Do you enjoy a good rant? Cruising the Cut, Episode 3, had my Arts Editor howling with laughter, as the guy, David Johns, loses it over the cushions on the narrowboat he’s just purchased.
I’ve not had any luck finding the episode online, unfortunately; we watched it on Amazon Prime.
Or, the Law of Unintended Consequences. The best of intentions can be detached and used as a cudgel, as AL Monitor reports:
Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to punish Russian officials accused of beating to death a whistleblower who publicized government corruption.
A decade later, the law has unwittingly spawned a multimillion-dollar lobbying cottage industry.
The Wikipedia entry for this law is here. The article notes an unusual provision:
But a unique facet of the Magnitsky law and subsequent amendments has created a whole new opening for more creative lobbying. Unlike similar laws blocking sanctioned parties’ US assets and banning travel to the United States, Magnitsky requires that US officials consider information from credible human rights organizations when weighing whether to apply sanctions.
There’s a lot of cockroaches that’ll try to build credible human rights organizations, I’m guessing. But there’s more!
In recent months, lawyers for Kuwaiti private equity firm KGL Investment and its former CEO, Marsha Lazareva, have launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to threaten Kuwait with Magnitsky sanctions if it does not drop embezzlement charges against her.
And it sure sounds like it’s all politics:
Working on the account are big names, including President George H.W. Bush’s son, Neil Bush; former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif.; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; and ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, until she joined Trump’s impeachment team. But the Lazareva camp has also consistently sought to portray her defenders as “human rights activists,” notably working with Washington nonprofit In Defense of Christians and former human rights lawyer Cherie Blair, the wife of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in its efforts.
Of course, this is the Middle East, a long ways away and has a dubious reputation for its links with such tawdry concepts as truth, honor, and justice; I have no inclination to comment on the quality of accusations against Lazareva or Kuwait.
But there’s certainly a lot of money being pitched into this metaphorical war, all hinging on the contents of an American law. It’s as if we’re exporting our law to the Middle East, isn’t it? Has anyone notified President Trump of this export, and its apparently high valuation? Only partly in jest, I should like to suggest that he put a price on it.
Of course, if you see the law as a proxy for morality – a concept for which I have an exceedingly wary sympathy – then our foreign policy since World War II has essentially been an export of our views on morality, starting with the Geneva Convention; any international lawyers out there who’d like to go into more detail?
Lokiarchaeota:
Lokiarchaeota is a proposed phylum of the Archaea.[1] The phylum includes all members of the group previously named Deep Sea Archaeal Group (DSAG), also known as Marine Benthic Group B (MBG-B). A phylogenetic analysis disclosed a monophyletic grouping of the Lokiarchaeota with the eukaryotes. The analysis revealed several genes with cell membrane-related functions. The presence of such genes support the hypothesis of an archaeal host for the emergence of the eukaryotes; the eocyte-like scenarios. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “The mysterious microbes shifting humanity’s place in the tree of life,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (1 February 2020, paywall):
The Lokis, more officially known as the Lokiarchaeota, have versions of the genes that help eukaryotes build membrane-enclosed compartments inside their cells. Without those compartments, eukaryotic cells would lack their most dramatic feature, the nucleus.
Jane Gaskell, as a teenager, wrote a novel named Strange Evil, which, upon being published, entered into the annals of legend in the genre of weird fiction. It concerns itself with the question of why gods exist, and, for Gaskell, it came down to belief: the more people believed, the greater the divinity.
As I recall, the novel ends with a giant, diaper-girt baby, chasing someone, presumably the protagonist, in order to wreak some terrible (terribly?) divine punishment, but shrinking as more and more of its believers choose not to believe in such a horror. It had its amusing moments. Sadly, I seem to have mislaid my copy, if in fact I ever had one.
But imagine if her premise were true: would naming an entire phylum of organisms for the old Norse God of mischief possibly bring him, it, back from where ever old, forgotten gods have gone? I don’t suppose that would be a boneyard, the sobriquet of the final storage area for retired planes before they are salvaged, but you never know. Are gods subject to salvage as well?
And would he be fatally insulted at being associated with a bunch of microbes? Or would it appeal to his reportedly macabre sense of humor?
Yep, this is a wandering piece of useless digression. Did you read all the way to the end? Shame on you!
Maybe a little tongue will take your mind off your skinny little dead wife.
Cornered (1945), if I’m to believe the release date, is a slightly prescient story concerning the human debris of war. It follows the vengeance of a Canadian, RAF Lt. Laurence Gerard, who, shot down during the war, met and married a member of the French Resistance, made it back to England, fought some more, and survives to the war’s end.
His wife does not. All he received was a notice of her death and a load of PTSD, a condition scarcely recognized during World War II, which is one reason for my assessment of prescience.
The story opens with him being demobbed[1] and making his way to France. Right off the bat we get tastes of his drive & style: when told it’ll take a month to get his visa approved to go to France, he finds his own way across Channel, doing the last couple of miles in a rowboat – which he then sinks. Long sought Peace may be upon the land, but this is a man still in fighting mode.
He rapidly finds his father-in-law, and eventually it comes out: his wife, and a number of other members of the Resistance, were taken to a cave, lined up, and shot.
Leaving the question: who did it?
Eventually, he’s in South America, which in reality also turned out to be a haven of runaway Nazis and collaborators, and gives me more reason for the assessment of prescient. Gerard is chasing a ghost: a man listed as dead, but with no other record. His wife is now in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Gerard, driven by his demons, gives chase.
The story has several satisfying twists, an exotic flavoring of those who savagely dance on the fringes of civilization, seeking the naked ugliness of raw political power over those they choose to despise. Against this backdrop, Gerard’s visceral pain and anger is a streak of dark green against the gangrenous putrefaction of the Nazis.
For all that, I thought the performance of the lead was a trifle one note, his PTSD could have played a bigger part in the story, and the antagonists could have used more development. But this story is neither simplistic nor entirely straightforward, and I think its recognition of the wear of modern warfare on the human psyche was ahead of its time.
