Yearly Archives: 2018

In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser describes meeting Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring at the end of this term, at Senator John McCain’s funeral:

A few minutes after the service, when the talking and singing was over and the bipartisan establishment flowed back into the humid swamp outside the cathedral, I ran into Jeff Flake, McCain’s fellow-senator from Arizona and, like McCain, one of Trump’s few remaining public critics among Republicans on Capitol Hill. “The fever will break eventually,” Flake said. “It has to.” It was an oddly optimistic thing to say at a funeral, and, when he said it, it hardly sounded convincing.

Senator Flake, your analogy should acknowledge the role the body’s immune system, in particular the antibodies that neutralize pathogens, plays in breaking that fever. You, sir, should have considered yourself one of those antibodies and helped lead the Republican resistance to President Trump.

Instead, you’ve chosen to retire just because you were facing a tough challenge in the primaries. Those primaries were your chance to stand on a stage in front of your fellow Arizonans and articulate why your vision of the Republican Party is superior to that of President Trump’s and his fellow extremists. Being a Senator may mean working with others, but it also carries the responsibility of being a leader when the requirement arises.

As it stands, you sound desperate more than confident, a bystander who doesn’t understand what is happening, or how to fix it. And that’s a sad thing to say about a politician and his political party.

A doomed romance. Spaceship radio operators are never good mates.

We discover that we’re going to the moon to rescue the Moon-people in Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), who have deviously influenced the lady navigator of the first ship to go to the moon. There’s some barriers, of course, such as the moon-spiders (I think my parents made one just like those in the movie to scare the kids on Halloween and called it Herbie), and the fact the ladies on the moon, having eliminated the men of their race, plan to do the same with Earth-men.

And it’ll be a takeover, not a rescue.

It’s all dull, corny stuff, and if there was a noteworthy theme, it escaped my attention. In fact, we both managed to fall asleep during it. Stay away from this dog.

Not unexpectedly, Nike’s signing of Colin Kaepernick to an endorsement deal has led to some backlash, as reported in WaPo, although its magnitude is not yet clear. But the report goes further on the history of Nike and social justice:

[Corporate reputation adviser Anthony Johndrow] said there is a perception that “you’ve got to keep your house in order first,” and that companies “can’t go proactive unless they’re pristine.” But Nike is charting another path, Johndrow said, not because the company lacks issues of its own, but because it has historically engaged with hot-button issues in its advertising.

In 1995, for example, Nike looked to its “Just Do It” slogan to raise awareness of women’s rights in sports. That same year, the company featured Los Angeles marathon runner Ric Munoz, who was HIV positive. …

Joe Holt, an expert on business ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said there is an important moral difference to companies promoting their views “because you have to” versus “because you want to.” He said one true test of a company’s values is if that company is willing to stick to them even at a financial cost. Nike’s use of Kaepernick in the “Just Do It” ad seems to affirm that dedication, Holt said, because it will inevitably alienate some customers.

I remain unpersuaded that this will result in Nike losing money. I believe they’ve analyzed the moral issue in detail and came to the conclusion that Kaepernick is in the right – and, secure in the knowledge that a system with a component of a belief in justice will reward those who behave in a just way most of the time, took their decision to be on what they consider to be the side of justice.

It’s also possible they simply analyzed the demographics leanings and made their decision on which will lead to more profit in the future. However, if that information ever got out, they’d be at hazard of being abandoned by the youth element they’re pursuing, as they are far more idealistic than the older generations and more likely to abandon Nike for a purely profit-driven decision with no moral reasoning going into it.

Nike may not be profitable in the near-future, but in the long-term I suspect they made the right decision.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the Trump team understand the basics of negotiations, as Leon Sigal implies on 38 North:

While the Trump administration demanded that the North move first, reportedly by providing a complete inventory of its nuclear material and production facilities, the North countered with the demand that Washington join South Korea in declaring an end to the Korean War. The declaration would commit to initiating a peace process that would include military confidence building measures to reduce the risk of deadly clashes in the contested waters of the West (Yellow) Sea and the Demilitarized Zone and culminate in a formal peace treaty.

