distortion of the actual facts. And if you call him on one, he will insist he was right or tell you that you misunderstood, or, if absolutely necessary, say the words came from someone else. In this last resort,  his favorite locutions are some form of “A lot of people are saying…” or “This is what I’ve been told…”, etc.

In short, there is no use challenging him. You will never get a satisfactory answer and, if your words or ideas gain enough traction with others, you will be personally attacked, possibly sued, and made a sworn enemy of the lunatic fringe. Who needs it?

Of all the crazy shit he blathered about yesterday, the thing I find the most insulting is the idea that he inherited a mess. The Obama presidency, in addition to being the most ethical and scandal-free we’ve had in decades, made tremendous progress cleaning up a real inherited mess. Do you even remember the financial crisis of 2008?

Here are a few facts about the nature of the “mess” Trump has inherited.

mess

One of the things Trump bragged about in the presser was how well the stock market is doing since he was elected. Obama knew better than to brag about it because it could easily come back to bite you if you did, though he really did have something to brag about. But Trump’s bragging is especially funny if you remember that during the campaign he said stock prices were artificially high due to incompetent and biased Federal Reserve policy. He said Janet Yellen was “doing political things” by keeping interest rates low.

But what bothers most people, I think, is that we’re starting to realize there will be no actual governing over the next four years, only “campaigning”, by which I mean Trump ceaselessly proclaiming his greatness, denigrating others, and making up “facts” along the way.

Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

There is a highly secure “Situation Room” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he and his aides can figure out how to respond to fast-breaking crises like North Korea test-firing a missile in the neighborhood of Japan. It’s cleverly disguised as a public dining room. So seemingly blatant breaches of security are not breaches at all, but the normal kind of activity to be expected in any highly secure area. Or something.

As should be obvious to all at this point, Trump is an insane clown who has no knowledge of how the government works, or diplomacy, or security, or, really, anything other than how to be the center of attention at all times. It’s pointless to criticize an insane clown or attempt to hold an insane clown accountable for the insane things he does because, after all, he’s insane. Also, the miasma of free-flowing insanity around the clown at all times is so dense, you couldn’t possibly pick a good starting place or even prioritize it all or try to respond to any of it in a rational manner.

This Failing New York Times piece points out that Democrats are lamenting  “the fact that the national security incident played out in public view”. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Nancy Pelosi tweeted.

In this one, the scene at the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room is described and Trump is likened to the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack: “a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention.”  It goes on, “But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.”

From the article:

The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

None of this surprises me, or probably anyone else, at this point. It’s Trump being Trump. And by tomorrow, we’ll be on to the next insanity and this will be tossed on the heap of scandals never to be revisited.

I just want to point out one quick thing here before we move on to God-Knows-What: when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email account to send her aides information like changes to her calendar. She is therefore unqualified to be president and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and, if Trump’s “base” has anything to say about it, hanged.

Is there a double standard at work here? No, of course not. You can’t seriously compare the actions of a sane competent woman to those of an insane incompetent clown.

In other news, the fees to join the Mar-a-Lago “club” have doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the election, but he is absolutely not benefiting financially in any way from holding office. Or something.

Let There Be Light

There are three main reasons that the Scopes Trial didn’t really settle the issue of whether the Theory of Evolution should be taught in schools, and why we’re still arguing about “Creationism” almost a century later.

The first is that (really stupid) people thought Darwin was saying something like “your grandmother was a monkey”, and they knew that to be a priori false.

The second is that very religious people thought that it contradicted the Bible, which taught that God created Adam and Eve, etc., and that therefore Darwin’s theory was untrue and also heresy.

The third is that various politicians saw that what mattered in all this was not the science, but rather the votes of the really stupid people, so there was no real margin in going against the grain on this.

Isn’t that always the way.

In reality, Darwin doesn’t contradict the Bible at all, if you just think a little bit about the word “day”.  If I said, “Back in my day,  music was really music”, most people would understand that “my day” meant “my youth” or “my era” or “my time”, and not some particular 24-hour period.

From Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

OK, we have light and darkness on the first day. But it isn’t until the fourth day that we have the sun and the moon. Just a few verses later, Genesis says:

16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

So the question is, how long was the first “day” if the sun didn’t exist? Well it wasn’t 24 hours long, that much is clear. It was an “era” long, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s a million years or something else. It’s all a blink of an eye to God. Or maybe He hadn’t invented “time” yet.

My point is that you can stick to a literal translation of the Bible and still understand that evolution was merely the tool that God used to create things in the first “days”, and Darwin was not a heretic. If you’re not really stupid, that is.

I’m thinking about this today because on this day, February 13, in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy. His mathematical and astronomical observations had led him to support the Copernican idea that the earth revolved around the sun, and the Roman Inquisition was pissed about it. It was heresy and that made Galileo an enemy of the state.

Trial of Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition, 1633.

Trial of Galileo

It was heresy because it contradicted various biblical passages which “proved” the earth was the center of the universe. For example,  1 Chronicles 16:30 says:

30     tremble before him, all the earth.
    The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.

Of course, the translated word “moved” here could be taken in other ways.  You could have taken it in the sense of “changed”, and this would have avoided a lot of trouble, and (intelligent) people may have seen there was no conflict here between scripture and science.

Galileo pleaded guilty to the charge in exchange for a reduced sentence and lived out the remainder of his life under house arrest. In 1992, only 359 years later, the Vatican acknowledged its mistake. So much for infallibility.

One thing to understand here is that, as with creationism, the politicians had something at stake here beyond what was true. And by “politicians”, I mean Popes and Cardinals. The Catholic church was the “state” and the wealthy and influential had the highest offices in the church.

It was vitally important to them that their “constituents” believed that they were the agents of God, or else their authority and influence would be undermined. Science and truth were secondary.

Isn’t that always the way.

A couple of other things to think about as long as we’re thinking about whether science can help explain things or solve problems, and whether politicians will be speeding up the process or slowing it down:

The Larsen C Ice Shelf is cracking in Antarctica. Ice shelf A and B already cracked in the last few years.

ice

New Zealand has just experienced its largest whale stranding in decades.

whales

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch now covers 8.1% of the Pacific Ocean. There will be more plastic than fish  in the ocean by 2050.

pacific-garbage

Woman in Gold

This beautiful painting by Gustav Klimt, “Bauerngarten”, will shortly go on auction at Sotheby’s in London. It’s been appraised at over $56 million dollars, but Sotheby’s expects it to go for much more.

bauerngarten

Klimt is one of the most important artists of the late 19th and early 20th century,  a leader of the Vienna Secession movement, and revered by Austrians. His primary subject was the female body and some of his work, particularly a ceiling he painted at the University of Vienna, was controversial for being “pornographic”.

sculpture

Today, all his work is much sought after by both collectors and speculators. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey paid $88 million for “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II”, and last summer sold it to a buyer in China for $150 Million.

woman2

In his “golden period”, Klimt used gold leaf in his work, creating some very striking multimedia works, one of the most famous of which is “The Kiss”.

kiss

The most iconic work of this period was known for years as “The Woman In Gold”, which took three years to complete. It hung in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna for some sixty years beginning in 1941, and was regarded as one on the great treasures of Austria and a symbol of Austrian culture.

woman1

You might notice the resemblance of the subject here to the one in Oprah’s oil painting. It is, of course, the same woman, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the title of the painting, before the Austrians enshrined it, was “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer”. It was commissioned by Klimt’s most important patrons and friends, the Bloch-Bauer family of Vienna.

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna in 1881, the youngest of seven children. Her father was the General Director of the Viennese Bank association and the president of the Orient railway company. She married at eighteen to the 35-year-old Ferdinand Bloch, the son of a Prague sugar producer. He grew the sugar business into an important European industrial concern. Adele’s sister was already married to his brother. They had no children and both couples combined their names to Bloch-Bauer.

Adele made their home a salon for intellectuals and artists, and the Bloch-Bauer patronage contributed greatly to the flourishing of Austrian art in the period. The two Klimt portraits Adele commissioned were a small part of their legacy. Adele died suddenly at age 44 of meningitis.

Shortly after the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, the Germans barged into the Bloch-Bauer home and took all their possessions, including the Klimts.

Ferdinand fled and died in Zurich in 1945.  He had willed the art to his nephew and nieces including Maria Altmann (née Maria Victoria Bloch). Maria married Fredrick “Fritz” Altmann who was taken to Dachau shortly after their honeymoon in 1938 as a hostage to get the Altmanns to transfer their textile factory to the Germans. Maria and Fritz were able to flee with their lives to the U.S. All the property they left behind was taken by Hermann Goering.

Maria became a naturalized citizen in 1945 and worked in the clothing industry. Fritz died in 1954. The story of how Maria was able to reclaim ownership of the Klimts, despite the determined efforts of the Austrians not to return them, is told in the film, “Woman in Gold”. Check it out on Netflix.

Both the Klimt portraits of Adele are currently on display at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Ave. at 86th in NYC. They’ll be there until September when the oil will go to its new owner in China. You have a few months to see them together. See you at the Neue.

 

 

Dartagnan beat me to it

You’re assignment today is to read this short piece on the Daily Kos.

I was going to write something along the same lines, but there’s no need – Dartagnan beat me to it and laid it all out perfectly.

It starts by pointing out that 9/11 turned Bush’s presidency around. His popularity early in his term was terrible, but soared after the attacks. 9/11 gave him cover to launch a disastrous war that had been planned before the attacks, and also to throw off constraints on presidential power.

It goes on to say that everyone knows an attack is coming at some point now, and Trump is doing everything possible to provoke it while laying the groundwork for blaming others (the courts).

It will be much worse this time around for a variety of reasons including the fact that Trump conflates national interest with his own self-interest.

Anyway, just go read it and report back here tomorrow.

L’état, c’est lui.

The man-baby’s hands seemed even tinier this morning.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court panel of three judges unanimously refused to reinstate Trump’s executive order  banning travel from seven Muslim countries.  The bleating and tweeting began immediately.

Trump quite clearly does not understand our tripartite system of government and the separation of powers it requires. He does not recognize the authority of any person or institution to  question his “mandate” or even his judgement as President/Emperor/King.

Anyone who dares question him obviously has “political” motives.

All I can say here is that I really hope this does go to the Supreme Court and that they unanimously uphold the appeals court. Any other result certainly will be evidence of politics destroying our system.

In recent days, we have seen that we can’t rely on the republican congress to assert its own power, independence or integrity (ha!). The approving of all Trump’s cabinet picks so far, as preposterously unqualified and inappropriate as they may be, shows this clearly.

The press has been neutralized, including, and perhaps especially, the newspaper of record, the Failing New York Times.

There’s really nothing left between us and idiocracy but the courts. Maybe a supreme court decision defining the limits of presidential power, or, as everyone would certainly refer to it, “a rebuke”, would stem the awful tide of Trump’s bullying.

See you in court.

“Trump Lashes Out”

Google it.

The man-baby is always lashing out. If you google it today, you’ll find a few new “lashing out” stories on the first page. This is just the lashing out of one day.

First, he “lashed out” at Nordstom department store for dropping Ivanka’s line of whatever the fuck she has a line of. Really, didn’t we just hear about how he was going leave the running of all the family’s businesses to his kids? See, he didn’t have to divest any of his holdings because there would be no conflicts of interest as long as the kids took care of all the business. He’d stay completely out of it.

Apart from the conflicts of interest, though, there is the issue of using the bully pulpit to attack or praise individual businesses based on whether he thinks they support him enough. It’s an entirely new thing for a president to be doing. Trump has praised L.L. Bean (board members contributed to him), caused some firings at Wynn casinos (someone said something about Melania), has continued to criticize “Celebrity Apprentice” after promising not to (Schwarzenegger didn’t support him), and on and on and on. Anyway, let’s all go on a shopping spree at Nordstrom today.

Then there’s the story of Trump “lashing out” at Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that the man-baby’s Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, said Trump’s war on the judiciary was disheartening and demoralizing. This one’s kind of funny not just because it’s a great example of Trump shooting the messenger, but because this particular lashing was attacking Blumenthal for misrepresenting his Viet Nam service (Trump was a draft dodger).

Then there’s the link to Trump “lashing out” against the judge who ruled against his Muslim travel ban. You know, the “so-called” judge that was appointed by W. At least he didn’t accuse this one of being a “Mexican”.

If you go past the first page of search results, you’ll find links to Trump lashing out at Vanity Fair because they published a negative review of his restaurant, Trump lashing out at John Lewis, lashing out at “professional anarchists” who joined protest against him, lashing out at the Failing New York Times, CBS,  and even FoxNews for suggesting Steve Bannon is calling the shots, lashing out at the Australian P.M. in a phone call, etc., etc. etc.

One that didn’t make the list today, but should be there by tomorrow is Trump lashing out at McCain for questioning the “success” of the Yemen raid.

As Trump himself has told us, he’s the best at many things. But when it comes to lashing out, no one even comes close.

So unifying. So presidential. So insane.

Rule 19: Democrats can’t speak

I was starting to feel like Nostradamus the other day, when I looked back at my inauguration day post. I made a bunch of predictions about the coming Trump administration, including,

“Polls will be discredited when unfavorable, and embraced when supportive.”

“From here, there will be only pre-approved interpretations of events, statistics, economic indicators, battlefield successes or failures, climate change, science.”

Two days ago, your president tweeted:

And today, Yemen withdrew permission for any further U.S. anti-terror ground missions because of the recent raid that produced civilian casualties that outraged Yemenis, while the man-baby is repeating that it was a great success.

The thing is, it’s all happening so fast that it doesn’t really feel like “predicting” anymore. Trump is seizing all power by discrediting, mocking, and attacking all who disagree or criticize. And I’m not talking about Meryl Streep or Alec Baldwin here. And I’m not talking about all the incendiary nonsense of the campaign.

I’m talking about the things he’s said and done in his three weeks of being president. I’m talking about his war against the other branches of our own government,  and against other governments.

When Trump referred to Judge James L. Robart, a Bush appointee who ruled against his Muslim travel ban,  as a “so-called judge”, it was actually shocking to me to see the judiciary discredited in such a manner. In a tweet, of course. From the President of the United States.

I started to compose a few paragraphs of outrage but then I couldn’t figure out how to begin or how to place it in context. It wasn’t the beginning of anything and there isn’t any rational context. It wasn’t an isolated incident. It wasn’t something that was so out of character and unexpected that we all had to stop and debate about it.

No, it was just another drop of venom-flecked spittle in a continuous fire-hose of venom-flecked spittle that has blasted from this insane clown and his posse for a couple of years now.

As president, Trump has railed against our free press (of course), our independent judiciary, the loyal opposition in congress (meaning even Republicans who dare take a step back), our intelligence agencies, corporate leaders, our treaty partners, our historic allies, and everyone else who might serve as a check or a balance or even a headwind to the power he wants to consolidate as president.

And it’s not just those in positions to oppose him now, but also those who might dare to oppose him in the future. The absurd Kellyanne Conway felt obligated to tweet (!) on behalf of the administration against Chelsea Clinton, of all people, who had said something about Conway’s invented “Bowling Green Massacre” .

Why respond at all? Why dredge up some ancient “lie” that Chelsea’s mother once told? And the idea that “you” lost the election is telling. Chelsea Clinton didn’t lose the election any more than Barron Trump won it. But, see, Trump can’t stop campaigning against his enemies, even after victory, and needs to throw red meat to his “base”. Chelsea Clinton might run for something some day. But the main idea is that those who “lost” have no right to speak now.

Yesterday, the latest, and really most disheartening, thing was added to the mix. That ever-so-American American, Mitch McConnell, invoked the obscure Rule 19, to stop Elizabeth Warren from reading into the record her objections to the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

Warren was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King that called Sessions a racist, and one from the late Ted Kennedy saying he was a  “disgrace to the Justice Department.” McConnell invoked Rule 19 to silence her. The rule says senators may not “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

When you think of what’s coming out of the Oval Office now, this move and this rationale are just unbelievable. And that congress would so quickly and completely submit to and abet Trump’s crazy desire for all power and zero criticism makes no sense to me. Don’t they want any power for themselves?

For months, I was reassuring myself that Trump would get a rude awakening when he found out that being President was not the same as being Emperor. What fun it would be to see his face when congress pushed back or the courts ruled against him.

But the joke is on us. All hail His Imperial Majesty, Donald J. Trump.

Dreyfus, Zola, Herzl

On this day in 1888, the trial of Emile Zola for criminal libel began in Paris. He had published an open letter to the President of France, Félix Faure, accusing the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew.

Dreyfus was a loyal career soldier sentenced, for treason, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy, though evidence had been discovered and brought to the attention of authorities that another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was actually the guilty party.

jaccuse

Zola’s intention was to be prosecuted for libel so that he could present the exculpatory evidence about Dreyfus during the trial. Zola was convicted of the libel charge, removed from the Legion of Honor, and faced imprisonment.

He fled to England to avoid prison, but returned after eight months.  He was offered a choice between a pardon which would allow him to go free if he admitted to being guilty, or facing a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again and sent to prison. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon.

Zola said of the affair, “The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it.”  In 1906, Dreyfus was finally exonerated by the Supreme Court.

The sensational Dreyfus case divided France, but provided proof that the intellectual class could shape public opinion and influence state policy. This was not lost on Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian-born secular Jew, who was a writer, journalist, and political activist working in Paris at the time. Herzl was witness to mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial and stated that he was particularly affected by chants of “Death to the Jews!” from the crowds.

Herzl is often thought to be the father of Zionism, though some scholars dispute this. He was certainly one of the strongest early promoters of the Zionist idea in any case. What Herzl took away from the Dreyfus affair is that a Jew could never truly assimilate into any other national culture. No matter how French or German or American, or “un-Jewish” he might think himself to be, other Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans always would see him as a Jew.

As a young law student, Herzl had become a member of the German nationalist fraternity, Albia, which had the motto “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland”. He later resigned in protest at the organization’s antisemitism.

He concluded that a Jew would not be accepted as a real Frenchman or German, despite any efforts or displays of patriotism or heroism in the name of that nation. He was always an outsider, the “other”, and always would be seen to have “Jewish interests” that would come before and conflict with French or German interests. Herzl concluded, presciently it would soon be shown, that the Jews could not rely on the protection or beneficence of their “host”governments. To be safe in the world and regarded as citizens in full, they must have their own state.

Herzl worked hard to organize Zionist conferences, lobby European governments, and so on. In 1896, Herzl published “The State of the Jews”, a book which argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe either for Argentina or for Palestine, their historic homeland. The Jews possessed a nationality, he said, and all they were missing was a nation and a state of their own. It was the only way they could avoid antisemitism, express their culture, or practice their religion freely.

Herzl died in 1904, and his descendants all suffered tragic fates.

His daughter Paulina struggled with mental illness and died of a drug overdose in 1930 at age 40.

His son Hans had converted from Judaism to being first a Baptist, then a Catholic, and then flirted with various other Protestant denominations. He shot himself at 39 on the day of Paulina’s  funeral. He left a note that said:

“A Jew remains a Jew, no matter how eagerly he may submit himself to the disciplines of his new religion, how humbly he may place the redeeming cross upon his shoulders for the sake of his former coreligionists, to save them from eternal damnation: a Jew remains a Jew. … I can’t go on living. I have lost all trust in God. All my life I’ve tried to strive for the truth, and must admit today at the end of the road that there is nothing but disappointment. Tonight I have said Kaddish for my parents—and for myself, the last descendant of the family. There is nobody who will say Kaddish for me, who went out to find peace—and who may find peace soon.”

Herzl’s third child, his daughter Trude, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Trude’s son, Stephan Theodor Neumann, was Herzl’s only grandchild, and became an ardent Zionist. He was working in Washington D.C. in August 1946, when he learned how his mother had perished. He was despondent about her fate and his inability to help the Jewish people. He jumped to his death from the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Washington, D.C. on November 26, 1946.

bridge

G.O.A.T.

For decades, I hated the New York Yankees. Actually I still hate them, although most of the justifications for the original hatred have long since disappeared.

I hated them because every situation seemed to favor them, because they always had the best players, because they always had the most money, because they always had the most luck. And, most of all, because they always broke the hearts of lifelong Red Sox fans who repeatedly saw their heroes come so close before the Yankees invoked the inevitable luck/skill/magic/whatever required to  kill their hopes and dreams for yet another year.

And the Red Sox fans weren’t the only ones who hated New York. All the fans of all the other teams felt pretty much the same way. New York was the Evil Empire. They bought wins. They stole the best players from all the other teams, turning them into Yankee farm teams. They cheated. They were cheaters.

All the while, the Yankee fans could not have cared less. The Yankees were always playing when everyone else had gone home for the winter. The championships flowed into New York and their players were seen as the Greatest Of All Time, the G.O.A.T., whether they really were or not.

It must have been great to be a Yankee fan. You spent all those hours watching the games for six months and all that money at the Stadium to see them in person, but, in the end, it was all worth it. When the team won, you won. Your prayers were always answered. God liked you best.

Last night, the Patriots, my Patriots, completed the greatest and most improbable comeback in Super Bowl history. Everything had to fall their way, our way, in the end. And, of course, everything did. Records were broken and opponents’ dreams were shattered. All the detractors who were gloating when it seemed out of reach found that the joke was on them. Again.

In my old age, I finally know how it feels to have been a Yankee fan all those years. All my time and all the attention paid over the last six months was totally worth it. Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T.  I’m a good person. God likes me best. Everyone else hates us.

The Patriots won it all. Again.

 

 

The Rose Kennedy Median Strip

The North End is Boston’s oldest and arguably most interesting neighborhood. It was settled in the 1630’s and has been a residential neighborhood continuously since then.

“North End Aerial with Rooftops”

Click to enlarge

Paul Revere’s house is still standing, as is The Old North Church.

revere

Paul Revere slept here. Every night.

church

One if by land, two if by sea…

In more recent times, it was where the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 happened. And the Brinks robbery. It was the home of Honey Fitz, JFK’s grandfather, and Charles Ponzi, inventor of the you-know-what scheme. At various times it was the neighborhood of Boston’s African-American, Irish, Jewish, and, most recently, Italian populations.

brinks

This is where the Brinks robbery happened

molasses

Some say you can still smell the molasses in summer

For fifty years, the North End was physically separated from the rest of Boston by the monstrosity known as the Central Artery, an elevated highway that sliced through downtown  Boston, blocking out the sun and creating a daunting obstacle for any pedestrian who was bold enough to try to reach the North End on foot. In the picture below, you can see a couple of foolhardy tourists risking their lives walking from downtown on the left to the North End on the right.

centralartery1

In 1991, the Big Dig started, a huge infrastructure project that completely changed Boston. It added a new tunnel under the harbor to carry I-90 traffic to the airport and beyond, a new bridge to carry I-93 traffic across Charlestown, and lots of other stuff.  The centerpiece of the project was the removal, finally, of the Central Artery, and the building of a network of tunnels under Boston to carry all the displaced traffic.

Click to enlarge

All of this meant 15 years of chaos and disruption for downtown Boston and even more isolation of the North End. It’s been a decade since it’s been completed, and, by and large the traffic objectives were met. The 24-hour traffic jam that had existed in Boston was greatly mitigated and the monstrosity that had divided the city was removed. It was once again possible to walk to the North End.

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The Central Artery, before and after the Big Dig

All throughout the project, one of the most interesting questions was what would be done with the open space created by the removal of the Central Artery. As usual, everyone in Boston had an idea, but most agreed it should be green space in some form. In 2008, The Rose Kennedy Greenway was finally opened. The slogan on their website is “Boston’s Ribbon of Contemporary Parks”

OK. Finally to the point of today’s post. The Rose Kennedy Greenway is not all that green and not in any sense a “way”. It is, rather, a more-or-less contiguous chain of 23 parcels of land, each developed separately with no real over-arching theme or cohesion. You’ve got the Armenian Park, the Chinatown Park, the Dewey Square Park, and so on. And while it does reduce the danger of reaching the North End on foot, it does little to “invite” you to do so.

