Comments Off on Sure, It Feels Good To Say It Until …
… someone remembers who kicked your butt.
Trump mocked Pelosi on Friday for allegedly getting the idea to delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate from a tactic that John Dean, counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, suggested on CNN.
The anecdote, which appeared in a Time magazine profile of Pelosi, was attributed to an aide who suggested that Dean sparked the idea of holding onto the articles as a way to force McConnell’s hand.
Trump, a regular viewer of cable news who often repeats what he hears on Fox News, responded to a tweet about it from conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway.
“Oh dear that is embarrassing,” Hemingway tweeted.
Trump shared that tweet and added of Pelosi: “She will go down as perhaps the least successful Speaker in U.S. History!” [WaPo]
I’m sure Trump doesn’t want to remember it – and perhaps can’t – but it was Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Chuck Shumer (D-NY) who kicked Trump’s butt up and down the world stage when it came to the government shutdown of 2018-2019.
If she’s so unsuccessful, what does that make you, President Trump?
But we’ve known that from the first weeks of your Presidency: a weak and incompetent President, in for the self-aggrandizement.
Ousted Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left the company with stock options and other assets worth about $80 million, but did not receive severance as part of his departure from the embattled company, Boeing disclosed late Friday.
Muilenburg lost his job due to the ongoing Boeing 737 Max crisis. The company’s board had stuck with Muilenburg through the first 10 months of the grounding of all 737 Max jets following two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. But on Dec. 23 the board announced that “a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”
Muilenburg’s holdings includes previous long-term compensation worth $29.4 million as of Thursday’s closing price, according to the filing. He also keeps shares worth an additional $4.3 million, as well as distributions from pension and deferred compensation worth $28.5 million. And, finally, he has the right to exercise other stock options to purchase an additional 72,969 shares of Boeing stock that are worth $24 million. He will have to pay only $5.5 million to acquire those shares.
More interestingly:
Muilenburg was stripped of his title as chairman of Boeing (BA) in October.At the end of that month he came under fire at a Congressional hearing for his 2018 pay package, worth $23.4 million. A few days after the hearing Boeing announced that Muilenburg requested that he not receive any stock or bonus money for 2019. That may have reduced his compensation for the year by about 90%.
Is he gutsy enough to donate the balance of his pay over his years as CEO to humanitarian causes? We’re not talking about a single year failure, as these airliners take years to go from glint in the eye to the tarmac.
Being shot or dying of thirst? That’s the question implicit in this AL Monitorarticle on Turkish criticism of Australia’s management of its camel herds:
Turkey’s government has been bitterly criticized for a systematic disregard for nature during its more than 17 years in power. Its multi-billion-dollar vanity projects, including Istanbul’s newly opened third airport and controversial plans for the so-called “crazy canal” duplicating the Bosporus, are decried for their horrific environmental costs. So it came as something of a surprise when the spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Omer Celik, took to Twitter today to air his outrage over Australia’s culling of camels.
Celik lambasted the move in a seven-tweet thread, saying, “We are deeply concerned at news that Australia will be shooting dead as many as 10,000 camels and call upon the Australian government to find a different solution. To kill thousands of camels in the belief that it will restore nature’s equilibrium and preserve water sources is not a humane approach.”
Australian authorities began shooting the beasts on Wednesday in southern Australia, where Aboriginal communities suffering from chronic drought have reported large camel herds rampaging through towns as they seek water. The mass slaughter, which is to last five days, is not directly linked to the country’s deadly bush fires, the authorities said.
To call this a one-off event to be blamed on the drought conditions through which Australia is plunging would be to think that the drought itself is an abnormality. However, whether or not the drought continues, it’s emblematic of the future: changing climate. For the animals, it’s not whether it’s getting better or worse, but just the simple fact that it’s changing, because most species have evolved to a certain level of specialization for the niche which they inhabit; the exceptional flexibility of humans is unusual.
But that doesn’t remove our dependence on the local fauna for food, environmental support, and no doubt factors I’m not thinking of at the moment. If that fauna gets into trouble, it imperils – and perhaps condemns – our style of civilization. Contrast how we treat nature as generally disposable vs the Ahuarco – they may act based on myths of dubious source, but that is a garment for their true connection to nature which acts to preserve the environment on which they’re dependent[1].
I expect that, in the near future, we’ll see more mass losses of life in Nature, especially in those areas in which humanity treats Nature as a bottomless garbage pit. How we deal with that situation should prove interesting, if only in a morbid sort of way. Do we let them die on their own or mow them down proactively when faced with overwhelming climate change?
1 While I did not find any specifics concerning how long the Ahuarco have been around, there were implications that they’re fairly ancient. This would be congruent with social evolution, in which this particular myth had actual survival value, and thus was conserved across the generations.
A while back a reader sent a link to an interview with avid socialist Nathan Robinson on Jacobin entitled “Socialists Identify With Humanity as a Whole”. I read it and responded diffidently:
I dunno. Long live the glorious socialist revolution? Judging an interview is a somewhat nebulous affair; judging an ideology based on a short interview with a fervent ideologist seems a dodgy affair.
He does remind me of your typical REASON Magazine columnist – the know-it-all type who has all the answers and believes the world is against him. Which may be true, but after a while I find the paranoia a trifle grating.
My reader’s response was a bit surprising, so I’m going to interject commentary in his response, below.
I only read the interview, so I didn’t get that feeling at all. Young, smart, idealistic, yes, but I agree with him on some major points: capitalism squashes out other ideas, and one can have an incredibly miserable life for a majority of one’s population while still getting gold stars on all the usual capitalist measures.
Which is true of most political systems; those in control, be they capitalistic, monarchs, or socialists, believe passionately in their system for the most part, and see little reason to encourage other systems. I see little reason to condemn capitalism for a sin embedded in virtually all competing systems.