The administration contends that the North wants the peace declaration before taking steps to denuclearize, but as North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told ASEAN foreign ministers in early August, “We believe that a method involving the balanced, simultaneous, step-by-step implementation of all terms in the Joint Statement, preceded by the establishment of trust, is the only realistic means of achieving success.” He emphasized the North’s “unswerving resolution and commitment to responsible, good-faith implementation of the Joint Statement,” and the “unacceptability of a situation in which we alone are the first to move unilaterally.”

His statement is just the latest indication that a deal is possible if the United States is prepared to accept a peace declaration. Seeking a nuclear inventory in return will only initiate a long period of uncertainty, however, with little benefit to the US and allied security while Washington tries to verify that inventory and while North Korean manufacture of fissile material and missiles runs free. A better starting point for Washington to seek is a suspension of the production of plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and intercontinental- and intermediate-range missiles, along with a declaration of the locations of related production sites.

Giving in to the demands of a dictator would make Trump look weak, and upset those in his base who see North Korea as a slave state, which is not necessarily wrong. It’s certainly an alien ideology to the West, and one I would consider unstable as it depends on the temperament of exactly one person.

And, yet, sometimes one must compromise in order to make progress towards an ultimate goal. Will agreeing to ending the Korean War constitute progress towards transforming North Korea from a war machine to a democracy?  Or would Kim continue to reign unimpeded? These are the hard questions facing every American President, and, in Trump’s case, it may be complicated by the expectations of his base. Common right-wing expressions that Obama was terribly weak, especially in the face of contradictory indicators, may make Trump’s goals that much more difficult to reach.

A number of pundits and legal professionals got bent out of shape over President Trump’s Tweet yesterday concerning the recent indictments of Republican Representatives Collins and Hunter:

[tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1036681588573130752]

For example, Steven Benen:

After more than a year and a half in the White House, Donald Trump genuinely seems to believe that the federal justice system should shield the president’s political allies – not only because of their partisan allegiances, but also because, in Trump’s mind, the attorney general should weigh electoral considerations before allowing criminal suspects to be charged.

Sally Yates, who served as acting attorney general before Trump fired her last year for giving the White House good advice, described the president’s rhetoric as “nothing short of an all out assault on the rule of law,” and I’m hard pressed to imagine how any fair minded observer would disagree.

Of course, it’s also easy enough to interpret this as another attempt to stir up the Trump base. The idea is to keep the emotional subsystem swirling about, aka “System 1”, and not let System 2, or the intellectual system, kick in^[1].

And, in fact, I do not credit the President with enough self-awareness to realize how what he writes may be interpreted. He may realize it, but even then he may not follow the consequences that the maelstrom that follows the collapse of the system we’ve built to so painfully over the last 200+ years would destroy not only him, but his family. He’s in immediate survival mode at the moment, proceeding on a plan he may think is clever, but has little basis in the realities of the moment.

But I think this is a great moment to take the measure of those in control of Congress. It’s clear that he’s calling for his own supporters to receive a break from the Federal law enforcement system, and in the past he’s whined about his political opponents not being investigated.

This is inciting corruption.

Any competent Congressional leader of any party should be calling for, and if they have the power, convening impeachment proceedings right now. Any excuse given in the past has been shredded and disregarded by competent observers. The fact that neither Ryan nor McConnell are not moving to remove this President is a measure of how far removed they are from the proper and required exercise of the powers of their offices. Whether it’s from fear for the fate of their party, their personal electoral fates (but Ryan is retiring at the end of this term), or fear for their personal safety matters not a whit.

And, as a further measure, the failure of the common Republican member of Congress stands as a further condemnation of the Republican members of Congress and the GOP itself. To my mind, this is due to the team politics concept that I’ve mentioned before, but perhaps I’m staring through my prism too much.

So, until November, it’s up to the Republicans to decide if they’re going to be responsible in governance – or prove they’re completely unworthy of the position. Their fate as an American political party is extraordinarily dependent on their decisions in the next few weeks.

¹This is from the book The Persuaders, which describes our cognitive apparatus as coming in two systems, #1 being the quick, fight or flight response, which is not rational but often serves best in emergency situations, while #2 is the rational, but slower, response. It’s a good book.

We think this may be wild cucumber.

Your Corporate Executive on Drugs.

The Wasp Woman (1960) is the classic story of the corporate executive who goes a step too far in pursuit of profit, and is turned into a wasp as a result.