This movie won’t bowl the audience over, and in today’s world, PTSD is not a revelation, but it’s still a good story with organic twists and turns.
1 Possibly dated Brit slang: demobilized, usually from emergency military service.
Keeping in mind that Judge Easterbrook was considered a possible successor to the late Justice Scalia, and is a long time leader of The Federalist Society, a highly conservative group with a special interest in the judiciary, no one can mutter Damn liberal judges! at this report:
In a jaw-dropping opinion issued by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on January 23, Judge Frank Easterbrook—a longtime speaker for the conservative Federalist Society and someone whom the late Justice Antonin Scalia favored to replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court—rebuked Attorney General William Barr for declaring in a letter that the court’s decision in an immigration case was “incorrect” and thus dispensable. Barr’s letter was used as justification by the Board of Immigration Appeals (the federal agency that applies immigration laws) to ignore the court’s ruling not to deport a man who had applied for a visa to remain in the country. [Politico]
Barr sounds like quite the authoritarian, doesn’t he? The report goes on to explain:
“We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again,” Easterbrook wrote. “Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.”
Given Trump’s record of defiance, Barr’s maneuver is predictable—but it is a shocking break with more than 200 years of constitutional and legal precedent.
Etc. And then author Wehle brings up one of the central problems that sometimes bothers me late at night:
The question looming over the presidency today is not what the law says, but what happens when the executive branch violates established law. As we saw with the impeachment debacle, without consequences, laws lose their force and become optional. In remanding the Baez-Sanchez case for a second time, Easterbrook insisted that the immigration judge’s waiver decision remains “in force,” and that “[t]he Executive Branch must honor that decision.”
What will happen, then, on the inevitable day that Trump’s administration refuses to honor a judicial decision? That scenario beggars belief, too. Courts enforce contempt through the U.S. Marshals Service, a team of federal police officers that is ultimately within the president’s chain of command. Will U.S. Marshals side with the judge over the president or vice versa? And if they get that choice wrong, what branch of government stands ready to hold them accountable to the people?
I suspect we’d see how the Army feels about democracy, and that would leave a bloody, pus-filled gash that wouldn’t heal for a generation or two. Much to Russia and China’s delight.
But this is just the next step in the inevitable Trump legacy. The prior step was the Betrayal of the Evangelicals. That was not betrayal in the traditional sense; rather, it was the enticement of the evangelical movement into a completely compromised position, and done with such delicacy that I suspect most evangelicals don’t even realize they have become one of the most immoral groups in the United States – not only for their use of the mendacious Trump to achieve their goal of pressuring abortion rights, but also for the concomitant corruption of the leadership of evangelicals, and for doing this all in the name of a dubious intellectual position.
This next step is more along the lines of a traditional betrayal, though. There is no doubt the moderate conservatives thought there would be some reasonable line Trump and his minions wouldn’t cross, but now they’re finding out that Trump’s vision of the United States is not the common one of the moderate conservatives, which, as distasteful as a committed progressive might find it, is a reasonable view, committed to long-term American bedrock principles.
I won’t say Trump is a committed authoritarian. I don’t think he has that much consciousness about himself; reports of his behavior paint a mercurial, grasping, obsessive man, whose desire for wealth & prestige has completely submerged any respect he has, or may have had, for democracy. That is, he seems little more than a very crafty child.
And he’s used the conservatives to approach his goals, whether they’re just money, or the prestige of building Trump Tower in Moscow, or he’s being blackmailed. The evangelicals are one peg in the wall he’s climbing, so is the GOP. Barr is one of his latest pegs, who, from the evidence, thinks he’s fighting a quasi-holy war with the supposedly Godless liberals, with Trump as his Holy Emperor; soon enough, unless he’s absolutely committed to toadyism, he’ll be on the ash heap of history – and on the wrong side, too.
Right next to Easterbrook and all the other conservatives who thought Trump was the golden path to conservative dominance over the coming decades, despite demographics being against them. Barrs ridiculous statement show them they don’t know where this path is going, but they’re not going to like it.
A few weeks back, while wandering the hinterlands of Amazon Prime’s Television & Movie Reserve, I ran across a show that seemed sort of oddball, and we started watching it. We became dazed and confused – why were we watching? Why was it so relaxing?
And now it’s done. At least until next time this dude with a camcorder releases episodes. Originally debuting on YouTube, then moving on to other platforms, it’s Travels by Narrowboat. A guy from Kent, England, by the name of Kevin, nearly fifty years old, sells all he has, buys a British narrowboat, and sets off to explore the canal system of Great Britain.
Lots of nice scenery, remarks on people and life, dismissal of the rat race that nearly ate Kevin alive, commentary on safety – it all seems pedestrian, and yet it was the first thing we’d turn to after work in this household.
Recommended? I dunno. I think either you’ll like it or hate it. Just make sure you start at the beginning. And don’t look for any shots of him and his boat going through the rapids.
He’s edited those out.
Long time readers will recognize the name Bruce Bartlett, a Republican member of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, who endorsed Trump in the hopes that, when he lost, the Republican Party would burn down and it could be rebuilt on more rational lines. (There are days I fantasize about using him as a conversational piece with a Trumpist.)
He’s also known for a meta-analysis he performed on a number of studies that concluded that Fox News viewers have, in general, a greatly inferior knowledge base compared to non Fox News viewers.
And now there’s former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, as reported by WaPo:
“The media, in my view, and I feel very strongly about this, is not the enemy of the people,” Kelly said. “We need a free media.” …
“That said, you have to be careful about what you are watching and reading, because the media has taken sides,” he continued. “So if you only watch Fox News because it’s reinforcing what you believe, you are not an informed citizen.”
While accurate, if you believe Bartlett’s analysis was properly done, it won’t have much effect. The Trumpists have been frantically demonizing Kelly almost since he left, notably with White House Press Secretary Grisham utterly discrediting herself in her frantic efforts to ingratiate herself with the new boss; there’s little reason to think Kelly’s statement will have any affect.