The part concerning ‘miserable life’ is also part of the following paragraph, so I’ll respond below.
Today’s so-called “record low unemployment” is a perfect example; the number and the claim completely ignores several very important features: (1) the majority of those jobs do not pay a living wage, (2) large numbers of people are working multiples of those jobs just to get by, (3) it does not measure a significant number of people who are considered officially to not be in the job market, but who would be if economic/social/employment/health conditions were not so horribly poor, and (4) that “full” employment is not making things better for most people, for society and for humanity.
And I agree: Lies, damned lies, and statistics[1]. A statistic is inherently founded on metric selection, and metric selection, usage, and interpretation is a far more difficult subject than is generally recognized outside of the communities of technical people involved. My reader’s complaints intimately involve metric selection, and I completely agree that the unemployment numbers are misleading.
Statistics are often used as a proxy for measuring the success of a society; by hiding behind the faux-objectivity of numbers, the politicians seek to use them to make themselves look good, rather than the more engineering approach, where you measure and improve, wash, rinse, repeat.
And when I say politicians, I don’t mean capitalist politicians or democracy politicians, I mean politicians of all systems: Monarchical, socialistic, communist, name it and it’ll contain politicians. And all politicians protect their turf using all the tools they can think of, and statistics can certainly be one of those tools. So, once again, I see this as a of being part of a social species in which our instincts are individualistic, not as it being capitalism’s sin.
I liked his definition of socialism as having concern for all of humanity. Contrary to what many ignoratti on the right think socialism is an economic system, not a political system.
Given that the political system necessarily dictates the economic system, it’s not entirely clear to me that this is a true statement. But I do like the word ignoratti.
1Anonymous, but often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia.
Comments Off on My Most Sincere Thanks To The Republicans
Once again, I’m forced to tender my most sincere thanks! to the Republican Party.
A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look intoconcerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing — though the assignment has not formally ended and no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, these people said. [WaPo]
Or, in other words, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton is anything but that. This is, what, the eighth or ninth hostile probe into her tenure as Secretary of State that has come up empty?
The obvious interpretation: Clinton has been a bugaboo of the conservatives for no better reason than she was, and is, the spouse of President Bill Clinton (D-AR), the politician who so humiliated Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and so many other Republicans.
Every time another Republican-backed investigation fails, it’s just another proof that Clinton was, and is, clean. She may be a crappy campaigner, but, apparently, she was clean as a campaigner and a clean Secretary of State.
Just builds confirmation that my vote for Clinton in 2016 wasn’t so much The lesser of two evils as The right thing to do.
It seems to be a rare situation in which a species is confined to a geographical range that happens to be under the control of a human group dedicated to saving the species, and I just have to like it. FromNewScientist (21 December 2019):
A critically endangered harlequin toad, known as the starry night toad, has been documented by biologists for the first time since 1991 in the mountains of Colombia. But unlike other such stories of “rediscovered” species, this one was never really lost – the local Arhuaco people knew exactly where the toad, which they call “gouna”, was all along.
“We have shared our home with the gouna for thousands of years,” says Ruperto Chaparro Villafaña, who represents the Arhuaco community of Sogrome near where the toad lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. For them, the toad is both an important indicator of the health of the ecosystem, whose presence guides their agricultural activities, and a link to the spiritual world, representing their mission to preserve life on Earth. …
Getting access to the area to see if the toad was still present took years of work building trust and friendship between the researchers and the Sogrome community, says Jefferson Villalba, co-founder of Fundación Atelopus, a Colombian conservation group.
He and his colleagues met with the community and its spiritual leaders, called mamos, multiple times over five years. They were eventually allowed to travel to see the toad in April this year, without taking pictures. Having passed that test of trust, they were permitted to return and document the toad alongside members of the community. They found a healthy population of around 30 individuals.
I’m sure if there was some commercial value to these toads, industry would scream bloody murder over this behavior, screeching about the rights of everyone to have access, right up until they’d achieved dominion over them, and then not a peep would be heard about those rights.
But kudos to the Arhuaco! I’m sure they don’t care about me, but they care about the toads. And while I’m not much for ‘spiritual worlds’, that’s OK. It’s leading in the right direction.
Reading about Trump’s reaction to being questioned about his hit job, to use appropriate mob language, on General Qasem Soleimani, as seen in this NPRinterview with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):
[NPR HOST RACHEL] MARTIN: You came out and came to the microphones and said it was the worst briefing you have seen on a military issue in your nine years in the U.S. Senate. What happened?
LEE: Yes. You know, my anger was not about the Soleimani killing. It was, instead, about the possibility of future military action against Iran. And it was on that topic that they refused to make any commitment about when, whether and under what circumstances it would be necessary for the president, or the executive branch of government, to come to Congress seeking authorization for the use of military force.
MARTIN: Because Congress was not given a…
LEE: I find that unacceptable.
MARTIN: Congress was not given a heads-up that the strike was going to happen against Soleimani.
LEE: That’s right. That’s right. And now, I want to be clear – with respect to the strike against Soleimani, that was arguably lawful. I still have questions that remain unanswered on that point. I’m going to set that side – aside a moment. And I’m going to assume, for purposes of this discussion, that that may well have been lawful.
What I’m most concerned about is about where that goes from here. What comes next? Is there another strike coming against Iran? If so, at what point do they need to come to us seeking an authorization for the use of military force? The fact that they were unable or unwilling to identify any point at which that would be necessary yesterday was deeply distressing to me.
And then Trump’s reaction to the House’s War Powers Resolution, in process, as reported by Gary Sargent in The Plum Line:
Meanwhile, Trump just rage-tweeted that he wants “all House Republicans” to “vote against Crazy Nancy Pelosi’s War Powers Resolution.”
