Frieze:
A broad horizontal band of sculpted or painted decoration, especially on a wall near the ceiling.
‘the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze’
‘the coastline is a frieze of cliffs’ [Oxford Dictionaries]
Noted in “A Princely Update,” Jason Urbanus, Archaeology ( Sept/Oct 2017):
Radiography showed that the prince’s belt was embroidered with fine silver threads that formed a continuous frieze of Celtic motifs, the only one of its kind ever discovered.
These gladiolas were innocently mooching about the garden one bedewed morning, and I decided to see if I could get a pic of the dew drops. Seems to have worked out.
Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D) wrote an entirely inappropriate post on Facebook, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal apologized on Sunday for a Facebook post that hoped for the assassination of President Donald Trump, saying, “I made a mistake.”
But the Democrat, who has faced a deafening chorus of critics insisting she should resign, did not indicate any willingness to do so.
At a news conference at Wellspring Church in Ferguson on Sunday, she said she had made a mistake and let others down. She had said much the same last week, but on Sunday she went further, apologizing to the president.
“President Trump, I apologize to you and your family,” she said.
She cited frustration with the tragedy in Charlottesville.
So why the lemonade? The reaction of Democratic leaders:
Missouri’s highest-ranking elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, have demanded that Chappelle-Nadal step down from her position. State Senate leaders have given her an ultimatum: Resign, or be expelled.
I was initially dismayed when reading a summary of the incident, but to hear that the Democrats, her own party, demanded her instant resignation – whether she complies or not – indicates to me that at least one side of the political spectrum still remembers how to conduct itself as a political party.
And, as a reminder, this is more than can be said for the GOP. For example, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) said this during the Presidential campaign:
“Nothing made me feel any better than [when] I walked into a gun shop, I think, yesterday … and there was a copy of Rifleman on the counter,” he said in audio posted by CNN of an event with Republican volunteers. “It’s got a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it. I was a little bit shocked at that ― it didn’t have a bullseye on it.” [HuffPo]
There are other examples as well, including this one from the current President, then candidate:
Repeating his contention that Mrs. Clinton wanted to abolish the right to bear arms, Mr. Trump warned at a rally here that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” [The New York Times]
So the Republican leaders in Missouri were outraged at State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal’s faux-pas, and rightly so. Were they similarly outraged at Senator Burr, or candidate Trump, when they advocated violence against another political personage? Because this isn’t about the impropriety of advocating the assassination of a President. This is about the disaster that would befall this nation if we fell to using violence to settle political differences, much like, say, Yemen.
I call on the good Republicans of Missouri to condemn Senator Burr and President Trump for their inappropriate remarks during the last Presidential campaign, or to repeat their condemnations if they issued them when those fell utterances occurred. It would demonstrate that they have the future of the nation in their hearts – not just the party.
Yes, we saw your ad for helpless victims, and we think we fit the bill.
I’ve always heard that The Amityville Horror (1979) was a classic of the genre, but really not much else, so going into this television cut of the movie, we were really free from preconception, excepting that it was going to be good.
And I suppose I must say, not being the superstitious sort, I found the elements of horror in this movie, as they were supernatural and religiously based, rather unimpressive on a personal level. I can see how someone with a religious frame of mind might be horrified at the thought of a house in which demons from Hell have some influence, but for my Arts Editor and I, we were unaffected.
Not that I’m immune to horror movies. Both Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) kept me on the edge of my seat, and I suppose another reviewer would scoff at the science-fiction substrate on which these films are based. But I think there’s a difference, in that for all the improbability of the aliens in those two movies of existing, the premise which they exemplify is not impossible. Yes, there could be aliens hungry for human flesh out there, just waiting for us to stumble on them.
In The Amityville Horror, we’re confronted with mere hints of creatures from myth, with all apologies to readers with religious convictions. Worse yet, the victims do not aggressively defend themselves – they are persistent in their residence, perhaps, but they are not clever enough to strike a blow in their defense. The idea of their existence is absurd.
And, yet, I can be intrigued by other movies with absurd elements, such as Greek gods. In those cases, the genre is not generally horror, but some other general thematic category in which the absurd elements play a metaphorical or allegorical role. Their is no profession of their existence; they are used to tell a story and give a lesson.