Clllllllllasic. Yes. Shakespeare reportedly did a version, but lost the script during a drunken bout of sex with Queen Elizabeth.

And here it is.

Colin Kaepernick, the Super Bowl calibre quarterback that couldn’t find a job in the NFLlast year, remains unemployed in his chosen field this year after the entire preseason has been played – but not in that of endorsements, as The Bleacher Report notes:

Nike selected former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as the face of its “Just Do It” campaign, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

And I think that simple, single sentence is a signal of how Nike sees the future, which is, as always, youth-centered. I did a little digging but failed to find any polls on the issue which call out results on an age basis. I suspect they would show that young people are more concerned with the justice of the situation than their elders, especially those who belong to no particular racial minority, who tend to have a more concrete approach to such matters.

So Nike, along with GQ^[1], recognizing the demographics of the situation, has made Kaepernick into one of their spokesmen, and by so doing have aligned themselves with the youth movement. Perhaps corporate leadership in either or both cases has an actual rational reason that has nothing to do with future corporate profits in making these moves – but, absent any cogent press releases on the matter, I doubt it.

And the poor ol’ NFL is between a rock and a hard place. Their best fans are getting older and don’t necessarily understand Kaepernick’s actions, the younger set are more likely to sympathize but wonder why they’re watching a sport that has terrible consequences for its players, and the President is – exceptionally inappropriately – pressuring the NFL to, well, take a knee by implementing rules that require the anthem to be honored.

Which is absolutely no  honor at all.

¹GQ named Colin its 2017 Citizen of the Year, according to The Bleacher Report article. On further consideration, that sort of honor may indicate GQ really does think kneeling for the anthem is a valid action. Good for them.

Years old, I think, but inspirational.

And the ornamental grass really didn’t appreciate it a week or two ago.

We tied it up with some string and it seems happier now.

Yes, Mr. Hammer, could you find my viscera? Someone seems to have sucked it out of me.

Mickey Spillane was not always content to simply write his books concerning leading man Mike Hammer, but once to actually play Mike Hammer in a movie, and that was in The Girl Hunters (1963). Hammer’s assistant and love interest, Velda, disappeared 7 years ago, apparently dead, and Hammer has crawled into a bottle and pulled the stopper in afterwards. But when a dying man appears with information suggesting Velda may still be alive, Hammer discovers purpose for his life has been restored.

The bullet that killed the man leads to another man killed with the same gun, a US Senator, and leads Hammer into danger where trusting the wrong attractive woman could get him killed. But Velda, mysterious Velda, summons him onwards, even as he discovers her concealed previous career as an OSI operative during the War. Hammer’s attention to detail and a sort of provocative caution serves him well as he solves more than one crime at a time, leading to a satisfying crescendo of betrayal and revenge.

The music is irritatingly repetitive, the audio is somewhat defective, but the cinematography is satisfactory and the story is not as predictable as one might expect. It’s no award winner, but it’s a respectable effort. And Spillane is not awful.

A couple of months ago Astronomy.com reported that the interstellar object that zoomed through our solar system appears to have been a comet:

In the new study, published June 27 in the journal Nature, researchers determined that ‘Oumuamua is slowly and steadily accelerating away from the Sun, which means it’s currently traveling faster than is predicted by celestial mechanics — a very well-understood branch of astronomy that deals with the motions of cosmic objects.

“Our high-precision measurements of ‘Oumuamua’s position revealed that there was something affecting its motion other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and planets,” said team-lead Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency in a NASA news release.

The researchers explored a number of possible scenarios in an attempt to explain the faster-than-expected speed with which ‘Oumuamua is hurtling out of the solar system. But after considering all the possibilities (such as solar-radiation pressure, friction-like forces, and magnetic interactions with the solar wind), the team concluded the most likely explanation is that the Sun is causing ‘Oumuamua to vent gas and dust from its surface in a process called outgassing, which almost exclusively occurs in icy comets, not rocky asteroids.

The assumption being no intelligence deliberately altering course, of course. They do note the lack of coma & tail, which they attribute to the small particles causing same to having been exhausted. The comet may be dissolving into bigger fragments.

And, as a science geek, it’s nice to get back to charismatic science – it’s uplifting to the spirit. Unlike politics.