It is a failure and a perpetual finalist for the Stewie Award.

The biggest problem with the Greenway is that it replaced the car-centric planning of the Central Artery with a car-centric open space. To be fair, it at least does have a few blades of grass growing on it. And it looks good from a helicopter.

after_aerial_photo_of_greenway-0-0

The Greenway is bounded by a three lane road on each side of it, and the 23 parcels are divided by active cross streets, each with a set of traffic lights that has Greenway users begging for a few seconds to pass from one rather bland and joyless parcel to the next. The car is still king, and therein lies the problem.

greenway2

As the above photo clearly demonstrates, the more accurate name for the Rose Kennedy Greenway is certainly the Rose Kennedy Median Strip. Or perhaps the Rose Kennedy Lost Opportunity.

Three of the twenty-three parcels are shown in this particular picture, and the one in the top left reminds us of the car-centricity of the Median Strip. It is a ventilation tower for the tunnels below, and gives off the expected “keep out” vibe when passing close by. There are also several other of the parcels that are nothing but on- or off-ramps to the tunnels.

Ramps: click to enlarge

This next before-and-after composite gives you an idea of what the Greenway really achieved for pedestrians and “park” users. Not all that much.

composite

It’s better, of course, but think of what it might have been! Other big cities have dealt with similar challenges and have come up with ideas that really do invite the pedestrian in and keep the automobile out. New York’s High Line comes to mind.

high-line

In Paris, you have the Promenade Plantée, the “first elevated park in the world”.

paris

But we’re talking about Boston here, not Paris or New York. In Cambridge, right across the Charles, we know how to make life better for pedestrians. All you have to do is set aside a few hours every week, say Sunday afternoons, and prohibit cars from the place you want to enjoy. Check it out:

 It would be so easy to improve the Rose Kennedy Median Strip, too.  Just close off a few of those pointless cross-streets to traffic on Sundays. That would be a start. The traffic on Atlantic Ave. is practically nothing then, and everyone could still get where they want to go just by driving an extra block or two to make their turns.

All those businesses in the North End would be happy about it. They waited half a century to be re-connected with the city they started, and we didn’t really deliver on the promises made. But, again, we’re talking about Boston. Not gonna happen.

That’ll Be The Day

The day the music died was 58 years ago yesterday. On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) died in a small plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa.

holly

They were on a tour of 24 cities in 24 days called the Winter Dance Party. They were travelling by bus, but the bus was having heating problems, so Holly chartered the plane to fly his band, which then included Waylon Jennings, from Clear Lake to Moorehead, MN, where the 12th date of the tour would be.

Most people know the story of how Richardson asked to take Jennings’ place because he was sick. Holly joked to Jennings that he hoped that old bus broke down, and Jennings joked back that he hoped the plane crashed, a remark that haunted him his whole life.

And most people know that Valens “won” the last seat on a coin flip with Dion (of the Belmonts), though that story has been disputed. Apparently the $36 price of the plane ride was an important disincentive.

The Big Bopper was 28 years old. He was on the tour because of the success of his one hit record, Chantilly Lace, which elevated him from the menial jobs he had up until then. He was broke when he died, with only $8 in a savings account.

Hard to believe, but Ritchie Valens was only 17 years old!  He’d already had several big hits including the immortal “La Bamba”, and was certainly destined for greatness. His work is still an important influence today. Seventeen. Wow.

valens

At 22 years old, Buddy Holly was an old man compared to Valens, and was by far the biggest star of the three. He had recorded dozens of great tunes at that point, and wrote them all himself.  It’s hard to overstate his influence on those that came afterward. That’ll Be The Day was the first song ever covered by the Quarrymen, John Lennon’s first skiffle band that morphed into the Beatles. But everyone listened to Buddy Holly and everyone wanted to be like him.

Most of the tunes were simple, using just three chords and about two minutes in length, as the AM radio format of the day required, but Holly’s brilliance was to show how much could be done within those primitive boundaries.

Holly basically invented the modern rock band. The original “Crickets”  had Holly on lead and vocals, along with rhythm guitar, base, and drums. But the rhythm guitar, Niki Sullivan, quit the band after a year to go back to school, so the iconic line-up was lead, bass, and drums.

It’s all that was needed to make great Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Buddy Holly was one of the most important pillars of 20th century popular culture, and his music is as exciting today as it was all those years ago.

An ignorant piece of work

I’m often struck by how much more people in other parts of the world know about what’s going on here than we do ourselves. And how seriously they take the blatherings and tantrums of President Man-baby, while we, here in the U.S.,  are becoming inured to them.

Want to know how we’re doing in Australia? A good friend of the blog in Melbourne emailed us his thoughts under the subject heading, “An ignorant piece of work”:

Stewie,

Your President is clearly an ignorant piece of work. His real weakness however is arrogance. He seems to think Allies and others will do what ever he wants them to do, i.e. what ever suits him politically. He has no concept of respect and give and take in a relationship. I would have said it would be hard to disrupt the Aust / US alliance especially with a Liberal (rightish) govt here. But he has done that already. 

Most Australians viewed his election with some amusement – happy to see a country that is weirder than us and makes for interesting newspaper reading. He never had much support here but now he would have a popularity rating of way less than 20%. I don’t suggest he try and visit here anytime soon – there would be large and active demonstrations. There would certainly be very little respect. Even the far right that were all over his win have disappeared – no mileage in being associated with him. The Govt had been taking a fairly conciliatory line to things up to now. “The American alliance is an enduring one and we will work respectfully with whoever the American people chose” sort of thing. Now I hear people ask “why would I go to the US for a holiday?”. All he has managed to do is drive people away and make it politically difficult for our govt to support the US in anything. So when they need support he will have to give back way more than he will want. And our Prime Minister was a pretty successful business man and has a healthy ego so he is going to give as good as he gets. The satire on TV here makes Saturday night live look tame!

The Government here has a 1 seat majority in a 144 seat House of representatives and a minority in the Senate. And its polls are not great. The opposition is a real disciplined opposition looking for any opportunity to have a go.

So the real issue for the US is its become exceptionally hard, if not impossible, politically for the Australian Government to support the US in anything substantive. China is already our major trading partner and there has been a long held view, and a slow reality, that we need to be much closer to Asia and especially China. Turnbull (not Trumball!) has everything to lose by standing up for the US.

I would have thought someone would have briefed the US president on these fairly basic facts before he gets cranky on a call and then has it leaked to show how tough he is!

Binyamin Appelbaum of the Failing New York Times, @BCAppelbaum, made this great map showing the countries Trump has pissed off in his first two weeks. Don’t want to think about what it might look like four years from now. If we’re still here, that is.

map

Tweeting towards Bethlehem

Three weeks ago, #Trump told us his health care plan was just about ready –  “all but finished”, he said. “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon. We will have insurance for everybody. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better and much lower deductibles”.

Sounds great, man-baby!

It all came as a big surprise to Republicans in congress. They hadn’t heard word one about it, apparently. Not to worry, though. We’ve forgotten all about it now. Three weeks ago is the paleolithic era in the sped-up world of the man-baby. Promises, accusations, recriminations, Executive Orders, feuds – they all fly by at the speed of Twitter and are immediately lost in the ether, replaced by some new craziness.

Does anybody really care? Does anybody expect the “truth”? Will anybody ever hold him to any of it? No, no, and no way.

Did a health care plan even exist, other than in his own imagination? Who can say. Remember, in his “Birther” heyday in 2011 he said with complete sincerity and conviction that he had investigators in Hawaii that had found unbelievable evidence regarding Obama’s real origins. “They cannot believe what they are finding”,  he said on TV.  He’d reveal it all in a couple of days, he said.

He never revealed anything. “They” found nothing because there was nothing to find and because “they” didn’t exist, any more than the P.R. man “John Miller” did. It’s hard to know whether it’s all “lying” or something else. Does a delusional person “lie”?

Anyway, I started writing this because I was reading about our recent “successful” raid in Yemen, where a Seal Team 6 member was killed and three were injured, where civilians including some children were killed, and where we purposely abandoned a $75 million aircraft.  Mind you, I read about it in the “failing New York Times” so it’s “fake news” to begin with.

But the man-baby tells us it was a success, so it I guess it was. From the article:

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world.”

“Important intelligence” sounds good, maybe even better than his health care plan or his birther evidence. Maybe he’ll tell us what it is soon. Or maybe we’ll forget all about it after a few more crazy tweets.

Here are some candidates from this morning:

tweets

A Deal with the Devil

If there actually were any real “Christians” in the Republican electorate, they abandoned their religious convictions to vote for Trump, an amoral con-man with no religious convictions at all. Everyone knew what he was, but they threw away all the “family values” and other holier-than-thou rhetoric and litmus tests that were applied to all presidential candidates over the last several decades.

Many have said all along that what was really at stake in this election was the ability to nominate Supreme Court justices, particularly for the seat left open by the death of Anton Scalia a year ago. Since that time, the Republicans have behaved in an unconscionable way, refusing to even meet with a highly qualified middle-of-the-road Obama nominee, Merrick Garland.  The ninth seat has remained vacant, leaving the court split 4-4 on ideological issues. Of course, there should be no “ideological” issues at all for the SCOTUS, but rather only legal issues. But we’re way past that now.

And the reason the Supreme Court pick is so important to them is that their fondest hope in the world, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is now possible. This was their deal with the Devil: we’ll elect even the preposterously unqualified and manifestly dangerous Donald J. Trump if it means the end of legal abortion in our country.

In selecting Neil Gorsuch for the court, the man-baby has delivered. Gorsuch will be approved even though the current rules require 60 senators to vote for the approval and there are only 52 guaranteed republican votes. Democrats would be well justified in resisting this after l’affaire Garland, and perhaps they will. There are ten among them who must run for re-election in states won by Trump, so their calculus is a bit different. Maybe they’ll give in.

But it doesn’t matter – even if the Republicans can’t convince eight democratic senators to vote with them, they will simply change the rules to require a simple 51-vote majority for confirmation. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.

The first two weeks of Trump have been a vertigo-inducing amusement park ride, but without the amusement. I can’t imagine anyone in congress looking forward to four, or perhaps even eight more years of it.

At this point, I would gladly accept a different deal with the Devil: we give you the SCOTUS and the overturning of Roe. You give us impeachment for Trump’s blatant conflicts of interest. We’ll have President Pence for four years, and a return to some sense of normalcy.

Whaddya say? Deal?

 

 

Shake, stir, fire. Repeat

It’s getting worse.

tweet

Remember when the Republicans criticized Obama for not “working with them” (as if that was possible!), not compromising, and doing things on his own? Those were the good old days.

The man-baby isn’t going to work with anyone, not even Republicans. He stirs up his base and looks for fights. What he loves more than anything else is fighting – he constantly pokes his finger in the eyes of his “opponents”, i.e. anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep behind him. Obviously, ridiculing and intimidating critics is not a strategy meant to win people to your cause. It’s a strategy meant to silence any form of dissent and consolidate power.

Less than two weeks in and it’s getting scary.

According to Press Secretary Sean Spicer, “career bureaucrats”, like acting Attorney General Sally Yates, “should either get with the program or they can go.”  She’s fired.

And, for Trump, it’s not enough just to fire someone who disagrees with you. In the corporate world, you thank someone for their service, make up some bullshit about how they want to spend more time with their family, give them a nice letter of recommendation, and walk them to the door. In Trump’s world, you use the office of the presidency to call them a traitor in the hopes that their lives will be made miserable forever and that no further criticism from them will be possible.

It’s fascinating to watch the people around Trump regrouping and doubling down every day. I just can’t decide who the biggest problem is here. I mean, apart from Trump himself. Some are just enabling him by nodding, some are whispering new craziness in his ear, and some clearly have no courage and no soul. There are quite a few to choose from. You tell me.

Check out our previous thoughts on Trump’s love of firing.

Oh, and now you can follow @StewieGeneris on Twitter.

Conflicts, shmonflicts

Many have noted that Trump’s wild flurry of executive orders and personnel changes is actually the implementation of every nutty thing he promised during the campaign. He’s fulfilling his mandate and doing the things he said he’d do, we’re told. Only a lot faster and more recklessly than anyone had imagined.

So no one should be surprised about the “Extreme Vetting” travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This is something he campaigned on heavily from the beginning. “Something’s going on” he said more than a year ago, and he vowed to prevent Muslims from entering the country “until we figure it out”.

On Trump’s web site in December, 2015, he states his intention of curtailing Muslim immigration.

“…it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again”

His supporters loved this fresh new talk after years of FoxNews criticizing Obama for refusing to say the words “radical Islam”.

And he’s never deviated from the intent or the specific language. “I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” Trump said during the signing at the Pentagon after the swearing-in of Defense Secretary James Mattis. “We don’t want them here.”

But after all this explicit talk and action about keeping Muslims out, the Trump team is walking it all back a bit. There was so much outrage and chaos resulting from the ban, and so much criticism from even some of his own supporters, that they felt it was necessary to now explain that the ban wasn’t about religion at all. See, there are several Muslim countries not affected by the ban, so the critics are just full of it and creating fake news.

Here’s a map showing countries affected by the ban.

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As everyone knows, Saudi Arabia is the beating heart of “radical Islam”. Apart from being the location of the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, it’s where the poisonous Wahhabi orthodoxy was born and allowed to flourish. It’s where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from. You’d think Saudi would be number one on the extreme vetting priorities list.

The usual explanation here is that our oil interests override our security interests, and the Saudi Royals are actually our allies in the fight against terrorism (some allies!), since Al Qaeda regards them as apostates and the ultimate obstacle to establishing their “caliphate”.

But in the Trump era, none of that matters. What matters is where Trump’s business interests are.  What’s notable about the big Muslim countries not affected by the ban is that Trump has business interests in all of them, and no interests in the seven countries affected.

In Saudi Arabia, Trump has several LLCs, according to his most recent financial filings (four of nine have apparently been closed) , and two in Egypt. Also omitted from the list are Turkey, India, and the Philippines, all countries where Trump has businesses. Same with the U.A.E. where Trump’s name is on a golf course and residential developments.

People are completely sick of Trump already. His approval ratings, according to Gallup, dropped eight points in his first week in office.

When the inevitable impeachment proceedings finally begin, they will focus on these conflicts of interest and others. The fact that Trump is manifestly unfit for office by temperament, qualifications, experience, and mental health are the underlying causes, of course, but it will be the conflicts of interest that bring him down in the end.

Just as Trump was unable to “pivot” from being a candidate to a president, he is also unable to change from being a businessman to an elected representative. To him, the business of America is just another profit center for the Trump  organization. He just doesn’t get it.

 

 

Extreme vetting for armed toddlers

Just keepin’ it real: in America, you are ten times more likely to be shot by an armed toddler than by an illegal Islamic jihadist immigrant.

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At 4:42 P.M. yesterday, your president signed one of his beloved executive orders. This one prevented all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Green card holders from those countries would also be denied re-entry pending a case-by-case review.

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J.F.K. Airport

At international airports,  hundreds of people who had unknowingly boarded their planes hours earlier were denied entry to the U.S. on landing. Families were separated, people with legitimate and important business we’re placed in custody. Demonstrations erupted and lawsuits were filed. The Department of Home Security issued statements. Judges issued temporary rulings. No one really understands what it all means at this point.

Well done, man-baby. Your insatiable desire to be the center of attention and to see your name on every media outlet all day every day has been satiated for a couple of hours. You have given the giant snow-globe we all now live in a vigorous shake, and you can rest for a while while others float about and try to regain control of their lives.

Chaos,  the essential ichor without which the man-baby cannot function,  is abundant for now. How, exactly, making everyone in the world hate us more every day will result in increased safety for Americans at home and abroad is anyone’s guess.

Watching the coverage on MSNBC, one got the idea that there might be riots in the streets and that perhaps impeachment was possible by the end of the day. If you flipped over to FoxNews, however, you would be unaware of the crises – they just weren’t covering it.

In any case, the president will do what he wants. Those closest to him know him to be an honorable, wise, intelligent, prudent guardian of American values. They love him unconditionally, and trust him to do what’s best for all of us. If you doubt it, just watch this short clip to glimpse the devotion.

Ronald McNair

Thirty-one years ago today, Ronald McNair died.

He was only 36 years old and had already accomplished more than most do in a full lifetime.

In an NPR interview a couple of years ago, his brother, Carl, said  Ron saw possibilities where others only saw closed doors. Carl told this story about the nine-year-old Ron:

Ron, without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts, decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library. The library was public, but not so public for black folks, when you’re talking about 1959 in South Carolina. As he was walking in there, all these folks were staring at him — because they were white folk only — and they were looking at him and saying, you know, ‘Who is this Negro?’

So, he politely positioned himself in line to check out his books. Well, this old librarian, she says, ‘This library is not for coloreds.’ He said, ‘Well, I would like to check out these books.’ She says, ‘Young man, if you don’t leave this library right now, I’m gonna call the police.’

So he just propped himself up on the counter, and sat there, and said, ‘I’ll wait.’ 

The librarian called the police — and McNair’s mother, Pearl. When the police got to the library, two burly guys come in and say, ‘Well, where’s the disturbance?’ And she pointed to the little 9-year-old boy sitting up on the counter. And the policeman says, ‘Ma’am, what’s the problem?’

By then, the boys’ mother was on her way.  She comes down there praying the whole way there: ‘Lordy, Jesus, please don’t let them put my child in jail.’ And my mother asks the librarian, ‘What’s the problem?’  “He wanted to check out the books and, you know, your son shouldn’t be down here,” the librarian said.

And the police officer said, ‘You know, why don’t you just give the kid the books?’ And my mother said, ‘He’ll take good care of them.’ So, the librarian reluctantly handed over the books. And then, Carl says, “my mother said, ‘What do you say?’ 

And Ron answered, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Ron ultimately earned a PhD. in Physics from M.I.T.  He was an accomplished saxophonist and a black belt in karate.

In 1978, he was selected as one of thirty-five from a pool of 10,000 for the astronaut program at NASA. He was a mission specialist on the Challenger in 1984, only the second African-American to fly in space, and the first of the Bahá’i faith.

He had composed a piece of music to be played on his second Challenger mission, STS-51-L, which lifted off January 28, 1986. It would have been the first piece of original music recorded in space.

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mcnair-3

This Land Is Your Land

If you have visited any of the National Parks, you know what a treasure they are and how important their protection is.  I suppose it’s possible to visit one of the parks and not be impressed and awed, but not for me.

There are more than 20,000 people who work for the National Parks Service. As far as I can tell they are almost universally dedicated and underpaid, and are just really outstanding individuals. I’m sure there are the same number of bad apples in that group as in any other, but I’ve never run across a single one.

The parks are under pressure from people who want to cut funding to them and exploit the resources within them. They are public property in an era where that very idea is anathema to the powerful, and their education mission is threatened by those for whom all education is an expression of partisan politics, as we have seen in recent days.

It’s too depressing to think of what will be lost if the parks system succumbs, so today I’ll reminisce in advance of any loss by posting a random few of my own photos.

Click on pics to enlarge. Also, please send Stewie some of your own pics or memories of the National Parks.

Acadia (via Elaine)

Carlsbad Caverns

Crater Lake

Denali

Glacier

Grand Teton

Grand Canyon

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Mt. Hood

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Olympic

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Mt. Ranier

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Redwoods

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Great Smoky Mountains

Yellowstone

Zion

As good as true

So the man-baby is calling for a “major investigation” about the imaginary voter fraud that’s been bothering him. He claims there were 3 -5 million votes cast illegally for Hillary Clinton in the election (and none cast illegally for him).

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As with most of what Trump blathers and tweets, there are absolutely no facts on which to base these fantasies. There are no “studies”,  no news reports (other than a couple of instances where people voted twice for Trump), and certainly no real support from other Republicans, who once again have to either nod their heads at his crazy assertions or hunt down a molecule or two of honesty or courage. Always a challenge for them.

And, of course, it immediately came to light that Trump’s daughter Tiffany was registered to vote in two states, as was senior strategist Steve Bannon, and Treasury Secretary pick Steve Mnuchin. Oh, and also son-in-law and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner as well as Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

There have already been nine investigations on this issue, and none have found any problems. In fact, the opposite was found: only four verifiable cases of voter fraud out of 130 million votes cast. I guess maybe those investigations weren’t “major” enough.

If you believe Trump is actually playing chess at the Grand-master level, you might think that what this is really about is the creation of more stringent voter ID laws down the road, which everyone understands will benefit Republican candidates in future elections.

If you believe, as I do, that the man-baby doesn’t have the attention span needed for chess, and that there’s actually no evidence he knows how to play checkers either, then you’re left with a couple of possible explanations for this weirdness.

One is that it’s just inconceivable to him that people don’t love and respect him as much as they should, so he creates a narrative that explains the apparent disconnect, usually involving crimes or conspiracy, and always involving “unfair” treatment.

Another is that this is yet another example of the Master Distracter at work. Today we’re not talking about Russian shenanigans, conflicts of interest, nepotism, or anything we should be.  Dilbert was on point today.

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I think that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as well as one other thing: once you assert it and repeat it a few times, it’s as good as true. We’ve talked about Trump’s use of the Big Lie  before, and also how he’s not tweeting at you or me but at his base of 60 million believers. For them, it doesn’t matter if there are actually any studies, or, if there are, what they might find. For Trump’s minions, voter fraud is already a real thing because Trump said it was.

It’s already as good as true.

 

Lysenko echoes

Trofim Lysenko was a geneticist (of sorts) who rose to become the head  of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which was the broad network of plant and cattle breeders, academicians, and research facilities operating in the Soviet Union from 1929-1992. Lysenko and his ideas, now known as “Lysenkoism”, dominated the organization for 30 years, and led to the formal ban on teaching “Mendelist” genetics (i.e. real genetics) in the Soviet Union, which lasted until the 1960s.

According to Lysenko, acquired traits could be inherited. In other words, if you grafted a branch of a plant of one species onto a plant of another, you’d be creating a new hybrid plant whose characteristics would be passed on to its descendants. Or if you plucked the leafs off a plant, its descendants would be leafless. In other words, Lysenko was not a scientist at all.

Lysenkoism was very attractive to the Soviets because it was “politically correct”, a term invented by Lenin, meaning that it was consistent with the underlying Marxist view that heredity played a limited role in behavior, and that a new “breed” of citizen, a selfless Soviet Man, would be created as generations lived under socialism.  Lysenkoism also held promise for addressing the famines created by the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. And Lysenko himself had risen from the peasantry and developed his theories “practically”, i.e. without scientific experimentation. All good, right?

The control of politics over science got to the point where Stalin personally “corrected” Lysenko’s draft of his 1948 opening address to the Academy,  “On the Situation in Biological Science”.

Looking back from our advanced and enlightened 2017 perspective, we can see the absurdity of it all, and appreciate the harm it all did, not just to science and “truth”, but to the millions who might have been properly fed without it.

And we can easily see that the real problem was the  cult of personality around Stalin. That one individual had the power to say what was science and what wasn’t, and that lives could be destroyed by such a pronouncement, is the ultimate indictment of the totalitarian model. And when you add in the personal limitations of that individual – paranoia, insecurity, superstition, the willingness to embrace nonsense as fact – you know it will end in catastrophe.

Lucky for us we live in a democracy with checks and balances, where one man cannot determine what science is, and one man cannot silence dissenters with the stroke of a pen. We live in an open society where the scientific method is understood, even with the occasional Inconvenient Truth it reveals. Right?

Wrong, suckers!

