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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.

1. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. And this is relevant how? But let’s pretend it is. It’s not a stretch, not even a mild strain, to understand that with transformation comes losses. Pioneering new territory sometimes leads into the lairs of trolls for some pioneers, but the misfortunes of the few do not serve to characterize the event. Or shall we discuss the sad case of many other suicides throughout the ages?
2. The Vietnam War continued for another three. To use this to dismiss Woodstock as a transformative event is wrong on several levels. Of course. We can make the comparatively weak point that transformation doesn’t take place immediately on a cultural level, it necessarily takes time to spread, where limitations have to do with information transmission time, resistance to change variables, etc. Or we can charge into the strong argument: The Boomers weren’t in charge. Who was? Nixon was a member of the Greatest Generation, and while I’ve done no further research, it seems reasonable to believe Congress was dominated by members of that Generation as well. In point of objective consideration, the fact that it took only three years for Vietnam to terminate might be considered amazing, if not for the many other factors which undoubtedly affected the process leading to that decision by Nixon. But to suggest that a transformative event for a demographic group that’s not in charge of war-making should have led to the termination of that war is either madness, naive, or imagining a point in order to condemn a group Garvin doesn’t much care for.
3. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon. Garvin believes the hand is quicker than the eye, but it’s not. Let’s go back to that sentence and read it again. Who was nominated by the major political party Democrats? George McGovern, a candidate so far to the left that he only won one state while challenging a sitting incumbent. Hell, I recall once my father, a lifelong Democrat, admitting he had voted for Nixon. McGovern was just too radical – and yet he was the Democratic Party candidate. And this is proof that Woodstock was nothing more than a puff of smoke? Really?
4. … and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was [the wars in] Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it wise to attribute to the ghosts of “generations” the dubious and mendacious actions of a Republican Administration? Here we assume a “generation” even exists and then heap sins on it, when the reality is that a major political party charged into a moral and pragmatic abyss, having been rattled by disaster and challenged by outside forces and alien tactics. It might be valid to suggest the Boomers’ attention to security is, or was, deficient, as the Clinton Administration witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, a failed bombing in New York City by forces allied to the later 9/11 bombers, and a successful attack on a Navy ship, but when we see the prudent reaction to those attacks, contrasted with the immoral response of the Bush Administration, it suggests that Garvin’s entire line of reasoning is damn well silly.
5. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969. It’s always handy to suggest we measure the immeasurable when defending the indefensible, and I fear there’s no handy yardstick for the health of race relations. So, how do we answer the question? I can state I think race relations are far better, just on my say so, or I can note that Woodstock took place in 1969, only 9 years after the segregated lunch counter sit-ins, and 5 years after the Civil Rights Act, and the official segregated lunch counter is a rare bird indeed. We can discuss the election of President Obama and the generally positive emotions he elicits, a decade later, for his performance in office. We can even talk about the protests, violent or not, over police shootings of blacks. Why are they proof of my point? Because they happen, and they are multi-racial. Race relations may not be where we want them, especially when it comes to certain police departments. But, again, this is all hand-waving – and if Garvin agrees, then it invalidates his point.
6. 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. No, they looked at the disaster called the Vietnam War, at its societal antecedents that appeared to lead up to it, and said, “No!” in a mildly repugnant and incoherent manner. To take it any further than that, though, is to make his review nothing more than a political hit piece, while ignoring the fact that the conservative predilection for war since Vietnam – which was started by the Democrats, it can be argued – has been generally condemned, and only defended by those who started them and thus have a vested ideological interest in having them seen as justified. As libertarians – or Libertarians – are generally seen as allied with conservatives these days, and rock music and general libertineism in line with the left side of the spectrum, we’re left with the spectacle of a conservative, or libertarian, attempting to defrock the naked masses of Woodstock for sins committed by the conservatives, and the nebulous guilt of Woodstock only being its inability to convince the conservatives of their own sins.

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:

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.

The flowers keep coming.

When it comes to the current economic conflict with China, I don’t think President Trump and his advisors really have much of a clue. Consider this remark by Stephen Moore:

“We’re learning that maybe China has a higher pain threshold than we thought here,” said Stephen Moore, who was an economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 election and remains close to the White House. “They don’t seem to care that this is having extreme negative effects on their economy. It’s kind of a mutually assured destruction game right now.” [WaPo]

Implicit in Moore’s remark is that this is a simple trade dispute. He doesn’t seem to be conscious of the reality that the Chinese Communists are playing for survival and even dominance.

