From Business Insider via my Arts Editor:
It would be interesting to have a graphic representation of the percentage of the state population speaking that language at home. I mean, are we talking sub-1%? 10%?
Just what percentage of the total population is seasoning for the apocryphal pot?
In a NewScientist review of three books on economic distress (“The global economy is broken, it must work for people, not vice versa,” 3 August 2019), I ran across a curious semi-quote that made me wrinkle my nose:
More than a decade on, people are still hurting. They often can’t find employment, or the scant work they can find offers little security or pay. They have no prospect that their living conditions will be ameliorated. Rightly, many of these people blame the “learneds” who failed to predict the crash. For example, a limo driver told [David Blanchflower, author of Not Working: Where have all the good jobs gone?] that people voted Brexit because “ordinary people had no hope”. How can we have hope when policy-makers haven’t learned from their mistakes?
No doubt they didn’t mean the politicians, but I could not help but see the professional politicians, such as to see Rep Gohmert (R-TX), or Rep Nunes (R-CA), or for that matter, the late Senator Proxmire (D-WI)[1], as a “learned” made me laugh.
And, you know, it’s not that bad a thing to not be an expert in everything. That’s why we have accredited experts and testimony and all that boring thing. Indeed, one of the most important skills of a professional politician is knowing when an “expert” is an expert, and when the expert is just a con-man, or someone with a hidden agenda, and then be able to pick up the salient points of the testimony from that worthwhile expert and implement them in public policy.
So, to a considerable extent, “wonks” like the execrable former Speaker Ryan (R-WI), whose ideology overrode any expertise he might claim to have, were a deterrent to good government; indeed, Republicans of his ilk might claim there is no such thing. They see society and the economy as self-regulating, which is ahistorical.
It was an interesting review to read. It almost made me want to go out and read the books.
1 Senator Proxmire had an annoying habit of handing out his Golden Fleece awards to NASA programs.
Munificent:
Noted in “When local news goes away, citizens suffer. Gannett’s megamerger will probably just inflict more pain.” Margaret Sullivan, WaPo:
GateHouse’s approach to its newspapers in recent years has made Gannett look almost munificent by contrast. And although Gannett’s name will be attached to the new company, GateHouse’s business practices seem more likely to prevail.
I generally find “single issue voting” to be a reprehensible practice by citizens who are responsible for selecting a leader who shares the responsibility of the safety and prosperity of a country, so when I read this WaPo opinion piece by Log Cabin (i.e., LGBTQ) Republicans Robert Kabel and Jill Homan endorsing President Trump on the grounds that he’s been good for the LGBTQ community, I shook my head at another pair of folks walking down that treacherous, yet so easy path. After all, evaluating a single issue is so much easier than synthesizing a few dozen issues and Trump’s responses to them before coming to a conclusion. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s right.
But the desperation of Kabel and Homan to endorse their President leaks through in this paragraph:
And it is not merely policies specific to LGBTQ people that have been good for our community. The president’s tax cuts have benefited LGBTQ families and helped put food on their tables. His opportunity zones have helped create new LGBTQ-founded small businesses. The administration’s aggressive negotiations on trade deals have preserved LGBTQ jobs. His hard line on foreign policy has protected LGBTQ lives. What benefits all Americans benefits the LGBTQ community, as we cross every racial, socioeconomic, religious and cultural divide.
It’s entirely reasonable to ask whether or not those same policies benefit those groups opposed to LGBTQ protections and rights, and realize that, yes, they do. In other words, Trump’s policies, celebrated above by Kabel and Homan, may actually benefit their cultural opponents – anti-LGBTQers, to be explicit – more than they benefit the LGBTQ community.
The hand is not faster than the eye.