Your new president has banned expressions from within any part of the federal government of thoughts on climate change that conflict with his own nutty mindset. And just to remind you what exactly that mindset is, here’s what he said in 2012:

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Tweets from Badlands National Park with actual facts have now been deleted by Man-baby-fiat. Of course nothing is ever actually gone from the internet once it gets there, so, for the curious, here they are:

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The Interior Department had its Twitter account shut down as well after two re-tweets regarded as unsympathetic to Trump during the inauguration. They’re back now, for the moment anyway.

Web pages about climate change, LGBT rights, civil rights and health care have disappeared from whitehouse.org. Archived Obama-era pages here.

Did we think this was possible? Could Obama or anyone else in the past have gotten away with this? Where’s Congress? Where’s the outrage? Who will say “no” to this guy? It hasn’t been a week and free speech has been happily thrown out the window.

We’ve seen the climate change denial among Republicans for years. Here’s a 2013  opinion piece from Forbes  on Lysenkoism and climate change. But it took the election of the man-baby to make all their dreams come true.

Screw facts, truth, science and the liberal elite horse they rode in on.

Disappointing, predictable

So the first few days of the Trump administration are in the books and it’s pretty much what we knew it would be.

In meeting with lawmakers, he repeated the preposterous nonsense, or, if you prefer, “lie”, that he actually won the popular vote, and that it only seems like he didn’t because of the millions of illegal immigrants who voted for Hillary.

Sean Spicer, the new press Secretary, had a couple of meetings with the press that gave us a pretty clear indication of how it’s going to be. In the first, he asserted that the crowds for Trump’s inauguration had been the biggest ever (more preposterous nonsense) and, gave us a clear indication of Trump’s highest priority: constant affirmation of his popularity, legitimacy, and greatness. Who beside the man-baby really cares about the size of the crowd?

The second Spicer performance was the first actual “press briefing” (full summary here). It was notable for some revelations about how we’re ready to fight in the South China Sea, how we’ll be working with Russia in Syria, how they’re actually serious about moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (not just posturing like everyone before them), and so on.

It was also notable for who he called on and in what order. Tradition requires the first question to go to the Associated Press, seated in the front row, center. But it didn’t. The first question went to the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid of little journalistic repute. The New York Times was finally called on at the end of the session. In other words, screw protocol, it’s my way or the highway. CNN better shape up or suffer the consequences.

Spicer also basically stuck to his guns about the crowd sizes. He said the unfair coverage of Trump in the press was “demoralizing”. Actually it’s the fair coverage of who Trump is and what he says that’s demoralizing, but never mind.

Where’s the fantastic Trump health plan that was “almost ready” last week? No one actually believed there was a health plan (there wasn’t), so we’ve moved on from that, apparently.

The first few days of Trump included no softening or reconciliation for those he trashed and railed against during the campaign.  No indication that he understands the campaign is over and he is now president of all of us, not just his Twitter followers. It’s as if he’s starting his re-election campaign now by hardening the appeals to his base. Make America Even Greater in 2020.

There was plenty of repetition of the “America First” slogan in the first few days. Not only is Trump now the president of all of us, he is, in a very real sense, now the President of the World. But just as he doesn’t care what the Americans who didn’t vote for him think, he also doesn’t care what the concerns of others around the world might be.

It might be fun to revisit the political cartoons from around the world that we collected before the election. But, to get an idea of what some of our friends think of Trump now, check out this Dutch video, made in the Trump style so as to better resonate with him:

#punchanazi

Richard Spencer got sucker-punched at the inauguration.

The internet is having a hard time deciding if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Someone suggested it would clarify things if, instead of thinking of it as a “sucker punch”, thinking of it as an “alt-rebuttal” might help.

I don’t know why it’s true but I do know it’s true: if we had a similar discussion of #punchhezbollah, none of the same logic would apply. Mystifying, really.

In “No Country For Old Men”, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) says, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

 

Dignity, always dignity

This Business Insider article says that Trump is setting the bar too high for himself. They say that by promising too much in the way of Making America Great, he sets himself up for failure if he doesn’t deliver. In his inauguration speech, he says, for example, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now”, and Business Insider asks, what if it doesn’t?

They miss an obvious point about the man-baby, and one they’ve actually made themselves. In this article they describe how Trump lives on the 68th floor of a 58-floor building. See, he thought it would have more value if it was ten floors taller, so he just added them in the brochures. It was a lot cheaper and faster to do it that way than to actually build the ten missing floors. Or to simply state the obvious that you’ve gone and built a 58-floor building.

The point is, that if the carnage doesn’t end, whatever that means, the man-baby will simply assert that it has. This is how he will Make America Great.

It’s getting harder to remember who Trump is amidst all the promises of who he will be, what he’s actually done in his life versus what he says he will now do, the reality of his lies and amorality  when the fantasy of strength and courage has been projected on him so relentlessly. And he is, after all, now the 45th President of the United States. I’d like to forget it all, too.

I’ll just light one candle in the immense darkness here for old times’ sake.

Dignity: Donald Trump bodyslams, beats and shaves Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania XXIII.

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Morality: Donald Trump was forced to sell the Miss Universe Organization – which also includes sister scholarship programs Miss USA and Miss Teen USA – in 2015 after his incendiary comments about Mexicans drove away broadcasters NBC and Univision. Trump owned the pageant for nearly two decades, during which time he would have had the opportunity to come into contact with nearly 4,000 beauty queens.

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Service: Trump’s Atlantic City bankruptcies explained.

Leadership: Trump University delivers. Not.

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Honesty: Trump has been involved in some 4000 lawsuits in his 30-year career, at least 75 of which are still open as his term in office begins. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

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Transparency: the Make America Great mugs are made in China.

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Confidence: Trump poses as his own P.R. guy. You can’t make this stuff up.

I could go on about the Trump Shuttle,  Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and more, but I’m running out of pixels.  Here’s the complete list of all Trump’s business failures, for the curious.

Can we see your Tax Returns? Nope.

Will you be divesting potential conflicts of interest? Don’t have to.

Can we at least see a real medical report, because, uh, maybe you’re clinically insane? Let me think. No.

But at least the long national nightmare of peace and prosperity that was the Obama administration has come to an end. America will be made great again.

America First. Again.

I like being an American. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. To my antecedents, America was a lifeboat. They clung to it and embraced it and tried hard to forget the dismal sea they had been drowning in before there was America for them.

No one is more dismayed by the steady rise of anti-Americanism around the world than I am. I like to think we still represent the city on a hill that J.F.K. referred to in a 1961 speech:

“We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us. Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities

When people around the world need help, it’s American intervention they hope for. Of course, they tire of it almost immediately when it is offered. You often hear the “criticism” that America doesn’t act out of altruism or magnanimity, but only out of self-interest. Duh. Yes, of course. We’re not going to act against our own interests, and neither is anyone else. It’s quite absurd to expect that.

And I totally get that we have often made things worse. We propped up every right-wing dictator we could find in the name of anti-communism after WWII, and there are plenty of people and governments who won’t forgive us for that. All this tends to strengthen our natural desire for isolationism and protectionism at home, as people of good will grow weary of having their efforts to benefit others turn sour and cause resentment. Let’s focus on fixing problems at home, they say, and they have a point. I feel that way myself.

Trump’s inauguration speech was notable for its combativeness, and absence of the traditional themes of reconciliation and working together to make things better. It did, though, revive an old slogan, “America First”. The man-baby may or may not know the provenance of this slogan as he knows so little, but I’m quite sure some of the people around him, Steve Bannon for example, know exactly where it comes from and who it’s directed at.

For those who have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, “America First” is the slogan of anti-semites. In 1941, the America First movement, led by the estimable hero and noted crackpot, Charles Lindbergh, campaigned tirelessly to keep America out of World War II. They were sympathetic to the cause of the Nazis, thought England should be left to its own inevitable defeat, and accused “the Jews” of both trying to take over Germany and agitating for America to enter the war against its own best interests.

In a Des Moines speech, Lindy says,

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I’ll leave aside the “us and them” for today.

The trick of “not condoning” persecution while strongly advocating steps that will increase it is a favorite of Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right. That Trump is oblivious to it is upsetting and disheartening. To Bannon, “the Jews” are whiny brats. And while, according to him,  he is not an anti-semite and doesn’t condone it, he has created a petri dish for it to grow and mutate, and now has inserted his thoughts and language into the brain and mouth of our clueless new Chief Executive.

Are Jews in America more at risk today than, say, Muslims? Who knows what the Orange Dystopia will bring. Uncertainty and chaos is assured, but, beyond that, no one can say. We will reel from one slogan, idea, and policy to the next.

For now it’s America First. Again.

Alea iacta est

Today the Rubicon is crossed.

The kakistocracy is installed and empowered, the nuclear codes handed over.

From here, there will be no “access” to leadership and no “news”.

From here, there will be only pre-approved interpretations of events, statistics, economic indicators, battlefield successes or failures, climate change, science.

There will be propaganda on the one hand, and “spies”, “liars”, and “fakes” on the other. There will be nothing in between.

Polls will be discredited when unfavorable, and embraced when supportive.

The prestige of the academy will diminish and its credibility doubted.

Credit will be taken for the accomplishments of others, and blame will be assigned for the inevitable failures and disappointments.

The rot and dishonesty that has festered in the judiciary, legislature, and fourth estate will finally take its toll. The checks and balances mitigating tyranny will no longer maintain.

Those who smile and nod will be praised and rewarded. Those who doubt and resist will be vilified and destroyed.

Clean air and water will be become more precious and rare, at some point available only to those who can afford them.

Routine medical care will no longer be routine. Life expectancy will lag behind other societies and possibly even decrease.

Public property will come under increasing control of private interests.

Those responsible for the welfare of all will prosper, and those who rely on their protection will struggle.

The transfer of wealth from the many to the few will accelerate.

Friends and neighbors will be distrusted and accused.

Historic allies will be abandoned as historic antagonists attempt to direct us.

Above all, the ship of state will not be steered with a steady hand. Chaos and uncertainty will increase.

“The best lack all conviction. The worst are filled with passionate intensity”.  Yeats.

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Bread and Circuses

One of the big reasons Republicans hate Obamacare (or any program designed to benefit others) is that Democrats typically want to fund it with higher taxes on the richest among us. The wealthy ask, “Why should the government take our money so that someone else can avoid paying their fair share?”

The argument seems to make some sense at first, until you realize that no one benefits from government handouts and subsidies more than rich people. There are a million examples, big and small, in the tax code alone, from reduced capital gains taxes to capped Social Security deductions to generous estate tax treatments. But there are reasonable discussions to be had around these issues that don’t always center on the greediness of the upper crust.

There are plenty of other examples outside the tax code as well. Defense contractors, private prison operators, for-profit “education” operations whose customers get government loans, oil companies who lease public lands for exploration or other operations, and many many others are producing healthy balance sheets for private citizens with the taxpayers’ money providing the income. Again, the picture is somewhat clouded by arguments that these businesses provide something necessary to the taxpayer, and they do it better than the government itself could, so quit with all the whining already.

And, of course, our beloved man-baby has been one of the best of all time. Bankruptcies, bond issues that were worthless, tax breaks, and more have all taken advantage of the taxpayer to line one individual’s pockets.  He’s quoted in this New York Times article about it all as saying,   “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.”

Of course, there were other suckers hurt by Trump’s “business” in Atlantic City beside the taxpayers: the banks who loaned him money, the morons who invested in TRMP stock, the contractors and their subs who did work for Trump and never got paid, etc. It was more than simply a direct transfer of public money to the man-baby.

If you’re looking for a truly egregious example of ultra-rich people directly lining their pockets with the taxpayers’s  money, with no accountability and no real benefit returning to the people, pro sports has you covered. And the N.F.L. is the worst of the worst.

In 2005, city planner Judith Grant Long  published years of research on the topic. The abstract says,

Governments pay far more to participate in the development of major league sports facilities than is commonly understood due to the routine omission of public subsidies for land and infrastructure, and the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements, municipal services, and foregone property taxes. Adjusting for these omissions increases the average public subsidy by $50 million per facility to a total of $177 million, representing a 40% increase over the industry-reported average of $126 million, based on all 99 facilities in use for the “big four” major leagues during 2001. For all 99 facilities, these uncounted public costs total $5 billion.

But that research is now almost 20 years old, and things are a lot worse now. Richard, a good friend of the blog, alerted us to this eye-opening article in the Atlantic, How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers. It talks about stadium-building and other subsidies to a 30-member group of billionaire owners, and it’s worth your time to give it a read.  Here are some pull quotes to pique your interest:

Twelve teams have turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone—receiving more money than they needed to build their facilities.

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn’t apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It’s time to stop the public giveaways to America’s richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams. 

Roger Goodell has become the sort of person his father once opposed—an insider who profits from his position while average people pay.

In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.

Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.

It goes on and on. Hospitals close and stadiums open. School districts suffer and football prospers. Those things and lots more will make you hate the N.F.L.

Wikipedia defines “Bread and Circuses” this way:

“…a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the generation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace.”

This weekend, two circuses are on offer. Friday, the man-baby will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the U.S., and Sunday the two teams who will play in Super Bowl LI two weeks later will be decided.

I was planning on ignoring the inauguration as much as possible, and enjoying the football as much as possible. It’s getting a little harder to keep them separate in my mind.

Manning, Obama, Assange, Trump

So President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence for leaking a huge trove of classified information to Wikileaks in 2010. She will get out of jail this May, rather than in 2045.

Of course Republicans criticized the move, despite the fact that the Obama administration has been much tougher in prosecuting cases of leaking information than any other. They have brought ten such actions, more than all previous presidencies combined. John McCain noted that the leaks were espionage that put our country in jeopardy.

Obama displayed his usual thoughtfulness and courage in making this move, citing the facts that Manning’s sentence was vastly longer than the 1-3 year sentences that other such cases yielded, that she has already served seven years, that the information leaked was not, in fact, the most highly classified, and so on.

He also cited the problems Manning’s gender dysphoria created for the prison system and her two suicide attempts in prison. These issues are neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. Chelsea should have thought of them when she was Bradley. But the commutation does, at least for the moment, spare us the debate over whether the rest of us should be required to pay for the poor dear’s gender re-assignment surgery.

I have no problem releasing Manning at this point for two reasons. The first is that, unlike that Hero of the Left, Edward Snowden, Manning acknowledged her wrong-doing, expressed remorse, submitted to the military justice system, and has served a lengthy sentence for the crimes. Spy.

Snowden, on the other hand, is noted for fleeing into the comforting arms of the enemy which benefited most from his crimes, while refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing at all. Hero.

The second reason I’m interested in this commutation is that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks operator to whom Manning leaked the documents and who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for five years now, has always said he will face extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges if Manning were to be released. Well, Julie, the ball’s in your court.

At first I thought, “Yeah, right. Assange will submit to extradition around the same time we see Trump’s tax returns, i.e. never.” Then I realized my mistake. This is actually going to work out very well for Assange. Being extradited to an Obama-led Department of Justice would have been a very different thing than facing the “wrath” of the Trump administration.

As we have recently learned, Trump takes Assange’s version of the Russian interference in the election as the truth, while complaining about and criticizing the work and the abundant documentation to the contrary produced by our own intelligence organizations. Trump chooses to believe those who flatter him, those who benefit him, and those who play him like a fucking fiddle.

And then there’s the fact that no extradition or other charges have actually been filed against Assange by the U.S. Only Sweden has filed for his extradition to try him for rapes committed there.

It will be interesting to see what Assange does here. I’m predicting that whatever it is will be preceded by a highly sympathetic media blitz on FoxNews.

It will be even more interesting to see whether Trump can demonstrate anything like the impartiality and wisdom of Obama in dealing with him. I suspect, dear readers, that you already know what I think about this.

Also sprach the man-baby

“I can be more presidential than anybody. Other than the great Abe Lincoln – he was very presidential.”


Trump spoke these words in March, after winning the Michigan Republican Primary. He was responding to questions about his behavior during the campaign: his coarseness, his preference for personal attacks, his name-calling and so on.  He and his surrogates repeated the sentiment often during the campaign, even as the field thinned out. Trump never showed the slightest inclination to change the tone of the meanest campaign ever run.

When he finally won the  nomination, we were told things would certainly be different from that point on. He would compete against Hillary Clinton on the issues. All the personal attacks, crazy accusations, threats, and venom would recede. He would “pivot”, meaning he would transform into a more suitable version of a likely nominee and turn  his attention away from his hard-core base of loyalists in order to win over the broader general electorate.

But it never happened. He was the same. Worse, even. Some expressions of dismay from various quarters, just to show I’m not making it up:

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/08/donald-trumps-campaign-and-the-media-are-still-wondering-when-hell-pivot-to-the-general-election/

https://heatst.com/politics/watch-republicans-keep-insisting-donald-trump-will-start-acting-more-presidential-but-he-wont/

http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumps-pivot-to-normality-isnt-coming/article/2003599

Well, he won the election without pivoting. I guess he felt he still needed to be the combative man-baby to win and maybe he was right.

Now, he’s president-elect, and this week he’ll be president. He doesn’t need to pick fights with people who don’t like him, particularly when you realize he’ll be inaugurated with the lowest approval rating of anyone since they started keeping track. That’s a lot of fight-picking.

https://qz.com/885286/presidential-inauguration-donald-trump-has-the-lowest-approval-ratings-of-any-president-elect-in-recent-history/

approval

This week he picked fights with several people, just to keep in fighting trim I suppose. Meryl Streep, John Lewis, NATO,  and Angela Merkel were among his targets.

The Lewis fight is particularly appalling. There is no upside for Trump in this, and there is certainly no upside for America. Trump rallied his 60 million against Lewis, who had said Trump wasn’t a legitimate president, given the Russian interference. They said things like, “He did something 50 years ago – so what!” Well what he did 50 years ago was literally put his life on the line for other people and a cause he believed in. What Trump did 50 years ago, conversely, was dodge the draft, acting, as always, for himself and risking nothing.

Or they said, “he’s a poor congressman – his district is in terrible shape”. Lewis represents most of Atlanta, which in Lewis’ thirty years of representation, has done very well. But that’s not the point. Whether you want to argue with Lewis’ talents or record as a congressman or not, you can’t argue that, in the same thirty year period, Trump represented anyone but himself.  In fact, he has never held any public office or even played any private role representing the cause of anyone else.

Our next president, who has made a career of selfishness, is criticizing someone who has made a career of selflessness.

Why does he do it still? There are two possible explanations, and you’re not going to like either of them.

The first is that when he tweets, he is not tweeting at you and me. He doesn’t care that we’ll be outraged. He doesn’t care what we think at all. He is tweeting to the 60 million that voted for him and they absolutely love the fights he picks. Of course, it makes no sense at this point, since they already have the president they want and that’s that. From here on, Trump will be the President of those who “up-vote” him. This is not good for the rest of America, and absolutely horrible for the rest of the world.

The second explanation is that all this fighting is not a choice he’s making.  He can’t help himself. He is who he is. There are not “two Trumps“.  This is not good for anyone, either. And the rest of the world knows it better than we do.

These last four links were all to my own musings on the subject. I’m repeating myself. I can’t help it. I blog to those who up-vote me. I am who I am. Also sprach Stewie Generis.

I agree with Trump

I agree with Hitler, too: German Shepherds are really fine dogs. The Führer and I are on the same page – it would be really cool to get a new German Shepherd puppy. Am I a bad person? (Don’t answer that.)

dog

Trump seems to me to be a profoundly ignorant person. A willfully ignorant person. It’s really quite shocking that someone who grew up with so many privileges and opportunities, and who has seen so much of the world in his adult life, could have taken in so little. A normal person would have to try really hard to achieve that, which is why I say he is “willfully” ignorant. Or maybe it’s related to some sort of ADD or other physical characteristic. He just can’t stay on one thing for more than a few seconds.

The net effect is, as I have pointed out many times, that Trump has no real principles. He doesn’t “believe” what he’s saying half the time because he doesn’t even know what he’s saying half the time. And then he’ll completely contradict himself, sometimes even in the same sentence, which only reinforces the notion that he doesn’t believe in anything. We’ve seen it often.

This is not to say that therefore nothing he says matters. As president, the things he says will matter very much.

This presents an interesting dilemma for the rest of us. Since, over the course of time, Trump will take every side of every issue (which is absolutely perfect for someone who wants to take credit for prescience), the law of averages suggests that sooner or later he’ll say something you actually agree with. Or, if you prefer, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

If you do agree with something that flies by on Trump’s twitter feed, it doesn’t mean you support him or think he may be an OK president. Or that he isn’t a vulgar man-baby. And it doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking the thing that Trump has now blurted out, either.

Some of the things you might be thinking are things you would have never said in the past, because you know your friends would think you were an asshole if you said them. Or just because the social contract that keeps us from screaming at each other all the time has forbidden you to say them. When Trump says them, it gives you permission to say them, too. Trump is voiding the social contract, which is why all the racists and nut-jobs on Breitbart think it’s Morning In America.

I’ll give you two quick examples of stupid things Trump said this week that I actually agree with. The first is we should cut funding of the U.N. (everyone there hates us), and the second is that we should cut aid to sub-Saharan African countries (the aid hardly ever reaches the intended recipient and usually accomplishes the opposite of what we hoped it would).

Am I a bad person? (Don’t answer that.)

 

 

Class trumps gender

One of the biggest mistakes made by the Clinton campaign was assuming that Hillary would have the support of most women. This would be their first real chance at breaking the biggest “glass ceiling” of all, and their first real chance to end the “testosterone poisoning” that has fueled our domestic and foreign policy since the county’s founding. Best of all, she would provide a great model to show all young girls that they can do anything and achieve anything.

But it didn’t work out that way. It was women that gave Trump the election. White working class women. It turned out class was much more important than gender: white working class women voted 62% to 34% for Trump. If it had been 50-50, Clinton would have won the election.

Part of the explanation is that what “working class” actually signifies has changed. It once suggested productivity and sturdiness. Now it’s a euphemism for downwardly mobile and poor. This New Yorker piece notes,

“A significant part of the W.W.C. has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban “underclass”: intergenerational poverty, welfare, debt, bankruptcy, out-of-wedlock births, trash entertainment, addiction, jail, social distrust, political cynicism, bad health, unhappiness, early death.”

Here in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, most of us are subject to the mis-perception that the “women’s vote” consists mainly of like minded sisters: progressive, educated feminists who mostly subscribe to similar views on issues. We think, in general, women will be pro-choice, favor stricter gun control, favor an Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work (perhaps even “comparable worth”), and so on. We naturally think that women would vote for a like-minded woman given the chance, and Hillary would be the perfect choice. So smart, so qualified, so committed to their causes.

In Cambridge, 650 women at the Harvard Business School united in their dislike of Trump and signed a letter denouncing their fellow HBS alumnus, Steve Bannon, who had been appointed Chief Strategist for Trump. It said,

We are female graduates and current students of Harvard Business School. We represent a wide range of religions, ethnicities and professions. We are daughters, sisters and mothers; native-born Americans and immigrants; Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. Bannon has been described as one of the chief architects of the alt-right movement, a movement that preaches white nationalism, racism, misogyny and hatred. He has repeatedly put forth hateful rhetoric against women, including a radio interview in which he referred to progressive, educated women as “a bunch of dykes.”

But the “wide range”of the women inside H.B.S. is not as wide as they think. Outside Cambridge, in the real world, things are very different. This excellent article, also from the Harvard Business Review explains a lot about Trump’s appeal, the “culture gap”, and why class is more important than gender.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Hillary Clinton epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

The lesson here may be that the interests of women and men are, in fact, not nearly as far apart as we thought. But the interests of the “elites” are completely different than the interests of the “working class”.

Check out this article from the New York Times just yesterday, explaining the rationale that various women had for preferring Trump. Prepare to be disheartened.

OK, I get it. I get why someone like Hillary is so unappealing to so many men and, yes, so many women. I really do. But it still must be asked, is there no better alternative than a dishonest, impulsive, narcissistic, belligerent con-artist?