But it’s nice to see a Republican Administration ex-official acknowledge the pathology that is Fox News.
A picture is worth a thousand words? For a bookworm like me, it’s often a half dozen words, repeated endlessly: boring. But not this one!
There’s a fire hydrant at the base of that, now wrapped in a frozen embrace with the tree.
I don’t know who took it, but it asks so many questions: what went wrong? What if there’s a fire? Can the tree be saved?
While I sympathize with the relatives of the victims of shootings, it’s more than a little difficult to get behind the actions of the people who held a demonstration at Ramsey County Attorney Mike Freeman’s house, angrily demanding the officers who shot and killed Brian Quinones last September should be put on trial and convicted of murder. Never mind the incongruity of demanding a jury come to a particular conclusion; the simple matter of the evidence made available to the public so far doesn’t make their demands compelling. From MPR:
In a statement, [Freeman] noted that the incident was tragic, but said Quinones threatened several officers with a knife and refused their orders to drop the weapon. Freeman said the officers’ use of deadly force was “necessary, proportional, and objectively reasonable” under Minnesota law.
Quinones’ family members feared the 30-year-old husband and father had been feeling suicidal, and have questioned why police couldn’t subdue him without resorting to lethal force.
Just after 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Quinones was driving erratically along Normandale Frontage Road near 77th Street, when Edina police officer Nicholas Pedersen tried to pull him over.
As he sped along the street with his music turned up, Quinones held his phone in his hand and livestreamed video on Facebook. Pedersen followed and recorded video simultaneously on his squad car’s dash camera.
Quinones refused to pull over, but eventually stopped after the pursuit entered Richfield. Pedersen got out of his squad, drew his gun and shouted, “He’s got a knife! Drop it. Drop the knife! Get on the ground!”
The question of when a policeman should and should not defend themselves with deadly force is certainly one that should be debated hotly, and perhaps adjusted from current understandings. Whether or not that would have helped with the infamous killing in our community of Philando Castile is a question that can never be answered, and is complicated by allegations that former Officer Yanez was not qualified for his position due to anxiety issues; I do not know if anyone followed up on them.
Edina Police dashcam video shot.
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office
But in the Quinones case, the videos that have been broadcast suggest that he was looking for an ending of suicide by cop, and forced them to it. He is clearly and repeatedly warned. And I have little confidence that, beyond a Taser, which didn’t work in this case, there’s much to be done to merely disable him; human beings can collapse at a flea bite, or tip over cars – predictability of a human under stress is a mug’s bet.
What I fear is that unreasonable demands will contaminate the greater case for policing reform, for deciding if profiling is systemic or isolated, and that will delay necessary reformations.
It’ll be interesting to see how history treats this worry:
A conference in California next week says it aims to make scientific studies more reliable, but critics fear the event is a new tactic used by those who question the reality of climate change.
The event, called Fixing Science, is being run by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a non-profit organisation based in New York.
The conference’s programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis – the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies – with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change. …
… [Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt in Germany] says there may be more to the NAS’s conference than that. “They use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,” says Schmid.
The NAS has published reports attacking sustainability initiatives, including campaigns seeking to persuade universities to divest their fossil fuel investments. A 2018 NAS report on reproducibility said that climate scientists seek to “demonize carbon dioxide”.
NAS president Peter Wood says the world is warming, but “whether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute”. In fact, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible.
Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: “We have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.” [NewScientist, 1 February 2020]
While it’s appalling to think that we’re going to face another appallingly fraudulent “institution,” much like the Tobacco Institute, in the name of corporate profits, it’s not unimaginable. After all, there’s a signification proportion of the world population which, for religious reasons, cannot accept that human activity is causing global warming[1].
The conference is causing quite a stir:
Computational biologist Lenny Teytelman is CEO of protocols.io, a company that aims to make experiments more reproducible by standardising how data and methods are shared. Aware of the NAS’s history, “I tweeted a general warning against the conference and then emailed the individual speakers to alert them about the group’s background,” he says. …
“My view is that many of the speakers at this meeting are being played,” Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford argued on her blog. By attending, they are lending credibility to fringe views and to an essentially political group, she said.
Bishop is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. I looked up her blog and found this:
The format of the meeting is cleverly constructed. The conference will be introduced and summed up by David J. Theroux (Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Institute and Publisher of The Independent Review) and Peter Wood, (President, NatAsSchols [Bishop’s acronym for National Association of Scholars, which she uses to distinguish it from the far more prestigious National Academy of Sciences]). Neither man has any scientific background. Theroux delighted the Heartland Institute last summer when he promoted the idea, recently publicised by Donald Trump, that wind turbines are responsible for killing numerous birds (to see this lampooned, click here)
Wood was an anthropologist who has been Provost at a small religious school, The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007), before moving to NatAsSchols. He has, as far as I can tell, no peer-reviewed publications, but he has written pieces deriding climate concerns, e.g. “the fantasies of global warming catastrophe are a kind of substitute religion, replete with a salvation doctrine, rituals of expiation, and a collection of demons to be cast out.”
Another presenter is David Randall, who is Director of Research at NatAsSchols, policy advisor to the Heartland Institute and first author of the report on “The Irreproducibility of Modern Science“. He is an unusual person to be authoring an authoritative report on the state of science. Web of Science turned up seven publications by him, all in politics journals, and none with any citations. His background is in history, library studies and fiction writing.
Corruption caused by commercial interests can usually be stemmed by legal actions. Religious certainty is usually not susceptible to rationality or legal actions, but rather force. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Take it as a warning: the National Association of Scholars will need to be treated very skeptically.
1 For Twin Cities residents, long-time meteorologist Dave Dahl made exactly that statement many moons ago. On the other end of the spectrum, my favorite meteorologist, Paul Douglas, is Republican, religious, and has no problems acknowledging anthropogenic climate change.