Kabel and Homan conveniently skip over the favor shown by Trump and Pence for religious organizations in general, attempting to give them the right to discriminate against anyone they can justify under the religious rubric. The disdain, even loathing, a number of religious organizations have shown for the LGBTQ community is the sort of thing that strains the fabric of society, because at this point the denial of these rights and protections are seen as unjust in a rational society, and perhaps the bedrock of American society is not obeying the arbitrary interpretations of obscure religious tomes, but the devotion to justice, however flawed that devotion has been, by significant portions of American society. The fact that we’ve fallen hideously short doesn’t mean that we accept it, but that we need to improve ourselves.
We fought a war over that.
So Kabel and Homan can attempt to celebrate Trump and Pence for what is ultimately a celebration of irrationality and cruelty, but I do not think I can join them in that.
In my opinion, if you’re going to propose a radical new theory about reality, you really need to get the known details right. Donald Hoffman is the proposer, suggesting that we scarcely glimpse reality at all – just enough to survive, really – but then he throws in this whopper in an article in NewScientist (3 August 2019, paywall):
The objection that a lion must be objectively real because anyone who looks over there sees a lion that we can all agree looks like a lion – so it isn’t unique to our subjective experience – isn’t a valid one, either. Humans agree about what we see because we have all evolved a similar interface. The interfaces of some other species, such as prey mammals, may have icons for lions that are similar to ours, and that guide actions similar to ours, such as keeping far away from them.
Excuse me, but I haven’t evolved anything tangible. My species certainly has, but that collective evolution makes our sensory apparatus – or interface – more or less identical, with the exception of those still changing, either randomly (and therefore irrelevantly), or in response to evolutionary pressures.
The balance of the article postulates that there’s something deeper than reality going on out there. I find what they’re talking about to be congruent with my on-again, off-again theory that we’re all in a computer simulator which features a late-resolution feature at the quantum level.
A brow wrinkler:
For Americans accustomed to paying 4 or 5 percent mortgage rates, let alone the double-digit figures consumers endured in the early 1980s, the new loan from Denmark’s Jyske Bank might seem inconceivable.
The Danish lender last week started offering home buyers 10-year mortgages at an interest rate of -0.5 percent. That means borrowers over a decade will pay back a little less than the amount borrowed, not including one-time fees.
This highly unusual condition may be good for Danish home buyers, but economists say it’s an alarming sign for the global economy. Several major governments and more than 1,000 big companies in Europe are now able to effectively borrow from global financial markets at a negative interest rate. For Jyske Bank, that means it can turn around and lend money at a subzero interest rate, too. …
“This is the ultimate indicator that something is fundamentally wrong with the world economy,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The escalation of the trade war is making it worse.” [WaPo]
A related article on the potential of a world-wide recession is here.
Neither article touches on a concern of mine, however: Monopolies.
Look, the field of lending money is a market like most others. That is to say, supply and demand are the primary drivers of prices in the market. In the lending money market, prices are denoted in interest rates, where the higher the interest rate, the higher the price.
Supply of money to lend comes from several sources, from common bank deposits to bonds to CDs (certificates of deposit). Each takes your money and lends it out to those who need it, eventually returning it to you plus a stated percentage worth.
Demand is market-specific, and demand for lent money usually[1] has to do with investment. What drives investment about, though? Two things:
Survival. When faced with larger, dangerous rivals in their market, firms will quite often invest research, facilities, and that sort of thing in order to grow their market offerings and survive their competitors’ depredations, and those investments are often funded through borrowing. This scenario is rarely susceptible to influence by politics, public or corporate, although it’s worth noting the defense industry can use politics to survive an otherwise intractable market position.
Grow profits. Firms driven by the need to grow profits will often invest, again in research, facilities, etc, and often will use borrowing to finance those investments. But what drives this need for growth in profits? Primarily investors looking to profit from their holdings. Interestingly enough, top level executives at most large companies have managed to insulate themselves from these demands through incumbency and general success, so these demands need not be necessarily met.
In a monopoly situation, the Survival reason diminishes and can approach zero. I think we’ve seen a great deal of consolidation in many industries, and the fact of the matter is that many markets have become dominated by monopolies, some of them government-run – meaning they don’t have to borrow money.