Trump voters unfazed

If you’re wondering whether any of the 60 million people who voted for Trump are feeling any buyer’s remorse, well, forget it. They aren’t. Inauguration, or as we’ve come to regard it, Crossing The Rubicon, is still a few days off, but a clear picture of what we’ll be getting has already emerged.

There will be no tax returns or medical reports released. There will be no divesting of business interests. Mexico will not be paying for The Wall. We will not Lock Her Up. There will be only extremely rare “press conferences” where every question is treated as an accusation and disputed rather than answered. There will be a cabinet of billionaires who are installed despite clear conflicts of interest. There will be daily tweets disparaging any individual who dares criticize the man-baby, and the presidency itself will be thereby demeaned. Russia, historically an ideological enemy, will be our best ally and have more influence on policy than any other. Relatives will be installed in important positions despite anti-nepotism laws. Our president will be hated and ridiculed by virtually every other country on the planet. If a business owner or board-member supports Trump, the bully pulpit will be used to encourage us to patronize that business – clearly an unprecedented (unpresidented?) abuse of the power of the presidency. Any of the 25 million or so people that got health insurance for the first time during the Obama years will now be out of luck.

There’s lot’s more that can already go on this list, and lots more will surely be added down the road. But you get the point.

Despite all these things, however, Iowa voters are happy with their choice. Iowa gave Trump his largest margin of victory, 15%, of any battleground state and are happy with what they got. The New York Times went to Monticello, Iowa last week to talk to the sages at the Table of Knowledge week and reported what they heard there 

tableThe Table of Knowledge

Here is a sampling from that piece of what they said.

They  marveled at how he had forced his fellow Republicans in the House to reverse themselves on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics. “He’s getting responses; things are happening. He got Congress to turn themselves around with one tweet.”

“There’s no secret the press doesn’t like him, and neither does a lot of the leadership,” he added. “And that’s because he’s planning on making a lot of changes.”

About allegations that Russians have embarrassing sex-tapes they could use to blackmail Trump, one said,  “The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it’s all a lie,”  He added he was more concerned that government officials might have leaked the material to the news media. “I don’t know if it was classified, but if it was, whoever leaked it needs to go to jail,” he said. “We need law and order back in this country.”

Asked about government programs to aid the poor, one said, “I think they should be drug-testing if they’re on welfare”, and “The welfare system needs to be reorganized – ‘Chicago people’ were moving to Iowa to receive higher benefits and bringing crime.”

One said, “I’m ashamed to say we caucused for Obama” in 2008. My view is he purposely got into the presidency so he could ruin America.”

Another called the Affordable Care Act a form of socialism. He said he had no problem with a candidate who had run as the voice of the working people but was stocking his cabinet with the ultrawealthy. He said, “I know these guys are really rich,” he said. “They may have pulled off a few plays that weren’t exactly on the up-and-up, but they all had to be pretty smart to be billionaires. If they replace their own concerns with the concerns of the country, they can make things really move forward. That’s what I’m excited about.”

Anyway, out of all this, there are two things that particularly strike me.

The first is the guy who said that for him, absent “positive proof”, it was all lies. By this he meant that only if FoxNews reported something would he believe it. The rest of the media was all lies. In other words, there is no “positive proof” that will ever change his mind.

The second is that we now have an answer to the question Trump asked everyone a year ago, “How stupid are the people of Iowa“.

 

Filibuster, Cloture, and Reconciliation

Ugh. Boring subject no one really cares about, I’m guessing. Feel free to merrily click away from here if you’d rather not read about how the Party of No is really the Party of No Shame. You probably don’t need any more convincing anyway.

In the U.S. Senate, a filibuster is a debate aimed at delaying a vote on legislation. The word comes from the Dutch word for pirate. The cloture rule, adopted in 1917, says that a two-thirds vote of the senate can end a filibuster. It was first used in 1919 to stop debate on the Treaty of Versailles. Even with the cloture rule, filibuster can still be effectively used, since a two-thirds vote is hard to come by.

In recent years, Republicans have gone crazy with filibusters to prevent a  Democratic president from doing anything at all, and particularly appointing judges.

Here are some charts I took from Mother Jones showing how the use of cloture votes has increased. The first shows the number of cloture votes by year, indicating who controlled the Senate and the White house using colors.

cloture1

The next chart shows the cloture votes when a single party controlled the Senate and White House. This chart shows that while both parties have used the filibuster in the past, its use in the Obama years has skyrocketed.

cloture2

The filibuster was primarily used to block judicial and executive-branch nominees Mother Jones notes:

Democrats had struck one deal after another with Republicans to try and rein in their abuse of the filibuster, but nothing worked. A few nominees would get through, and then another batch would promptly get filibustered. The chart below tells the tale. Under George Bush, Democrats mounted filibusters on 38 of his nominees. That’s about five per year. Under Obama, Republicans have filibustered an average of 16 nominees per year.

This chart tells that story:

cloture3

Mother Jones:

Republicans announced their intention to filibuster all of Obama’s nominees to the DC circuit court simply because they didn’t want a Democratic president to be able to fill any more vacancies. At that point, even moderate Democrats had finally had enough. For all practical purposes, Republicans had declared war on Obama’s very legitimacy as president, forbidding him from carrying out a core constitutional duty. Begging and pleading and cutting deals was no longer on the table.

To get around the use of a filibuster for legislation, the Senate can limit debate to 20 hours by using the “reconciliation” process , which limits debate, effectively taking the filibuster out of play. They simply can de-fund something when preparing a budget.  During the Obama administration, reconciliation was used to pass the A.C.A. because Democrats could expect no compromise from Republicans, no matter how moderate a nominee was or beneficial a law would be. Even if something or someone Republicans had previously championed  was proposed by a Democrat, the answer would be no. Democrats had a majority of 59 in the senate, which was historically plenty to pass legislation, but not a super-majority of 60, which would be enough to end any filibuster.

Republicans were, and have remained, apoplectic about the A.C.A. being passed in this way. In 2009, Mitch McConnell said that using reconciliation would “make it 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.” He also talked about how using reconciliation on health care would be a “disservice to the American people” because it would deny a “full and transparent debate.”

Well, folks, this week that very same Mitch McConnell, now Senate Majority Leader, has done the very thing he railed against just a short time ago, when the shoe was on the other foot. He used reconciliation to de-fund the A.C.A.

It goes without saying that they have offered nothing to take its place. For the last eight years, the Obama administration has been asking them for their ideas on this. They had none. They have none.

 For those of us who are hoping someone will have the courage and principle to say “no” to Trump about anything at all in the next four years, we need to look some place else. The Republican controlled Senate and House will not rise to this challenge. They have no shame. They are the Party of No Shame. And hypocrisy. And corruption.

Feel-good story, right?

New England Patriots’ Martellus Bennett seems like a good guy to me. The big Tight End is smiling and relaxed whenever I see him interviewed on TV, and, for me, it helps that he’s picked up some of the slack created by the season-ending injury to the best player in the NFL, Rob Gronkowski. For all you Patriots-haters out there (and I know who you are), we’ll just concentrate on his Good Works for now.

He wrote a children’s book, “Hey A.J, it’s Saturday!” based on his own family with the title character being his daughter. It is the first of a planned “Hey A.J.” series.

hey

He described the book this way, “The stories are just adventures we have around the house that I recreated through stories. A.J. is this girl who ends up making a mess all the time, you know, but everything comes to life. She uses her imagination in several different scenarios, so it’s pretty cool.”

In June, he went to the Tobin school in Roxbury to read his book to the kids there, and they were thrilled.

bennett

The school doesn’t have enough books and no budget for them. They tried an on-line fundraiser, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere. Out of desperation, the teacher of the class Bennett had read to tweeted him this week asking for help. She was hoping he’d re-tweet the plea and maybe raise some money that way. He asked her what they needed and she told him $2500. He reached into his own pocket and gave them $3000. Problem solved. What a guy!

Let’s take a step back, though. We have a public school here, where the teachers are very poorly paid and often used their own meager resources to buy supplies for the kids.  They tried raising money online. They reached out to friends and got lucky in this case. It’s so unusual, it made the news. What about all the other cases with no happy ending? Isn’t this something our Department of Education should be working on?

Not in the Trump era. Betsy DeVos will be our new Education Secretary if she gets confirmed, and you can bet she will. DeVos has a very complex financial picture that, in the now-forgotten era of pre-Trump ethics, would be subject to time-consuming scrutiny by the Office of Government Ethics for potential conflicts prior to confirmation hearings.

But the O.G.E. is being pressured to forget all that. They’ve written an unprecedented letter to the Senate committee they report to, saying the review is far from complete. They accused the GOP of rushing Trump cabinet confirmations.

devos

A tempest in a teapot, right? Not for the kids of the Tobin School. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire political operative who has used her family’s vast Amway fortune (a huge pyramid scheme, BTW) to influence education in Michigan. She doesn’t like public schools. She would like to privatize education through Charter Schools and religious education. She will undermine public education programs and further dilute a limited pool of federal education dollars by funding school choice voucher programs.

And, apart from her ideological inappropriateness,  DeVos has real conflict of interest issues. She owns shares of K12 Inc., a company whose core business is the management of public for-profit online charter schools.

Her operation feels a little bit like Trump University to me – profits first and the Hell with substance. The New York Times wrote a piece in 2011 about a school managed by the company:

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Education Week also wrote about a K12 Inc school just a couple of months ago:

 “for five years in a row, the Hoosier Academies Virtual School had been failing.”

“It had been assigned an ‘F’ grade from the state of Indiana every year it had been open except its first, when it had garnered a ‘C.’”

 Despite more than a decade of state investigations, news media reports, and research that have documented startling failures and gross mismanagement in full-time online schools, the sector—dominated by two for-profit companies—continues to expand, spreading into new states and enrolling more students.

Betsy DeVos  is personally invested in this failure and was at the end of a funnel that took tax dollars dedicated to public schools and transferred them to Wall Street.

Martellus Bennett took money out of his own pocket to put it where Betsy DeVos would like to take it right back out to put it in hers.

Still feeling good?

Make Polio Great Again

For a minute there, it looked like Trump appointed RFK Jr., an anti-vaccination kook, to “chair a presidential panel to review vaccine safety and science”. At least, this is what RFK Jr.said after a meeting with Trump on the issue.

This really shouldn’t be a surprise, since Trump did meet with anti-vax activists in August, who reported that he was “extremely educated on our issues.”  Trump has repeatedly suggested in interviews, tweets and during debates that he sees some link between childhood vaccinations and autism, despite the lack of any scientific evidence supporting such a link.

For some reason, this reminds me of the 2006 conference that Iran had  in which “experts” from around the world spoke about the scientific evidence they had that the Holocaust never happened. The expert from the U.S. was David Duke. Nuf sed.

If you’re wondering if any Republicans will voice an “opinion” that maybe immunologists know what they’re doing, forget it. The best you’ll get is “I have an open mind about it – the jury is still out”. Just think back to the 2008 Republican primary debate where the candidates raised their hands to indicate a belief in creationism. It came up after Rick Perry, our next Energy Secretary, told a kid in NH that evolution was just a theory that was out there. Here’s a breakdown of how the candidates answered the evolution “question” at the time.

As long as we’re clearing up some old fake news and ideological science, I think maybe we should try to get to the bottom of the long-running controversy about the alleged “fact” that the earth is round.  Who knows what the truth really is about this?

Anyway, we may be safe for the moment. Trump appears to have walked back the notion that he is appointing RFK Jr. to anything right now.

rfk-tweet

But here is the interesting thing about all this: I can no longer remember even the last few outrages that have come at a rate of at least one a day for months. Something about nepotism, maybe? Russian hacking? Ethics? Conflicts of interest? Don’t know, don’t care. None of them matter any more. They never happened. Vaccines and autism – that’s what’s important now!

Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

When J.F.K. nominated his brother for Attorney General in 1960, the question of nepotism immediately arose.  Kennedy shrugged off criticism, joking that he thought it would benefit his brother Bob to get some legal experience before going out to practice law.

R.F.K ultimately turned out to be an excellent and courageous Attorney General, leading the country’s civil rights and anti-corruption efforts. But that was beside the point for most people, Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Nation blasted the appointment as “the greatest example of nepotism this land has ever seen,” while Newsweek called it a “travesty of justice.” Irresponsible, said a New York Times editorial: “It is simply not good enough to name a bright young political manager, no matter how bright or how young or how personally loyal, to a major post in government.”

So in 1967,  5 U.S. Code § 3110, the  federal anti-nepotism law, was passed. It was referred to by most people as “the Bobby Kennedy law”, and it was sponsored by a Democrat, Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa).

The law says, “A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.”. The law defines exactly who is a relative and specifies son-in-law in this definition.

Today, Donald J. Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as Senior White House Advisor, a clear violation of the law. But laws do not apply to Donald J. Trump. Congress will not only be complicit, but will facilitate his actions in defiance of the law. There is nobody that will say no to the man-baby. He will do what he wants.

Here’s how the Republicans will justify their actions in this case. The anti-nepotism law does say, “An individual appointed, employed, promoted, or advanced in violation of this section is not entitled to pay, and money may not be paid from the Treasury as pay to an individual so appointed, employed, promoted, or advanced.”  They will say that as long as Kushner forgoes pay, everything is cool.

But it’s not cool. They are ignoring the part that says “in violation of this section”.  It’s against the law for Kushner to take the job, and, if that part of law is violated, it is further against the law to be paid.

Doesn’t matter. It will be done Trump’s way. Resistance is futile. Kellyanne Conway, Mitch McConnell, and others will shortly be explaining on all media how the push-back (if anyone actually dares to push back) is just sour grapes from sore losers.

They don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Man-baby can’t help himself

The other day, for no apparent reason, the man-baby started a fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger because the Celebrity Apprentice ratings were off. He bragged that he was a ratings machine  From the link:

The reaction was utterly predictable. Democrats — and even some Republicans — wondered why Trump was fixated on the ratings for “The Celebrity Apprentice” on the same day that he was set to receive a briefing from intelligence officials about the depth and breadth of Russia’s hacking into the 2016 election. It was the height of irresponsibility, they tweeted!

Meryl Streep gave a passionate anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globe awards last night. In general, I’m with those who think politics should be kept out of these venues. I don’t really care what Colin Kaepernick thinks about the issues of the day, for example. Or, to be honest, Meryl Streep, though I agree with every word she said on this occasion.

If they do have something interesting or important to communicate, let them write an Op-ed piece or whatever, but keep it off the field or the stage.

That being said, does Trump really need to respond to every single criticism that reaches his ears? And does his response always always always have to come in the form of an ad hominem attack?

trump

What happened to “time to come together and heal”?

After the election, I was trying to convince myself that maybe it was possible that things would still be OK. After all, since Trump has no principles and the goal was always just getting elected, not actually “Build a wall” or “Lock her up”, maybe he wouldn’t feel inclined to “act” once in office. Maybe he wouldn’t screw things up. Maybe he’d adopt the “First Do No Harm” model. That would be the best case.

The worst case is that some ISIS moron tweets “Trump has tiny little hands and that means something else is tiny, too. Nyah, nyah, what are you gonna do about it, nuke Riyadh?”

If he can’t help himself from going after Meryl Streep, what might his response to this be? And it’s pretty clear he can’t help himself.

 

The Light Dawns

I could not for the life of me figure out why the Republicans wanted so badly to do away with the Office of Government Ethics (O.G.E.) last week. They tried to do it without public comment, and literally in the middle of the night. Why?

Today I know. It’s because they want to make sure that Trump’s cabinet of billionaires is installed with no resistance at cursory hearings. Cabinet appointees have, in the past, been required to file a Form 278 with the O.G.E., a detailed and complicated form  that lists stock holdings, business interests, board seats and other arrangements benefiting them, spouses, minor children, business partners or potential employers. This is to make sure that no conflicts of interests arise.

The O.G.E. process is complicated for wealthy individuals with lots of investments and properties. Penny Pritzker, a Hyatt Hotels heir now serving as commerce secretary, filed a 278 form that was 184 pages long, and she agreed to sell stakes in more than 200 entities. This was the way things were done in the Obama administration, creating an exceptionally scandal-free eight years.

These House Republicans are shameless. They hated Julian Assange and Russia six months ago, now they love them and take their version of events as gospel while questioning our own intelligence agencies. Why? Because the man-baby says that’s the way it will be and the man-baby is a Republican, or so he says.

Someone said the way to solve the Obama-care repeal dilemma (i.e. removing something that works without replacing it with anything at all), would be to simply rename it Trump-care. You know how he loves to see his name on things. Let the man-baby “Republican” have the glory and we’ll keep the insurance!

They couldn’t stand the idea of even meeting with a perfectly well-qualified, moderate Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, because a Democrat nominated him, but they’ll bend over backwards to ram unqualified, inappropriate people through when nominated by a Republican.

What next? Maybe they’ll propose a law that makes being a Democrat a crime. Or suggest life imprisonment for “insulting” the presidency (when held by a Republican, that is).

Anyway, if you want to read a little more about this whole thing of vetting cabinet nominees for conflicts, click on one of these articles:

 

You asked for it, you got it

Since the movie quiz we had the other day didn’t pose as much of a challenge as I thought it might, we’ll have to take it up a notch. No clues today – you’re all too smart to need them – but I will say that all today’s movies met with critical approval: the lowest score for any of them on Rotten Tomatoes was 85%, and the highest was 100%!

To get you warmed up, we’ll start with a couple of box-office boffos you might have seen at your local ten-plex , then a classic or two and some smaller but still well-known flicks to build your confidence, then on to the art-houses where you’ll start to doubt yourselves, and finally a deeper dive offshore and to some indies that will destroy your self-esteem and kill your desire for more movie-related posts.

Full credit for just the movie name. If you get 14 out of 20 right, we’ll nominate you for King /Queen/Other at Trump University’s Homecoming Dance.

Answers here.  Ready?  Go.

1)

god-will

2)

bear-jew

3)

no-country

4)gallipoli

5)koyan1koyan2

6)double-indemnity-grocery

7)
dolce-vita

8)

repulsion

9)

somethingwild-3

10)pope-of-greenwich-village

11)

the-fighter1

12)

murmer

13)

three-burials-melquiades-estrada

14)

thebandsvisit_2lg

15)

amoresperros

16)

y_tu_mama_tambien

17)

katyn2_1

18)

volve0119)

the-great-beauty

20)

policeadjective

You’re fired!

I used to think that our founding documents protected us from the rise of a demagogue, and that if a demagogue was able to rise, his demagoguery would be nipped in the bud. The separation of powers and the free press would assure that. The president is not an emperor, after all.

Well, forget all that. None of the institutions that we thought would protect us will. The judiciary will no longer be independent. Congress will happily relinquish its autonomy and its last few shreds of public confidence. The fourth estate has been completely de-fanged by the internet, the decline of “journalism”, the rise of disinformation, the blurring of entertainment and information, greediness and fecklessness.

There was a lot of outcry this week when Congress decided to officially do away with ethics oversight. Why in the world would they do this in the first place? What problem does it solve? Is it really a priority? Anyway, they reconsidered their rashness after a tweet from The Orange One, and reversed course the same day. No one wants to be on the wrong end of a twitter fight with the man-baby, after all.

The way (Republican) congressmen have functioned in recent years was to take their marching orders from the Kochs and Dark Money interests. If they didn’t, well, a “better” candidate would miraculously emerge in their district and they’d lose their job. The voters were already hypnotized into voting against their own interests by talk radio,  FoxNews, and the alt-right internet. Minimum wage? Social Security? Health Care? Unions? Clean air and water? Bah! Who needs them? We’d rather starve and choke if we can stick it to the Liberal Elite.

But something has changed. The new reality is that the voters are still hypnotized, but their allegiance is with a new Svengali. Whatever Trump tweets, goes. Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin are now more credible than our own intelligence agencies? Tweet it. Done! Let that coward John McCain whine about it all he wants.

If Trump wants to single out an individual, whether a gold-star mom, a beauty pageant winner, a news reporter, a congressman, an agency employee, a corporate CEO, or whoever else, that person is in deep trouble with the 60 million Trump supporters. A random tweet can easily mobilize the best of them to irrationality and the worst of them to violence.

And Trump is completely at ease fighting with Democrats and Republicans alike, with historical allies or enemies, with our own security agencies, with news outlets, print media, sports figures, federal judges, Supreme Court justices. Anyone and everyone. Let’s face it, he just likes to fight. Chaos is his best pal.

If you say something nice about him, you’ll be spared. Temporarily. Nothing he says today is guaranteed not to be reversed tomorrow. You’re better off keeping quiet.  Anyone who thinks things will change when he actually takes office is deluded. “You’re Fired” is not just a TV catch-phrase – it’s who he is and wants to be. Fear him. Fear for your job. He has the power to destroy you. (You know who else was like this? I’m not saying his name…)

He’s put in place a team of people to head agencies whose very existence they’ve questioned. Expect a lot of firing within those agencies . And then, expect the firing of the people put in place to do the firing.

Congress now needs to please the man-baby, lest he mobilize his grass-roots minions against them. And with all the nutty promises and rhetoric from the campaign now in play,  the lid is off. They’re itching to show they mean business. Repeal the ACA without a replacement? Yes, because the most important thing we can do is de-fund Planned Parenthood right this second. Put them out of work

Today the coming orgy of firing got a big shot in the arm. The House Republicans (yes, them again) revived a 130 year-old rule that allows them to reduce the pay of any individual government employee to $1. In other words, to fire them.

From the link:

Democrats and federal employee unions say the provision, which one called the “Armageddon Rule,” could prove alarming to the federal workforce because it comes in combination with President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the Washington bureaucracy, his call for a freeze on government hiring and his nomination of Cabinet secretaries who in some cases seem to be at odds with the mission of the agencies they would lead.

“This is part of a very chilling theme that federal workers are seeing right now,” said Maureen Gilman, legislative director for the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal employees.

The man-baby is going to love this! You’re fired, you’re fired, and you’re fired, too. You’re all fired!

Just because I’m a librarian…

Talking about illuminated manuscripts led us to the story of the Spanish Forger which leads us to the fascinating Belle da Costa Greene.  A little background to begin…

The Beaux-Arts architect Charles Follen McKim finished the magnificent Boston Public Library in 1895.

boston_library_eb1

There are so many wonderful details and decorations inside, you really have to visit it to see.  Never mind the fabulous collections housed there.   Bates Hall is the main reading room and is recognized by architects as one of the most important rooms in the world.

bates_hall_boston

Around this time in New York, J.P. Morgan started collecting medieval manuscripts to go along with his books and art.  He kept his collection mostly in England, because of a 20% tax in the U.S. on imported art, but also had many things in storage at the Lenox Library on 5th Ave. at 70th St.in NYC. And he had many pieces at his home on Madison Ave. at 36th.

He wanted to consolidate the collections to properly house and display them, and in 1902 he asked McKim to build him a library adjacent to his home.  The result is regarded by many as McKim’s masterpiece.

rotundapierpont-morgans-library-bs

Now, he needed a librarian to organize, catalog and expand the collection, and in 1905 he hired the 21 year old Belle da Costa Greene, who had been introduced to him by his nephew, a Princeton student.  She had been working in the library at Princeton, and had gained some expertise with illuminated manuscripts.

Greene has been described as smart and outspoken as well as beautiful and sensual.  It’s often said she lived with “Bohemian freedom” – I’ll leave it for you to imagine what that’s actually a euphemism for.  She moved with ease in elite society, and was known for her exotic looks and designer wardrobe.  She said, “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”

Andi Bohs as Belle da Costa Greene

She was one of the first women to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.  She became Morgan’s most trusted confidante and cultivated a wide variety of art dealers, critics and museum curators. It’s easy to understand why, given her knowledge, style, personality, and the unlimited resources of J.P. Morgan.  She held the job for 43 years.