Trump’s vast inexperience in foreign policy is working against him. He’s been banging the drum for more concessions, and that flies in the face of what the Chinese, or rather leader Xi Jinping, is likely to do, given his position as an autocrat who could be retired at any time.

But even more concerning is that Trump tends to be highly transactional, which is to say he treats the world as if it has no memory. But in the political world, things don’t work that way. Embarrass the Chinese, and even if Xi is removed as a result, the Chinese will remember who did that and may do it to them. It’s fine to make enemies of the Chinese, but you have to know what you’re doing, and Trump is clearly clueless.

I must confess, since having read Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut, it seems like I’m seeing its predictions playing out right here in the United States, even if we’re not the agrarian society on which it is based. Case in point: Turchin notes that when things are falling apart, the commoners begin abandoning the farmlands as the elite gain control of more and more farmland and demand a larger and larger share of the produce – there’s a lot more to it, but I’ll just leave it at that.

So what’s been happening? The American family farmer has been under attack for many years, and now we have the latest bump in the road:

Agriculture has been a weapon of choice in the escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

With China officially pulling out of buying U.S. agricultural products, American farmers are losing one of their biggest customers. It could be a devastating blow in an already tough year for crops and commodity prices. It may also dent U.S. gross domestic product and hurt companies like Deere, whose business is directly tied to farming in the Heartland.

“Sales have already been lower this crop year because of the existing tariffs. If we went all the way to no China exports whatsoever, that would of course result in even larger market and price impacts,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “Cutting China completely out of the market would be a very big deal.” [CNBC]

This is the sort of thing that, if it goes on to long, will shake out anyone without capital reserves, and that means many of the small farmers will go under, selling their land out to the survivors. The survivors will be the Big Ag companies that should easily survive a period of falling profits or even losses, and then we’ll see the farmlands become even more deserted as Big Ag consolidates.

Another aspect of the decline of a society, only hinted at in Secular Cycles, is the deepening of societal divisions, principally between the commoners and the elite. The elite preoccupies itself with internal competition, as everyone competes for a position on the summit. Recent statements from CEOs concerning the importance of the advancement of profits at the expense of workers and customers sounds suspiciously as if the elite in control of corporate entities doesn’t much care for the common worker, doesn’t it, nor even for the customers. Just think of the once cheap drugs whose prices have gone through the roof – not due to manufacturing or material costs, but lack of competition.

The Republican political elites fall into the same category as they dance to the tunes of corporations, as they use the speaker of ALEC, and of special interest groups such as the NRA, notorious for demanding absolute gun rights on behalf of the guns & ammo industry. The resultant behavior of “Moscow Mitch” and now “Leningrad Lindsey” (Senator Graham (R-SC)) has been mind-boggling in its callous disregard for anyone not in the elite group.

Of course, at some point the burgeoning population, both of commoners and elite, along with falling profitability in absolute terms, leads to conflict within the elite group. What will it look like this time? Will it happen at all, or does Turchin’s theories not apply to corparatist states masculating as democracies?

The future is not clear, but the hints are troubling.

I see that China is reported as having blinked in the one day currency war:

Dow closes higher after China blinks

Dow Jones Industrial Average

The Dow and the broader US stock market rebounded Tuesday, driven by optimism that currency tensions between the United States and China would ease.

INDU) finished up 312 points, or 1.2%, while the S&P 500 (SPX) closed 1.3% higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (COMP), which was hit worst in Monday’s selloff, closed up 1.4%. …

The yuan continued to slide Tuesday, but the pace of its decline slowed. One dollar last bought 7.0235 yuan in China, and 7.0530 yuan in the offshore market, where the currency trades more freely.

Stock investors also took comfort after the Chinese central bank announced plans to issue central bank bills worth 30 billion yuan next week. That propped up China’s currency, which bounced back slightly against the dollar after the announcement. [CNN/Business]

But is this the only reasonable way to interpret events? In all but the most barbarous of conflicts, it’s necessary for the two sides to be able to communicate, whether it’s as for truce, surrender, prisoner exchange – or something else.

In this case, the two warring countries, America and China, have been bludgeoning each other with financial weapons. My interpretation isn’t that China “blinked,” because Chinese leader Xi Jinping cannot afford to be seen as weak, either within or outside of China. After all, in practical terms he’s an autocrat, and autocrats are never guaranteed their seats of power – they have to prove themselves both tough enough and competent enough to keep them. If Xi even looks like he’s weak, he might suddenly be retired by some younger wolf, hungry for power.