That’s a reference to a measure that the House speaker is putting to a House vote Thursday that would require Trump to cease any military hostilities against Iran 30 days after enactment, if he hasn’t received congressional authorization for it. The House will all but certainly pass this, and there are other tougher measures on tap. …
But Trump’s tweet calling on “all House Republicans” to vote against the new war powers measure now means that being loyal to Trump is synonymous with giving him unconstrained warmaking authority, despite all the madness we’ve seen. And so it shall be.
And so has the mob boss decreed, so get thee behind him or suffer his wrath. I like the mixture of mob boss with evangelical language, it’s so appropriate.
But how to characterize the future? I’m a little divided here. Is this like a baby, seeing its rattle being taken away, screaming its infantile head off in hopes that Mom will lose her nerve and return it forthwith?
Or are we seeing the second coming of Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman dictator, frantically gathering power around himself? It sure seems like his second- and third-rate minions are doing his bidding because they, like him, can’t conceptualize how an actually functioning democracy makes us stronger, not weaker. Of course, with Moscow Mitch (R-KY) squeezing the idea of cooperative governance to death in the Senate, and former Speaker Ryan (R-WI) demonstrating exceptional incompetence in leading the House, I can see how those minions might not understand how a democracy is supposed to work – most of them are too young to have seen it in action, and they’ve been spoon-fed a hatred of the Democrats that blinds them to facts.
Understand, but neither excuse nor forgive.
And just for that little nuclear cherry on top of the sundae comes former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
SARAH SANDERS (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): You know, I can’t think of anything dumber than allowing Congress to take over our foreign policy. They can’t seem to manage to get much of anything done. I think the last thing we want to do is push powers into Congress’ hands and take them away from the president. Any Democrat that doesn’t understand that America is safer now that one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world is rotting in hell is completely naive and completely misses what we need to have in a foreign policy and the last thing I want to do is see them take power away from President Trump and put it into their own hands. I don’t think anything could be worse for America than that. [Fox News via MediaMatters]
In case you don’t know it, war making powers are specified by the CONSTITUTION to reside with Congress. That they haven’t managed them very well for decades is irrelevant.
So I’m sure a lot of pundits are going to make much of Sanders’ remark, suggesting she’s ignorant, but I doubt that’s the case. I suspect this is just part of the GOP strategy for painting Trump as a helpless victim while he attempts to aggregate more and more power – and get himself elected. And unless Fox News gets on that rare white horse and makes a big deal out of the fact that Congress is the custodian of war making powers, most of the Fox News audience will just nod complacently and mark that off as another offense by the House Democrats. A few will remember, but will they bother to get outraged?
Jonathan Chait in New York’s Intelligencer section has an incisive comment on Trump’s defenders in the context of the recent killing of General Qasem Soleimani by American forces here. Unfortunately, it has one defect:
The Iran conflict has placed President Trump in a heretofore novel position of outflanking his domestic foes as a hawk. Having previously cast himself as a deal-maker or isolationist, Trump now occupies — at least temporarily — the traditional Republican identity of war fighter, punishing the world’s villains. His supporters are taking advantage by employing the familiar conservative message in such situations: accusing their opponents of actively sympathizing with the enemy.
“The only ones mourning the loss of [Iranian general Qasem] Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates,” says Nikki Haley. Because she has previously established a modicum of independence from Trump,Haley has received the most attention for this remark, but she is hardly alone. Kellyanne Conway sneers, “The alarmists and apologists show skepticism about our own intelligence and sympathy for Soleimani.” Republican apparatchik Tony Shaffer attacks “Democrat lawmakers who would rather mourn a war criminal than credit President Trump for making the world safer.” And so on. …
What makes this current smear campaign so extraordinarily ironic is that Trump is actually guilty of the very thing his surrogates are falsely charging his opposition. Trump has repeatedly lavished praise on the world’s most notorious dictators. Trump in 2016 praised Saddam Hussein’s methods of killing terrorists: “He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.” Trump’s point was not only that the United States was unwise to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but edged into outright admiration for his unlawful methods.
This is a theme he has voiced over and over. Trump on Vladimir Putin: “The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.” On Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: “A strong person, he has very good control.” On Xi Xinping: “He’s a strong gentleman, right? Anybody that — he’s a strong guy, tough guy … President Xi, who is a strong man, I call him King, he said, ‘But I am not King, I am president.’ I said, ‘No, you’re president for life and therefore, you’re King.’ He said, ‘Huh. Huh.’ He liked that.” …
That Trumpists can turn around from ignoring or justifying his professed love of dictators to accusing Democrats of supporting an Iranian militarist merely shows the mental flexibility required of the president’s defenders.
Bold mine. Mental flexibility is neither a bad thing nor is it an accurate description of the Trump cultists. Mental flexibility permits thinking outside the box, effective evaluation of arguments countering one’s own perceptions of reality, and the ability to say I’m wrong and I’ll change my beliefs!
The correct noun Chait inexplicably failed to choose was moral. While I’m aware that I myself believe that morality changes over time to enhance group survival as their context changes, the time scale here renders the observation irrelevant; morality should be firmly concrete over the scale of, at most, a few years.
Moral flexibility, in this context, suggests the criminal, the hypocritical, the untrustworthy. It’s ok for your President to sympathize with autocrats, but not his political opponents? Wrong-oh, you moral midget.
Such people shouldn’t be permitted positions of power and responsibility. Hear that, Representative Collins (R-GA)? Resign now.
In case you were wondering why Iran seems to be happy with a near-miss revenge attack on US forces in the wake of the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Qasem Soleimani, AL Monitor has an explanation – sort of:
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed that its barrage of surface-to-surface missiles against two US bases in neighboring Iraq early Jan. 8 killed over 80 US military personnel, leaving some 200 others injured. IRGC commanders announced that “tens of missiles” were launched, all precisely hitting the targets, with none being intercepted.