That, in turn, reduces general demand for lent money, and thus low, and even negative, interest rates. While it sounds like madness, it may be a way for lenders to lock-in customers for future profits; loss leaders, so to speak.
All of this leads, in a way, to meditations on What is a healthy economy, anyways? Is it the perpetually growing, perpetually higher profits that we’ve seen in the past, intermittently interrupted by recessions and depressions? Or is there a healthy steady-state economy in which profits are relatively static?
And what if it turns out that this is a long-term trend? Look for banks to get a little desperate as profits from lending continue to dry up. After all, the boardroom insulation from investor demands isn’t perfect, and if profits begin to drop, then the top level executives may be replaced, which will lead to more desperation.
The addiction to ever-increasing profitability may be hard to break.
1 A notable exception is the practice of borrowing money to pay a corporate dividend. While I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for the practice, I can’t think of any; among the illegitimate, morally speaking, reasons is ego.
This legal brief, submitted by Senator Whitehouse (D-RI). et al, concerning litigation over New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. the City of New York that will come before SCOTUS, has caused a bit of a ruckus. Here’s one of the passages which are atypical of briefs written for the Court:
Parties and lawyers seeking to shape the law through affirmative litigation might once have been reticent to openly promote their political agenda in this Court. No longer.
Confident that a Court majority assures their success, petitioners laid their cards on the table: “The project this Court began in Heller and McDonald cannot end with those precedents,” petitioners submit. Pet’rs’ Reply at 2. Petitioners identify no legal question on which the circuit courts of appeal disagree. They do not suggest the court below “so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings” to require this Court to exercise its supervisory power. Indeed, they do not suggest this withdrawn municipal regulation presents any “important question[s] of federal law that . . . should be . . . settled by this Court.” Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States, Rule 10 (2017). They simply want a majority’s help with their political “project.”
To stem the growing public belief that its decisions are “motivated mainly by politics,” the Court should decline invitations like this to engage in “projects.” See Quinnipiac Poll, supra note 2 (showing fifty-five percent of Americans believe the Court is “motivated mainly by politics”).
Petitioners’ effort did not emerge from a vacuum. The lead petitioner’s parent organization, the National Rifle Association (NRA), promoted the confirmation (and perhaps selection) of nominees to this Court who, it believed, would “break the tie” in Second Amendment cases.3 During last year’s confirmation proceedings, the NRA spent $1.2 million on television advertisements declaring exactly that: “Four liberal justices oppose your right to selfdefense,” the NRA claimed, “four justices support your right to self-defense. President Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh to break the tie. Your right to selfdefense depends on this vote.” Id.; see Laila Robbins, Conservatives Bankrolled and Dominated Kavanaugh Confirmation Media Campaign, The Hill (Oct. 19, 2018).
NRA spokespersons were similarly blunt: “The NRA strongly supports Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court because he will protect our constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” said Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s top lobbyist. Press Release, NRA-ILA, NRA-ILA Launches Major Advertising Campaign Urging Confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh (Aug. 7, 2018). “It’s critical that all pro-Second Amendment voters urge their senators to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.”
And etc. National Review’s David French is livid:
I just finished reading of the most astonishing legal briefs I’ve ever read. It is easily the most malicious Supreme Court brief I’ve ever seen. And it comes not from an angry or unhinged private citizen, but from five Democratic members of the United States Senate. Without any foundation, they directly attack the integrity of the five Republican appointees and conclude with a threat to take political action against the Court if it doesn’t rule the way they demand. …
The implication is plain. The conservative justices are doing the bidding of their “corporate and Republican” masters. Their principles are malleable; only the results matter, and the results are dictated by the men and women who supported their confirmation and fund the litigation before the Court. “This backdrop,” the senators argue, “no doubt encourages petitioners’ brazen confidence that this Court will be a partner in their ‘project.’”
On ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser is entertained – I think:
The brief itself is less a legal document than a declaration of war. Though parts of it argue that the high court lacks jurisdiction over this case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, the thrust of the brief is that the Supreme Court is dominated by political hacks selected by the Federalist Society, and promoted by the National Rifle Association — and that if those hacks don’t watch out, the American people are going to rebel against them. …
The decision to lock Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland out of the high court, and the decisions to muscle Judges Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh onto that court, are the kind of tactics that exposes the molten core of partisan politics at the heart of the Supreme Court’s high-minded rhetoric.
Neither Gorsuch nor Kavanuagh, moreover, possesses even the second-hand democratic legitimacy that normally attaches to presidential appointees. Both men were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote, and were confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.
The judiciary, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, has “no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever.” Its power flows entirely from the widespread sense that its decisions are legitimate. Courts “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”
In other words, Republicans may come to find that by seizing control of the judiciary through constitutional hardball, they did so much damage to their prize that it is no longer worth having. The Whitehouse brief is an early warning sign that Democratic elected officials are, at the very least, ambivalent about whether they should obey courts that are increasingly seen as illegitimate. If those courts push too hard, that ambivalence could harden into something that will do permanent damage to judicial power.
Which reminds me that my belief that the judicial system should and must be isolated from the whims of popular sentiment has an implicit assumption: that the judges are not biased in their judgments. If that assumption is false, then the lack of a popular mechanism for removal of a justice, in the face of a partisan Senate controlled by a faction unwilling to do its duty, leaves the nation at risk of losing its respect for the judiciary.
Thus, Millhiser’s conclusion may be prophetic: the harder the Republicans squeeze their prize, the less valuable it becomes while damaging their reputation as well.
This will be a case worth watching if it actually generates a heated response from the conservative bloc.
Because my Arts Editor really liked this ditty by Tori Kelly.
For all of President Trump’s tough talk on China, I just had to laugh when I saw this:
The White House on Tuesday said it would delay imposing tariffs on Chinese imports of cellphones, laptop computers, video game consoles, and certain types of footwear and clothing until Dec. 15, significantly later than the Sept. 1 deadline President Trump had repeatedly threatened.
The announcement, which came from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, ensures that Apple products and other major consumer goods would be shielded from the import tax until at least December, potentially keeping costs on these products down during the holiday shopping season.
The announcement moved stocks sharply higher. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed close to 500 points, or nearly 2 percent, on the news. The stock prices of Apple, Best Buy, Mattel and Macy’s were among those that rallied on the announcement. [WaPo]
For a President who’s repeatedly accused his predecessors of mendacious politicking, he sure seems to be trying to beat them in this category. He discovers that trade wars are not easy to win and refuses to take his medicine – instead, giving good cheer to the Chinese.
Alas and alack, however, today also saw a big slide in the major market indexes as we achieved – perhaps an improper adjective – an inverted bond yield curve:
The bond market is flashing a big neon caution sign.
Yields on 10-year US Treasury bonds dipped below the yield on the US 2-year bond Wednesday. It was the first time the 10-year yield was below the 2-year yield since 2007 — just before the Great Recession. Both were hovering around 1.58% as of late Wednesday afternoon.
In another worrisome sign, the yield on the 30-Year US Treasury fell to a record low Wednesday of about 2.01%.
This is significant. When shorter-term rates are higher than longer-term bond yields, that is known as an inverted yield curve. The 3-month US Treasury already inverted versus the 10-year this spring. Yield curve inversions have often preceded recessions and are a sign of just how nervous investors are about the immediate outlook for the economy. They are demanding higher rates for short-term loans, which is not normal. [CNN/Business]
An interesting contrast to a recent WaPo article on the evangelicals, who cite the roaring economy as a subsidiary reason to vote for Trump. It would appear that investors have their doubts about Trump’s ability to keep the economy going. His tendency to stir pots without trepidation – a seldom used herb these days – can leave one with an unnecessarily upset stomach when you least expect it.
Of iris, of course!