With this horror movie, though, the fright-inducing elements are used literally, and are purposed to raise the hackles on the back of your neck, to inflict the fight or flight reflex and drag you into fright. And there’s nothing implicitly wrong with that – unless these literal elements are absolutely rejected by the audience. And that’s what we did.
Add in plot holes, such as what happened to Father Delaney, perhaps introduced by the television cuts, and the movie becomes an also-ran, a disappointing heart to the mythic classic.
Robert Williams on Lawfare has a suggestion for the North Korean situation – the United States should conditionally accept the Chinese proposal of North Korea freezing all tests and exports of nuclear & ballistic missile technology in exchange for scaling back US and South Korea joint military exercises. The condition? Professor Williams thinks that China should bring something to the table as well, such as a more robust enforcement of U.N. sanctions. But something rang a little false to my completely inexperienced ear:
The point here is not to suggest that a three-part deal with China and North Korea will necessarily work. Nearly any proposal designed to produce constructive negotiations with Kim’s regime must be viewed with an abundance of caution given the historical record and the fact that Kim sees nukes as essential to his survival. On almost any conceivable scenario, deterrence and containment will be cornerstones of U.S. strategy going forward.
There’s a key assumption that I have not seen questioned and/or bolstered anywhere is that Kim sees nukes as a key to his survival. Does he? The recent contretemps between Trump and Kim actually suggest something different – that Kim sees his advanced weapons capability as a lever for making further gains in the International game. Yes, survival is part of it – but the primary objective may be advancing such things as the North Korean economy, Kim’s prestige, and no doubt other things that don’t come immediately to mind. These may not be integral to his political survival, but by advancing them, he may make his position more secure, he may make his people more comfortable, he may even advance some lost ideological cause, although exactly what cause would not be lost under the North Korean flag escapes me.
Why is this important? Motivations dictate actions, even veiled actions. If we assume Kim is running scared and is surrounding himself with weapons that up the stakes world-wide just as a matter of survival, we may predict from that position that he’ll take an action which, in reality, he doesn’t care to take. We need to be sure of just exactly is motivating his development of nuclear weapons.
Trump blows a lot of smoke and looks foolish, and Kim probably got exactly what he wanted. That’s how I read Robert Carlin’s post on 38 North concerning the dangers of a war breaking out a few weeks ago between North Korea and the United States:
The real question, the important question, the one that could be answered was: what were the North Koreans doing from August 9-14 while the US was huffing and puffing over Pyongyang’s threat about Guam?
The answer, it turns out, was easy: almost nothing. There were rallies in Pyongyang and the provinces. (The two laggards held their rallies yesterday.) There were reports of youths and students rushing to declare their willingness to enlist in the army. But for the rest of the country, the message was that the way to defeat the Americans was: Stay at work! Produce more!
In other words, there was no mobilization of the population in preparation for a military confrontation. Even more telling, although Western media were fixated on Guam during this period, North Korean media barely mentioned it after the initial statements appeared announcing the planning. None of the reports on the rallies mentioned Guam. The focus, instead, was on the August 7 DPRK Government statement issued in response to the new UN Security Council sanctions resolution passed just a few days before.
And does the mainstream media have access to that sort of data? I don’t know. But certainly actions say more than incoherent bluster. Trump might have done better if he’d just said, Oh, did Kim say that? Maybe he needs a little pat on the fanny. Although that might have given us all a lot more heartburn.
Apposite:
suitable; well-adapted; pertinent; relevant; apt:
an apposite answer. [Dictionary.com]
Noted in Andrew Sullivan’s latest column for NYMag, “Trump’s Charlottesville Response Should Change Everything — and Will Change Nothing“:
These broad, smug generalizations are not only on the left, of course. Here, for example, is an interview with a traditional Southern Baptist theologian, Andrew T. Walker, who has a new book providing moral guidance on the transgender issue. Walker cites Paul’s condemnation of swindlers, thieves, drunks, homosexuals, and adulterers as apposite to the transgender experience: “There are practices and lifestyles that, if left unrepented of, can prevent someone from inheriting — that is, having a place in — the kingdom of God. To live as a Christian is to accept God’s authority over our own. Transgender identities fall into that category — they are not compatible with following Christ.”