Yet hours later, in a televised address from the White House, US President Donald Trump denied any casualties, saying the bases had only been slightly damaged. According to Iraqi sources, 22 missiles came from Iran, striking the Ain al-Asad base in Anbar province as well as an air base in the Kurdish city of Erbil.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Iranian leadership prided itself in fulfilling a promised “harsh revenge” for the death of its most powerful commander, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, assassinated in a US drone attack outside Baghdad International Airport last Friday.
The conventional explanation would be that the regime in Tehran is attempting to thread the needle between a home public which must see the regime as strong in retaliation, and facing a foreign enemy which could inflict incredible harm on Iran – and its own reputation – if it so chose to do so.
But all the posturing makes me wonder – did Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rest of the leadership of Iran actually think Soleimani was an asset? Or is there a silent relief that he’s gone?
I have no idea how to confirm this hypothesis, unless a defector pops up with relevant information.
Landing in the morality tale category is Whistle Stop (1946), a dour tale condemning all the usual sins, with the usual rewards for those who stay on the path. I’ll skip the usual details and simply note that Kenny, our clinical subject, smokes, drinks, gambles, and plays pool, which, of course, leaves little time for working; he’s bitter and has the personality of a sponge; he’s not particularly good looking; and, finally, he has no money.
And apparently all of this is meaningless to the local ladies, who flock to him regardless.
All of this renders this tale of mobsters and the virtues of working with one’s hands, rather than being shot at by the cops, a bit hard to take.
Pertaining to a zoonosis: a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people or, more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals but that can infect humans. There are multitudes of zoonotic diseases. …
Zoonoses may appear suddenly and be relatively virulent, as illustrated by HIV which ignited the AIDS epidemic and the coronavirus responsible for the outbreak of SARS. [MedicineNet]
There are no known U.S. cases or any cases in any countries outside China, the CDC said. “But outbreaks of unknown respiratory disease are always of concern, particularly when there are possible zoonotic origins to the outbreak,” the CDC statement said.
And here’s an informal example of Famous Last Words:
Xu Jianguo, a former top Chinese public health official, struck an assuring note and said the government’s disease control capabilities today are much stronger than they were in the early 2000s.
“More than a decade has passed,” he said. “It’s impossible for something like SARS to happen again.”
No, I don’t love my husband, let me prove it by tickling your tonsils with my tongue! Who needs reasoning powers anyways?
Blonde Ice (1948) is a study of a psychopath’s behavior, and how the expectations of those around them, a collection rendered invalid as they’re based on a model of human behavior inconsistent with the psychopath’s pattern, can lead to disaster.
We meet Claire Cummings, pretty lady, on her happy marriage day to wealthy Carl Hanneman, but little does Carl know that Claire is working hard to keep two other men happy as well: Al Herrick, and, more persistently, Les Burns. Both are newspapermen, and Herrick helped her get a job at the newspaper which led to her romancing with Les.
But the marriage to Carl is a relative surprise, and both work to keep their feelings under control. Les faces an especial challenge in this regard, as Claire insists on a full-blown kiss out on the terrace after the tying of the knot; indeed, she may be using that tongue of hers to start undoing that which even the Queen may not put asunder, as the old saying goes. Carl stumbles onto the parasite and her victim, but Claire fobs him off with an excuse, and soon they’re on their way to the resort for the usual activities of the newly wed.
But the very first morning, Carl manages to stumble over a love letter Claire is writing to Les, and, not being entirely dim, pronounces the marriage to be over. He’s nothing if not decisive: he leaves her with the cash she won at the horse races, a little from his pocket, her luggage – and the hotel bill. He’s off for home immediately.
Claire’s pissed at him, not at herself, and that night, having spotted a low-on-morals pilot for hire, gets a flight on the sly back to home, and then right back to the hotel. The next day, she comes home the normal way, calls up a surprised Les for a ride home, and, together, they discover Carl’s dead body.
The first reaction of Les is suicide, and Claire pushes it, but the police are slow to cotton to that theory, seeing there’s a lack of expected powder burns – and fingerprints. But Claire wastes little time hooking back up with Les, and he’s helpless in her beautiful-lady charms. He’s been there before Carl, and had seen her climb the social ladder to Carl’s level, and then return to him, and while there’s a case to be made for admiring her gymnastics capability, the fact that Les is helpless in her charms speaks powerfully to how the expectations that go along with physical attraction – and, by extension, other attributes – can render humans insensible to rational analyses.
But Herrick isn’t a slug. He’s been assigned the story of the Hanneman death, and he’s digging around. When an up and coming politician, wealthy & single attorney Stanley Mason, makes an appearance at the club they all frequent, Claire is fast on her feet, persuading Herrick to introduce her, and she begins the process of worming her way into his affections. But she’s run into a problem: that pilot who flew her on the sly for a surreptitious visit to the Hanneman home has put one and one together, and needs a bit of cash to tide him over.
And she doesn’t have it. The estate is in probate.
Eventually, it turns out the pilot is a gambler, and, like most, really bad at it. He puts a big squeeze on Claire, but when meets him to pay him off, she adds a gift to the package: a slug in the back.
And meanwhile she’s so close to heaven. Mason, the politician and attorney, soon wins two things: a trip to Washington as an elected Representative, and Claire’s hand in marriage soon-to-be. The latter is announced without Les knowing a thing at the party he’s attending as a guest, once again blindsiding him. But Claire is keeping him on the hook, and when Herrick figures that out, he lets Mason in on Claire’s predilections. Mason charges in to let Claire know that he’s no sucker, but he makes a mistake and takes a knife to the back from Claire. And Les’ back luck just keeps getting blacker, as he walks in on the body, picks up the knife, and turns to find the cops crashing in on the scene. Oooops.