Nocebo:

A nocebo effect is said to occur when negative expectations of the patient regarding a treatment cause the treatment to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. For example, when a patient anticipates a side effect of a medication, they can suffer that effect even if the “medication” is actually an inert substance. Both placebo and nocebo effects are presumably psychogenic, but they can induce measurable changes in the body. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How a positive mind really can create a healthier body,” David Robson, NewScientist (25 August 2018, paywall):

Placebos are inert pills used in most clinical drug trials. The participants are divided randomly into two groups: half take the drug being tested, the rest, for comparison, take an identical-looking sugar pill. With no active ingredient, the placebo shouldn’t have any effects. Yet it often brings about measurable changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations. Patients sometimes reap these benefits even when they know they are taking the placebo (see “Everyday placebos”). On the downside, our expectations of a pill can also produce side effects, including nausea and skin rashes. This is the placebo effect’s “evil” twin, the nocebo effect (see “The science of voodoo”).

One practical result is to not consider a “diet” to be abstemious, but instead learn to adore every bite.

The biographical documentary RBG (2018) tells of the times of current Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her life from college until today, and of the actions which she took which have cemented for her a prominent place in history with regard to women’s rights, which she distills to a simple, strong quote of one of her predecessors, Sarah Grimké, who I will quote in full (rather than Ginsburg’s abbreviated version):

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks [, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.]

The sheer drive it took to move society from hardly admitting women to Harvard Law School to multiple women occupying seats on the SCOTUS is illustrated in devastating fashion in this documentary, and serves, in a way, to enlighten us to the extent that high-achievers must shut themselves off from the more common facets of today’s society in order to pursue their dreams, as her own children comment that they believe their mother actually does not know how to operate her own television.

By turns charming, horrifying, opaque, and delightful, I believe it’s important to see just what it takes to pursue the proper implementation of the greatest organizing principle of American society, that without justice, our society is unstable and even dangerous. This realization should upset the current movement towards replacing government functions with private sector functions, as the latter have no inherent attachment to notions of justice, but rather to self-advantage; and, more importantly, the notion that justice necessarily limits freedoms should once again be acknowledged and examined, as perfect freedoms can be shown to lead to disaster.

Thought-provoking and inspirational.

Recommended.

It’s noteworthy that neither Party is doing well.

On the right is one of the most important charts in the current American political landscape. From Gallup, it speaks to how Americans feel about adhering to specific party tenets.

In two words, they don’t. In case you’re wondering, this 2017 chart is roughly reflective of the latest Gallup polling of August 1 – Independents at 43%.

I was reflecting on the Republicans and Democrats post-midterms, and how both parties are dependent on wooing Independents in order to get themselves elected. If the Democrats do manage to take control of the House as expected, Megan McArdle sees the Democratic majority as coming under tremendous pressure to begin impeachment proceedings:

And if Democrats manage to eke out a majority in both houses of Congress, here is the poll’s really bad news for Trump: Half the country wants him impeached. …

Most worrying for Trump is that three-quarters of Democrats say they want Congress to impeach him. If Democrats gain control, they will be under immense pressure from their base to deliver.

That doesn’t mean they’ll do it. It takes a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to actually remove a president from office. The best that Democrats can possibly manage in 2018 is a narrow majority; they would need more than a handful of Republican senators to support removal. The leaders of a Democrat-controlled House might well decide they’d rather not force their Senate brethren to take a hard and futile vote.

For long-term Republican strategists, a failure to impeach may actually be a fucking disaster, as Megan hints at elsewhere. In Trump you have a President who is fundamentally disconnected from reality, who lies and cheats and is, for the first time, under continual observation by observers who make their money by discovering mistakes – the free press. He knows this, and tries to defend himself through his Fake News meme, but when even Fox News is beginning to criticize Trump, it may slowly be dawning on everyone in the news business that an attack on one is an attack on all, when it comes from the Executive.

But he remains the face of the Republican Party. In fact, in these mid-terms many Republican candidates are embracing him like Superman, as I’ve noted a number of times, and have used a perceived lack of personal loyalty to him as a lever against Republican competitors.

And this must horrify our hypothetical Republican strategist. The Republican brand is being bloodied not just by the incompetent and lying Trump, but by all his little Trump-wannabes.