A few weeks ago Neuroskeptic reported on his recent “sting”, using text from Wikipedia concerning Star Wars, of suspected predatory science journals, and how one had fun with him:
Two journals requested me to revise and resubmit the manuscript. At JSM Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (JSciMedCentral) both of the two peer reviewers spotted and seemingly enjoyed the Star Wars spoof, with one commenting that “The authors have neglected to add the following references: Lucas et al., 1977, Palpatine et al., 1980, and Calrissian et al., 1983”. Despite this, the journal asked me to revise and resubmit.
At the Journal of Molecular Biology and Techniques (Elyns Group), the two peer reviewers didn’t seem to get the joke, but recommended some changes such as reverting “midichlorians” back to “mitochondria.”
There were several which requested publication fees, and then printed it anyways. Clumsy assholes, them. At least the above guys recognized the sting. Maybe they’re legit.
By Zach Rudisin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
This thread has been dormant, but a recent circulating mail caught my attention, and it rather fits this this old topic. A short email, which means I’ll quote it directly, although reformatted.
Funny, this must have been missed by the media………………..
And that’s only the beginning of the comparisons.
On Friday, the Trump administration released their annual report to Congress on White House Office Personnel. It includes the name, status, salary and position title of all 377 White House employees. The report also said that Trump decided not to take a dime of his salary, instead he donated it to an amazing cause! (see below) .
The report also showed that President Trump is far better at saving money than Obama was. The total annual White House salaries under trump are $35.8 million vs. $40.9 under Obama, a savings of $5.1 million. Here are some other key findings:
There are 110 fewer employees on White House staff under Trump than under Obama at this point in their respective presidencies.
Nineteen fewer staffers are dedicated to The First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS). Currently, there are five staffers dedicated to Melania Trump vs. 24 staffers who served Michelle Obama (FY2009).
However, it’s what the report said Trump did with this salary that has everyone talking! Instead of taking his salary, Trump donated all $400,000 to the Department of the Interior where it will be used for construction and repair needs at military cemeteries! AMAZING! It’s so great to have a President who loves our brave military men and women so much
Oh, and where’s the media coverage of this?
Oh that’s right, they don’t cover anything good that the President does.
Let’s first look at the irrelevancies, the distractions, if you will, before we take in the main course. I speak of the disdain of the media. … where’s the media coverage of this?
For the second quarter in a row, President Donald Trump declined to take a salary and opted instead to gift the quarterly installment to a government entity, this time to the Department of Education.
At a White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders presented a check for $100,000 to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
WaPo:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced at the White House on Wednesday that President Trump was donating $100,000, his salary for the second quarter of the year, to the Education Department to help fund a science camp.
The headline of the news release issued by the Education Department said: “Secretary DeVos Accepts President Trump’s Q2 Salary as a Donation for STEM-Focused Camp.” STEM refers to science, technology, engineering and math.
CNN:
The $78,333.32 that President Donald Trump donated from his first paycheck as President will help fund restoration projects at Antietam National Battlefield.
Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Wednesday that the portion of the salary, which Trump in April announced he was donating to the National Park Service, will support restorations at the National Park Service protected area in Sharpsburg, Maryland, which commemorates the Battle of Antietam.
I trust the point is made – this goober’s on the prowl for the unwary. But as I said, this was the distraction. And a secondary distraction is the claim that the salary will be used for military cemetery restoration and maintenance, and how this proves, somehow, that the President loves the military. Well, the claim about usage is palpably wrong, and while I shan’t argue that the President does seem to have some sort of fixation on military men (see how many former generals he’s appointed to prominent positions in his Administration), this distraction is primarily to point out that the President’s “love” is quite selective – don’t be looking for that kiss on the cheek, or even a polite salute, if you’re transgender, or if you’re Muslim. Those two disgraceful acts are, of course, to be forgotten if you are taken in this email. The rest of us, though, will not forget his contempt for those who don’t quite fit his image of a soldier – nor will we forget how he equated his attendance of a military prep school for actual service.