But not all is lost. Mason’s buddy, Dr Kippinger, is a police psychologist specializing in pathological personalities, and he puts together a plan to get Claire to reveal herself as the fiery representative of hell that she is. Sadly, his plan works all too well – she confesses, and when she tries to kill the psychologist, she ends up dead on the floor as well.
Seeing Les Burns, on the floor mourning her loss, sums up that even in the face of a confession of three deaths being on her, he cannot help but mourn both her and those expectations built up by the conventions of the era: a woman and mother at home, all the better for being pretty.
He should have married his assistant, instead.
Tight and well told, this isn’t a whodunit, and not really noir, despite claims to the contrary. This, not unlike our current political contretemps, highlights how someone who operates outside of our parameters, our realm of familiarity, a psychopath who cares little or nothing for the opinions of others, except as to how they can help advance her self-centered agenda, can leave a trail of disaster behind her. It’s like pitting a guy with a knife against a guy with a machine gun, without telling the knife guy that he’s outmatched.
I shan’t recommend it, as it’s a little flat, and building empathy with the characters isn’t quite as easy as it should have been, but it’s still a worthwhile flick.
We’ve been seeing the horrific pictures and stories (not to mention ridiculous conspiracy theories) concerning the Australian wildfires, but their impact on Americans may be a bit blunted because we don’t really think Australia’s much more than an oversized island. Au contraire, thanks to Kyle Hill:
Australia’s area is 7,692,024 km2, and the United States’ area is 9,833,520 km2; subtract Alaska at 1,717,856 km2 and the continental United States’ area is roughly 8,115,664 km2, or we can just say Australia is roughly 94% the size of the continental United States.
And those fires are doing significant damage to an area about the size of our own.
Comments Off on Another Defense Down And Twitching
One of the defenses of the election of President Trump is that he’d learn on the job. So has he? Professor Rebecca Friedman Lissner of U.S. Naval War College, who studies Strategic and Operational Research, thinks not:
Although considerable variation characterizes this administration’s approach to decision making, learning should be apparent in across-the-board procedural improvements. Instead, President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria is a useful, recent test case that suggests the foreign policymaking process has, at minimum, not improved and may actually have grown less effective with time. Reportedly, the president “instinctively” elected to withdraw U.S. forces after a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan signaled his intent to attack Kurdish forces in northern Syria near the Turkish border. The decision was not part of a formal policymaking process and ignored the recommendations of the Departments of Defense and State. In fact, it came as a surprise to the Pentagon, which indicates its disassociation from a meaningful interagency process and precluded carefully considered implementation. The abrupt withdrawal was rife with unintended consequences the president does not seem to have considered, from the liberation of Islamic State prisoners to the complication of an ultimately successful mission against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and diplomatic fallout from the abandonment of the United States’s Kurdish partners. Its suddenness echoes earlier presidential decisions about Syria, most notably Trump’s surprise order to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops in December 2018—which the president later partially reversed, but not before the resignation of Secretary Mattis in protest. In a further procedural parallelism, the president seems to now support a new plan that leaves approximately 200 U.S. troops in eastern Syria to guard local oil fields. [Lawfare]
I found her use of the instinctively interesting. In the evolutionary context, we do well with off-the-cuff decisions when they regard situations which we’ve faced many times before as a species. It should be obvious that making complex decisions regarding whether or not troops should be stationed in the Middle East on an instinctive basis is simple madness.
Perhaps most critically, the president’s personality is simply not amenable to learning. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that individuals tend to be better learners when they are open to environmental feedback, change their beliefs readily and receive discrepant information open-mindedly. Yet first-person accounts of those who have worked with the president, at-a-distance psychological assessments, and observation of President Trump’s public rhetoric and behavior all indicate that the president indexes poorly on each of these dimensions.
I would simply say that the President is a narcissist who cannot, in his own mind, be wrong. Since improvement implies failure, in his mind, we won’t see failure.
In fact, learning on the job was the expectation of people who didn’t understand the inferior nature of Donald J. Trump.
Not much is making it through the congestion clogging my brain as I undergo the bi-annual head cold which is my doom, but through all the analyses of the Qassim Soleimani killing I haven’t seen anyone talking about how Iran really might respond.
I mean, they can run around screaming for revenge, kill some Western aid workers, and be done, or launch an attack on an American naval vessel, but this doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter: What does Iran really want to accomplish?
If you shrug and say, Hurt America badly!, well, that’s rather dodging the question. Anyone who’s played a thoughtful, competitive game is well aware that analyzing your opponents methods in the context of their goals is of vital importance. And when you Hurt America badly!, you have to define what that means. Or, more accurately, what the leaders of Iran might mean by that.
Of course, a military response is visible and satisfying, but the riposte from the American military might be devastating to the Islamic Republic of Iran – after all, a visible sign that Allah is not on your side could be dispiriting to the masses – it could even foment revolt. And, in the end, the United States can always build a new ship or replace a few dead troops, tragic as it may be to say. Our resources are amazing.
But we’re the Great Satan, so I wonder if Iran’s leaders are getting together to think about this more deeply. They might ask themselves, What has hurt the United States the most over the last couple of decades? And I fear their answer might be this:
Donald J. Trump in the White House.
If they come to that conclusion, we may see a response designed to rally American support behind the worst President the United States has had the misfortune to have in office. Another four years of Trump? More division, polarization, mistreatment of refugees and immigrants, more encouragement of rabid racism.
Over the next six months, historians may trace the future of the United States, not Iran.
Ten Little Indians (1959) is a TV movie made from the Agatha Christie play And Then There Were None (1943), and chronicles the arrival of guests and staff at Indian Island for a weekend of revelry in a classic old Victorian house, supported by the mysterious generosity of Mr and Mrs Owen.