The story of the Spanish Forger began with “The Betrothal of St. Ursula,” a painting that had been ascribed, based on its style, to fifteenth-century Spain. In 1930, Belle da Costa Greene refused to support its purchase for New York’s Metropolitan Museum because she suspected it was a forgery.  She was the first to identify the Spanish Forger’s distinctive characteristics and gave him his name.

brothel

The Betrothal of St. Ursula

Later, the St. Ursula panel  was tested using neutron activation analysis, and it was discovered that the green pigment in the painting was copper arsenite a.k.a. Paris Green, which was not available before 1814, confirming Greene’s suspicions.  Because French newsprint has been found behind some of his panels, it is suspected that he actually worked in Paris, but the name Greene gave him has stuck.  In 1988, the painting that gave the Spanish Forger his name was given to the Morgan Library and Museum.

Greene’s achievements are even more remarkable when you factor in the need to overcome the racism of the day – she was the daughter of African American parents, but concealed her background and invented Portuguese lineage to take its place.

An amazing woman.  If you want to know more about her, check out this biography.

You want me to hold the chicken?

OK, I surrender. Everyone likes thinking about movies more than about Trump or Israel or even biblioclasm.

Here’s a pop quiz. Random scenes, some iconic, some not, from random movies. Can you name the movie and the principal actors in the scene? No cheating with that Google thingy you kids are always playing with, either. They’re mostly pretty easy, especially for people who have been around a few years, so have fun.

Get 15 out of 20 right and you win a gold star from Stewie. Get them all and you receive a PhD from Trump University.

5-easy-pieces1: I want you to hold it between your knees.

blues2

2: Jake goes to church.

diner1

3: Pick up the beat, will ya?

taxi

4: Here’s an easy one for you.

5: If you don’t know this one, you shouldn’t be playing.

6: Hint: It’s a Lush Budgett Production.

stella

7: Another no-brainer, just to keep your batting average up.

gregory-and-sophia

8: The swans fly high in the Kingdom of Vespa

garr

9: I’m very proud of being a woman…

heart

10: Bet you don’t get this one.

bang

11. TEGWAR

strangelove

12. That’s a load of Commie bull.

fargo3

13. I’m cooperating here.

zorba.jpg

14. Another slam dunk

mother

15. You’re running a food museum here.

kalifornia3

16. Take it easy, Early

bicycle-thief

17. Hint: DeSica

thousand-clowns

18. Go to your alcove.

if

19. Boarding school fantasy

breathless

20. To become immortal, and then die.

Answers will be posted in the comments section for this post tomorrow, or later today if you beg really nicely.

Filling the swamp

Let the madness begin.

For months now, we’ve been hearing about Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp”. If you’ve been paying attention to his pronouncements (really, though, why would you bother when none of them means anything?), you know this swamp-draining thing is about lobbyists. Trump’s Big Idea is that there’s too much outside influence in congress and that lobbyists had created a swamp of money and corruption.

Trump pledged to “make our government honest once again”, which is pretty funny since the eight years of Obama have been scandal-free, the cleanest administration we’ve ever had thanks to strong ethics guidelines and vetting from Obama himself. Anyway, Trump’s 10/17/2016 proposal for sweeping ethics reform had five points:

First: I am going to re-institute a 5-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for 5 years after they leave government service. I am going to ask Congress to pass this ban into law so that it cannot be lifted by executive order.

Second: I am going to ask Congress to institute its own 5-year ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and their staffs.

Third: I am going to expand the definition of lobbyist so we close all the loopholes that former government officials use by labeling themselves consultants and advisers when we all know they are lobbyists.

Fourth: I am going to issue a lifetime ban against senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

Fifth: I am going to ask Congress to pass a campaign finance reform that prevents registered foreign lobbyists from raising money in American elections.

Not only will we end our government corruption, but we will end the economic stagnation.

There is huge shift in power about to begin Washington.  Both houses of Congress will be controlled by Republicans, and the incoming Republican president is a “businessman” with more potential conflicts of interest than anyone in history.  They want big changes to health care, infrastructure, and lots of other areas where private interests have historically exercised their lobbying clout to great effect.

But so far, Trump has shown little interest in backing up his words with any action. He’s stacked his transition team with lobbyists and insiders.  Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, has opened a new lobbying firm just a block from the White House, along with another Trump adviser, Barry Bennett.

If there was any doubt left about the Republicans’ actual intentions about ethics and lobbying, it was removed  yesterday.  In a surprise vote with no public debate, House Republicans destroyed the Office of Congressional Ethics, which since 2008 has provided independent oversight over congress.  It was set up in response to bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All were convicted and served jail time.

In response Nancy Pelosi said, “Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House G.O.P. has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions. Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

Another way to say it is that the new administration is closely adhering to the bumper sticker slogan we suggested for them when discussing the absurdity of the Electoral College, “The Opposite Is True”.

Old movies I’ve seen a million times

There are certain movies that I will watch over and over again. I guess they’re all “old” now. If I’m flipping around the TV channels and one of them comes up, that’s it, I’m watching until the end.

A lot of them are on everyone’s must-see list: box office hits, epic blockbusters, Academy Award winners, and such. Movies like Mutiny on the Bounty (both the Gable and Brando versions), The Godfather (I and II), Singin’ in the Rain, Casablanca, Goodfellas, Lawrence of Arabia, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Wizard of Oz, and many more qualify for me.

Generally the ones I’ll watch over and over are very well-written, or movies that have a performance that stands out so much that you want to see it again and again. Or movies that just make me laugh for whatever reason. Or movies with so many plot twists and characters you learn something new each time you watch.

Here are a few more that randomly come to mind that I never get tired of. They might not be the best ever made, and I’m not sure they’re even my “favorites”, but I will watch them again if I happen on them.

Post your own list in comments.

The Heiress (1949)

Based on the Henry James novel, “Washington Square”. Absolutely great writing. Every word of dialog is perfect and not a syllable wasted. Ralph Richardson is outstanding as Dr. Austin Sloper and Olivia de Havilland is perfect as his devoted, shy and unattractive daughter.  Her transformation to embittered, wised-up adult is a tour-de-force. Montgomery Clift as the fortune-hunter, Morris Townsend.

heiress

The 1997 remake, “Washington Square”, with Albert Finney as the doctor and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the daughter, is also very worthwhile, and I’ll watch it whenever it’s on as well.

Get Shorty (1995)

Great cast and a very funny script based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Excellent music. It’s supposed to be John Travolta’s movie, and he’s very good,  but Dennis Farina as Ray Bones, and Rene Russo as Karen Flores, steal every scene they’re in.

Delroy Lindo,  James Gandolfini, and Gene Hackman are all great, too.

Film and Television

Breaker Morant (1980)

One of the best anti-war movies ever. Australian soldiers in the Boer War are put on trial for political reasons by their own leadership. Smart court-room dialog, based on real events.   Edward Woodward as the poetry-loving Breaker, and Bryan Brown as the women-loving Handcock are extremely sympathetic characters. British hypocrisy and snobbery are tested but win out in the end.

breaker

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Not many movies feature a virtuoso turn by a brilliant comedienne, but this one has three. Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Teri Garr are all fantastic. Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle are hilarious in Mel Brooks’ “Son of Frankenstein” send-up.

Mean Streets (1973)

Robert DeNiro’s Johnny-Boy is a psycho powder-keg, always getting his friend Charlie, Harvey Keitel, in hot water with his mobbed-up uncle. As with all Scorsese, the music is great and the language is, too. Who you callin’ a mook?

mean

Hombre (1967)

Another outstanding script  based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Sharp dialog throughout. Paul Newman, Richard Boone, Fredric March, Martin Balsam, and Diane Cilento are all good.

hombre

Paths of Glory (1957)

Another excellent anti-war movie, also with great court-room dialog. Again, soldiers are being tried by their own leadership – this time it’s the French in WWI. Kirk Douglas is at the height of his powers in this early Kubrick gem.

paths

Play Misty for Me (1971)

Clint Eastwood as the FM disc jockey stalked by the insane Jessica Walter. What  I like about this movie is how perfectly it captures the time and place – Monterey/Carmel in the pre-hippie 1960’s. And Walter’s perfect crazy woman.

misty

Badlands (1973)

Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are both great as teenagers on a murder spree in Terrence Malick’s take on the Charles Starkweather serial killings. Great music and atmosphere.

badlands

Biggest lies, biggest prize

Remember in 2011 when Trump sent his crack team of investigators to Hawaii to get the real truth about Obama’s birth?  Man, how he milked it – every night on TV, every day in the papers and on the net.

“I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” Trump said on NBC at the time. Right. They can’t. And they didn’t find anything. And they didn’t exist.

“We’re looking into it very, very strongly. At a certain point in time I’ll be revealing some interesting things,” Trump blithely blathered on CNN’s American Morning.

Of course he never produced anything. He also never admitted there was nothing to produce. He also never gave up the fiction that he had knowledge on the subject that others didn’t.

Only in September 2016 did he grudgingly say that Obama was an American, something  everybody (except most Republicans) had already known for years. Speaking at the opening of his new Washington D.C. hotel, he tacked these words on at the end,  “President Barack Obama was born in the United States”  This was all he had by way of explanation after years of preposterous lying.

I really, really hate bringing Hitler into these Trump discussions, but when talking about The Big Lie, you have to. Hitler invented it in 1925, and you just can’t pretend otherwise. Dictating Mein Kampf he talked about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He explained it this way:

“…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Today, Trump is at it again. Using language almost identical to that of his Birther Period, Trump is saying that the 17 security agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, who have concluded that the Russians interfered with the election are wrong. On Saturday, he said he knew “things that other people don’t know” about the hacking, and that the information would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Last week, he sent Kellyanne Conway out to say that the sanctions Obama had implemented against the Russians were actually directed at Trump. Basically the message here is that, for the incoming Trump administration, Democrats are the enemy of the U.S. and Russia is our ally in the fight against this enemy.

What I don’t understand is why say anything at all? The election is over. The hacking report is not going to change the result, and no one is claiming that it will. There is no longer any pressing need to discredit Obama or Democrats or anyone else.

Trump’s idiotic statements on the subject are more of the same combative nonsense that we heard throughout the campaign. It was effective then, but the job now is different: then the job was to get elected, and now it’s to bring the country together and lead all of us, including critics and including non-partisan independent agencies of the government that you’ll have to work with over the next four years, and who have no anti-Trump motive at this point.

Manbaby, you’ve already won the biggest prize. Stop already with the biggest lies.

Terrorism, violence, incitement

Yesterday, Teresa May, Prime Minister of the U.K. made a surprising speech in Brussels in which she condemned John Kerry’s harsh rebuke of the Israeli government. Kerry had said the Israelis were now being guided by right-wingers whose support of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was the greatest obstacle to achieving peace and the two-state solution for Israel/Palestine.

Kerry made this speech by way of explaining the U.S. abstention from the vote on U.N. resolution 2334, an absurdly one-sided resolution defining the settlements as “illegal” and basically blaming Israel for all the problems in the region, as the U.N. always does. The U.S. has always exercised its veto power on one-sided anti-Israel resolutions in the past, but, by abstaining here, it enabled passage of the resolution by a 14-0 vote.

Some observers think May’s speech was an indicator of a seismic shift in European politics that coincides with the onset of the Trump era. (I like “onset” there – like a sickness). The State Department responded to May’s statement saying,

“We are surprised by the U.K. Prime Minister’s office statement given that Secretary Kerry’s remarks — which covered the full range of threats to a two-state solution, including terrorism, violence, incitement and settlements — were in line with the U.K.’s own longstanding policy and its vote at the United Nations last week.”

And this is the subject of today’s polemic: “Terrorism, violence, incitement and settlements” are not in any way the “full range of threats” to a two-state solution. None of those can even claim the top spot.

Before I tell you what the biggest obstacle to a two-state solution is, let me just explain why settlements are not the problem. From 1948-1967, the “Palestinians” were living in the very Judenrein paradise they now say they need to establish before discussing peace. There were no Jews in Gaza or the West bank, and certainly no “settlements”. Virtually every day during that period, the Arabs were planning to attack the Jews or actually attacking them. Here is the shocking list of attacks before 1967. It all culminated in the combined armies of all Israel’s Arab neighbors launching the Six-Day war to obliterate Israel once and for all. I’m waiting for someone to explain what’s different now, other than the creation of that peace-loving organization, Hamas, in 1987.

The biggest threat to the two-state solution is that not a single Palestinian has ever once said they favor it, and not a single one thinks two states is a solution.  Even the most educated, cosmopolitan, and erudite Christian Palestinians, like Edward Said or Hanan Ashrawi, who themselves would certainly be purged from a Hamas-led Palestine, have either explicitly or implicitly opposed it.

The two-state solution is a figment of the western liberal imagination. No Palestinian thinks Israel is a legitimate state.

When Hamas “leadership” is asked if Israel has a right to exist, the answer is always a non-answer such as, “What difference does it make? Our reality is the Zionist Entity behaves as a de facto state”. In other words, “No.”

When Fatah or the P.L.O. is asked, they always deflect and twist the question, e.g. “When Israel recognizes a Palestinian state, we’ll discuss it”.

Just look at the P.L.O charter if you want to understand it. It’s all about how Israel has no right to exist, and Zionism is colonialist, aggressive, racist, and fascist. It talks about the “liberation” of Palestine from its occupiers.

And here is the main point: “Occupation” is the presence of “Israel” in the Palestinian homeland, by which they mean lands “occupied” in 1948, i.e. the founding of Israel, not lands “occupied” in 1967 after the six-day war. Occupation ends when Israel ends.

The Palestinians could have changed their charter over the years to reflect some sort of acceptance of the state of Israel, but it has never happened. The last time it was modified was 1968. From the above link to the charter:

“The original PLO charter from 1964 is identical to the 1968 charter except for article 24. The 1964 charter defined Palestine as the territory of the State of Israel and specifically excluded the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1968 version of the charter included both Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the Palestinian homeland to be liberated.”

Can this be any clearer?

And the wording never will be modified, either, because anyone suggesting it will be guilty of the greatest crime you can commit in “Palestine”: you’d be a “normalizer”, meaning you agreed on some level that Israel has a right to exist.

There’s a lot more to be said about this, but the bottom line is that the Palestinians care a lot more about ending the Israeli state than co-existing with it and/or creating their own.

Netanyahu:  “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.

Golda Meir: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Can anyone realistically disagree with this? It’s not about settlements. It’s not about the Right of Return. It’s not about East Jerusalem. It’s not about borders or water rights. It’s always been about Arabs hating Jews.

The Spanish Forger

Ready for a little more on biblioclasm? Of course you are. OK, let’s go.

Once a book has been dismembered, it’s pretty difficult to establish provenance for each leaf.  For a long time, expert forgers were able to reap profits by insinuating their work into otherwise legitimate sales and auctions.

In at least one case, the forgeries were so beautiful and well executed that they retained a lot of value on their own, even after the forgery is revealed. This is what happened for the “Spanish Forger”. No one knows who he was, and he almost certainly wasn’t Spanish. He was probably French and he produced a large number of works around the turn of the 20th century.

Wikipedia says,

The Spanish Forger’s works were painted on vellum or parchment leaves of genuine medieval books, using either blank margins or scraping off the original writing. He also “completed” unfinished miniatures or added missing miniatures in medieval choir books. His works fooled many experts and collectors and appear today in the collections of many museums and libraries. Over 200 forgeries have been identified

Some examples of his work:

forger4

forger1

forger3

The Forger didn’t simply copy genuine works. He developed his own style, a romanticized vision of the middle ages, and ultimately this led to his being “outed” by experts, which finally happened in 1930. They noted that the Forger’s work often contained themes inappropriate for the works they were to have been taken from. For instance, one of his trademarks was showing a woman’s “cleavage”, as in the second example above. This wouldn’t have appeared in a genuine bible.

But his works still have a place in museums and private collections. Here’s one owned by Harvard, which contains many of the hallmarks of the Forger’s style: courtly scenes, sweet facial expressions and decolletage for the ladies, swirling water, fairy-tale castles, and tapestry-like trees:

forger6

Here’s a Christie’s auction where a few pieces fetched about $28,000 in 1998. The Morgan Library in New York had a one-man show of about 75 of the Forger’s works in 1978. It was the Morgan that first figured out what the Forger was up to.

Want more about The Spanish Forger? Tons of detail and history here.

The internet is forever

Carrie Fisher was perhaps best known for playing Princess Leia in the original Star Wars flick. When Steve Martin heard about her death the other day, he tweeted the following tribute:

martin

Kind of sweet, right? Unambiguously meant as a compliment and homage.

Wrong. It’s an insult. Unbelievably insensitive.  He had to delete it because of the backlash from outraged internet strangers.

See, Carrie Fisher struggled all her life against being a sex-object for Star Wars nerds. How could Steve Martin be so crass and clueless not to to see the damage his tweet does?

Cinnabon also tried to be nice and was slapped down. They deleted this indefensible assault:

cinnabon

Three things are at work here:

The first is the tyranny of the individual, a recent phenomenon that we have previously discussed. Lots of people liked the tweets but a couple didn’t. The tweets must go.

The second is a weird addiction to outrage that so many now seem to be afflicted with, and which the internet enables.

The third is that there is no such thing as “deleting” anymore. When Steve Martin attempted to delete his tweet, he thought it would disappear, appeasing the outraged,  and that would be the end of the controversy. The opposite happened. The tweet was given new life and was greatly amplified.  It would now be seen by tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people, rather than just those who “follow” Martin.

Be very careful about what you type, and be prepared to weather an unforeseeable shitstorm.   It’s all on your permanent record. The internet is forever.

The greater threat: NSA or Alexa?

So let me start by saying that, in my view, Edward Snowden is not any kind of hero, didn’t provide any great service to the country, not even “start a national discussion”, and barely qualifies as a whistleblower. I think he’s a self-involved, cowardly little piss-ant who broke some laws and then fled to countries where government conducts far more pervasive and intrusive surveillance than he was accusing the NSA of doing. The fact that he chose Glenn Greenwald to “leak” to really says it all.

The Justice Department claims he compromised our national security efforts and put agents at risk by revealing the techniques and extent of NSA eavesdropping, which Snowden claims was illegal.  They want him to return for trial or to try to negotiate a plea, which, for a less cowardly individual, would be the perfect platform to make his heroic case to the public.

The whole thing seems silly to me at this point. It’s hard for me to imagine that the NSA is learning anything about us that we aren’t already happily giving away in exchange for some “conveniences”. We’re even paying for the privilege.

Say you use Gmail to send a message to your friend asking if he has an outdoor wifi camera.  You will see ads popping up for wifi camera deals the next time you use Google for searching. Every email you send or receive is being viewed, saved, and analyzed by Google. You opted in to this by using Gmail (and by not encrypting your messages).

The Uber app wants you to agree to let it know your location for a time before they pick you up and after they let you off. In other words, you’ll be giving them permission to know where you are all the time. Do I think that anyone who now relies on Uber  is going to refuse this and lose the convenience? Of course not.

I got an Echo from Amazon recently. You talk to it and it plays music, adjusts your thermostat, buys stuff, orders a Pizza or a ride, searches the web, and does a lot of other tricks.  When you say the word “Alexa”, it wakes up and does what you ask.  Of course this means it’s always listening for you to say the word.

Always listening and always recording everything said in your household, if that’s what Amazon, or some rogue employee, chooses for it to do. Or if the government wants Amazon to help it solve crimes or prevent terrorism. To make you feel a little better,  Alexa turns itself off if you ask whether the NSA is listening right now, or at least that’s what it appears to do.

And of course, there’s hacking. The information is out there in the cloud, waiting for our government, some other government, or some fourteen year old kid to come for it, even if Amazon or Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or Uber or whoever refuses to hand it over. And corporations care a lot less about securing their data (i.e. your data) than you might think – security is not a profit center and no one can really tell them for sure if they’re doing it right anyway. Yahoo let credentials for a billion accounts go out the door while trying not to. The game is already over. We lost.

My thesis here is that we’ve already given up virtually all privacy, so it really doesn’t matter much what the NSA does by way of legal or illegal eavesdropping.

I totally understand that there is a distinction between voluntarily giving information to a corporation that wants to sell us stuff and has no power to put us in jail, versus being secretly surveilled by a government agency that can ruin our lives. I’m arguing that in the world of total connectivity, lax security, and highly motivated governments and private parties, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Businessman-in-Chief

One of the things we heard repeatedly over the summer was that it would be great if government was run more like a business and that, as a great businessman, Trump would be the one to make this happen.

First of all,  the question of whether Trump is a good businessman is very much open to debate. Even if your only criterion was how much money someone had, it’s still not settled in Trump’s case.

Second, there is a huge difference between running a publicly held corporation and running a closely held private company.  In a family business like Trump has, you can fire people at will, stiff your contractors and creditors when it suits you, sue or threaten to sue people who challenge you, declare bankruptcy for profit, disregard affirmative action requirements, refuse independent audits, keep financial results secret, refuse outside directors, and so on. Virtually all the profits flow into your own pockets, and the sole purpose of the enterprise is more and more profits. For you.

Trump did try going public at one point about 20 years ago, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Stockholders, or as Trump regarded them, “shmucks”, lost 90% of their investment in the TRMP offering.

But third, and most important, the whole thesis that government should be run like a business is silly. Government isn’t a business and shouldn’t be run like one. It should be run like a government.

Businesses have managers, owners, customers, employees, and creditors. The interest of each differs wildly from the interests of the others. Government doesn’t have owners or customers. It has citizens.

The interest of business management is obscene compensation, particularly in proportion to their employees. They work for short-term gains. For themselves.

The interest of business owners (stockholders) is long-term growth. They are mostly represented by mutual fund companies, which also have a grotesquely overcompensated management class whose interest aligns more with company management than their own customers, the retail stockholders. The stockholder is routinely misled for the short-term advantage of the managers.

The interest of business customers is to get high quality products or services at a reasonable price. But in recent decades, customers have devolved from important clients-to-be-pleased to disposable suckers-to-be-fleeced. Just look at the way the big cable and phone companies treat their customers for ample evidence of this. Better still, look at the “students” at Trump University.

The interest of business employees is long-term stability, including a living wage, and health and retirement benefits. But employees are no longer really valued by most business managers. They are exploited, disposable, and typically don’t share in the success of the enterprise. They are regarded as overhead to be reduced whenever possible by outsourcing, salary cuts, and diminished benefits.

The interest of business creditors is that they want to get paid,  but they can be easily stiffed. The terms of their contracts can be re-negotiated by the business managers who have all the cards in that game. Bankruptcy can be declared to provide management “protection” from having to pay. The business can simply say, “we’re not paying – sue us”. Trump has stiffed his creditors, bondholders, and suppliers over and over again.

Government is not like this at all.  Everyone has the same interest. It’s employees are citizens. Its creditors (bondholders) are often citizens, too.  No one is paid disproportionately, and certainly not obscenely. Creditors can be assured they will be paid – U.S. debt obligations are known to be the safest in the world.

But, most importantly, the government is not a for-profit enterprise. All assets belong to the citizens, and if any manager were to directly benefit from any “deal”, he will have committed a crime.

When a voter says he wants the government to run like a business, he means he wants to eliminate waste and not overpay for what we buy. Fair enough. But it’s also understood that the government is to be run for the benefit of all, not the few at the top.

And here is where the voter will be bitterly disappointed. This is not what they will be getting with Businessman-In-Chief Trump.

 

 

American Biblioclasm

If you look up “biblioclast” in the dictionary (by which I mean click on that link, since no one actually uses a dictionary anymore and the word isn’t in a lot of them anyway) you’ll see it means one who destroys or mutilates a book. It is most often used to refer to book-burning, but to librarians and collectors, it refers to someone who separates out of leaves of a book to be used individually, mostly to be sold as works of art in their own right.