What’s my real point? Long time readers of this blog are aware of my observation of how the partitions of society into sectors – private sector, public sector, health, education – is not merely a matter of convenience, but is actually an implicit recognition that they not only exist, but that each has explicit goals which not only differ from each other, but affect the character of the operations devised within each sector, such that an operation that is optimal for one sector may be suboptimal, or even completely inappropriate, in another.
Bypassing all the interesting discussion of this topic (all those posts are listed here), let’s relate this to the email under the microscope. First, for newer readers who are perhaps doubtful about my above statement, I will ask my rhetorical trick question:
What is the acceptable profit margin of the government?
Of course, for the newer reader the answer is no doubt, Well, uh, I don’t know – that’s not the point of government! Exactly. Exactly. Now let’s read that email again, keeping in mind that we’re talking about government, not the private sector, even if the honest reader, who is not a bean-counter, would find the statements problematic in the private sector context.
So, you’ve finished reading. We see the application of an appalling and simplistic calculus to the operations of the White House. Since when do we use the operating budget of the White House, or the count of staff, as a proxy for evaluating the successful operation of the White House?
In my mind, never. True, there is a requirement of efficiency, but this missive wisely makes no effort to evaluate the performance of the Trump White House, because Trump’s accomplishments, despite his self-congratulatory blather, have been few and far between, while his failures have come in blinding snowstorms of incompetency. Even an honest Republican will acknowledge it. Only the Trump supporter, voluntarily blinded to the regular media in favor of Trump’s Twitter account in an intellectually dishonest maneuver of breathtaking audacity, will disagree.
In fact, by disregarding this requirement, the author is attempting to discard competency from the evaluation of the President. On this metric, an empty White House, with only Trump walking the halls hither and yon, is the best White House. Would the author accept this? To the extent he sputters and tries, we know the author to be unserious and disruptive of the society which makes the United States – because most of us understand this most important point:
The White House must excel in diplomacy. As the primary and nearly exclusive arbiter of foreign policy, in a world full of immediate dangers, the White House’s expenditures are a distant tertiary aspect of its evaluation. The real questions: How much does the world respect us? Do we have foreign relations objectives which will lead to a more prosperous and safe world? Do we have real-world operations in place to achieve those objectives? For all these things, White House staff must respond with support, from the National Security Advisor right down to the chef who makes our foreign visitors happy.
So this missive, by substituting inappropriate metrics that are naive even in their native habitat for the appropriate metrics of competency, does a massive disservice to the reader, whether it’s someone who merely scans the email quickly, or the reader who has been mistrained by Fox News to hate President Obama.
It’s always wise to think about metrics, a subject I’ve long considered blogging about, but haven’t gotten around to yet.
And I suggest forgetting this email completely, as it’s designed to instill pride in a President who is, by any realistic measure, falling down on the job.
Into the ol’ mail slot, if email could enter slots, came a new piece. I reproduce it below as a screen shot, as I can’t find it on the web and merely copying it is unsatisfactory. To summarize, the piece is from United West (“Uniting Western Civilization for Freedom and Liberty” – note all the keywords selected for emotional content), noting the selection of a mosque in Boca Raton, FL, as a polling station, and presenting a video the claims the mosque is a center for Islamic extremism. A local (to Boca Raton) meeting to discuss the matter is announced for August 17, 2017, where evidence may be presented. Finally, an assertion of United West being a charity is made, and a request for a donation.
I couldn’t find much on this one that isn’t from biased media – which means I skipped reading Breitbart, YouTube, BareNakedIslam, etc. ThinkProgress, obviously slanted to the left, noted the cancellation of using the mosque, along with all the other religious joints being used, etc. This is interesting:
Indeed, while some take issue with using religious spaces as polling locations, churches, synagogues, and other worship halls have served as voting centers throughout American history. A rabbi serving a Reform Jewish congregation in nearby Boynton Beach noted this history while voicing support for using the mosque as a polling center last week, saying, “to suggest that every mosque is pure evil and every other religious institution is pure good is just not accurate and it’s prejudice and it’s wrong.”
Don’t click on the picture for a more readable version – it actually gets smaller.