Mr and Mrs U. N. Owen.
Soon enough, the classic nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians is found inscribed colorfully on a wall, beneath which are ten Indian statues. It’s quaintly amusing.
Ten little Indian boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.
The tension ratchets up when the butler plays a record on instructions from the missing Owens, but it’s not music, it’s a dry accusation of everyone in the house being responsible for one or more murders. Even the kitchen staff is unexcused. The sensibility of an imminent social faux-pas is upon us.
And then a guest collapses and dies while sipping a drink. Dr. Armstrong diagnoses cyanide poisoning, based on the symptoms of foaming at the mouth and … choking.
The bodies begin hitting the floor in earnest shortly thereafter, each echoing its line in the rhyme and always followed by a broken Indian statue, until, as the thunder crashes and the lights go out, only two are left, torn apart by the knowledge that it has to be one of them committing these revenge murders.
Right?
The production values are, unfortunately, fairly inferior, even for 1959, and the pace is just a trifle hurried. We never do really get to know anyone well enough to mourn their demise, or even cheer on their increasingly desperate failures. This is unfortunate, as it reduces the tension we could have felt for all these doomed people.
Still, it’s a lovely – and fortunately short – bit of fun.
Comments Off on A Pundit Or An Ideological Zealot Test
I see that, in the wake of the United States’ fatal attack on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps‘ Qasem Soleimani, Iraq is taking action:
The Iraqi parliament has voted to obligate the Iraqi government “to work towards ending the presence of all foreign troops on Iraqi soil,” according to the media office of the Iraqi parliament. [CNN]
This may be an opportunity for my reader to evaluate their favorite “pundit” to see if they really are a pundit, or merely an ideological zealot, unworthy of your attention. Did your pundit attack President Obama for pulling most of the troops out of Iraq, using that to blame Obama for the development of ISIS? Even though Obama was legally obligated to do so?
Let’s see if your pundit begins screaming about Trump doing the same. If he does, then she’s a pundit – even-handedness is the definition, despite the fact that contravening Iraq’s parliamentary will is, in itself, problematic.
If, on the other hand, they remain amazingly silent on the topic, then you can guess they’re nothing more than an ideological water carrier for Trump, and really aren’t worthy of further attention.
Comments Off on Applying That Engineer’s Need For Precision
My apologies to Kevin Drum, but I must point out a flaw in his history of the United States. During his analysis of the American killing of the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassim Soleimani, deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and a number of others, including four generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Kevin suggests …
Escalation of hostilities almost never gets the other guy to back down. It doesn’t get us to back down, after all. Why should we think it will get Iran to back down?
Except it has. In 1983, the United States lost 241 military personnel, and the French lost 58, in an attack by Islamic Jihad. The goal of the attack?
The result? It may be questionable to use Wikipedia to connect action to result, but here it is:
The attacks eventually led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, where they had been stationed following the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) withdrawal in the aftermath of Israel‘s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
And I recall observing at the time that President Reagan’s force had, indeed, been chased out of Lebanon.
My point is not that Drum forgot about this, really, but that, yes, sometimes the application of deadly force can cause another nation to back down – if it’s done properly. There is no generally applicable rule; it’s entirely dependent on the character of the attacked entity. As a colleague I met at the start of my career once noted, the Indians succeeded in chasing the Brits out of India using peaceful resistance because the Brits couldn’t stand the immorality of slaughtering the Indians en masse. There would have been no such moral compunction if the foreign invaders had been Nazis. The United States suffered mass casualties in the attack on the MNF, which was publicly unacceptable; another such incident would have damaged the GOP brand for a generation, because the casualties were a raw reminder of what happened in Vietnam.
So we left, because the GOP was in charge.
Of course, the problem with the current incident is that Trump and his Administration has not displayed competency. That doesn’t mean this won’t stop the Iranians from meddling in their neighbors business, but it really lowers the odds that this has been thought completely through, particularly since we have this report:
When President Trump’s national security team came to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, they weren’t expecting him to approve an operation to kill Gen. Qassem Suleimani.
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Palm Beach to brief Trump on airstrikes the Pentagon had just carried out in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia groups.
One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to talk about the meeting on the record.
Unexpectedly, Trump chose that option, the official said, adding that the president’s decision was spurred on in part by Iran hawks among his advisors. [Los Angeles Times]
The scene was indeed set perfectly. Washington could not have chosen a better time, as after a series of protests from Baghdad to Tehran and Beirut, Soleimani had lost some public support and was seen as part of Iran’s suppression system against people and their free wills. The attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad had also turned the majority of Iraqi political forces and the international community against Soleimani as the highest — albeit unofficial — leader of the PMU. The location turned out to be perfect as well. The strike took place in Iraqi territory, raising questions among the Iraqi public about the reason for an Iranian general being present in Iraq, especially after accusations facing Iran-backed forces of killing Iraqi protesters and abducting many of them. Selecting a quiet place in the airport also prevented the killing of any civilians that might allow Iran to victimize themselves and demonize the United States.
But, in the end, I’m just picking a very important nit; I more or less agree with Drum:
A Talleyrandesque sort of devious statesman might—might—be able to handle the aftermath of this in a way that makes relative peace more likely. Unfortunately, Trump is an idiot who is doing this because he’s obsessed with Benghazi and wants to show his predecessor that, by God, a red line is a red line. He has no idea what he’ll do next.
The Fantasticks (1995) is the story of a tutelary deity of love taking the form of a carnival in order to press two young neighbors to honor their mutual vows of love. This is a light, fluffy American musical, and it got off to a fast start but then fell apart, and if I made up parts of this review, that’s just too damn bad.