And for the discerning Independent who takes their role in politics seriously, the Trump phenomenon, antithetical to American principles and customs, must mark the Republican party as an anathema not to be condoned.

Sure, there’s a lot of Independents who don’t take their role seriously, or absolutely loathe Democrats for reasons legitimate or illegitimate, or are single-issue voters who have yet to understand there’s more to politics than a strong defense, or abortion, or transgender bathrooms. But they will learn.

And the lessons to be learned is that the guy holding the biggest office happens to be Republican and lies a lot. And so do a lot of his adherents.

So what happens if Trump is not impeached and convicted next year? He has two more years of wrecking the Republican brand. Sure, his supporters won’t see it that way – but their intensity of loyalty is vitiated by their small numbers, which are shrinking as more and more come to their senses, and the demographics inevitably eat away at them, they being mainly older voters.

In the short-term, there’s a lot of hand-wringing over the Senate and how the Democrats can, at best, only hope for a slim majority. But what happens in 2020? There will be a lot more Senate Republican seats up on the election block, and a President who, in all likelihood, will have become far more toxic than he is even now – and, yes, I find that a little hard to stomach, too. But that’s what will happen. And that amateur claptrap he spews will end up all over the Republican brand, and its consequences will become apparent.

The Republican strategist should be squirming big. Particularly if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed as a SCOTUS and Roe v Wade is set aside. Independent women will remember that for a long, long time. And they won’t forgive.

No character, in fact a real whiner. Godzilla reportedly sought help from a support group later that year.

One of the weaker offerings in the kaiju Godzilla series is Son of Godzilla (1967). Sonny boy, as I’ll call him, first comes to light on Solgell Island (if I remember the name right), still in the egg. The egg is being dug out of a mound of boulders by three Gimantises, gigantic praying mantises who can fly. This is being observed by a journalist who is visiting an experimental station on the same island.

Better known for their roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The Gimantises break the egg open and make some half-hearted attempts to dine on Sonny boy, but Godzilla, in a very minor, unmenacing aspect, arrives in time to kill two of the three Gimantises and chase the third away, and Godzilla now assumes the parenting role. Meanwhile, the journalist discovers a heretofore unknown inhabitant of the island, a daughter of a missing archaeologist, who helps the team out when they become sick, and later when Spiga, a giant spider, attacks.

Bad story short, the last Gimantis is pithed by Spiga, and Sonny-boy almost meets the same demise, but big ol’ Dad comes to the rescue, and Spiga finds himself (herself?) overmatched and eventually catches fire and capsizes. The science team finally performs its experiment, which causes a snowstorm to occur on the tropical island, and Godzilla and Sonny-boy go into hibernation.

Yech. This was a real time-waster.

Corsetry:

[British]

1. the making of or dealing in corsets
2. corsets considered collectively [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “Preserved ocean creatures make landfall in London,” review of a science show, Sumit Paul-Choudhury NewScientist (25 August 2018):

The presentation of body parts works well. The material fact of the crucian carp’s pea-sized brain makes its ability to learn from experience all the more striking. Everyone knows what gills look like from the outside, but their corsetry, winnowed free from flesh, is a different matter. And a shark’s stomach turns out to be surprisingly small but densely corrugated, as it is surface area, not volume, that counts when it comes to digestion.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Can’t help but wonder about the usage.

Can’t you see I’m eating lunch here?!

An unfortunate, if understandable, adherent to the God’ll Getcha genre of films is Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961). Dr. Peter Blood, freshly minted, returns to visit his father, who happens to be the village doctor, and his oh-so-attractive and freshly widowed nurse, Linda. But hiding behind Peter’s affable exterior is a ragingly ambitious scientist intent on achieving his goal of, well, being God, no matter what anyone says.

Taking advantage of local men he deems as wasting their lives, Peter uses them for his experiments, all the while misleading the village detective and the undertaker about the condition of all these corpses, even when the corpses still seem to be twitching and rolling their eyes.

But eventually Linda digs out his secret (or perhaps sleeps it out of him, him being dashing and she being without husband), which is basically heart transplantation, and accuses him of murder because the men he’s experimenting on are, for the most part, still alive – and who, incidentally, needs anesthesia? But Peter will have none of it, raging against superstition, while Linda invokes God’s will.