The Sun-Sentinel also covered it. Neither Sun-Sentinel nor ThinkProgress mentioned alleged extremist activity. Importantly, both of these articles date back to July 2016, more than a year ago – while the meeting sponsored by United West is dated to August 17, 2017. Why such a delay in this meeting? Did it take place?
Snopes doesn’t mention this entire incident. In fact, Google only returned 14 entries on it, so unless you read the fringe-right extremist sites, there’s no mention of it. Which makes it quite suspicious.
And I’ve never heard of a United West charity, which automatically marks THEM as suspicious in my mind – after all, scam-artists are rampant. First I went to Charity Navigator, my first visit ever, since United West notes prominently their “501-c3” status – this is usually specified 501(c)(3). I didn’t find them, but typing United West into the Charity Navigator search engine brings up 124 entries, from United West Valley Firefighters Charities to Hamlin Unit No 11 American Legion AUxiliary Dept of West Virginia. Maybe I missed them. Maybe Charity Navigator doesn’t know about them. It’s not a conclusive search.
Charities must have EINs to claim 501-(c)(3) status. Google was unhelpful. ProPublica makes available a database of EINs, but searching on United West yields 23476 hits. Adding in Civilization was unhelpful. So .. the next step is to interrogate United West directly.
United West has a slick web site, but their search engine yielded nothing useful in response to a request for their EIN, so I cannot prove or disprove their claim to be a charity – and thus cannot check with Charity Navigator to evaluate their performance as a charity.
So I started poking around the United West web site, and discover this, with the headline “Obama funded Hezb’Allah weapons factory being built by IRAN in Lebanon.”
It’s no surprise United West is right-leaning, given the content of the mail, but in my mind, misleading or outright lying headlines pushes them right over the line into the same pocket of hell occupied by the Soviet propaganda masters. Let’s take this apart a little, shall we?
Right from the get-go, Obama funded … this phrase implicitly suggests a voluntary contribution from former President Obama directly to a factory. Well, no. Sorry, kids United West, try again. The money to which the headline refers was an internationally mandated return of funds, by an international court put together by the United States and Iran to decide matters such as these; in fact, this makes it a matter of national honor, involving the return of funds paid for weapons systems never delivered by the United States. Here’s Fortune.com’s[1] coverage of the event, from which I extracted this information. I think Fortune.com is eminently more respectable, since it presents facts and doesn’t distort the issue, so far as I can see.
But there’s more to come. In the body of this press release, the money is referred to as jizya, which is old Islamic term for taxes levied on non-Muslim subjects. While it’s good to see United West pushing back against the old falsehood that Obama is Muslim, this is really a childish twist on cleverness, reinforcing the central falsehood of the article. It acts as a club membership keyword – if you know what it means, then you’re part of the club.
And this is always important when gaining trust from the marks.
There’s little point in going on.
* * *
But what about the rest of the content of the mail? I’d like to make two points in relation to the Sleight of Hand entitling this post.
First, there’s this reference about Sharia law enfolding the United States. Given the brutality reported under Sharia law in Iran and Saudi Arabia (adversaries, by the way), as well as the Islamic State, this is meant to evoke fear, and, in fact, the famous fight or flight mechanism. Why is this important? Because it turns off the rational part of the human mind. Humanity celebrates itself for its capacity for rationality; it’s an intellectual error, however, to believe that this means we’re automatically rational. We’re not. We have a lot of short-cuts we use to achieve positive results, but those short-cuts mean we discard rationality when we use them. We look at a situation and react without rational thought.
This is great when the bushes rustle and we take off running because there might be a lion in the bushes. Make no mistake, the rational part of our brains (sometimes referred to as System 2) can be too slow to assess some situations.
But implanting an automatic reflex doesn’t make it right, and that’s what’s going on here. This group wants to say Sharia in the United States, and then use your automatic reflex of fear to shake out your wallet.
So let’s think about it, together. What does the United States Constitution say? Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This is known as the Establishment Clause, and it sounds like a safeguard to me. But is there concrete evidence that it’s really a safeguard?
Yes. Eugene Volokh covered this last year, which I noted here – a Minnesota appellate court rebuffed just such an attempt. American courts apply American law, as Eugene states the unequivocal obvious. So long as American law includes the Establishment Clause, we need not worry about a theocracy of any sort taking over the American government – and ruining the country.