The term, Nepantla is a Nahuatl (Aztec language) term connoting in between or a reference to the space of the middle. A number of contemporary scholars, writers, poets and artists have elaborated upon this concept, enhancing and/or adding on to the Nahua concept. (See Gloria Anzaldua, Pat Mora, Yreina Cervantez, Miguel Leon Portilla).
Most often the term is referencing endangered peoples, cultures, and/or gender, who due to invasion/conquest/marginalization or forced acculturation, engage in resistance strategies of survival. In this sense, this larger, cultural space of Nepantla becomes a postmodern paradigm or consciousness rooted in the creation of a new middle. [ChicanoArt.org]
A conservative friend sent me a YouTube, purporting (and probably is) from Australia, commenting on the current dire fire situation. I thought it would just be an interesting documentary, but it turns out to be a potent cocktail of facts and highly suspect assertions, which you can read as conspiracy theories. The video runs for 31 minutes, so you can watch it, or you can skip it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxHcBDp4J84 [link is now broken]
For me, the red flags are raised by these observations, chronologically ordered:
Doppler radar is used to keep the storms away. This was pushed so quickly I almost missed it, but there it was beginning @ 5:36. Then there’s this radar image @ 5:55:
Impressive, no? Ignoring the issue of simple fakery, the problem, of course, is that if there’s any evidence of Doppler radar affecting the weather – pushing the clouds away, as this chap would have us believe – I can’t find it. Wikipedia doesn’t know about it[1]. I can’t even find skeptical commentary on the subject; you’d think Skeptical Inquirer would have checked into such a claim, and I’ve been a subscriber for decades. I’m no physicist, but it’s my suspicion that Doppler radar could have an effect on the weather if the amount of power pushing the signal out was so outrageous that it burned out the transmitting elements of the apparatus. And possibly the power plant backing it.
The end of Australia (@ 14:00) is nigh due to the politicians. Perhaps my weakest objection, this dude asserts that a series of decisions made by popularly elected politicians were all taken in order to destroy Australia as it’s currently known. My problem with this is two-fold: (1) Does anyone really think a vast collection[2] of elected politicians can coordinate such a conspiracy over the number of necessary years, (2) just to destroy the very thing that benefits them? Really? I’d grant the suggestion that politicians will make foolish decisions, especially if, like the American President Trump, they smell short-term gain and are quite self-centered or delusional, but to expect the politicians to cold-bloodedly destroy that which gives them value is just silly.
Chemtrail conspiracy mongering (15:37). The dude doesn’t actually actually call it that, but he remarks that aluminium, barium, and strontium have been sprayed on the country. Upon looking up barium spraying, I discovered this article in The Guardian, entitled My month with chemtrails conspiracy theorists: … But to Tammi, a 54 year-old organic farmer, it’s a “chemtrail”: a toxic cocktail of aluminum, strontium and barium sprayed from planes in a plot to control the weather, the population and our food supply. Chemtrails have been researched and found to be jet exhaust and condensation. While I didn’t view this dude’s other videos that concentrate on that subject, I’m willing to guess he’s gulped down the chemtrail conspiracy pill – or is at least willing to use it to manipulate his more conspiracy minded audience members.
His careful stirring of passions over reason (@16:45). He admits he’s no experts on forest fires, and yet he can’t help but use the chaos and fury of a wildfire to suggest that the forests have been salted, as it were, for a tremendous fire. That stirs emotional fury, the thought of someone planning to destroy the life on the continent through carefully planned fires. Is this rational? No, and it’s planned as a way to ensure the audience doesn’t start thinking for itself. He’s evoking the flight or fight reflex, and this strategy is often used by these sorts, as explained in The Persuaders, a book I recommend for those who want to understand how marketeers and dudes like the guy in this video try to manipulate audiences. A little later, around 19:30, he uses the term genocide to describe what is going on in Australia, another stir of the emotions.Why not consult with experts? Well, they might come up with inconvenient facts which would not support the tale he’s telling.
Climate change denial (@20:54). In just a single comment, he shrugs it off. It doesn’t support his narrative, so he doesn’t consider it important; he’s focused on his conspiracy theory that Australians are under attack by their own politicians.
In general, this is a skillful mixture of facts and dubious assertion, and the stir-stick is a gentleman with a very fine voice and foreign manner – a problem Americans in general have is that a good accent can cover a host of sins. Brit Andrew Sullivan observed that he could push the most outrageous stuff in class at Harvard, and most of his fellow students would swallow it all because, he said, of his authoritative British accent.
The problem for an audience member who does a bit of research, though, is that the video completely loses its value because of his reliance on discredited and/or deeply implausible conspiracy theories. For example, he suggests the government isn’t nearly doing enough. Maybe, I don’t know. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has certainly not impressed me with his mental acuity. But this dude doesn’t have any credibility, so I don’t know.
Similarly, his overview of MPs not being required to disclose whether they own water rights might be a good point. Australia is an arid continent, perhaps this is happening and is a serious matter. Maybe they are corrupt. If only I could take this dude seriously.
He’s entirely ruined any valid points by his inclusion of these conspiracy theories and his method of arguing. Ironically, he warns that some web sites have fallacious information or pictures; I’m not sure if he’s defending his territory by a bit of sleight of hand, or if he’s in earnest in his warning.
So, for the viewer who’s impressed by this video, be warned: it’s included conspiracy theories and employed communication strategies that render it quite untrustable. I rather enjoyed his delivery and manner, and I have to wonder if it’s rehearsed or comes naturally. It reminds me of Rush Limbaugh, although Limbaugh’s voice is warmer and more friendly.
But, in the end, that’s fluff: when you’re pushing sordid lies, your voice’s warm and friendly qualities are don’t matter. Anything this guy says has to be taken with a very large grain of salt.