I’ve been meaning to find a time series of Trump mendacity for the last couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago one just fell into my lap – from WaPo, who Trump reportedly hates anyways.
It’s rather a measure of the stress he’s under, isn’t it? The first year of his term, not so much stress. End of 2018, though, saw the mid-term elections, which exploded in a limited disaster for a President who – at least in his own eyes – saw an economy that had never worked so well before. True, in the Senate the table was tilted towards the Republicans anyways, and a couple of weak Democratic seats were won by the Republicans – but the House saw a large GOP advantage evaporate as voters behavior indicated an evolving consciousness of the ongoing disaster of Trump. As Party leader, Trump was responsible for Party performance – and it didn’t go well.
Skeptical readers may wonder about previous Presidents. WaPo didn’t start this database until partway into the Obama Administration, so there’s no apples-to-apples comparison. Worse, the implication is that they didn’t have a well-organized database until Trump came into office, although I could be wrong. However, there is an article in which WaPo documents the Obama mendacity legacy, stating that they fact-checked 250 statements (without summarizing their findings), and giving their list of the top-10 whoppers.
Yeah, Top 10.
Worse, one is not during his Administration, but during the campaign (whether that’s worse or better is debatable), and another one is actually an intellectual error on the part of the Fact Checkers, which I addressed in one of my more popular posts here when Marc Thiessen made it. While it’s disappointing when anyone lies, it appears to be safe to say that Obama, whether or not he actually aspired to any great heights in the field of lying to the public, has fallen short of the Trump heights in mendacity.
All that said, one has to wonder if Trump is delusional, or if he has a clear strategy when he lies. My guess is that he has a strategy, and it depends on the principal of imperfect information. We are all burdened with imperfect information, whether we’re a professor of some distinction, or someone who’s dabbling far from their domain. It’s inevitable.
So Trump can be confident when he asserts that we were in a historical crime surge back in 2016, some people would believe him – especially those who happened to live in an area that was unfortunately experiencing that surge. Or … pick your topic, from Republicans being the original protectors of citizens with pre-existing health conditions to Mexico paying for the wall through redemptions. Whatever that means.
And how many of us deal with inveterate liars? Virtually none of us – we expect a basic honesty from everyone we deal with. When we run into an inveterate liar, it’s so far outside of our experience, most of which we don’t double-check anyways, it’s easy to get suckered in.
Perhaps the most interesting result from the 2016 Presidential Election was this: Trump lost his home county (New York County), home to Manhattan, 87% to 10%.
Yeah, a 77 point loss.
The Vera Coking house in Atlantic City, from which Donald J. Trump tried to evict Coking via eminent domain so he could build a limousine parking lot (photo by Jack Boucher/Historic American Buildings Survey).
Trump is no doubt well known in Manhattan, as that is where he did his building – and not in the least trusted. For independents who are still undecided, this is an important point in your analysis. Most candidates can count on their home state. When Mondale lost to Reagan, he won Minnesota. I don’t think he won any other state.
Trump couldn’t even come close in his home town.
Trump supporters should consider that.
If you’ve been wondering why there’s so much continuing uproar over Attorney General Barr, an attorney who occupied the same position under President Bush (GHW) and, until joining the Trump Administration generally considered an honorable man, today’s contretemps concerning the length of sentence for convicted felon and Nixon-lover Roger Stone is a clue: when the Department of Justice announced it would override the requested length of sentence for Stone that was requested by the prosecutors on the case, they all quit. This came after this tweet appeared:
This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice! https://t.co/rHPfYX6Vbv
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2020
I daresay the prosecutors, successfully proving Stone engaged in felonious behavior in connection with one of the most important parts of democracy, and when they chose to quit it wasn’t because they have lucrative jobs waiting, but because they recognize they can no longer work in an honorable manner with the Department.
Look, this is all circumstantial evidence, right? But, in combination with all the other evidence – begin with Barr’s misleading summary of the Mueller Report – and the sum total does not leave Barr looking like an independent and competent AG.
If Trump really thought “the crimes were on the other side,” and Barr was doing nothing about them, shouldn’t he be tearing Barr a new one? Yet, nothing happens. Barr is busy keeping him happy.
It’s one thing when an untrained dude like me says it, it’s quite another when someone with the right letters after their name shouts it from the rooftops, like Scott R. Anderson on Lawfare:
But the president is already pushing up against the legal and practical limits on his control over federal employees. While Trump may be able to remove officials from certain political positions with limited repercussions, there are far more constraints on what he can do to career civil servants. And pushing against those limits is likely to place Trump back in the same difficult position he only recently escaped: with his efforts to solicit political favors from Ukraine back under independent scrutiny. As a result, the president may not have much more leeway with which to continue his campaign of vengeance.
It only makes sense, so if Trump tries to take too much revenge – and it hasn’t been much so far – he could find himself in yet another awkward position. His base won’t care – they’ll just take it as persecution, and in fact if he doesn’t engage in public revenge, his base might start questioning him.
But the independents, who might hang around long enough to find out that the whistleblowers are the real persecution victims, may care. So can Trump restrain himself? Can his handlers restrain him? Time will tell.
But this just gets beyond me. The abstract of “Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer“, Lesovik, et al:
Uncovering the origin of the “arrow of time” remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which declares that entropy growth proceeds from the system’s entanglement with the environment. This poses a question of whether it is possible to develop protocols for circumventing the irreversibility of time and if so to practically implement these protocols. Here we show that, while in nature the complex conjugation needed for time reversal may appear exponentially improbable, one can design a quantum algorithm that includes complex conjugation and thus reverses a given quantum state. Using this algorithm on an IBM quantum computer enables us to experimentally demonstrate a backward time dynamics for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity. [Nature: Scientific Reports]
Nature is more than respectable, but reversing time? Or is this just some minor aspect?