REASON’s Glenn Garvin yearns to be a cultural critic, but when he uses his review of the recent Woodstock documentary Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, his distaste for the Boomer Generation lures him off the beaten track and into a ravine, where I fear the wolves may eat him. Here’s the pivotal moment in his review:
Source: Wikipedia
The most notable thing about the PBS Woodstock is the contortionist specter of a generation blowing smoke up its own ass. The last 15 minutes or so are mostly devoted to people who attended Woodstock declaring it a utopically transformative event that changed everything. Really? Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. The Vietnam War continued for another three. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon, and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was Afghanistan and Iraq. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969.
You could as easily make the argument that what defined a generation was not Woodstock but Altamont or the Manson Family. Baby Boomers didn’t change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word “Fuck!”without getting spanked. It’s sad that, 50 years later, they still can’t tell the difference.
And off Garvin strolls, convinced he’s buried the Boomers. Let’s dissect these self-satisfied paragraphs in the context of his dismissal that it was a transformative event. Note that I’m not backing the claim that it was transformative, I’m simply ripping his reasoning to pieces.
Lawyer Michael Dorf assesses the impact of Justice Kavanaugh, the replacement for Justice Kennedy, on SCOTUS:
Or is it? Some statistics (available from SCOTUSblog) suggest that the substitution of Kavanaugh for Kennedy has had little effect. Last Term, Justice Kavanaugh was in tight agreement with Chief Justice Roberts (92%) and in nearly as tight agreement with Justice Alito (91%). The only pair of Justices that were even closer to one another were Ginsburg and Sotomayor (93%). Meanwhile, Kavanaugh agreed with Gorsuch no more often than Kavanaugh agreed with Kagan (70% each). That’s quite similar to Justice Kennedy’s last Term on the Court, when he agreed most often with CJ Roberts (90%) and was actually more likely to side with the other conservatives over the liberals than was Kavanaugh in his first Term. Could the substitution of Kavanaugh for Kennedy have moved the Court to the left?!
Further statistical evidence for that arresting hypothesis comes from the fact that in the last Term there were actually more 5-4 decisions in which the four liberals voted as a bloc and picked up one of the conservatives than in which all five conservatives voted as a bloc. And the evidence isn’t just statistical. Remember I promised to say something further about the Bladensburg Cross case: Well there, Justice Alito’s majority opinion was joined in full by Roberts, Breyer, and Kavanaugh, as well as in substantial part by Kagan. They were outflanked to the left by Ginsburg and Sotomayor and to the far right by Thomas and Gorsuch. The Alito opinion was balanced and moderate (even if I didn’t agree with everything in it). Could we be witnessing a new pattern in Roberts Court version 8, in which there is a moderate bloc of left-leaning centrists (Breyer and Kagan) plus right-leaning centrists (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh), and then a liberal bloc (Ginsburg and Sotomayor) and a very conservative bloc (Thomas and Gorsuch)?
And so we can anticipate that, after all that row over allegations, the Court is really fairly much the same?
I think that’s a real phenomenon that will continue to show up occasionally, but as a general account of the Court the short answer is NOOOOOOOOOO! The idiosyncrasies of a single Term are just too great to permit any substantial generalization.
Context is everything:
To be clear, I understand that lawyerly distinctions can be and were drawn between those cases and other cases in which the conservatives did not defer to agency action. It’s not all politics. But anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention understands that there’s an awful lot of politics. And for now, the politics of support for a Republican administration tempers the conservatives’ hostility to the administrative state. It won’t always.
Bloc analysis of the Court is always interesting for what it may reveal of its personality and views – and how they sometimes change. For example, my impression has been that Justice Thomas has been creeping further and further right, and he was no lefty to begin with, while Alito and Ginsburg do not appear to be moving much, if at all.
Roberts remains a bit of a cipher.
I just liked the colors.
Dr. James Lovelock, a name familiar to anyone interested in ecology and a few other sciences, remains unrepentant at age 100 for his blasphemy:
You have come under fire for some of your attitudes, like your pro-nuclear energy views.
Has it occurred to you that most of the large money that circulates in this country comes from the fossil fuel industries? And they probably spend huge sums of money on anti-nuclear propaganda.