Before the printing press, books were individually created and “illuminated” by scribes and artists, some taking years to produce. Very few individuals could afford them, and very few could read. We’re talking here mostly about bibles, prayer books, texts used in the Catholic mass, and so on. Some examples of illuminations:

illum4

In many cases, books were hauled away and dismembered as part of the spoils of war. It was pretty much standard operating  procedure, since raising and maintaining armies was expensive and they were expected to pay for themselves.

In the last years of the 18th century, for example, Napoleon invaded Italy and looted the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Many of the liturgical manuscripts there were lost to biblioclasm and spread to the winds. Some did survive intact, found their way into private collections and can be seen by the public from time to time.

But some were cut up, reassembled, and sold as works of art. Between 1802-1806, the Venetian priest-turned-art-dealer, Abbé Luigi Celotti, cut miniatures from some of the Sistine Chapel loot to make montages which he framed and sold. This one, now in the Houghton Library at Harvard,  has as its central image a Last Judgement taken from a missal belonging to the Medici pope, Clement VII. The border has four scenes of Adam and Eve taken from other books, and the whole parallels the original sinners and the damned at the Second Coming of Christ.

biblio

From the book lover’s point of view, all this is quite barbaric.

In the 20th century, the Nazis took biblioclasm to new levels, burning any books written by Jews. This was, of course, an ideological outburst more related to the Bonfires of the Vanities than to biblioclasm-for-profit. Hard to say which is worse, really.

Right here in the U.S. we’ve had some pretty egregious examples of mutilating books for profit. A  good example is the Beauvais Missal, a manuscript produced at the end of the 13th century that originally had 309 leaves. It survived intact for well over six hundred years and was ultimately purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in 1926 by William Randolph Hearst, who sold it for $1000 in 1942 to New York dealer Philip Duschnes, a notorious book-breaker.

Duschnes quickly went to work selling leaves for $25 to $40. Today, there are 99 known leaves of the Beauvais Missal scattered across the world, in 26 states and five countries (Canada, Japan, Monaco, Norway, and England).

Here’s a case where someone found a leaf of the Missal in a trunk in Maine!

missal

Leaf from the Beauvais Missal

All of this brings us to the real subject of today’s story: with help of the internet and digital technology, we can attempt to reassemble some of the books that were scattered in this way. The Broken Books project at Saint Louis University is attempting to re-assemble them digitally.

Here you can look at the leaves of the Beauvais Missal that have been traced so far, and here is an interesting site about the effort to reconstruct it.

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

 

you cannot believe the things he says

The Washington Post agrees: Trump thrives on chaos.

“We’re just operating in this world where you cannot believe the things he says,” said Eliot Cohen, a foreign policy expert and former George W. Bush administration official at the State Department.  “It will have large consequences for our allies and our adversaries, and it’s going to greatly magnify the danger of miscalculation by all kinds of people.”

This is the pattern we have consistently seen and can expect to see over and over going forward:

  1. Trump tweets out some incendiary nonsense that puts the world on edge and makes everyone wonder if he’s insane,  ignorant, or simply looking to get us all killed
  2. His surrogates fan out to explain to the media what he really meant and how it’s not that bad and not at all what it seemed
  3. Trump then contradicts his surrogates, says the Tweet meant exactly what it said, and doubles down with additional gasoline for the fire
  4. The surrogates fan out once more and complain the media is making way too big a thing about it and why didn’t anyone complain when Hillary said x, y, or z.

Everyone now understands Trump is the Master Distracter, and is perhaps trying to deflect attention from something else, trivial or important, e.g. that no big-name talent wants to perform at his inauguration.

But every single day? Is this really necessary?

Thomas Nichols, a U.S. Naval War College professor, says

“It’s worse than not having one explanation.  If you’re going to change policy, then that requires a kind of steely consistency and a lot of disciplined messaging.”

“We’re all spending a lot of time trying to devise the future of America’s nuclear policy out of 140 characters.”

Is this the way we want to live?  Is the entire world just a snow-globe that Trump shakes up for his own amusement every  day?

I’ll say it one more time.  Man-baby: Put. The Twitter.  Down.  Or, if you prefer the Keith Olbermann style:

keith

Do we need a two-state solution?

There’s a place where the population is perpetually at war with itself. Two opposite world-views are tearing the place apart.  Two cultures are colliding. Battle lines are drawn and both sides are dug into their positions more obstinately than ever.

An entrenched culture that did things its same old way for centuries is being displaced by an alien culture with different values. The first group is not well educated or “cosmopolitan”. They are conservative, religious, rural, agrarian, patriarchal, and resistant to change. They see the intruders as over-educated, cosmopolitan, liberal, infidels, urban, industrial, matriarchal, and changing things that shouldn’t be changed.

I’m speaking, of course, of North Carolina. Can the two sides there live together?  Must one be absorbed by the other? Or must they be divided into two states to keep the peace?

North Carolina has been in the news a couple of times this week. First, their legislature met in a last-minute behind-closed door session and passed laws limiting the power of the incoming governor, a Democrat who, after a very close election, is replacing a Republican incumbent. The laws are unprecedented and assure that Republicans will retain power.

This news is really troubling and makes North Carolina seem like a crazy, out-of-control, and very un-American place. If you are a Republican, a Democrat is your enemy, disguised as your neighbor and fellow citizen. If he somehow wins an election, a way must be found to thwart him anyway.

The other news story out of North Carolina was that its legislature met for nine hours, also in a closed door session, and decided not to repeal the absurd “Bathroom Bill”, or HB2, that has been costing the state’s economy a lot of money, and making North Carolina an object ridicule for many people. The bill says, among other things, that you have to use the bathroom corresponding to the sex indicated on your birth certificate.

For people who don’t have much of a stake in this and don’t follow such things very closely (i.e. most of us), HB2 seemed like an absurd and gratuitous shot at the LGBT community, coming out of nowhere and a “solution” to an apparently non-existent problem. Yes, we get that some people are not entirely comfortable using a particular bathroom. And we also get that others would be uncomfortable if they switched.

But is anyone’s life going to be made miserable/tolerable by the passage/repeal of this stupid thing? Can’t these issues be resolved by individuals as needed? Will they have armed guards checking birth certificates at the entry to public restrooms in NC now? Has anyone been arrested over this? Has there been an epidemic of wrong-bathroom use that has harmed the population?

In short, WTF is this really about?

Well, to the supporters of the law, it’s about some things the Civil War was about, and most things the presidential election was about. The federal government was trying to impose its will on the state. Liberals were forcing their agenda on conservatives. People who believed there was no difference between men and women and gender was a made-up thing were bullying people who didn’t. Outsiders were disrupting a traditional way of life that locals liked just fine.

It started in April 2014 when the feds issued “guidance” on sexual assault for schools that receive Title IX funding. The guidance was that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity” and that “the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the parties does not change a school’s obligations”

In other words, transgender people are protected from discrimination under the law.

A few months later LGBT leaders also sought to extend Charlotte’s non-discrimination ordinances to include some new protected classes: marital and familial status, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression. The City Council ultimately votes 7-4 to add the language to the ordinances.

In March, 2016, Republican legislators convene a special session to overturn the Charlotte ordinance. They go far beyond the bathroom issue and, in one day, enact HB2, a bill that basically nullifies every nondiscrimination ordinance ever passed by any local government in the state.

Reactionaries gonna react.

The war of words escalates and positions harden. The ACLU files suit against NC. Bruce Springsteen cancels a concert. The Justice Department tells the Governor that HB2 violates civil rights law. The Governor sues the Justice Department. The NBA announces it will relocate its 2017 All-Star game. The U.S. District court rules in favor of a UNC transgender student who wants the system to refuse to enforce HB2. The NCAA announces it will move scheduled championships to other states. Corporations announce they are reconsidering North Carolina as a site for their operations.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are potentially lost to the North Carolina economy. What to do? Should they repeal HB2? And by doing so give in to the Muslim-Socialist agenda of the illegitimate president, just for a couple of dollars? Tough one.

This week they held a special session of the legislature to discuss repeal. Republican state law-makers and Democratic leaders in Charlotte had apparently struck a deal under which the city would repeal the local ordinance, and in return, state lawmakers would repeal HB2.

But the repeal failed and we’re back to where we started: it’s a Civil War that cannot be won. This time it’s not the Blue and Gray, but the Blue and Red. One side can never convince the other of the rightness of its own position and wrongness of the other. No compromise is possible. Brother against brother. Which side are you on?

 

 

 

Everything and everything else

In this time of universal connectivity and full-duplex blathering, everyone has the same power to spout their opinions as everyone else, and you are never required to listen to an opinion different from your own. It’s been said a million times now – the internet has created a “news” environment where each person can tailor the news to his own needs, and the line between news and opinion has become blurred to the point of invisibility.

When you are only listening to others who are reinforcing what you already “know”, the chances of you being open to a contrary opinion are smaller than ever. The idea that anyone could ever convince anyone else of changing their mind on something is now perilously close to obsolete.

Of course everyone wants to believe they’re right and loves validation. I don’t think that’s anything new. What is new, though, is that now any individual, irrespective of their qualifications or motives, can broadcast their views with the same volume and on exactly the same platform, and using the same tools, as sources that had previously been regarded as authoritative. Everyone has the same capability of expanding their readership and has the same size potential audience.

Do you really have to read the New York Times when Stewie Generis is sitting right over here with all the facts you’d ever want? The same number of mouse clicks is needed to get my view as theirs. I could use the same fonts and layout if I wanted and even the same “sources”. And why should you care what Maureen Dowd thinks more than what Stewie thinks?

The other day I read a question from someone asking the internet how to deal with family arguments over the holidays. Their family, clearly Trump supporters, apparently wouldn’t stop trying to change their mind about the implications of the election. The question said,

“My family thinks  we are hysterical/worried over nothing, that we don’t understand some piece of the puzzle, or that they have “heard” differently than what we know to be true. The most generous interpretation of their approach is that it is condescending, but that ignores that most of their arguments are also objectively incorrect. They will not accept anything as fact that they do not already believe to be true, and they are not interested/able to discern reputable sources from nonsense.”

I thought this expressed the problem very well. How can you change someone’s mind when they can’t tell the difference between reputable sources and nonsense? And, through this looking glass, aren’t they thinking the same of you?

I’ve made the point before that the internet devalues knowledge. No one is smarter than anyone else. No knowledge needs to be acquired or retained, since all knowledge can be retrieved with the click of a mouse or tap on a screen. This implies further that wisdom is equally devalued and so are facts, or “truth”, if you prefer. Depending on where your search takes you, anything might be true and everything is as true as everything else.

Privatizing the Presidency

Conservatives have long sought to reduce the role of government in all aspects, and the Trump presidency will no doubt provide a good deal of help in that endeavor.

Just to cite one example of many, Betsy DeVos, the incoming  Secretary of Education, really doesn’t believe in public education at all, preferring charter and religious schools.

The failed Bush administration attempt to privatize Social Security doesn’t seem to have deterred Trump. His “point man” for Social Security, Tom Leppert is a long-time privatization advocate.  Mike Korbey, who is heading the SSA transition, is a former lobbyist who has advocated privatizing Social Security. Dorcas Hardy, a commissioner of the SSA during the Reagan administration, is also on the Trump administration’s SSA transition team. She called for privatizing Social Security while at the libertarian Cato Institute in 1995.

The privatization of the military and security services began in earnest in the Bush/Cheney era with companies like Blackwater USA doing most of the heavy lifting in Iraq. But there are many companies contracting work that used to be done by our armed services. There can no longer be any doubt that war is a for-profit enterprise in the Trump era.

But all this is old news. What’s really different about Trump is his desire to privatize the presidency itself. He prefers his private security detail to the mandatory protection of the Secret Service. He’s said that he wants to use his own plane rather than Air Force One.  He’s indicated he will be spending more time at his home in New York than the White house (with the family not even moving to D.C.).

Even the use of his private Twitter account, rather than official channels of communication is an issue. Just as it’s easy for him to impulsively blast out some nonsense, it’s also easy for an unthinking citizen to impulsively respond, only now that citizen will be talking at the POTUS, and must be very careful indeed about any opposing speech that might be deemed a threat.

And, of, course Trump has refused to release his tax returns, divest any business holdings, or even clarify what they all are. His conflicts of interest in at least some of these businesses, e.g. his Washington D.C. hotel, are nonetheless obvious.

All this blending and blurring of the private with the public is ominous. While each of these things seems trivial enough on its own, and no direct threat to our way of life,  in the aggregate a clearer picture emerges.

This is how it’s done in countries where the government operates for the benefit of the rulers and not the citizens. This is what the dictators and despots do.

 

The opposite is true

One of the reasons we have this silly Electoral College thing is that the founders couldn’t settle on the right way to elect a president. Should he be appointed by the senate? Should state governors decide? A popular vote would be good but people might not get accurate information about candidates from outside their state. And for a candidate who had never run for office and therefore had no record to analyze, it would really be a problem

They had to figure a way to prevent a completely unqualified demagogue from fooling the people who had no idea what he was really like, so they invented the Electoral College.

There’s little doubt that today the Electoral College will vote Donald Trump in as president, but it’s a bit ironic when you think that the people who knew him best supported him least. This seems like exactly the thing the Electoral College was meant to take into consideration

New York state gave Hillary a true landslide victory: 59% to Trump’s 36.5%.

But in New York City, Trump’s home town, it was really something. It didn’t matter that he had no record whatsoever of public service – everyone knew him very well from his businesses, bankruptcies, frequent law suits, outrageous media appearances and “socializing”, bogus “university”, and many other unsavory activities.

In New York City, Trump took an unbelievable beating.

In Queens, where he grew up, Hillary Clinton got an amazing 75.1% of the votes. But in Manhattan, where Trump lives and operates, everyone really hates him. He got less than 10% of the votes cast! It’s unbelievable.

Here’s the full breakdown by neighborhood.

You can zoom in and click on individual wards in that map. The Upper West Side is really devastating for Trump. That’s his old pussy-grabbing territory. In his prime, his favorite haunt had been the China Club (how perfect is that?!) on 75th and Broadway. If you spend a little time with the map, you can find parts of the UWS where Trump got less than 5% of the vote!

Trump thinks he has a mandate, but not only did he get fewer votes than Hillary, he even got fewer votes than that “loser” Mitt Romney got in 2012! Some mandate.

He claims to have won the popular vote, which he lost by close to 3 million votes, because millions “voted illegally”. There is not a single bit of evidence to support this. In fact the opposite is true.

pop-vote

Trump falsely claims to have won an Electoral College landslide . In fact, the opposite is true.

electortal-college Come to think of it, that makes a great slogan for the Trump presidency: “The opposite is true.”  Let’s get some bumper stickers made up.

Anyway, enough of this whining.

The message for today is pretty simple: if the Electoral College can’t even do the very thing it was created for, let’s just get rid of the stupid thing once and for all.

The chaotic transfer of power

In at least one past blog entry, I fretted about how it seemed Trump didn’t understand that the peaceful transfer of power was one of the things that made our democracy great. It meant, among other things, that our international treaty partners could rely on agreements made by past administrations, that our foreign policies could withstand ideological shifts at home without upsetting the world, that our currency would be stable, and that domestic political differences would be tempered by a strong moderating force.

If the storm cloud of Trump’s election has a silver lining, maybe it’s that we didn’t have to be tested in this area. The “Lock Her Up” faction was mollified, at least temporarily. The “Lock and Load” faction  can put their assault weapons down for a few minutes.

But it seems that the man-baby needs more than just the adulation of his fans, more than constantly seeing his name on every newspaper, internet site, and media outlet at the same time, and more than just the legitimacy and acceptance into the political elite that the election conveys.

What is now becoming crystal clear is that Trump needs chaos.

Only when all his allies are completely flustered, torn between jumping ship and circling the wagons, can he feel in control. Only when all his detractors are apoplectic with disbelief can he be assured of the commitment of those loyal to him. Only when the world is holding its breath to see if he was serious about his latest outrage does he feel that he actually controls the levers of power.

It’s bad enough that Trump intends to conduct foreign policy by Twitter, away from any sane or even semi-informed advisers. We’ll all see where that leads soon enough. But can we all at least agree that he must wait until he’s actually the president before doing it?

The Chinese seized a U.S. drone operating in international waters, escalating tensions in the Pacific. The U.S. protested through the usual channels and the Chinese agreed to return it to de-escalate the crisis. So far, we’re talking about a fairly normal, if dangerous, international incident with an optimal outcome for all – Chinese faces saved, Navy gets its drone back, world at peace.

But that’s not good enough for Trump. Apparently the idea of the Obama administration continuing to operate effectively and within accepted norms is too much for him. How can any crisis be settled without his input? Isn’t he the one with the “mandate” now?  Doesn’t everyone need to know what he thinks?

Time for some action from Trump Tower. Time to cause some chaos. With a tweet, of course. China can keep the drone – I don’t want it!

At last, the man-baby is pacified, at least for a couple of hours. Everyone’s talking about him again, so he can rest. Doesn’t matter that he’s not even the president yet. Doesn’t matter that he’s weakened  our position with China. Doesn’t matter that the world is laughing at us.

The Global Times, a Communist Party-controlled newspaper in Beijing, poked fun at the confusion in the United States.

“Before Trump’s generous announcement that he didn’t want the drone back, the Pentagon had already announced publicly that they have asked China to return the ‘illegally seized’ [unmanned underwater vehicle] through appropriate governmental channels,” the paper wrote. “We don’t know, after seeing Trump’s new tweets, if the Pentagon should feel boggled.”

Ahhhh. Sweet, sweet chaos. That’s the thing.

Out with the old

I watched Obama’s last press conference yesterday and was yet again struck by how calm, thoughtful, fair-minded, moderate, and intelligent he is. And what a very good president he has been.

The economy has recovered under his watch, adding 36,000 jobs per week over eight years. Financial markets have rebounded. He has limited our military adventurism. As he promised, he tried hard to close Gitmo. He presided over the successful raid that ended bin Laden. He can be forgiven for the crime of getting health insurance for 20-30 million people who didn’t have it before. He did all these things and many more in the face of absurd obstructionism and vilification

During the press conference, he repeated that the biggest threat we face is losing sight of who we are as a nation, gently chiding his republican critics who have eviscerated him for not being tougher on Putin, but who now, according to a recent poll, think Putin is more trustworthy and reliable than democrats.

The mercurial and petulant man-baby that will soon replace him is an entirely different animal. The new president will have the nuclear codes and the authority to unilaterally launch a strike at will.

According to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Trump’s election makes it more likely that humanity will perish in a catastrophic event of some kind, because his intentions are secret. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Baum said Trump’s “tendency toward erratic behavior, combined with a mix of difficult geopolitical challenges ahead, mean the probability of a nuclear launch order will be unusually high.”

It’s the “his intentions are secret” thing we need to worry about most. What Trump says does not actually reveal what he intends, which is the essential characteristic of “bullshit”. Trump is a classic example of a bullshitter.

In his seminal essay, “On Bullshit”, Harry Frankfurt distinguished bullshitters from liars. He said,

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

It’s going to be a tense four years. I predict Trump will do away with press conferences entirely, as he needs them no more than he needs daily security briefings. We will not have a chance to compare his performance under that difficult spotlight with that of Obama. He has said he will continue to communicate his thoughts via twitter, and this will have to suffice.

Every morning we will awake to something no one had foreseen. An angry response to a negative restaurant review, perhaps, or perhaps a tweet that ends the world.

 

Syria: All vs. Everyone

Having a hard time figuring out who the good guys are in Syria? It’s unbelievably complex. That’s why there’s no good “solution”, political or military. Also, there are no clear, achievable objectives for us that could shape a coherent policy and that’s why we’ll be the loser no matter who is deemed the winner. Even if we stay out of it, we’ll be someone’s enemy.

Above all, it’s too complex for Trump. You can’t sum this thing up in a tweet.

The first thing to know is it’s not ISIS vs. The West. This would be a convenient explanation and one that is very attractive to  Trump: a simple, patriotic narrative that would energize our military and that our population would support. And it’s what is being put forward by Trump’s man-crush, Vladimir Putin. For Putin, anyone who opposes Assad is a terrorist. Trump ran on a platform of “bombing the shit out of ISIS”.

Apart from the Syrians themselves, there are five countries involved, each with it’s own set of interests: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and the U.S.

Turkey wants to keep Kurdish separatists in check, both in Syria and Iraq. They supported anti-Assad rebels early on and would like to see him gone.

Iran wants to prop up Assad to maintain its access to Lebanon, where its client, Hezbollah, opposes Israel, whose nuclear weapons Iran fears. Also, maintaining Shiite control of Syria’s Sunni majority  increases Iran’s regional influence. Assad is a member of the Shiite Alawite sect.

Russia also wants to prop up Assad. Syria is one of Russia’s few allies and buys weapons from them. Syria contains Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union.

Saudi Arabia wants to check the spread of Iranian power. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the two regional proxies in the never ending conflict of Sunni vs, Shia.

The U.S. would like to see Assad gone. We’ve given weapons to the “rebels” (hopefully the good ones) and the Kurds in order to fight ISIS.

Lots more explanation here.

syria

Within Syria, you’ve got the weak Assad government and its Alawite followers. You’ve got anti-Assad “rebels” who are the remnants of the Arab Spring. You’ve got Syrian Kurds, the Sunni civilian majority, factions within the military, a variety of extremist groups battle-hardened from fighting in Iraq. And you’ve got ISIS, which seems composed mainly of foreign kids that have been lured into the mess by Jihadist propaganda.

As is the nature of all things in the middle east, each sect, tribe, gang, and family has its own interests, and as time has gone on, each has felt more threatened by reprisals from all the others. The factions have become smaller, more numerous, and more intractable. Assad’s indiscriminate bombing of cities is the most extreme example of this splintering – everyone who is not part of his clique is his enemy.

aleppo

Aleppo

What to do? Who knows. When it’s over, it won’t be over. There will be vendettas and plots, executions and assassinations. If Assad remains, he will be the president of nothing with enemies all around.

But I am quite confident that, before then, the man-baby will find a way to make it worse.

Gravity is just a theory

Right. Newton’s Theory of Gravitation is a theory. It attempts to explain a phenomenon which we can all easily observe.  Everyone agrees that something, let’s call it “gravity”, keeps us from flying up into the air willy-nilly.  Even mentally ill people.  Even religious fundamentalists.  Even, and here I’m on thinner ice, Republicans.

Let’s not confuse ourselves by saying gravity is “just” a theory, or the jury is still out, or reasonable people disagree, or whatever.

I can find you a “scientist” who is willing to go on record as saying that tobacco has not been proven to be a risk factor for cancer.  It takes some doing, but, if you start with the Tobacco Institute, you can get it done.  Since some people who smoke don’t, in fact, get cancer, it’s “just” a theory (supported by a mountain of evidence).

It’s a little harder to find a scientist who will say human activity is unrelated to the observable phenomenon of climate change, but there are apparently 27 of them that have been identified.

I won’t question their integrity here by revealing who is paying for their “research”.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human activity is accelerating climate change.

This, of course, makes no difference to most Republicans, or to the president-elect, and certainly not to his transition team aide, Anthony Scaramucci.  Speaking on CNN, Scaramucci said that the scientific community “gets a lot of things wrong”.

He said,  in the past “there was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat”, and  “there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world.”

OK, there’s really no point in arguing with the willfully ignorant.  I get that.  But let me just get one quick point in here.  It is simply not the case that there was “overwhelming science”  showing the earth was flat or the sun revolved around it.  There was overwhelming superstition and religious conviction that these things were true.  The mission of science is to either prove or disprove them.

He said the “Trump team wanted common sense solutions – non-ideological”.