Welcome to Bikini Atoll. This is a sonar map of the lagoon where the first submarine nuclear explosion took place in 1946:
The sticks mark the final resting places of the ships used as test targets. These ships were thought be capable of surviving the blast, so, according to this BBC report:
These vessels – old units from the US, Japanese and German navies – were not prepared with the expectation that they would become artificial reefs. If that was the intention, they would have been stripped down.
Instead, the war-game scenario demanded that they should be left in position as if operational. That meant they were fuelled and even had munitions aboard.
“As we were mapping, I could know without looking up when we were near the [US aircraft carrier] Saratoga, because we could smell the bunker fuel; it was so heavy and is still streaking out.
Long time readers may recall that I find the practice of leaving shipwrecks lying around nettlesome, especially those which are a danger not only to the environment, but to local humans who may be caught in a catastrophe when the fuel oil or munitions reach critical. The radioactivity of these ships simply makes it even more difficult to visualize how to raise and properly dispose of these ships.
And the population of Bikini Atoll was mistreated dreadfully.
There’s been the expected bewailings of the punishment for Sondland, the Vindman brothers, and perhaps others still to come. Senator Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY), and presumably just about all the members of Congress, has recognized that whistleblower retaliation is illegal:
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) requested all 74 inspectors general, including the Defense Department IG, to investigate retaliation against whistleblowers after President Donald Trump got key impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman kicked out of the National Security Council last week.
Would the Democrats consider another impeachment? I think, at the very least, they should make noises about it. After all, this is a violation of law, and it falls well within the House oversight function to investigate and, once again, prepare articles of impeachment.
What’s worse than being impeached but not convicted? Yeah, you got it.
Messaged properly, the Democrats can use such an impeachment inquiry and trial to continue to chip away at the rotten core of the Republican Party – and to affirm the message that the Presidency is not to be treated as a Mob position.
I was a consummate bookworm when I was a kid, became an addict to social media when it started in the early 1980s[1], and have never stopped reading, although I’ve shifted from fiction to non-fiction, from books to magazines and online. Through this practice, I’ve become increasingly sensitive to how writing styles can correlate to the purpose, often hidden, of the author. To use a gross sample, if I see a lot of hysterical adjectives, if I see a lot of exclamation points, both of which are designed to activate our emotional response systems, I become immediately suspicious of whatever it is I’m reading. In a nutshell, I automatically suspect the argument being advanced, whether it be intellectual or commercial (i.e., BUY THIS PRODUCT, IT’LL CURE ALL YOUR ILLS!), is less than compelling, perhaps even fraudulent[2].
A more nuanced collection of examples, and therefore difficult to detect and positively correlate, is the august tone I find in National Review articles. They have a ponderousness to them that projects an authority that precludes a need to rely on facts or right reasoning to make their point. (I should note that contributor David French is less willing to use that form that most other NR contributors.) Add in their flight from an initial NeverTrump stance to a YesTrump position and its concomitant moral and ethical problems, and I find them so irritating I resist visiting the NR website. They start with the assumption that their ideology is correct, push through or simply ignore the oppositional facts and arguments like a bulldozer through a china shop trying to buy a single teacup, and end with a righteousness unearned.
This habit of mine may also explain why I read The Persuaders with such interest, although its topic is a bit of a sibling to my sensitivities on the matter of communications. This tome investigates how various entities attempt to persuade us to take political positions and buy commercial products, not through rational expostulation, but through sleight-of-hand and knowledge of how minds work.
So, several months ago when Eve Fairbanks published a meditation on how her communications with conservatives, family or otherwise, raised the hair on the back of her neck (my description), I was fascinated:
I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like [Ben] Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.” …
When I read [Bari] Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched [Jordan] Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?
My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.
Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South. [WaPo]
Is it OK to condemn or agree based on rhetorical style. No.
Is it OK to research based on rhetorical style? Yes.
Returning to my initial point, this is why the style of communication is as important as the subject and argument itself. A style that seeks to obscure, which attempts to ally itself with some moral goodness using vacuous or theological arguments, I’ll tell you there’s a dozen more strategies available to those who would rather twist words and appeal to invisible beings than admit they are in the wrong. That’s part of my analytical approach to reading any piece, fiction or not (although purposes are rarely shared between the two categories).
Moving on and breaking the thundering tone of my moral outrage (see, I can do it, too!), I now suspect I understand what a professor of Rhetoric does. From the same article:
Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.
It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”
Perhaps I’ve developed an informal sense of rhetoric. Rhetoric would have been an interesting subject to study in college, if only I had known it even existed. After all, it appears to study, at least as one subject, how those employ rhetoric to obscure repulsive practices and thoughts, clothing, in this case, the pus-filled body of slavery in the finery of freedom, minority rights, and even, in the case of the Fire-Eaters, the Word of God. I get a lot of pleasure in taking apart missives which I consider misleading, exposing the methods of the charlatans to the world. Bringing light to darkness makes me feel like I’ve done a bit to make the world a better place, transient as it may be.
Fascinating article, good read.
1 “Social media” of the era were Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), of which I ran one of a type known to encourage enthusiastic communication (rather than the other major purpose for which BBSes existed, which was file-sharing) for 20 years, and spent inordinate amounts of time programming, using, and indulging in activities affiliated with them.
2 Such suspicion does not preclude admiration for the communication, however. Both my Arts Editor and myself found the commercials for Enzyte, a supplement for “natural male enhancement,” quite charming, if that’s the word for it. The CEO of the manufacturing company of Enzyte, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, ended up in the pokey, along with his mother (!), and the company went bankrupt, thus suggesting art and ethics are tenuously connected, at best.
Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.
The promise: One of the most critical promises then-candidate Donald Trump made was to drain the swamp. NBC News has conveniently made available a collage of videos of Trump’s promise here, but what it comes down to is the removal of corruption from government. Because public perception, valid or not, is that corruption is rampant in Washington, D.C., this promise became one of the linchpins to his victory in the 2016 Presidential election.