So you think it is a contrived argument?
Yes, the anti-nuclear argument is very much so. It’s so safe, it’s almost ridiculous. And it’s improving. The latest form of nuclear energy being worked on uses thorium, rather than uranium, and it’s almost impossible to get it to go into a runaway chain reaction or to do anything nasty. [NewScientist]
His biography says “independent scientist,” and he’s not kidding.
Politico reports on what some perceive as unrest in the evangelical portion of Trump’s base:
Paul Hardesty didn’t pay much attention to President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., last month until a third concerned constituent rang his cell phone.
The residents of Hardesty’s district — he’s a Trump-supporting West Virginia state senator — were calling to complain that Trump was “using the Lord’s name in vain,” as Hardesty recounted.
“The third phone call is when I actually went and watched his speech because each of them sounded distraught,” said Hardesty, who describes himself as a conservative Democrat.
The article goes on to try to suggest this may cost Trump a substantial number of evangelical voters, while noting prominent Evangelical leaders are poo-pooing the notion.
I’m on the side of the evangelical leaders. While a few evangelicals may become so disenchanted as to withhold their votes, the fact of the matter is that the top dog in any organization, regardless of the formal rules, will push the boundaries and flout the rules as a matter of course. It shows he’s the leader, the top dog, the guy calling the shot. And while this Pew Research poll, measuring the tolerance of voters for the checks and balances of our democracy, is limited to Democrats, Republicans, and leaners, it’s not too hard to believe that evangelicals would poll much like their fellow travelers. The poll’s banner says it all. Like most Presidents, he pushes the boundaries, and in his case that includes the boundaries of language of some of his base. All in the name of being the boss.
In the end, the evangelicals may be appalled by the occasional “god damn!” but Trump has been, and will continue, to deliver political goods important to the evangelicals. They’ll continue to clutch the Lover of Lies and Blasphemy to their bosoms in a frenzy over their rewards in the world.
Does your financial advisor look like this?
You’ll need some special help to enjoy this movie. I’d start with an intoxicant, then a buddy to help you make fun of the guy in a gorilla suit, wearing a diving helmet circa 1920. The buddy will also come in handy for the bubble machine which accompanies the guy in the gorilla suit’s communications with his home planet, which involves a lot of hand-waving, forceful orders about calculations and errors, and, you know, miserable kow-towing by the guy dispatched to wipe out the inhabitants of Earth.
He was such a jerk. He’d tickle all his victims before he strangled them. Even the little girl.
Oh, and the movie? Robot Monster (1953). Plum full of laughable special effects, some of the worst dialog ever, and a plot which is basically the dream of a young boy who’s been in an accident and is seeing a world in which there are 5, no, 8, no, 6 human survivors, we zip around crazily from a little girl who, in the face of Armageddon, really just wants to play house, her brother the brave but overwhelmed defender, their older, nubile sister, lusted after by fellow survivor & science guy Roy, as well as the aforementioned Robot Monster, aka Ro-Man, and … need I go on? Oh, I must, I see. Well, let me just mention that when the older sister is being carried away by Ro-Man in order to extinguish her, you can actually see her smiling and even laughing. It’s a bit like those Godzilla movies where the extras hired to run away from the Big G can be seen to be madly giggling as the city comes down around their ears.
The screen flashes with some sort of special effect for no particular reason. Popcorn becomes dessicated and barren as you ingest it. Your faith in the honorable profession of invading monsters is crushed. You’ll need therapy afterwards!
This is the sort of movie where the intoxicant is used to wash out your mouth and other orifices, not to enhance the effect of the movie.
Oh, you know you want to. Here you go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV2RQCtSf8
These are not the ingredients for a vigorous democracy. That, I fear, is the message in Ben Caspit’s assessment of Israel’s pursuit of a strong man to keep them – and God – safe:
In the end, Netanyahu won, at least in the public forum. His supporters are not put off by the investigations into his affairs and accuse the “deep state” and the left of conspiring together to depose him. Other, less prominent suspects are also benefitting, including minister Haim Katz, Aryeh Deri and Yaakov Litzman, Knesset member David Bitan and others. The public is rapidly losing faith in the rule of law.