Another interpretation, one that makes Xi look tougher, is that he was waving his war club around enough to demonstrate to Trump, a known coward and deeply confused about foreign policy, that Xi has the power to screw up the economy of the United States if he so chooses, and is willing to pay the price, which would be uproar in the Chinese economy as well.

In this respect, the open-ended nature of Xi’s power puts him in a commanding position with regards to Trump, who must win a Presidential election in order to remain the Chief Executive of the United States – and who is vulnerable to impeachment and removal if he begins to lose his base to disillusionment. Indeed, if he loses the GOP faithful to economic disappointment, he may resign in disgrace rather than continue.

And Xi knows this.

China may have blinked, but only with planning and malice aforethought. If Trump tries to continue the tariff and currency war, we may see China resume its currency manipulations, and while Trump’s attacks on American politicians may sting, I really doubt Xi gives a shit if Trump calls China a currency manipulator.

He has bigger fish to fry.

Yeah, they’re as tall as me.

Close ups are more fun, though.

What did you just say about me?

It’s always fun to prepare oneself to watch some utter drek, and discover it’s not drek at all. X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) fits neatly into this niche, what with it being made by the King of the Bs (or schlock), Roger Corman, during the Golden Age of B movies. Yet here we have a soberly considered premise: if a human eye could be modified to be sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, rather than that small chunk we call the visible spectrum, what would we see, and, more importantly, how would we manage it?

Dr. James Xavier is a research M.D. driven by the thirst of knowledge, specifically the improvement of our ocular equipment, and when he concocts a drug which appears to improve the sensitivity of the eyesight of mice, he’s all excited. This was the first hint that this movie was not what we were expecting, as the simple experiment he puts together to show the mouse is seeing more than it should is simple, easy to understand, and really rather delightful to see done.

The next step? Self-experimentation, because Dr. Xavier is simply too hungry for knowledge to use intermediaries. The first experience is a terrifying blur, but as he sharpens his control, it lets him stop another surgeon from improperly operating on a child. He becomes fixated on the advantages of his vision, if he can only master it, and when his assistant, Dr. Brant, decides to forcefully end the experiment, the driven Xavier accidentally tosses him out a window.

Xavier slips away from the research facility as the police arrive, and fades into a traveling carnival, where he does simple tricks. His enhanced eyesight lets him examine people desperate for a cure for their illnesses, but between his failing eyesight and his crooked manager, he’s unhappy. When his love interest, Dr. Fairfax, tracks him down, he flees with her, but with a plan: to move to Las Vegas in order to use his powers to cheat the casinos, and use his winnings to fund his research.

But casinos dislike cheaters, and when Xavier overreaches, he must once again flee. By now, his non-stop exposure to the electromagnetic spectrum has rendered his sanity a chancy thing, and following police pursuit and a car accident, he stumbles into a revivalist tent.

And I’m sure my reader knows what the Bible says about eyes.

Not only is the plot good, but so is the acting and the surprisingly well managed special effects. Not that this is movie is a triumph, as Dr. Brant is more or less a shell of a character, and Dr. Fairfax isn’t entirely believable, either. But the drive and authenticity of Xavier is almost mesmerizing.

And what does Xavier’s sad end say about science? For those looking for a dose of morality, it might be the dangers of science meme. Then again, given the extensive time spent letting the audience experience, as can best be done, the enhanced vision, the commentary may be refined to observations that humanity’s ability to comprehend the reality around them is limited, and trying to go beyond it using direct experiential stimulation will end in disaster. Evolutionary biologists might come up with even more fascinating themes.

But in any case, this is quite a reasonable movie, given its parentage and era. A very pleasant surprise for the audience member who, like ourselves, didn’t know just how good it can be.

Paul Waldman is worried that the legacy of President Trump in the world of white supremacists will last for years:

In the wake of two horrific mass shootings over the weekend, particularly the one in El Paso where 20 people were allegedly murdered by a man who apparently left an online message echoing some of the themes of President Trump’s rhetoric, many have been putting blame at least partially at the president’s feet. We can debate how justified that is, but for the moment I want to shift focus just a little. There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence. …

For many of them, that’s enough. To hear their sentiments echoed from the highest office in the land provides enormous satisfaction, even if the results don’t match the rhetoric.