Linda escapes, and while the village detective amasses the customary mob to find the evil scientist, Peter, he, in an angry fit of rage that Linda would hold him back from his imminent achievement, tries to culminate his experiments by giving life back to … Linda’s late husband.

Six months dead.

This is where willing suspension of disbelief becomes scuzzy blanket rent with moth-eaten holes, because the late husband is quite the moldy mess. First, to suggest that the blood Peter is feeding into him will be able to get through the guy’s veins, if they even exist any more, is silly. And then brain death is really going to be hell on the guy’s personality.

In fact, it leaves him a drooling, murderous wretch who fortuitously takes out his anger (presumably for being dragged out of heaven) on Peter, while Linda, who had been invited to attend the big revivification, manages to escape. Again.

So the real problem here is consigning the moral question of why experimenting on living, sentient human beings is wrong to the divine realm. He’s rejected the divine; for him, morality should be driven from somewhere else. But, instead, not only is this ignored, but his decision to deny the supposed sacred word of God, only asserted by Linda, results in his rather grisly demise.

Oh, and conveniently (as my Arts Editor remarked), the late husband once again assumed his ‘late’ status after choking the life out of the guy who transgressed God’s will.

Up until the emotional theological argument, it was actually an interesting movie, but after that bit of silliness (Linda didn’t have a rational argument, just hysterical shouting), followed by the vengeance of God bit, it became a lot less interesting. Arbitrary rules are, after all, interesting only in that they can be terrifying to work with, rather than having some predictability about them.

It would have been far more interesting if Linda had been ready with some secular moral arguments that appealed to the audience’s interest in why Peter’s activities are more those of a narcissist than a scientist, but it’s fair to say the resurrection of Linda’s late husband is more or less just an opportunity to laugh. Or possibly get seasick, the cinematographer worked hard to bring the audience to the edge of illness in this fight scene.

Watch at your own risk.

In a surprising development, The New York Times is reporting that China is not sending samples of the latest influenza mutation for analysis and vaccination development:

For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States — specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials.

Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization.

Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow, hampering preparedness for the next biological threat. …

“Jeopardizing U.S. access to foreign pathogens and therapies to counter them undermines our nation’s ability to protect against infections which can spread globally within days.” [said Dr. Michael Callahan]

I don’t doubt the immediate suspicion is that China will develop its own vaccine and withhold it from the rest of the world, in hopes of causing chaos if the virus turns out to be as deadly as its cousins, and far more contagious. It’s a reasonable concern.

But there are other explanations for the Chinese behavior:

1. Concerns about the Trump Administration. It’s not beyond belief that someone would weaponize an influenza virus and deliberately spread it to other countries, much like the primary concern, above, but weaponization could make it much worse. I’m not as familiar with biological weapons as I might like – or maybe I am – but the public has had a taste of it in the use of anthrax spores as a weapon in 2001.
2. Leverage in the tariff war. This is an implicit threat to the American homeland. But would Trump even understand it?
3. Depopulation. Way out on the edge of the spectrum of possibility is that this is a deliberate depopulation effort by the Chinese against the rest of the world. The aggregate excretia of the world is beginning to have an impact world-wide, and the Chinese may have decided a radical approach to reducing world wide population is in order. We need to remember that valuing human life differs from region to region, and while we tend to freeze up when a few American lives are lost (in contrast to a century ago, where lives were spent freely during World War I), in other parts of the world the loss of life is treated differently.

The order of plausibility of the above, for me, is 2, 1, 3.

Suzerain:

1. a sovereign or a state exercising political control over a dependent state.
2. History/Historical. a feudal overlord. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Another toxic Trump brand bites the dust,” Aldous J Pennyfarthing, The Daily Kos:

Well, now all the people who for some reason once equated “Trump” with opulence and epicurianism — when they really should have been thinking of Granny’s white lightnin’ and the ceement pond — are finally bailing on our slovenly suzerain.

Conservative but not-that-conservative Max Boot remarks on some historical perspective to try to explain current trends:

We now have leaders, such as Trump and the Brexiteers in Britain, who are endangering the hard-won achievements of the post-1945 era by embracing nationalism and calling into question international institutions such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization and NATO. For many politicians, this is a cynical exercise: They are manufacturing grievances to justify their lust for power. But why are so many ordinary people willing to go along?