My second point is very simple. The mail leads off, “Jeeze, what next? Are we still in the US or what?” (In the process of making the mail part of this post, we seem to have actually lost this line. Any reader who wishes to see the mail I received need only send me mail, using the link on the right, asking for the mail and I will forward it on to you.) Now, maybe this was added by a later relayer, but to my eye this seems to be another attempt to gain the sympathy of the reader, to signal mutual regard, and therefore trust, in the sender of the email.
And the rest becomes a wearisome exercise in failed trickery: the request for a donation to support the defense of the homeland, a defense unneeded (you pay enough in taxes for the Department of Defense, doncha think?), as we’ve come to understand here.
The lesson here? Damp down the automatic panic reaction brought on by certain keywords and do some research.
1The section in question from Fortune.com:
The major issue between the two governments was a $400 million payment for military equipment made by the government of the Shah of Iran, prior to the 1979 uprising that topped him. The U.S. banned delivery of the jets and other weapons amid the hostage crisis, but froze the $400 million advance payment. “The Pentagon handled arms purchases from foreign countries,” says Gary Sick, a former National Security Council official who served as the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. “Defense took care of the details. So the $400 million scheduled purchase was a government-to-government transaction. The U.S. government was holding the money. That’s why it was so difficult to resolve.”
But we finally did the thing we did last year – adorn the garage with strings for training the tomato plants to climb. Whether we get any sort of substantial harvest this year is up in the air, though. They seem to be behind.
Geoglyph:
Carved into the chalk of a hillside in southern England, the Uffington White Horse is utterly unique. Stretching 360 feet from head to tail, it is the only prehistoric geoglyph—a large-scale design created using elements of the natural landscape—known in Europe. [“White Horse of the Sun,” Eric A. Powell, Archaeology (Sept/Oct 2017)]
Also comes with a nifty picture.
Good article, too.
I mentioned 38 North was a little annoyed at the media earlier today. Now I see they’re outright angry at a specific South Korean media company:
For those of us steeped in nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, this headline makes no sense. ICBMs are land-based missiles fired from mobile launchers or underground silos. So it would indeed be an amazing feat of technical skill if the North Koreans were able to pull this off.
The problem is this headline was fake news although the average reader would certainly have been excused for not recognizing that. In fact, it was a big mistake by the Yonhap News Agency, South Korea’s largest news outlet that serves not only South Koreans but also has a regional and global readership. What makes the headline even more alarming for us is that it was based on a 38 North satellite imagery analysis by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. BUT he didn’t say what the headline says.
And Yonhap was exceptionally slow at issuing a correction. The lesson here? Read any news about North Korea fairly critically.
Yeah, he’s dead, but why Mr. Octopus sticks his victim’s legs up in the air like this is a mystery. Maybe he’s proving his kill like baseball players are supposed to flaunt the ball after catching it?
Henry Fonda. Shelley Winters. John Huston. Names that adorn Hollywood like party bunting. And what do you get when you put them all together?
Tentacles (1977), that’s what.
And you don’t want to know what that might be. Much like the previously reviewed Scream and Scream Again (1970), this is a bait and switch movie, the great names not working to any great affect, although Huston does a bit more with his part than do any of the rest of the headliners from either of the two movies. He’s investigating the mysterious deaths of people in and near the water.
And then entire boats start disappearing.
And it may have something to do with the radio.
And, after a while, we were cheering the octopus on. Except when I was yelling at the television, “Oh, god, Henry, what did the producers have on you to induce you to make this piece of tripe?!”
This is our apple tree, and it’s full of rotten apples.
And while maybe, just maybe, we can blame the cuts for the television for some disastrous movies, Tentacles is really fairly much devoid of any sympathetic characters. Maybe the octopus will get your sympathies, since all the blame is devolving onto Fonda’s company that’s using far too much energy in its probes for oil, thus stirring up the octopus.
But, honestly, the only clever part was using a couple of killer whales to attack the octopus.
Ever hear about the book that was so bad that the reviewer not only didn’t finish it, but heaved it across the room? This is a movie that deserves to have rotten food thrown at it.