1 Which is not to suggest Wikipedia is the end-all, but it’s certainly a good place to start.
2 A rabble, if you will, but a very dignified rabble.
… a critical concept and term from Ibn Khaldun, meaning the “capacity of a social group for concerted collective action.”
When a society – or empire, since that was Turchin’s focus – is in decline, its asabiya is running low. For those of us who like economy of expression, asabiya and societal health is correlated. And in a society in which the asabiya is running low and overpopulation is present, Turchin observes internecine war begins to break out in the upper levels of society which are involved in governance as they battle to stay in the elite, or even to become a dominant faction.
While Turchin suggests this is because of a burgeoning scarcity of resources, basically the commoners who do the work, he also notes that it can be caused by the cessation of an existential threat. We’ve seen the latter in the failure of the Soviet Union. China may be just as dangerous as the Soviet Union, but, unlike the Soviet Union in its hey-day, it doesn’t try to frighten the United States into submission; the leadership of the China, whether due to internal issues or due to craft, is very subtle in its adversarial relationship with the United States.
What brings this up? This APreport concerning the attacks of Trump’s allies on Democratic Presidential nominee-wannabe Joe Biden:
A video of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden that was selectively edited to falsely suggest he made racist remarks during a recent speech made the rounds Thursday on social media, raking in more than a million views on one tweet alone.
Experts have been warning about the dangers of selectively edited videos being used as a misinformation tactic ahead of the 2020 presidential election. They are easier to make and do not require the sophisticated technology needed to produce deepfake videos, which are fabricated to look realistic.
In the edited clip, which was less than 20 seconds long, Biden says, “Our culture is not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation.” Social media users paired the video with comments like “It’s almost like Joe Biden is a Racist.” Posts with the video surfaced across social media platforms on Wednesday.
For those of us who believe in the value of facts, truth, and fair play over the ethic (!) of victory at all costs, this is disheartening, especially when Steve Benen predicts this is only the beginning.
So let’s talk about the implications of high asabiya. Often acquired in the face of continual and severe threat, it is a recognition that, as a whole, we are greater than our aggregate worth as individuals. This is essence of teamwork, and so much more. But the binding has to go both ways, the potential members of the society to be bound together by asabiya must have motivations to join that society that are greater than the motivations to remain apart.
Those latter motivations, of suspicion and distrust, are often traceable to differences in color, religion, perceived value systems, politics, etc – and more subtle factors, such as affinity for dogmatism, or certainty that you are always right. These factors are more or less unconscious; one sees conscious, manipulative actions for socio-political reasons, which most often have to do with jealousy of position, as leaders who do not wish to become small frogs in big ponds exert themselves to keep their followers separate – keep the pond smaller so they seem bigger and more dominant. The latter can be, but are not necessarily, pathological; it certainly lessens asabiya.
Contrariwise, implicit in the increase of asabiya is the commitment to treat others in the bound community fairly, in all venues, from sharing food to competing for political position. Treating other members unfairly is the utter equivalent to dumping arsenic in the community water supplies in order to be rid of some hated personality, it’s really simple as that. There may be some short-term benefit, but in the long term, no matter how much the miscreant wishes to believe otherwise, it’s a loser for everyone.
That’s what I see happening here. Someone – I don’t know who, but probably plural – who is no longer worried about outside threats has decided that it’s time to tear the United States apart in their pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige. Nevermind that there are strong external threats, and Trump’s strikes against Iran-aligned Iraqi militias has made those threats stronger.
But what really bothers me is the fact that this is just another step on the path trod by the Roman emperors and Senate, the French nobility, the English nobility, and many others as population pushed up pressure on resources, foes were vanquished, the elite feared losing their status, and the personal pride and religious vanities of some all conspired to destroy the social cohesion which had brought them their eminence in the world. Not that eminence, in and of itself, is desirable, but the positive things that can be done with eminence, such as alleviating illness and suffering, suffocating the warlike instincts of others, and all that sort of thing, are lost when that eminence is lost.
Trump may not be aware of this problem in a direct way, but indirectly, through world-wide polls of confidence in American leadership and its importance to the American citizenry, he has some awareness. We know this because he lies about it. He says world confidence in America has soared since he took office. Wrong.
But, in the meantime, we keep walking this bloody, weary path of history, ripping ourselves apart, rather than operating as a team to face the immense challenges of today. Those who have become fixated on wealth, power, and prestige keep denying reality and use the political weapons of total destruction in their strategies to hold on and gain more of those things, no matter what the cost might be for the future.
It sounds depressingly like Turchin. The path leads down into darkness and disaster.
Tensions abound in Pamela (2020), which we caught on Amazon Prime but is listed in IMDb as a February 2020 release. This is a tight family-tensions thriller, set over a single dinner. As mother Pamela, daughter Vanessa, and son Matt order and ignore dinner and down far too many cocktails, the latter two reveal they know there’s a big, nasty family secret involving their late father and themselves. As they seek answers, each prods the other, but Pamela is the chief target of their thrusts, their hunger for answers to the questions brought up by their shared childhoods. Who is their father, after all, and why did he do as he did? And why is she defending him?
As we learn that no one’s perfect, we also discover how those imperfections interact with each other, and how that affects the characters, even those that aren’t there to defend themselves – and why deep, dark secrets can sometimes be problems with no good answers.
There’s no question this is well-acted, but the script might have benefited from another draft, especially as some pointed barbs might have brought out a bit more tension, a few more questions to chase around on the table with one’s fork. And I’m curious as to whether they tried to film this without that unnamed furry animal clinging to Matt’s face, and finally decided he looked better with it than without it. It was … distracting.
But this kept the attention of my Arts Editor and myself, and not out of morbid curiosity. Each actor knows what they’re trying to accomplish, and they do it well. As I recall, the movie poster was decorated with various film festival awards, and it earned them.