That’s the heart of the problem right there: to these idiots, science is ideological.  And why shouldn’t they think that?  After all, if you can fund a scientific study that shows tobacco is not so bad, well, that kind of proves science is for sale, right?

Who knows?  With enough funding, maybe we can disprove the Theory of Gravitation.  And we’ll all fly away.

Are you now or were you ever…

A communist? A homosexual? A Conscientious Objector? A climate scientist?

Wait. A climate scientist? I mean we all recognize the other accusations (in the form of “questions”) from the McCarthy era, but not the “crime” of being a climate scientist.

In the McCarthy era, they hauled you before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked you these questions. It didn’t really matter what you said because they already had you based on some meeting you’d been to or someone you’d been associating with.

But then they asked you who else was there, who your friends are, who influenced you, and so on. They wanted you to name names. It was the worst thing you could do, and yet there wasn’t much point in refusing. If you refused to answer, you would go to jail for contempt of congress and you’d lose your job and become a pariah. If you answered, you’d be shamed, lose your job and become a pariah, but, hopefully, not go to jail. You were blacklisted either way. And they already knew the names you were naming.

Describing the times years later, Arthur Miller said,

It was a ritual of humiliation –  conspiracy was the name for all opposition. And the reformation of the accused could only be believed when he gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Only this ritual of humiliation, the breaking of pride and independence, could win the accused readmission into the community

In today’s terms, the country had been delivered into the hands of the radical right, a ministry of free-floating apprehension toward anything that never happens in the middle of Missouri. It is always with us, this anxiety, sometimes directed towards foreigners, Jews, Catholics, fluoridated water, aliens in space, masturbation, homosexuality, or the Internal Revenue Department. But in the 50s any of these could be validated as real threats by rolling out a map of China. And if this seems crazy now, it seemed just as crazy then, but openly doubting it could cost you.

Sounds like a lot things happening today. But naming names of scientists? Was this a thing back then?

Not then, no. But it is now. From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor:

Donald Trump’s transition team has sent a list of 74 questions to the Energy Department (DOE), asking, among other things, for the identity of all employees and contractors involved in international climate meetings and domestic attempts to cut carbon emissions.

The questionnaire specifically asked for the names of all DOE employees who attended the United Nation’s annual climate talks for the past five years, employees who helped develop the President Obama’s social cost of carbon metrics, and which programs are essential to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.

All of which raises concerns that Trump’s administration will target employees involved in Obama-era policies that the president-elect spent his campaign promising to dismantle, including the Paris Climate Agreement, Clean Power Plan, and various other DOE and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

“This feels like the first draft of an eventual political enemies list,” said a Department of Energy employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal by the Trump transition team, told Reuters. “When Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp it apparently was just to make room for witch hunts and it’s starting here at the DOE and our 17 national labs.”

The Republican Party has been the anti-science voice of America for a long time now. They’ve opposed stem cell research, put forward “creationist” curricula in schools, and some have even opposed vaccination. And, of course, they’ve advanced the notion of climate change as a left-wing hoax.

So far, scientists themselves have not been sanctioned for their work. So far.

Oy vey.

Press conference? I’d rather tweet.

Why should there be a problem if a president wanted to use Twitter instead of some other media to make an announcement, change or clarify policy, or even pick a fight. Is it so different from making a speech?

Yes, it’s different, and, yes, it’s a problem.

First of all, you have only 140 characters to say your piece. Can you really make international policy in 140 characters? Can you even use full words? Is there any room for nuance? Can you avoid ambiguity? No, no, no, and no. But it’s perfect for someone with a limited attention span.

Second, if you make a speech, you have a speech writer. You have editors. You make second and third drafts. You pass it by your advisers. You vet your points and choose your words carefully, particularly on foreign policy matters. With Twitter, none of this happens. Got a brilliant idea while sitting on the toilet? Tweet! Perfect for someone who is impulsive and always right.

Third, not only don’t you have to consult with others before tweeting, you don’t have to answer any questions after tweeting. Or if you do choose to answer questions, you can say it was a joke or you were misunderstood or it was locker room talk or you were speaking as an entertainer and not as an official or they started it or whatever. And you do it on Fox”news”. It’s the opposite of a press conference where people try to pin you down and hold you to what you’ve said before. Twitter is a one-way medium if you want it to be. Perfect for someone who likes to make proclamations and give orders, but can’t take in any information.

Trump has given no press conferences since the election, but has often tweeted, even about matters that should be the domain of the president, not the president-elect.

He got himself (and, therefore all of us) in hot water by accepting a call from the president of Taiwan. Then someone apparently told him that we’ve had a one-China policy for fifty years, and the Chinese regard Taiwan as a province (where all the Nationalists fled after the 1949 revolution).

Of course, Trump can never be wrong, so let the tweeting begin. Trump doubles down, as always, and says the one-China policy is in play unless we get a better “deal”, blah blah blah. Goes on TV (Fox of course) talking about North Korea and a lot of other stuff he obviously just heard about five minutes ago.

But he’s  not dealing with Low-energy Jeb or Little Marco or Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary here. China’s Global Times newspaper called him an ignorant child (should have said man-baby IMO) and said “The ‘one China’ policy cannot be bought and sold. Trump, it seems, only understands business and believes that everything has a price and that if he is strong enough he can buy and sell by force”. They said a “real crisis” would ensue if Trump kept this up.

I don’t see a good way out here. Maybe the China tiff will fizzle. I hope so. But no one is going to take away the man-baby’s Twitter now. They tried it once a couple of days before the election, but it didn’t “take”.

We’re in trouble.

Yesterday’s wisdom

Some things make so much sense when you read them that you just know they’re true. They can’t not be true.  Depending on your own view of the world, they may give you comfort or consternation. Either way, they’re so obviously true, you can just accept them and modify your behavior and thinking going forward based on what you’ve read.

Less than two months ago, a couple of weeks before the election, Paul Krugman wrote  that Donald Trump had only a 7% chance of being elected according to the Times Upshot model, whatever that is.

His theme in that piece was basically that any Republicans who had endorsed him or hadn’t backed away from him soon enough should be ashamed of themselves, and that anyone who voted for down-ballot candidates were voting for Trumpism.

It was obvious from the beginning that he was a “con artist” — so declared Marco Rubio, who has nonetheless endorsed his candidacy. His racism and sexism were apparent from the beginning of his campaign; his vindictiveness and lack of self-discipline were on full display in his tirades against Judge Gonzalo Curiel and Khizr Khan.

So any politicians who try after the election to distance themselves from the Trump phenomenon — or even unendorse in these remaining few days — have already failed the character test. They knew who he was all along, they knew that this was a man who should never, ever hold any kind of responsible position, let alone become president. Yet they refused to speak out against his candidacy as long as he had a chance of winning — that is, they supported him when it mattered, and only distanced themselves when it didn’t. That’s a huge moral failure, and deserves to be remembered as such.

Of course, we know why the great majority of Republican politicians supported Mr. Trump despite his evident awfulness: They feared retribution from the party’s base if they didn’t. But that’s not an excuse. On the contrary, it’s reason to trust these people even less. We already know that they lack any moral backbone, that they will do whatever it takes to guarantee their own political survival.

And what this means in practice is that they will remain Trumpists after the election, even if the Orange One himself vanishes from the scene.

What he wrote made all the sense in the world. It was all obviously true. Backing Trump was an indication of spinelessness and dishonesty. But it’s all yesterday’s wisdom

Conflicts and interests

Some people are starting to believe Trump doesn’t even understand what the concept of “conflict of interest” even means.

The other day Kellyanne Conway, our new Secretary of Smiling While Fighting, said Trump will continue his role as Executive Producer of Celebrity Apprentice in his spare time. She said, “Were we so concerned about the hours and hours and hours spent on the golf course of the current president? I mean presidents have a right to do things in their spare time, in their leisure time.”

Leaving aside the idea that the POTUS will have enough spare time to do another job, there are obvious conflicts of interest for both NBC and DJT here. At least they’re conflicts in the sense that the rest of us use the term. The president will have an interest in a show aired by a media company that also reports on his presidency.

But the man-baby understands the idea of conflict of interest very well. It only seems like he doesn’t because the rest of us are misunderstanding what his interest is. We all assumed his interest and that of the American people would be the same thing.

Trump knows there is no conflict of interest between being the president and running his businesses for the obvious reason that being the president is now one of his businesses. See?  Everything he does will be in his interest. Where’s the conflict?

This new paradigm is evidenced in virtually every one of his cabinet picks as well. But it’s interesting to note that the reason given for dropping Rudy Giuliani from consideration for Secretary of State is that the Trump team thought there would be conflicts of interests because of his business ties overseas. He was giving speeches to foreign governments about how evil it was that Hillary Clinton was giving speeches to foreign governments. You can’t make this shit up.

But today we learn that the front-runner for the job is the CEO and Chairman of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson. Giuliani giving some speeches abroad is a conflict but the chairman of the world’s largest oil company doing business in 200 countries isn’t?  No, no, listen. Our national interest is making oil company executives rich, and our foreign policy is based on how best to do that.

It’s not so hard to understand.

Midway revisited

Midway Island is a tiny dot of land, only 2.4 square miles, thousands of miles from anywhere else. It’s literally in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about “midway” between Asia and North America.

You know its name because the greatest naval battle of all time was played out there over a couple of days only six months after Pearl Harbor. All four of Japan’s aircraft carriers were sunk in a decisive victory for the U.S. It permanently crippled the Japanese Navy and changed the course of the war in the Pacific. The name might also be familiar as Chicago named it’s downtown airport after this battle.

Today, only about 50 people inhabit the island, all employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.   There had been a National Wildlife Refuge there, but no tourists have been there since 2012, as the tourism program was suspended for lack of funding.

You can try virtual visitation if you’re desperate to see it.

Midway has always been home to a large population of birds, including three species of Albatross.

three-albatross-512x219

Today, Midway is again on the front lines of battle, and the stakes this time are much more important even than WWII. It’s a battle all of us are certainly losing. Americans, Japanese, and everyone else. All of us.

Every piece of plastic that has ever been created is still in existence. Over five trillion pieces of plastic are already in the ocean, and according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, there will be more plastic than fish, by weight,  in the ocean by 2050. Some eight million tons of plastic trash leak into the ocean annually, and it’s getting worse every year. Americans are said to use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

Even though Midway is in the middle of nowhere, and should be a pristine beach free of any human impact (other than that of the ecologists working there), it is a landing place for a lot of the sea-borne debris. It just happens to be in the way.

great_pacific_dump

Weirdly, marine life seems to like eating plastic as much or more than anything else. I guess it’s also possible that the food chain has been so disrupted  by garbage and climate change that they just don’t have the same food available now that they’ve had in the past. In any case, the Albatross population at Midway has been eating a lot of it.

Click on an image to enlarge it

If you stick your hand into the sand at Midway, you can pull up an array of colored particles. Some people call this “new sand” – it’s plastic that has broken down into smaller pieces. The smallest are called nano-plastics and end up in plankton and become part of the food chain.

They’ve tried to stay ahead of the garbage on Midway, cleaning it up and flying it out – but it’s hopeless. Too much new garbage washes ashore every day or is flown in by the birds.  Midway will certainly disappear under the ocean before any of the plastic  decays. For now, they’re shoveling plastic against the tide.

As always, a few dedicated souls are doing what they can to reverse the damage. You can see what the Friends of Midway are up to. But obviously action on a much larger scale is required.

Are you optimistic?

A day like any other

Trump needlessly picks a Twitter fight with Chuck Jones, a union leader at Carrier who criticized him and his “saving” of all those jobs.

Trump selects a climate-change denier, Scott Pruitt, to head he E.P.A., a department whose very mission he disagrees with.  You can’t really be surprised by this kind of thing anymore.

Sean Spicer, the spokesman for the RNC, was on PBS Newshour. Asked about the appointment, Spicer said all Trump appointees are there to advance the Trump agenda. He also asserted that Trump’s sons are hunters and therefore environmentalists, even if their views differ from the “radical left” environmentalists, apparently referring to those of us that would like clean air and water and believe government can help with this.

Also, Spicer was asked if Trump stood by his  assertion that three million people had voted illegally.  Spicer said, “of course he does and that’s based on several academic reports…” He’s apparently referring to some already debunked nonsense.

It goes without saying  that Spicer said these and other things with a straight face (and a defensive, combative tone),  and may even believe them.

Trump’s term hasn’t even started and I can’t wait for it to be over.

mencken

Fake news, real consequences

With Trump and his team, you never know whether they’re putting out bullshit because it’s great strategy or because they actually believe it.

So, by now you all know that fake news was invented and disseminated by Michael G. Flynn of the Trump transition team. He put out the “news” that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the back room of a pizza shop in D.C.

Makes sense, right? Why wouldn’t she? Many people were outraged by this and one idiot charged in and shot the place up.

Flynn is the son of Trump’s national security adviser selection, Michael T. Flynn. The senior Flynn also has a tenuous grip on reality and is known among colleagues for his “Flynn Facts”.

The New York Times and Washington Post debunked the fake news, but apparently not everyone reads those publications. Go figure.

But here’s the thing. Wouldn’t you think that after this, people would at least understand that this particular thing was made-up and that fake news has the potential to cause real havoc?

No. The internet doesn’t work that way. Instead, we have a new revelation. The shooter was an actor and  “the whole thing was a psyop” , a “false flag Hegelian dialectic problem-reaction-solution event”. Wake up, sheeple!

The engineers who conceived the internet knew it could be the greatest tool ever invented to share knowledge world-wide, a way to further understanding among disparate peoples across the globe, a place where facts would reign and everyone would have instantaneous access to them.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The internet is a firehouse blasting out disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and lies. And the people who understand this best and can manipulate it to their advantage will lead us.

A day that will live in infamy

Seventy-Five years ago tomorrow, 353 Japanese fighter planes, bombers, and torpedo planes launched from six aircraft carriers sneak-attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.

pearl

There were eight battleships in the harbor. All were damaged and four were sunk.  The Japanese also damaged or sank three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a mine layer. 188 aircraft were destroyed.

2403 Americans were killed. 64 Japanese attackers died.

America declared war on Japan the next day, and less than four years later, Japan, its population and resources exhausted and its cities in smoldering ruins, surrendered unconditionally.

peace-sign

Uh, what was the question again?

With the help of U.S. largess in the form of the Marshall Plan and the Allied Council led by Douglas MacArthur, Germany and Japan were rebuilt and gradually became economic superpowers that rival the U.S.   Neither had to spend any money on their defense over the decades, and, along with everyone else, relied on the U.S. to be the world’s policeman.

Sixty years later, there was another sneak attack on American soil.

never-forget

There were 2877 Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks, hundreds more than were killed at Pearl Harbor. Unlike Pearl Harbor, they were almost all civilians. Enemy losses: the 19 attackers died.

The whole world was aghast, and, for at least a few days, supported us.  They said, “We are all Americans”.

Student officers display a US giant nati

We are all Americans

After the 9/11 attacks, again unlike Pearl Harbor, the U.S. did not declare war on anyone.  No war was declared on Saudi Arabia where almost all of the attackers came from, where the poisonous ideology behind the attacks was created and spread, and where the money and support for the attackers originated.  Neither was war declared on Afghanistan, where the attackers had been given sanctuary to plan and train for the attacks,  and where the Taliban regime protected them as honored guests.

The U.S. figured the response should be a surgical one since, after all, the attack was launched by a only handful of fanatics, who certainly could not represent a widespread ideology or “movement”.  We’re not the bad guys, after all, and the whole world supports us.  Right?

Nothing happened for a few weeks while we ruminated on how to respond.  Then, with smoke still rising at the World Trade Center, an operation was undertaken to root out the plotters in their mountain hideout.

wtc-october

But first, we thought we should re-create the success of the Marshall plan – no need to wait until we’ve beaten the bad guys.  We need to win over the hearts and minds of all the poor people in Afghanistan who must hate the Taliban and who will regard us as liberators and saviors, and who would really like a western-style democracy, like everyone else.  Right?

We started dropping not bombs but food on Afghanistan.  They’ll love this!  But it wasn’t that simple.  They didn’t love it.  They found fault.  They liked to eat rice, bread, and meat but we were giving them peanut butter and beans and other things they didn’t care for.

They usually eat with their hands, but each American kit contained plastic cutlery and packs of salt and pepper!  The directions on each packet were printed in English, French and Spanish; but Afghans speak Dari!

And the packages were the wrong color – they looked like bombs!  And one hit a guy’s roof and caused some damage!  And it wasn’t enough!  They needed shoes, clothing, and meat, they said.

International aid agencies criticized us for combining military and humanitarian missions.

In other words, we’re monsters.

And we didn’t get the bad guys, either. They walked over to Pakistan and lived in protected luxury for another decade, plotting, propagandizing, and stirring up trouble the whole while.

Fifteen years after the attacks, the “war” is still going on.  Americans are still dying in Afghanistan, and the entire region is in turmoil.  And, all over the world, the “We are all Americans” thing is done forever, an embarrassing relic like your high school yearbook picture.

Where did it all go wrong?

Well, we weren’t doing too too well in Afghanistan, so, on March 20, 2003, we invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, and whose leadership hated the people responsible for them.  It’s as if, after Pearl Harbor, we had decided to kick China’s ass.   This, of course, is precisely what bin Laden had hoped for.

George W. Bush has been asked many times since then whether he thought the Iraq invasion was a mistake, and has almost always answered that “history will ultimately judge”.  He is a content man.

Well, George, history’s verdict is in. March 20, 2003 is a day that will live in infamy.

the-iraq-war-800x430

We are villains

In Can Life Prevail, Pentti Linkola writes,

“The US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States – a corrupted, swollen, paralysing and suffocating political entity – must be across the Third World – and among the thinking minority of the West too.”

Clodovis Boff writes,

“The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference.

WTF? How did we get here? How are we not only the bad guys, but the worst guys?

After WWII, we not only built our own economy, but helped improve the economic condition of people all around the world. Between 1970 and the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled.

The number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011.

The percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.

Francis Fukuyama writes,

Yet statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities. And from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.

This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.

John F. Kennedy had understood these issues well. When he accepted his party’s nomination, he invented the “third world” idea, saying,

“Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. There are new and more terrible weapons, new and uncertain nations, new pressures of population and deprivation. One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free, but one-third is the victim of cruel repression, and the other one-third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.”

 And in his inaugural address,  he said,

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

But JFK is long gone. We are embarking on the era of DJT.

Will our position in the world be improved in the coming years? Will the U.S. be less hated or hated even more? Will our petulant man-baby engage with these issues?

jfk-djt

You can’t eat money

Or breathe it.

Yesterday we had lunch with a woman from Beijing who mentioned how ironic it is that since the incoming American administration will be led by a climate-change denier and loaded with rich people who think environmental concerns are a left-wing conspiracy,  China will now have to take a world leadership role in this area.

Yes, we said. Why don’t the Kochs and their minions understand the threat here? Don’t rich people have to breathe the same air as poor people after all?

Turns out the answer is, no, they don’t. In China, you see, people who can afford it live in homes and work in offices where advanced technology has been deployed to keep the air cleaner than clean. Special filters and pressurization systems make sure that the upper crust never have to breathe the poison that most people there now see as normal.

In the U.S., the Dakota Access Pipeline is a project meant to reduce the cost of transporting crude oil. It’s an 1172 mile long pipe crossing four states and costing billions, and has been resisted by several small groups of activists supporting the interests of the Standing Rock Sioux, who fear it will ruin their drinking water and desecrate sacred burial sites. It’s supposed to go underneath a lake that serves as their reservoir.

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Yesterday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit that would allow construction through the Standing Rock area. This is a huge victory for the opposition, but it’s never over until it’s over. And the oil companies usually find a way to get what they want.

Two firms involved, Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics, attacked the move as a “purely political action”. They accused the White House of abandoning the rule of law “in favor of currying favor with a narrow and extreme political constituency”.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will become president. Hope you like the taste of money.

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Donald J. Trump, Diplomat

So the man-baby isn’t even president yet and he’s already got India and China pissed off. With his free-wheeling tweet-it-from-the-gut style and his inability to take in information from people that actually know something, a couple of phone calls is all it took.

If someone calls him to congratulate him on being a fantastic guy, that person is his new Best Friend Forever and can do no wrong, at least until some criticism from that BFF reaches his ears, and then it’s twitter tantrum time. No need to look at a map to try to figure out where the BFF is calling from or what our relationship with his country or its neighbors might have been for decades.

If it’s Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, a really tremendous person BTW,  what’s that got to do with U.S. policy  in China anyway? You say no president-elect, or president, has spoken to a Taiwan leader since Washington cut formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and recognized the People’s Republic in 1979? I say, pffft. If China doesn’t like it well it’s #TimeToGetTough

The people who think Trump is playing checkers regard this as reckless blundering. The people who think he’s playing chess say it’s a calculated move to respond to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. I’m holding off my judgement until it’s been demonstrated that Trump can correctly point to the South China Sea on a map without Kellyanne Conway in the room. Or until someone convinces me Trump knows how to play checkers.

Back in 2012, Trump tweeted,

“Get it straight: Pakistan is not our friend. We’ve given them billions and billions of dollars, and what did we get? Betrayal and disrespect — and much worse #TimeToGetTough”

But that was before Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a really tremendous person BTW, called him to say what a fantastic guy he is, and, bingo, all that touchy terrorism stuff is forgotten. Never happened. Don’t worry about it.

According to the Prime Minister,

“President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems.”

What’s that you say? India and Pakistan don’t get along very well? Hmm. Well, uh, has anyone from India called to tell me I’m a fantastic guy? Not yet? Well, there’s the problem.

The good news is that Kellyanne Conway assures us that Trump has been fully briefed before talking to any world leader. Whew. That’s a relief. You had me going there for a minute.

 

Why we can’t have nice things

So we’ve mentioned what a failure City Hall Plaza is before. It’s a nine-acre plain of 1,246,343 bricks and nothing else.  We’re always interested in the latest plans and schemes to  make something useful out of it.

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Wind speed averages 24 miles per hour on a portion of the plaza’s barren flats, which was rated “dangerous and unacceptable” in a 1996 engineers’ study.

It originally had a fountain, which Architectural Digest hailed as Boston’s answer to Trevi Fountain in Rome! I’m guessing no one at that publication had ever actually seen Trevi.

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But the fountain leaked from the beginning, with the water going into the subway below, and quickly morphed into a weed-choked hole. It’s gone now -they put plywood over it and then concrete.

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In 2014, safety concerns were raised. The Boston Herald reported plywood under the concrete is severely waterlogged and sponge-like, and could be compromised. “Due to the observed plywood saturation, mold and insect infestation, we consider the remaining service life to be uncertain,” BSG Group engineers wrote in a report.

Over the years, lots of things have been suggested to improve the space. Jan Wampler, an MIT architecture professor who worked  for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, considered the plaza “horrible,” and in 1970 began suggesting improvements: a drive-in movie, maybe, or public vegetable gardens.

The cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who lives in nearby Cambridge, supported a proposed $4.5 million “music garden” inspired by Bach’s “First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello.” But after a year’s wrangling over money and scheduling, a frustrated Mr. Ma pulled up stakes and found another city: Toronto, where, in a day, he secured a prime three-acre site and basic backing for the deal.

In the 1990’s, mayor Tom Menino held a contest for the best ideas on what to do with it. 190 people submitted ideas, including put a ballpark there, or an abolitionist museum, a video village, a “Tomb of the Bambino” (for Babe Ruth).

In 1995, he formed The Trust for City Hall Plaza, a 33-member panel led by real estate developer Norman Leventhal, who was responsible for many successful projects in Boston, including the beloved Post Office Square park.