Results So Far: The answer to the question of whether or not the swamp is being drained appears, on its face, to be easy: Failure. There are several categories to be considered: those in which lobbyists are nominated to positions of influence over the agencies which they were lobbying; those officials who refuse to cooperate with what appear to be appropriate requests for information, including subpoenas, from Congress; and those in which officials of agencies are forced to leave due to a scandal which can be classified as swampy. Sometimes the former category can be difficult to define for positions such as the Secretary of the Treasury, as the position requires specialized knowledge that can be acquired only by working in the industry; and, of course, I am not familiar with all officials and their, ah, peccadilloes. Nor do I keep up with all the news, all the time.
I will present my observations as a series of categories. Feel free to notify me of corrections using the mail link to the upper right.
Not a swamp creature to my knowledge: Sessions (Attorney General; recused himself from Russia investigation when ethically required to do so, much to the horror of President Trump); Tillerson (State; no known swamp scandals, although Trump supporters might argue that calling his President a ‘moron’ was scandalous, and his activities at State were more likely incompetent in damaging State’s capabilities); Mattis (Defense); Esper (Defense); Perdue (Ag); Azar (HHS – although his political contributions might be considered swampy by some); Carson (HUD); Chao (Transportation); Brouillette (Energy); DeVos (Education – although one is tempted to accuse her of incompetence); Wilkie (Veterans); Kelly (Homeland); Nielsen (Homeland – the family separation policy may be shameful, but it is not swampy); Lighthizer (Trade Rep); Coats (DNI – but Trump ended up dismissing him); Haley (UN Ambassador); Nauert (UN Ambassador – withdrawn); Craft (UN Ambassador); McMahon (SBA); Carranza (SBA).
Lobbyist for industry or similarly disqualified: Shanahan (Defense; lobbyist for Boeing, no known expertise – nomination withdrawn); Bernhardt (Interior – lobbyist for firms in the energy industry); Pruitt (EPA – energy industry lobbyist); Wheeler (EPA – energy industry lobbyist, although he had also worked in the EPA prior to being a lobbyist – perhaps that deserves an AND, instead); Scalia (Labor – lobbyist for Chamber of Commerce)
Appointed because they were thought to be highly compliant with President Trump’s wishes over the legal requirements of their positions: Pompeo (State; alleged to be part of the Ukraine scandal; also headed CIA, where leaks indicated he ran it as a political, rather than professional, operation); Barr (AG; displayed dubious behavior in response to the Mueller Report)
Sordid history in position: Zinke (Interior – accepted trips on private jets from entities his agency regulated; general budgetary excesses; subject of internal investigations concerning various matters, including interference with casinos); Ross (Commerce – reported to sleep through meetings); Price (HHS – resigned after criticism for using charters and military aircraft for travel); Perry (reported involvement in the Ukraine scandal; distinctively unknowledgeable and unprepared for the position); Shulkin (Veterans – dismissed for apparently lying to ethics investigators); Mulvaney (Management & Budget – reported to direct resources away from tasks he doesn’t like, admitted to quid pro quo and tried to walk it back in the Ukraine scandal); Pruitt (EPA – subject of 15+ (!) investigations for general incompetency in the position).
Just a dubious history: Puzder (Labor – nomination withdrawn; former CEO of CKE; involved in some allegedly unethical practices; on the positive side won some industry awards); Ross (Commerce – reported to have lied about his net worth prior to joining the Trump Admin); Acosta (Labor – led the infamous Jeffery Epstein Florida plea deal); Jackson (Veterans – allegations of substance abuse, proclaimed Trump having the best of health when report showed otherwise, unprepared – nomination withdrawn); Ratcliffe (DNI – found to have misrepresented his expertise – nomination withdrawn); Haspel (CIA – involved in the torture ops during the Iraq War); Mulvaney (Management & Budget – admitted he wouldn’t meet with a corporate lobbyist if they didn’t have a big check in hand)
Refused to cooperate with Congress: Mnuchin (Treasury – Trump tax returns).
The swamp is partially about influence, and President Trump’s hotel holdings are well-known to those who wish to buy his attention and compliance. Open Secrets has documented quite a lot of this, such as Saudi Arabia:
Saudi foreign agents and lobbyists came under fire for spending more than $270,000 to put up a group of veterans at Trump International Hotel. The vets were lobbying for changes to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) — legislation that enabled 9/11 lawsuits against the government of Saudi Arabia — after those veterans claimed they did not know their trip had been organized and financed by the Government of Saudi Arabia.
The Bigger Picture: This, of course, lacks context. None of Trump’s officials have actually been convicted of a federal crime, but then his term, whether 4 or 8 years, has not yet come to an end, making comparisons dubious. It’s worth noting that in the Obama Administration, only General Petraeus, then serving as Director of the CIA, was convicted of a crime; the Bush II Administration saw eight of its members convicted of crimes, including Chief of Staff to the VP Scooter Libby; two in the Clinton Administration (one being child pornography, which is not swampy); the Bush I administration saw one in its 4 years of existence; and then we get to the Reagan years, which appear to be positively rife with scandal – I’m not even going to bother to count. Carter’s four years had none; Ford saw one on tax evasion; Nixon eleven, with nine for various corrupt practices related to Watergate, and including the shocking conviction of VP Agnew on tax evasion.
Related scandals not resulting in convictions? I’ll grant my memory prior to Obama is spotty, and I don’t have time to chase all of that down. But with Obama, there was very little out and out scandal beyond Petraeus that I recall. When the tragic Benghazi Incident occurred, the Republicans beat the drums concerning Secretary of State Clinton, but despite multiple hostile investigations, nothing was ever found; the only reasonable conclusion isn’t that she’s smarter than the Republicans, but that there was nothing to be found. I also recall the Fast and Furious scandal, involving AG Holder, but, again, nothing seems to have come of it.