These efforts all culminate in a campaign to denigrate and delegitimize the Supreme Court. Netanyahu is well aware that it holds his last and most important chance to exonerate himself. If and when the Knesset grants him immunity so that he can escape justice, the issue will inevitably be brought before the Supreme Court. That is why the court, one of the most important beacons of light in Israel’s democracy, has been attacked and battered over the last year like it has never been before. And it is why Netanyahu tried in April and will try again in September to form a coalition that would enable him to legally emasculate the Supreme Court and strip it of most of its authority.
The upcoming Israeli election is more than just a referendum on Netanyahu. It is a referendum on the rule of law itself, which large parts of the population see as little more than a leftist mutation whose sole purpose is to hurt their dear leader. [AL-Monitor]
It’s a sad commentary on what used to be a vigorous & healthy democracy. The threats to Israel’s existence, real or imagined, that were once met with diplomacy where possible, and violence where necessary, are now handled with violence as will be tolerated by Israel’s allies, namely the United States. Diplomacy? Is it diplomacy when Netanyahu repeatedly implores the United States to bomb Iran?
And the zealotry? It acts to smother any other approach to the situation. Speaking as an agnostic, I recognize that sometimes a religion can be transformative, but in this case it appears to amplify the xenophobia that is latent in all human beings, and leaves the believers scrambling for those who will protect their physical beings. And, yet, there are communities that refuse to contribute to the defense, even as they demand it.
The next few months may presage the American future.
Lardaceous:
resembling lard: often applied to tissue infiltrated with the starchlike substance amyloid [encyclopedia.com]
Noted in “Biden Knows How to Make the Moral Case Against Trump,” Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine):
But avoiding the lardaceous orange elephant in the room seems like a defensive dodge to me. It gives the impression of weakness. It cedes too much to Trump and normalizes him. It is not the relentless, epiphanous stare-down of Trump that a successful 2020 opponent needs to muster, and that so much of the country is yearning for. And it misses what is in fact the central issue in 2020: the unique danger this bitter bigot poses to this country’s liberal democracy and civil peace.
Due to an unfortunate confluence of events, we were unable to attend the Fringe again for a week, when the shows are in their last runs. Normally I wouldn’t tease readers with notices about shows no longer available, but tonight we saw three shows we thought really stood out.
First, Size by Somerville Productions was an enthusiastic meditation on the problems of body image in today’s society.
Second, Measure4Measure by Rough Magic Performance Company is a slimmed down retelling of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure. These are actors who know how to say their Shakespeare, and a playwright who knows how to slim him down, as this fit – tightly – into the hour limitation of Fringe. We really enjoyed this production.
Third is A Confederate Widow In Hell by Breaker/Fixer Productions. This is a well-constructed and acted two-man show (one without a head) in which the eponymous lady, tormented in hell, insists upon the importance of preserving Southern culture, curses her descendants for their foolishness in donning white sheets and indulging in prevarications concerning the reasons for the Confederacy, confesses her husband to be a heartless bastard, and generally blames the South for the sins of the free market. This one is quite memorable, and there’s a chance you could catch this in some other venue, as Breaker/Fixer appears to have been around for at least a couple of years and advertises it as having been produced in other venues, although their web site appears to be out of date.
If you do happen to run across any of these shows, don’t hesitate to watch them!
This WaPo article on the worries of Republicans concerning the 2020 election reminded me of one of the subtle tactics of Republican campaigning:
The Trump campaign has been paying attention to the Philadelphia suburbs and Trump’s gaps with suburban women. Last month in King of Prussia, Pa. — a short drive from Fitzpatrick’s district — it launched its 2020 Women for Trump coalition. The gathering featured Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who touted the Republican overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
“Is your life better now than it was before Donald Trump got elected? Do you have a little more money in your bank account, did you get a break on your tax return this year?” Lara Trump asked the crowd.