The military historian Michael Howard provided at least part of the answer in a brief but wise 2000 book, “The Invention of Peace.” “Bourgeois society is boring,” he wrote. “There is something about rational order that will always leave some people, especially the energetic young, deeply and perhaps rightly dissatisfied. . . . Militant nationalist movements or conspiratorial radical ones provide excellent outlets for boredom. In combination, that attraction can prove irresistible.”

Boredom with the long period of post-Napoleonic peace in Europe, along with the rise of virulent nationalism, contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The chief of the German General Staff, Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, wrote in 1912 that all of the European powers would suffer from a “great European war” and that the chief beneficiaries would be the United States and Japan. But, he added insouciantly, “For me it will be all right. I am most tired and extremely bored by this lazy peacetime life.”

It’s not clear to me how well Howard’s observations apply to today, given that a large part of Trump’s base are older white voters who deeply resent how the United States has changed, and another chunk are the evangelicals, which I have begun to assign a shorthand definition of people resistant to change.

The tone of Boot’s remarks make it seem like the world wars were random choices made by bored people. My understanding, though, is that these were the result, in World War I, of a system of alliances that required reactions to belligerence, so that when a few Serb rebels, perceiving themselves as oppressed, shot and killed Archduke Ferdinand, those alliances went off like clockwork. It was 19th century diplomacy mixed with 20th century weapons.

World War II featured two different motivations. The Germans, suffering from the vindictive reparations demanded by the French (who, it must be said, were badly hurt by the Germans in World War I), had lost their moral foundation as a people, as will happen when mass poverty suddenly and seemingly arbitrarily appears, making them malleable clay for the right madman. The Japanese, on the other hand, had grand delusions of national godhood, and when the Americans put the squeeze on them by denying them the scrap metal they needed to feed their industry (not having much in the way of natural resources in their homeland), it was either give up their delusions or take what they needed to remain god-like.

A discouraging observation thoroughly applicable to today’s Trump-supporting evangelical.

Obviously, not having read Howard’s book, it’s hard to really decide if it’s foolish generalizations or “wise,” as Boot would have it. But from bombing altitude, it doesn’t impress me.

The tomatoes continue apace:

Yeah, the garage is just about overwhelmed, isn’t it?

I sure wish Wolverine had been played by Adam West.

The other end of the Wolverine part of the X-Men saga that ends with Logan (2018) is told in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). This is a fairly pedestrian, if tightly paced story of how Logan, born in the 19th century, fights his way through several wars into the 21st century and eventually becomes an X-Man doubled, in the sense that he already has a qualifying mutation, and then that mutation is enhanced through surgery by a military man obsessed with creating the perfect weapon for America – a weapon which Logan and his brother, another mutant named Victor, must eventually destroy through a team effort, despite the fact that Victor reserves to himself the right to kill Logan.

Yes, this movie does subconsciously encourage you to write in long, run-on sentences.

It’s exciting, it’s explanatory, but, in some ways, it’s ho-hum. We learn why Wolverine sometimes act as if he’s had a lobotomy (because, like, he had an extreme lobotomy, one might say), and while it makes sense, its consequence (amnesia concerning the love of his life and probably his murderous brother) ring just a trifle hollow.

If you’re an X-Men fan, or just want a bit of adventure for the evening, this isn’t a bad choice. Don’t look for it to be life-changing, though.

Steve Benen reminds me of an unintended analogy as he discusses the ever-receding deadline for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation to terminate:

As we discussed a while back, I’m curious about the behind-the-scenes dynamic. It’s possible, for example, that Trump is optimistic about the looming end of the investigation because his lawyers keep feeding him dubious good news that he chooses to believe.

In other words, it’s possible they keep saying, “This will all be over very soon, Mr. President,” to which a delighted Trump responds, “Sounds great.”

I couldn’t possibly track down an online reference at this late date, but it reminds me of an article published just after the final days of Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who died of cancer. It was reported that, near the end, he asked his doctors when their treatments would end his pain, and their reply was that “it would all be over soon,” in the Japanese tradition of doctors not telling patients bad news (or so I read – anyone confirm / disagree?). The Emperor died shortly thereafter.

I get the feeling the same words, if not quite the same results, are taking place here, this time pronounced by his lawyers. “Mr. Mueller will be finished soon.”