At hearings, a Trust member requesting anonymity said, referring to the City Council chambers, “Since the redesign process is starting from scratch, why not think big? Why not get rid of the monstrous City Hall building, an architectural Frankenstein, and replace it, in a new location on the lot, with something that works. This room is a prime example of what’s wrong with City Hall.  It’s a hearing room where you can’t hear.”

They came up with proposals that included a hotel, a glass-enclosed Winter Garden and cafe, civic green and more. But people in Boston objected to the Trust, saying it only had real estate developers and corporate interests on it, and not enough average citizens, and anyway it didn’t have the authority to recommend anything.

In Boston, everybody has to have their say and this usually means nothing can get done. Menino backed away from the Trust and their ideas withered away.

So here’s today’s brilliant idea: let’s let Delaware North transform City Hall Plaza into a winter wonderland, give it a hashtag, #BostonWinter, and then they can charge people money to use it!

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From Boston.com

For the entire month of December, Boston’s City Hall Plaza will be transformed into a magical land of winter festivities, New England’s first European-inspired holiday market featuring 42 shopping chalets, and attractions. Bostonians and visitors alike will be dazzled by the eclectic array of winter activities with more than 50 things to do, from wine and chocolate tastings, ice skating, live events and local artisans and musicians. #BostonWinter has plenty to offer all ages every day of the week from 11 a.m. daily through New Year’s Day. See website for holiday hours and evening closing times. Tickets for paid attractions are available online in advance (bit.ly/BostonWinterTix); shopping, public performance and browsing is free and open to the public. 

Closing times? Ticket prices? Will we never learn? This is why we can’t have nice things.

Birds head south, plastic heads north

It’s that time of year again. December in the Northeast means you can see the birds flying south. That is, you can see them if you’re not distracted by all the plastic hanging in the trees.

The leaves are now gone from the trees leaving an unobstructed view of what has replaced them. Plastic. Tons of it. And since its nobody is responsible for getting rid of it, it accumulates year to year.  It’s something you tend not to notice if you’re speeding by in your car. In the summer, if you’re out for a walk, you don’t notice it much because of the leaves.

It’s one of those things you don’t notice until someone draws your attention to it, and then you can’t stop noticing. This time of year, if you take a walk on the bike path next to the Charles River, you can see it in full bloom.

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There’s plenty of plastic along the banks of the river as well, but each year there are big volunteer efforts to clean up all the trash there, and they do a great job. The trees are a different problem, though. If you look carefully at the picture at the top of the Charles River Watershed site in that last link, you can see some tree plastic that will persist after the banks are clean.

Part of the problem is the cost of getting a single piece of plastic out of a single tree. Part of the problem is that many trees are in some weird no-man’s land of jurisdictional ambiguity. Who’s responsible for the trees between Storrow Drive and the Mass Pike? City of Boston? City of Cambridge? The Turnpike Authority? The DCR? And which of these has the budget they’d need (and the will to prioritize this) to start addressing the problem?

But most of the problem is the sheer volume of plastic that has been produced over the years. It doesn’t go anywhere once it is created. The wind takes it from place to place until the trees give it a permanent home.

Some progressive towns have now passed laws against the certain kinds of plastic, but the wind doesn’t pay attention to town borders, and the scale of the problem defies local control.

In the end, the visual pollution of the tree plastic is a minor annoyance, an insignificant whiff of the overall disaster here. Try doing a google image search of “wildlife plastic” if you really want to make yourself sick.

 

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The Master Distracter does it again

The other day, our president-elect tweeted (of course) that flag-burners should go to jail, and the media went ape-shit.

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The internet, talk radio, cable news, print news, and opinion writers all had a massive heart attack simultaneously:

From the left is was: Doesn’t he know the Supreme Court has ruled on this? Twice? Doesn’t he know even Scalia said its OK? Hasn’t he read the constitution? Doesn’t he know what free speech is? Does he know the difference between being president and emperor?

From the right is was: Finally a president who understands. Burning the flag is treason! You elitists don’t get it – desecrating the flag is desecrating our military. Most people agree flag burning should be illegal. Crooked Hillary also wanted to outlaw it!

But why was Trump even talking about flag burning at all? True, there had been a demonstration at tiny Hampshire College several weeks earlier, after which a flag had been burned. But that furor had died down and been replaced and replaced again by others. It certainly wasn’t in the actual news when he blasted out his twitter-twaddle.

Some say it was because he was watching a FoxNews piece about it at the time, and, impulsive man-baby that he is, couldn’t stop himself from firing off a stupid tweet. And why not? It would only strengthen his popularity among his supporters, and that has shown to be a winning strategy for him.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened is that Trump was really getting annoyed by the coverage of him that had filled the airwaves over the previous 48 hours. That coverage was actually about something serious (for a change) and was getting some traction. It was all about his conflicts of interest – how he already seemed to be using the office of the presidency to further his various businesses, how we didn’t even know what they all were because of his refusal to release his taxes, how we were in uncharted waters about what he would have to divest or put in blind trusts, and so on.

Ordinarily, Trump is happy as long as his name is all over the front pages, and it really doesn’t matter if the coverage is pro or con – either suits his purposes just fine.

During the campaign, monopolizing the news with his incendiary nonsense ensured that his opponents got no coverage – we weren’t even sure who they all were – and that he never had to address actual issues of government or policy. Whenever talk about him seemed to be ebbing, he’d throw some new gasoline on the fire.

But all the talk of conflict of interest was starting to have an effect, and he had to get us off it. Trump is the Master Distracter. Hence the flag-burning “controversy”.

Of course, all this would easily be countered by a journalistic profession that had some integrity and responsibility  and trusted the American people to have an attention span longer than Trump’s. But in the era of 24/7 news for profit, the beast must be fed. Even a serious story has a short life and must be set aside for new meat, serious or silly.

Journalism is dead. Twitter is alive. And Trump knows exactly what to do with these new realities. It’s time to face facts: Donald Trump is actually smarter than the rest of us.

A Hell of a summer

In the summer of 1941, Europe was at war, but America wasn’t. During that summer, two of baseball’s immortals were in their prime and putting on a show that dominated the news, sometimes putting events in Europe in the shadows for the average American.

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Ted Williams, then only 22 years old and in his third year with the Red Sox, was having a season for the ages. It would end with him hitting .406, the last man ever to reach the .400 level. In the 75 years since, only a couple of players have ever come close, though Williams himself almost did it again 16 years later, when he hit .388.

Joe DiMaggio, in his sixth year with the Yankees at age 26, put together a 56-game hitting streak, a record most think will never be broken. He won the MVP that year, for the second of the three times in his career, though, by any objective measure, Williams had the better year.

During the streak, which went from May 15 to July 17, DiMaggio batted .408 (he finished the year at .357). Over that same span, Williams hit .412. Baseball experts agree that the most important individual statistic is On-Base Percentage.  Williams’ OBP for the season was an astounding .553, while DiMaggio’s was a very good .448.  Williams had a slugging percentage of .735 while  Joe D. slugged .643.

But DiMaggio was playing in New York where most of the MVP-voting writers worshiped him, and Williams was playing in Boston where he had already begun his lifelong war of words with the press.

On June 22nd, Joe extended the streak to 35 games, as the Yankees beat Detroit 5-4 at home. He went 2 for 5, including a hit off Hal Newhouser, a future Hall-of-Famer. On that same day, the Nazis began Operation Barbarossa. They crossed into eastern Poland, violating the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact that had partitioned Poland since August 1939, and, in doing so, opened up a second front in the war.

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The invasion of the Soviet Union brought millions of Jews under Nazi control. Jews in what is now Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and eastern Poland all paid the ultimate price as the Germans steamrolled their way to Stalingrad.

The big killing factories like Treblinka and Auschwitz were not yet fully functional, but the Nazis couldn’t wait. Village-by-village and city-by-city, the Jews were simply rounded up, marched to a suitable field nearby, and shot, often in full view of their neighbors, who were almost always the beneficiaries of the property left behind.

Within two years or so, 1.6 million Jews had been murdered in this Holocaust by Bullets.

On September 22, with only a week left in the 1941 baseball season, fans were rapt as Williams was still hanging on to his .400 average. He had a double in three trips against the Senators in Washington, which actually dropped his average a tick.

That same day was the end of the Jews in Vinnitsia, a good-sized Ukrainian city. More than 20,000 of them went to the pits to be shot. The last Jew alive in Vinnitsia is shown in this photo, where a proud member of Einsatzgruppe D finishes the day’s work.

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The Last Jew of Vinnitsia

I am quite sure the gentleman depicted here had a name, but it is lost to history. Any friend or family member who might be able to identify him from this picture was already dead in the pit below him by the time it was taken. He may have had children as well – did he sing them a lullaby at bedtime? He may have had a profession, hobbies, interests. Maybe he played a musical instrument – the violin, perhaps?  Maybe he liked chess. Maybe he was aware of DiMaggio’s streak, as Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea was, or was hoping to find out if Teddy could finish above .400. It’s all possible.

On the last day of the baseball season, September 28, Williams’ average had dropped to .39955. The Red Sox had a meaningless doubleheader to play at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, and his manager, Joe Cronin, asked him if he wanted to sit it out so that his average could be entered into the books as .400. Williams famously declined, saying if he was going to hit .400, it would be for a full season, not a part of one. He then went out and got six hits in the two games, finishing the season at .406.

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That same day, in Kiev, the city’s Jews received this order:

“All the Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday September 29, 1941 by 8 a.m. at the corner of Melnikova and Dokhterivskaya streets (next to the cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, bed linen etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot”.

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The Germans were ordering the Jews to show up to be shot. If they failed to do so, they would be shot. Over the next two days, 33,771 Jews were marched to a ravine at the edge of the city called Babi Yar and murdered there. It was the largest single massacre of the war.

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Marching to Babi Yar

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Later that day

The summer was over for Williams, DiMaggio and the Jews of Kiev. It was a Hell of a summer.

 

Turmoil, discovery, and creativity

In the 1960’s we experienced war, cultural upheaval, exploration of the unknown, and a creative explosion in the arts. But, for my money, it was the 90’s that was the real decade of turmoil, discovery, and creativity – the 1490’s.

Technology took a leap forward with DaVinci’s oil lamp in 1491 – its flame is enclosed in a glass tube placed inside a water-filled glass globe

In 1492, The Emir of Granada, Muhammad XII, surrendered to the army of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile bringing to an end the 780 years of Muslim control of Andalusia.

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Muhammad XII

In 1492, The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, or Torah, was published for the first time.

Columbus set out to reach the orient by sailing west and stumbled on the “new world” in 1492, although it wasn’t really “new” to the people living there. The largest and slowest of his three ships, the Santa Maria, went aground on what is now Haiti and sank on a calm night in December. Only the cabin boy was steering the ship at the time as everyone else was asleep.

In 1492, the Spanish Inquisition, determined to enforce Catholicism and root out its enemies, was picking up steam. The Catholic monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree that forced the Jews of Castile and Aragon to convert, leave, or die. 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled. The Alhambra Decree was revoked in 1968.

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Ferdinand and Isabella

The most fortunate of the expelled Jews succeeded in escaping to Turkey. Constantinople had fallen to Muslim rule in 1453. Sultan Bajazet II welcomed the expelled Jews warmly. “How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king,” he was fond of asking, “the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?”

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Istanbul in 1493

In 1493, the Jews were expelled from Sicily

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The Aragonese Empire

Florence was the artistic, commercial, and homosexual capital of the known world, but in 1495,  Girolamo Savonarola held it in thrall with his prophecies of Florentine greatness. “Florence will be more glorious, more powerful and richer than ever, extending its wings farther than anyone can imagine”.  He had been assigned to Florence in 1490 by Lorenzo de Medeci, who died in 1492. Savonarola became a fierce critic of the Medecis and contributed to their downfall in 1494.

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Savonarola

In 1495, Savonarola began hosting his regular Bonfire of the Vanities. Anything associated with sin was thrown on the fire – combs, mirrors, jewelry, artwork, books, playing cards, cosmetics, fine clothing, musical instruments. Even Botticelli, swept up in Savonarola’s preaching, allegedly threw some of his paintings on the bonfire.

In 1496, King Manuel of Portugal concluded an agreement to marry Isabella, the daughter of Spain’s monarchs. As a condition of the marriage, the Spanish royal family insisted that Portugal expel her Jews. Only a few were actually expelled; tens of thousands of others were forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death. The chief rabbi, Simon Maimi, was one of those who refused to convert. He was kept buried in earth up to his neck for seven days until he died. In the final analysis, all of these events took place because of the relentless will of one man, Tomas de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor, who died in 1498.

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Torquemada

In 1497, Savonarola was excommunicated. In 1498, he was condemned as a heretic and schismatic, and hanged in the Piazza della Signoria (live cam).

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The Murder of Savonarola

The Pieta, perhaps the most beautiful single object ever produced by a man, was sculpted by Michelangelo in 1498.

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Da Vinci’s  “Last Supper”, painted on the wall in the dining room of the monastery at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, was completed in 1498

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No doubt about it. The 1490’s were a wild ride with lots of high points and lots of lows.

The tyranny of the individual

The convergence of political correctness and identity politics has funneled us into an ever-attenuating tube of acceptable opinion and speech. It seems to me we are nearing the end of this tube and are now confronting its natural consequences.

We started out as a country committed to preventing the tyranny of the majority over minorities, mainly political and religious minorities, while preserving individual rights. We evolved into a society where minority interests took center stage and the majority had to accommodate whatever grievance was presented by whatever minority, no matter how small the group was. The logical conclusion of this is that minority groups as small as a single individual can now demand the acquiescence of everyone else.

Anyone on this flight allergic to peanuts? No peanuts for anyone else.

A really interesting article entitled “When Women Become Men at Wellesley” appeared in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It aggregates several of my favorite preoccupations:  racism, sexism, intellectual dishonesty, political correctness, the cowardice of university administrators, and more. But, in the end, it’s about what I would call “the tyranny of the individual”.

The article starts with a student at Wellesley College named Timothy Boatwright who wanted to run for MAC (Muticultural Affairs Coordinator)  on the student cabinet . Timothy describes himself as “masculine-of-center genderqueer”

A movement sprung up to oppose Timothy, called “The Campaign to Abstain”. The idea was that if enough people didn’t vote in the election, Timothy could be denied the office he wanted. But why deny him the office? There were dozens of trans and genderqueer people at Wellesley and no one had had any issues before. Or at least no one had talked about any.

The principal argument of the Campaign to Abstain was, “Of all the people at a multiethnic women’s college who could hold the school’s “diversity” seat, the least fitting one was a white man.”

Put another way, all would have been well if Timothy had been a black woman, a black man, or a white woman. But he was a white man, and this was too much.  I don’t know whether this falls under the heading of racism, sexism, or both. I’ll leave that for someone smarter than me to sort out. It’s something, though – that I can tell you.

And why would Timothy want to go to an all women’s college in the first place? Well, “because it seemed safer physically and psychologically”. He knew who he was in high school, before applying to college, and was “out” as transgender to his friends, though not his mother. But he didn’t reveal his gender identity on his application, partly because his mother helped him with it (really? why?) and partly because, as he put it, “it seemed awkward to write an application essay for a women’s college on why you were not a woman.”

No shit.

It would indeed have been awkward to write it, and, you would think, awkward to live it.

But he needed his safe place, so honesty on the application was not really a priority. As we have all come to understand, a “safe” place is an absolute requirement for anyone under 30. If someone feels unsafe or discriminated against in some way, the rest of us – all of us – must right the wrong. So many snowflakes to accommodate!

The number of women-only colleges has shrunk down to a precious few and they struggle to remain viable.  Should they modify their charter to stay alive? Turn their back on their founding principles to save their jobs? Attempt to satisfy all special-interest groups in the name of progressivism and inclusion, even when doing so betrays their most sacred principles? And what about the alumnae who don’t like the changes they see and may withdraw support?

According to the article,

Women’s colleges argued that they offered a unique environment where every student leader was a woman, where female role models were abundant, where professors were far more likely to be women and where the message of women’s empowerment pervaded academic and campus life.

A Wellesley student, Laura Bruno, in describing in a radio interview what she thought the benefits of women-only education were said, “We look around and we see only women, only people like us, leading every organization on campus, contributing to every class discussion.”

Kaden Mohamed, another student, heard this and was horrified. He demanded an apology, which he got. In an email, he said Laura’s speech was “extremely disrespectful.” Really? “Extremely”?

He continued: “I am not a woman. I am a trans man who is part of your graduating class, and you literally ignored my existence in your interview. . . . You had an opportunity to show people that Wellesley is a place that is complicating the meaning of being an ‘all women’s school,’ and you chose instead to displace a bunch of your current and past Wellesley siblings.” 

OMG! Kaden was “literally ignored” in someone else’s interview? This cannot stand!  He was aggrieved, and no individual’s grievance can be left unaddressed.

What has become of sisterhood? Or even siblinghood?

Around campus, more and more students were replacing “sisterhood” with “siblinghood” in conversation. Even the school’s oldest tradition, Flower Sunday — the 138-year-old ceremony that paired each incoming student with an upper-class Big Sister to support her — had become trans-inclusive. Though the school website still describes Flower Sunday as “a day of sisterhood,” the department that runs the event yielded to trans students’ request and started referring to each participant as a Big or Little “Sister/Sibling” — or simply as Bigs and Littles.

Some female students, meanwhile, said Wellesley wasn’t female enough. They complained among themselves and to the administration that sisterhood had been hijacked. “Siblinghood,” they argued, lacked the warm, pro-women connotation of “sisterhood,” as well as its historic resonance. Others were upset that even at a women’s college, women were still expected to accommodate men, ceding attention and leadership opportunities intended for women. Still others feared the changes were a step toward coeducation. Despite all that, many were uneasy: as a marginalized group fighting for respect and clout, how could women justify marginalizing others?

The  Wellesley administration is tied up in a gordian knot of political correctness, with individuals and groups arguing with each other over what is correct.  What to do? Ultimately, I’m pretty sure they’ll do whatever cowards do. Leadership and taking a strong stand on controversial issues never gets you anywhere in those jobs.

You can’t solve this or any dispute to everyone’s satisfaction, and since each individual must be satisfied, the only answer can be one which would piss everyone off equally. If Solomon were here, he would divide this baby into 2300 pieces, accommodating each of the 2300 individual tyrants in the student body.

At the end of the tube of political correctness and identity politics is the end of Wellesley College.

 

 

 

“History will absolve me.”

As Donald Trump has informed us via Twitter, “Fidel Castro is dead!” Thanks, man-baby.  How would we ever get the latest without you?  And with that exclamation point you threw in there – well, who can say you aren’t The Great Communicator now?

For the people who loved Fidel, he was a heroic savior, and for the people who hated him, a murderous tyrant.  In any case, his was a remarkable life. A successful revolutionary at 32, the “maximum leader” of a country for most of five decades, and a major thorn in the side of the greatest military and economic power in history.

He was an educated man,  a man of great physical courage, unbreakable conviction in the rightness of his cause, and a spellbinding orator. When he was arrested by Batista in 1953, he said,

“I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”

In an effort to prove he wasn’t a dictator, Batista released him and his followers after being elected president the following year, and,  in 1959, he was overthrown by Castro.

As Maximum Leader, Castro micro-managed every aspect of life in Cuba. Many say he improved health care and literacy for the people of Cuba, or at  least the ones he didn’t rob, jail or murder.

Will history absolve him? No way.

As we have learned the hard way, the problem with overthrowing a regime is figuring out what to  put in its place, and Fidel chose to throw in with the bad guys.  He declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and cast his country’s fate with that of the Soviet Union.  Apart from bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, this meant assuring dependence on an economic model that could never succeed.

To be fair, he had little choice in the matter.  With Castro instituting agrarian reform, “nationalizing” foreign oil interests, and eventually seizing all foreign-owned property, the U.S. figured he had to go.

Decades of mutual hostility and intransigence ensued, and it may still be difficult to get beyond that, even now with Castro gone.

But the real problem with Castro, and the reason history will not absolve him, is that he saw himself, personally, as the Cuban government.  Dictators all over the world, whether religious, military, or royal, all have the same problem.

When a country gives itself over to a cult of personality, when its military is accountable only to one individual, when no orderly succession is enshrined in the founding documents, and when the “strongman” retains his grip until he is incapacitated decades later, the “revolution” is lost and the citizens will suffer.

A benevolent dictator is still a dictator.

Pinkwashing

I’m making myself sick. The more I learn about some of the things Israel’s detractors say about it and about Jewish people, the less I feel like writing anything.

In mentioning the despicable Jasbir Puar yesterday, I found myself going down a rabbit hole I wish I never saw. I  was aware only in a broad sense of how poorly Jewish students and any pro-Israel voices have been treated in recent years on many college campuses, but reading this article and some of the links in it really made me feel bad.

Not gonna say much more about it, other than I did learn what  “pinkwashing” is. Turns out that Israeli friendliness towards the LGBT community is actually a conspiracy to “brand” Israel as a progressive, western-style state and recruit gay people from elsewhere to support its criminal activities.

Childishness and condescension on campus

Guess what this lecture is about. I’ll give you a buck if you can do it just by reading this description:

“This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine. Calculation, computing, informational technologies, surveillance, and militarization are all facets of prehensive control. Further, the saturation of spatial and temporal stratum in Palestine demonstrates the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a “remote control” occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli “home invasions” through the maiming and stunting of population”.

Give up? It’s about how Jews suck. And they’re harvesting organs of Palestinians. And stunting their growth by poisoning them. And lots of other bad shit, too. The lecture was given at Vassar College. The Daily News (OK, I get it – consider the source) calls it Hatred on the Hudson.

Vassar is one of the most expensive colleges in the country. A lot of kids are going into debt to get a degree at a time when the value of that degree in the job market is more in question. At the same time, kids are learning less and less.

A recent ACTA-commissioned survey found that more than one-third of college graduates could not place the Civil War in a correct 20-year span or identify Franklin Roosevelt as the architect of the New Deal; that 58 percent did not know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred in World War II; and that nearly half did not know the lengths of the terms of U.S. senators and representatives.

Yet this nutty woman is given a platform to mold young minds. I guess as long as the message is smothered in that dense linguistic porridge of fuss and feathers that “academics” prefer, well, it must be something worth learning.

But the real story here is how colleges and universities have abandoned academic standards as a necessary part of remaining financially viable. Their mission used to be to educate, but now it is to retain valued customers by giving them what they want.

And what they want is to complain. But they want a safe place to do it, free from the “triggers” of contrary points of view (or facts, for that matter). George Will (yes, again, I know), wrote a piece in the Washington Post recently that began,

Many undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I am entitled? Campuses create “safe spaces” where students can shelter from discombobulating thoughts and receive spiritual balm for the trauma of microaggressions. Yet the presidential election came without trigger warnings?

The morning after the election, normal people rose — some elated, some despondent — and went off to actual work. But at Yale University, that incubator of late-adolescent infants, a professor responded to “heartfelt notes” from students “in shock” by making that day’s exam optional.

And went on to note:

Bowdoin College provided counseling to students traumatized by the cultural appropriation committed by a sombrero-and-tequila party. Oberlin College students said they were suffering breakdowns because schoolwork was interfering with their political activism. California State University at Los Angeles established “healing” spaces for students to cope with the pain caused by a political speech delivered three months earlier . Indiana University experienced social-media panic (“Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight”) because a Catholic priest in a white robe, with a rope-like belt and rosary beads, was identified as someone “in a KKK outfit holding a whip.”

A doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Santa Barbara uses “feminist methodologies” to understand how Girl Scout cookie sales “reproduce hegemonic gender roles.” The journal GeoHumanities explores how pumpkins reveal “racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.” Another journal’s article analyzes “the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers.”

He connected it all back up to the election by saying:

Academia should consider how it contributed to, and reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case, tenured faculty and cosseted students.

In short, we’re getting the government we deserve.