Again, this is apples to oranges, and inferences as to how Trump compares to his Democratic and Republican predecessors is at least somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
SO … this beholder says he’s never seen so much scandal & squalor in any White House Administration, but then I’m a trifle too young to remember the Nixon Administration. That judgment began as an impression, but research for this post suggests that the swamp, if anything, has become deeper; and that campaign promise, as it progressively became more and more broken, has inspired raucous mockery among the political opposition.
For those who care about easily-kept campaign promises being, well, kept, Trump has apparently failed, and failed badly, on this one.
And, for those intent on using the easily swayed Trump for their own purposes, such as the Evangelicals and the >ahem< lobbyists, they won’t care. They’re getting what they wanted and corruption is a non-starter for them.
Sluice:
A sluice (/slus/ SLOOS; from the Dutch sluis) is a water channel controlled at its head by a gate. A mill race, leet, flume, penstock or lade is a sluice channelling water toward a water mill. The terms sluice, sluice gate, knife gate, and slide gate are used interchangeably in the water and wastewater control industry.
A sluice gate is traditionally a wood or metal barrier sliding in grooves that are set in the sides of the waterway. Sluice gates commonly control water levels and flow rates in rivers and canals. They are also used in wastewater treatment plants and to recover minerals in mining operations, and in watermills. [Wikipedia]
Noted while watching Travels by Narrowboat.
“I’ve said before that I’m a citizen journalist. What kind of journalist am I if I don’t rush to the front line when there is a disaster? I will use my camera to witness and document what is really happening under Wuhan’s efforts to contain the outbreak. And I’m willing to help spread the voice of Wuhan people to the outside world. While I’m here, I promise I won’t start or spread rumors. I won’t create fear or panic, nor would I cover up the truth.” – Chen Qiushi, Chinese journalist [via CNN]
Idealists envision a world better than the current world, and heap blame on the powers that be. That’s why they are often excoriated and condemned – who wants to lose their place on the ladder of power?
Last month I noted that some observers wondered if the Chinese Communist Party would be able to use their response to this epidemic to boost the Communist Party brand. Part of WaPo’s latest report suggests the answer may be inclining towards no:
The risk to front-line medical staff was painfully illustrated this week when the Wuhan “whistleblower doctor” Li Wenliang, who was detained and forced to apologize for rumor-mongering at the beginning of January after trying to alert his colleagues to a strange new illness, died of the coronavirus.
The death of a healthy young doctor who tried to sound the alarm has led to an explosion of anger across China at the way its leadership responded to the outbreak, an anger that many political observers are saying represents one of the biggest challenges to the Communist Party in years.
With the party struggling to manage public reaction, a Beijing-based company, Womin Technology, quickly compiled a “public sentiment” report drawing on posts from more than 100 social media sources and submitted it, along with their recommendations, to the central leadership.
The seven-page document, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, analyzed the intensity of public outrage over Li’s death. It recommended that the party leadership “affirm” the doctor’s contributions while stepping up efforts to block harmful speech and “divert” the public’s attention with positive news.
It predicted, finally, that there was “low probability” of street gatherings but warned local authorities to be on guard to “deal decisively” with any unrest.
Any worries about unrest suggest the response has been late, inadequate, or both. A taste of authoritarian methods:
Beijing authorities Friday said that lying about having contact with someone with coronavirus could be punishable by death, that failure to report symptoms such as fever could lead to criminal charges, and that people who are not wearing masks could be detained.
“If found to have endangered public safety with dangerous means, those with such behavior … could be arrested and sentenced to three years or less of imprisonment for lighter cases, and 10 years or more in jail, life sentence, or even death sentence in severe cases,” said Li Fuying, director of the Beijing Judicial Bureau.
And overnight, CNN has a report on a Chinese lawyer turned journalist who has apparently disappeared:
Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who had been doing critical reporting from Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak, went missing on Thursday evening, just as hundreds of thousands of people in China began demanding freedom of speech online. …
Friends and family later found out from the police that he had been forced into quarantine. By Sunday, Chen’s disappearance had started to gain traction on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, with many pleading for his release.
“Hope the government can treat Chen Qiushi in a fair and just way,” one user wrote on Sunday morning. “We can no longer afford a second Li Wenliang!” …
Will this stir up anger? CNN uses suspect adjectivals:
Amid deep and boiling anger, China announced on Friday that the National Supervisory Commission — the Communist Party’s much-feared disciplinary watchdog which operates in secrecy — is dispatching a team to Wuhan to conduct a “full investigation” into [late medical doctor] Li’s case. [Li had been silenced as a rumormonger in the early days, caught the virus from one of his patients in hospital, and passed away recently.]
Deep and boiling anger is a subjective, and suspect, phrase. It may be accurate, but to me this stands out as a red flag in CNN’s report. Until China is actually caught up in revolution, and the Communists are collapsing, I wouldn’t take those adjectives too seriously.
But, while on the same page, for those folks who want strong leaders, go back and read that bit about China’s National Supervisory Commission – while “much-feared” is also subjectively adjectival, this has an air of plausibility, since even the FBI was once much-feared, when under the control of Director Hoover. There’s a good reason FBI Directors are term-limited. In the autocracy towards which President Trump leans, this is what happens, and all the guns you can put in your basement won’t help if it’s accepted that his much-feared disciplinary organization is permitted to engage in such nonsense. President Xi has known autocracy all of is life, and consequently those are the tools to which he’ll first turn.
Meanwhile, the data coming from the graphic monitoring tool from Johns Hopkins University, as of last night, now has deaths over 800 (814, as of the last refresh, and I’m not going to redo the screen capture, etc) and infections over 37,000 – if you trust the data. I don’t have an opinion on that issue, nor am I trying to spread a rumor; as a software engineer who has studied data collection issues from time to time, suspicion about data is simply a professional tool. As someone who is aware of some of the methods of autocracies, I have a persistent voice asking Why should we trust data from China? There’s already been questions raised about their economic growth numbers. Not to make my readers paranoid or anything …
While the deaths are tragic, the numbers of deaths doesn’t appear to be exploding in the way I would expect if this was an existential threat to humanity. Not that I know anything about such topics, nor do I happen to know any epidemiologists – but I would be expecting an exponential increase in the early stages, and that phenomenon doesn’t appear to be there.