But others, the less stable and the more heavily armed, will not be assuaged. They may well see in Trump’s presidency nothing but failure. After all, didn’t he promise a return to when people like them were on top? The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it.

Waldman may be right, in fact I fear is right, that there will be more mass shootings as the white supremacists become more and more disappointed that America didn’t rally around their whiteness and proclaim itself a white homeland.

But, in the long, tragic, and painful end, every shooting traceable to white supremacy discredits white supremacy. It demonstrates the immaturity of every single member of the white supremacist movement, their inability to intellectually persuade anyone capable of a moment of logical thought, of introspection, of simple decency.

It’s emblematic of the sheer laziness that is the inevitable traveling companion of white supremacism, that reluctance to admit that competing with anyone who is not white might result in their failure. It’s so much easier to point at their skin, earned without the sweat of the brow, than to work hard, or study hard. To pull out a gun, shoot others, and perhaps die in the attempt is so much easier than to cope with the problems of peaceful co-existence, those problems that might leave their desperate egos burdened with the knowledge that, their skin-God shown to be empty, they cannot compete.

Fear and laziness.

So, for the press, it’s quite one thing to label some barbaric murderer a white supremacist; it’s quite another to, once again, destroy the position, a shield for nothing more than power-seeking. That’s what needs to happen. Some people need to see the same arguments over and over before they comprehend it.

And some never will comprehend it. For them, gun control may be the closest we can come to an answer in a free country.

China has decided that its return volley in an “easy to win” trade war will be a devaluation of its currency:

The yuan weakened sharply after the People’s Bank of China set its daily reference rate for the currency at 6.9225, the lowest rate since December. The central bank said in a statement that Monday’s weakness was mostly because of “trade protectionism and new tariffs on China.” President Donald Trump threatened a new round of tariffs on the country last week. [CNN]

And the markets, as I type this at 1:15 Central, respond right on cue, as the NASDAQ is currently down nearly 4%. But is it significant?

Markets, once upon a time, reflected the predictions of the investing entities that used them, but I wonder if that’s true any longer. As the markets are moved increasingly by algorithms which are predicting movements in stock prices in time increments utterly irrelevant to my investing strategy, I tend to look at big drops at these as, at worst, an incident to simply ignore, and at best a chance to pick up some investments on the cheap.

I’m not saying that China’s devaluation is unimportant, but I am saying that it’s impact may have been magnified by the algorithms used by many firms in an attempt to make money off of micromovements in micromoments. They chase each other down the rabbit hole, as it were, even though they’re aware of the news that started it all.

In other words, faux-investing. I don’t know that I’d take this to be predictive of an imminent trade disaster.

On the other hand, it is indicative of the amateurism of President Trump. Trade wars are not easy to win; that’s why they’re called wars. In fact, both sides can be badly hurt by them, particularly if they’re heavily dependent on that trade. In fact, the question may be, Can the United States hope to win? Let’s skip the conservatives and liberals, and go with someone whose job is to properly predict results – an industry insider. From the same CNN report:

“Risks of Trump intervening in foreign exchange markets have increased with China letting the yuan go,” wrote Viraj Patel, FX and global macro strategist at Arkera, on Twitter. “If this was an all out currency war – the US would hands down lose. Beijing [is] far more advanced in playing the currency game [and has] bigger firepower.”

Not having even a passing interest in currency wars, I can’t guess if he’s right. But I can say this: if the President decides, or is goaded into, winning this currency war at all costs, he will in fact try to do so regardless of how many Americans he may hurt. After all, he’s a narcissist with a sensitive ego, and if he looks like he’s losing a war that he promised would be easily won, he can’t afford to look bad to his base.

And that will hurt the Chinese as well. I think this may turn into a game of chicken, and the question will be whether or not a President with a rabid base but deeply opposed opposition and independents can outlast an iron-fisted autocrat who is facing internal pressures of his own. Presidents can be impeached; autocrats can be overthrown.

This has the potential to become very interesting.

Local academics believe that water wheels, used all around the world, were discovered on the banks of the Euphrates River in Anbar province and should be on the World Heritage List. [“Can Iraq get its water wheels on UNESCO World Heritage List?” AL Monitor]

Perhaps it’s unfair of me, but all I can see is a vast herd of waterwheels, prancing about the Euphrates, waiting to be discovered.