Reinforcing, albeit unconsciously:
“This whole area [i.e., Chamblee, GA] is going a little more liberal, a little more to the left,” Brent Darst, a 48-year-old accountant and Trump supporter, said this week at the nearby Lowe’s. “Republicans are going to benefit from all of these Democratic presidential candidates moving over there, but that doesn’t mean you can take it for granted.”
Darst added: “I drive an hour to get to work. If you remind people that you’re the party that doesn’t want to take away more of your money, you’ll do all right.”
In other words, it’s the focus on the money in the pocket issue. Yet humanity doesn’t exist simply to amplify its personal, individual wealth, now does it? It can’t, because that wealth is simply the top of an edifice, an edifice consisting of an efficient and just government, in turn built on a political structure which guarantees certain rights, built on the importance of a civil society, and etc. All of those elements must achieve a certain level of health in order for the rest to be healthy.
By focusing on the health of a single element, we by default then ignore the health of other elements. We’ve been seeing the results of that mis-focus in the non-financial activities of the Republican Party – the nomination and confirmation of far-right, sometimes incompetent, judges, the concentration on banning abortion (opposed by 77% of the electorate), the unlimited right to guns – and the consequences of that in a society made up of irrational actors.
But is your pocketbook fatter?!
This little head feint involves the most definite and intimate of self-interests, luring the voter away from considering the overall health of the Republic, always a difficult topic to evaluate, and to one’s own personal wealth. This, while a highly subjective and wildly interpreted topic, is also the most easily evaluated, a lazy exercise which appeals to just about anyone who has not been trained to think of the greater good. I have, in fact, been subject to this very ploy: a late, conservative friend of mine implored me to consider how President Trump’s policies must surely be benefiting my 401K, and I had to explain earnestly to him that it just didn’t matter: if the nation was nearing collapse, or the planet ecological collapse, then my personal wealth, or lack thereof, had no relevance to evaluating Trump’s performance as President. He failed to reply.
So the trick, in the final analysis, is the false metrics ploy. We see that in many segments of society, the use of one measurement, such as Our profits are sky-high! as a distraction from the more important metric, such as Our sloppy manufacturing methods have polluted the environment! I don’t necessarily mean to say this is a purposeful deceit, but it is up to the voter to contemplate proper metric selection – and whether an entity promoting an inappropriate metric is merely mistaken, or maliciously selecting the wrong one.
And then contemplate the available measurements of the best metric and how the political parties are representing those measurements, and how they intend to deal with them, or not. And vote accordingly.
Fitzwilly (1967) has good pacing, good acting, a charming lead who shows grace under pressure, and it took me – literally – a year to watch. This movie about a ring of thieves who thieve, at least partially, to support an old lady whose money has run out without her knowledge seems a bit too much like meringue to really be worth the time. It’s only in the end, when it’s revealed that her dictionary, which her butler, Fitzwilliam, had regarded as nothing more than time-passing foolishness, is a runaway bestseller, does she receive her first of two bits of cleverness.
The second is when she, and not Fitzwilly, blackmails an assistant D.A. into not pressing charges against one of Fitzwilly’s cohorts, who also happens to work for old lady, caught during their final caper. She’s really quite delightful as the young man gradually caves to the pressure.
Perhaps the theme here is never trust the demeanour of old ladies. If so, this sure was a snoozer, despite the plethora of fine actors and good pacing. I just could never stay awake.
These came out nicely.
Noted in AL Monitor’s Middle East lobbying updates newsletter:
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck’s Milan Dalal contributed $1 to the presidential campaigns of Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. on April 30 and May 25. Dalal lobbies for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Really? $1? Why? The same firm gave $5600 to Trump’s Victory Committee.
As my Arts Editor shelled a boiled egg, placing the shells on the counter, I handed her a dish for the shells. She stared at it and the pile of white chips.
“I fear that ship has sailed,” she quipped.
Short pause.
“And did it sail for the Seychelles?” I asked.