Still, keep an eye on things.
One of you must be Boris Karloff! The producer promised I’d be working with him!
If you can get past Boris Karloff, noted English actor, playing a Chinese detective, then the confusing named, at least in this print, Mystery at Wentworth Castle (1940, aka the equally perplexing Doomed to Die) might be a pleasant way to pass an hour. This is not a whodunit, but rather a thriller, in which the head of a shipping company, Cyrus Wentworth, already reeling from the sudden burning and sinking of one of the line’s ships, the Wentworth Castle, with high loss of life, is shot to death virtually in front of his primary rival, Paul Fleming, as well as the rival’s son, Dick.
Dick was in the office to ask for Wentworth’s daughter in marriage, and is in the final stages of a row, being shown the door, when a gun goes off and Wentworth dies. Dick is the presumed murderer, but he’s disappeared, much to the frustration of everyone: police captain Street, who wants this case closed, reporter Roberta Logan, who wants an exclusive story, and Wentworth’s daughter, Cynthia, who cannot believe her fiancee would have shot her father. Cynthia is the one who calls in Jimmy Wong, Chinese detective, to investigate.
From here we get a tangled web: Chinese smugglers, shots fired in the dark, high technology to recover handwriting from ashes, cooking the books, lies to the police, all leading to a denouement and a killer that no one would have foreseen – because it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, and the killer’s motivations are never explored.
It’s a trifle disjointed, and the byplay between Street and Logan is forced and annoying. Definitely a mediocre effort, which is unfortunately also mildly racist with Karloff playing the Chinese detective.
But at least it was pleasant and a trifle convoluted.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL), former Senator and former Attorney General, on the state of his political opponents:
He reminded the audience of his battles against “amnesty” and globalism; of how, despite having supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he agrees with Trump that foreign entanglements must be more carefully scrutinized; and of his prowess as a culture warrior: “Y’all know one of the biggest things in America today is whether or not that people actually believe there is a truth and a right and wrong. This crowd, this left-wing group, are socialist, they’re secularist, they believe in their revolution, and they don’t believe in tradition and order and law and the Constitution. It’s a big deal. I feel strongly about it, and if we do this thing right, the American people agree with us. Don’t you think?” Yes! came the reply from the audience. [WaPo Magazine]
Running for his old Senate seat in Alabama, he released this ad to kick off the campaign:
Out of the 100 United State Senators, I was the very first one to stand with @realDonaldTrump and I will keep fighting for him and his agenda. pic.twitter.com/Cf0tN8nzGl
— Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) November 14, 2019
Jeff, you’re endorsing the viewpoint and man who doesn’t respect you, the Constitution, or truth – as demonstrated in the admission of many Republican Senators’ admission that he was, indeed, guilty as charged by the House Democrats; the point of disagreement was whether or not the crime was a high crime or not.
JBS III, I should be amazed that your head doesn’t explode from the obvious cognitive dissonance, but I’m not. The moral decay of the Republicans just makes me tired and sad. But, in all fairness, I must say that you made the proper decision when it came to recusing yourself from the Russia investigation, and for that, I thank you.
Not as much thanks as I feel is proper for Romney, Amash, and Walsh, but a small bit. Would you do it again?
I was reading about former New York City and candidate for the Democratic nod in the Presidential contest, Michael Bloomberg, in WaPo:
Which brings us to Super Tuesday, on March 3. That’s the first date on which Bloomberg will be on ballots, thanks to his late entry into the 2020 race and his unorthodox strategy of spurning the first four states. He has gambled that he doesn’t need the “momentum” that candidates covet from those early states, perhaps in part because his lavishly self-funded campaign doesn’t need the money that usually comes with it. He’s also betting that not even trying in those four states will help him avoid the kind of potentially negative narrative that Biden is confronting. It’s a novel strategy, but if anyone could pull it off, it would be a mega-billionaire like Bloomberg.
So can he? Super Tuesday will be make-or-break for Bloomberg, no doubt — as it will be pretty much for everyone else. That’s because 14 states are holding contests, and about 1 out of every 3 delegates is at stake. As the other candidates have focused on Iowa and New Hampshire, Bloomberg has blanketed these other states with ads and hired unheard-of amounts of staff in them. The combined investment so far is more than a quarter-billion dollars.
And a historical comparison struck me: Is he the next Didius Julianus?
I can see my readers slapping themselves upside the head in surprise, but for those few who don’t remember their Roman Empire history, here’s the Wikipedia take on him:
Didius Julianus (/ˈdɪdiəs/; Latin: Marcus Didius Severus Julianus Augustus; born 30 January 133 or 2 February 137 – 1 June 193) was the emperor of Rome for nine weeks from March to June 193, during the Year of the Five Emperors.
Julianus had a promising political career, governing several provinces, including Dalmatia and Germania Inferior, and successfully defeating the Chauci and Chatti, two invading Germanic tribes. He was even appointed to the consulship in 175 along with Pertinax as a reward, before being demoted by Commodus. After this demotion, his early, promising political career languished.
He ascended the throne after buying it from the Praetorian Guard, who had assassinated his predecessor Pertinax. A civil war ensued in which three rival generals laid claim to the imperial throne. Septimius Severus, commander of the legions in Pannonia and the nearest of the generals to Rome, marched on the capital, gathering support along the way and routing cohorts of the Praetorian Guard Didius Julianus sent to meet him.
Abandoned by the Senate and the Praetorian Guard, Julianus was killed by a soldier in the palace and succeeded by Severus.
Buying yourself the Emperor’s throne isn’t quite the same as the Presidency, but the parallels are undeniably present.
But what does it mean?
If it’s Hue has a sense of the ridiculous, that’s OK. I can live with it.