And we have a tree full of rotten apples, just waiting to be used on tripe like this.
The Editors of 38 North are unhappy with misrepresentations – in their view – of the history of interactions with North Korea:
Cases in point are two recent articles in the New York Times, which, on balance, has done great reporting on the unfolding crisis. The first, “How Trump’s Predecessors Dealt with the North Korean Threat” by Russell Goldman, has a clear theme that they have been snookering us all along. Well, that may have been true for part of the time, but it wasn’t true for all of the time. The article completely misrepresents what happened under the Clinton administration, asserting that North Korea accepted the carrots offered by the administration in the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework—two multi-billion dollar reactors and heavy fuel oil shipments—then cheated when it was supposed to be denuclearizing and learned the lesson that it could profit by provoking the West.
Sounds pretty straightforward, but unfortunately, it is fake history. If the author had bothered to do more research, he would have learned that in 1993, US intelligence estimated that North Korea could have enough nuclear material to build about 75 bombs by the beginning of the next decade. The Agreed Framework ended that threat. In 2002 when the agreement collapsed, the North only had enough material to build less than 5 nuclear weapons. Moreover, Pyongyang had made the mistake of allowing key nuclear facilities to deteriorate into piles of junk. So it couldn’t restart them. In effect, a plutonium production program that had cost tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars to build had been trashed because of the agreement. True, Pyongyang had started to cheat by exploring a uranium enrichment program that could also produce bomb-making material, but that program was nowhere near as advanced and wouldn’t reach fruition for years. Sounds like a good deal to us. But none of this is mentioned in the article.
And it’s important to have a clear-eyed view of how history has truly unfolded, because past events will influence how North Korea will view potential future negotiations and actions – as we should have learned from the Iranian mess. In that one, we supported a hated dictator in the Shah, and the result has been a revolution, a hostile adversary for nearly 40 years, and a group largely hostile to Western values.
I’ve been musing on the observation that most of the Alt-Right is made up of young men, and combining that with the scientific discovery that men’s brains don’t complete the process of maturing until their late 20s. I generally figure the young fascists are just rudderless cannon fodder, indulging their darker, primeval natures; the older ones are doing so as well, but in their case it’s the urge for power, with perhaps a sprinkling of xenophobia.
Then I think about President Trump’s own statements about not having changed much since his time in first grade.
And then I start to wonder …
it would explain So Much …
A reader responds concerning the Google controversy:
The writing is kind of amateurish, yeah. Here’s what The Economist has to say about the situation, and I find myself pretty much in 100% agreement with them. [link]
An interesting read, chiefly for the contrast with Dr. Soh’s remarks, where, to repeat, she said:
Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.
As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
While The Economist writes:
It would have been better for Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and the boss of Alphabet, its holding company, to write a ringing, detailed rebuttal of Mr Damore’s argument. Google could have stood up for its female employees while demonstrating the value of free speech. That might have led to the “honest discussion” Mr Damore claimed to want—and avoided the ersatz one about his firing. It would have shown that his arguments are not taboo, but mostly foolish and ill-informed. And it would have countered his more defensible claim: that Google, and the Valley, so welcoming of gender diversity, are narrower-minded about unorthodox opinions.
I suppose the answer will be found in the ability of Google’s future work force.
On National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty sounds more than a trifle weary as the soap opera we call a government, a soap opera we honestly shouldn’t be the least surprised about, grinds on, perhaps massacring those tender ideological nerves principled conservatives are at such pains to nurse:
Source: Michael Offutt.
I don’t know where he got it.People who write about politics and have Twitter accounts will continue to lose their sense of sanity trying to cover this administration as if doing so gave them membership in a dignified profession. Being a part of the Fourth Estate of a history-making republic seems respectable. Being a Steve Bannon fanfic analyst sounds like something else.
Perhaps the decent thing one can do for one’s sanity is to become a proper conspiracy theorist. What a relief it would be if George Soros, Vladimir Putin, or the members of Bohemian Grove were pulling all the strings. Who cares if they’re evil? At least they’re adults taking responsibility for the world we live in. Until today I thought Louise Mensch and other Putin obsessives were unhinged. Now I wonder if they aren’t pioneers of self-care and self-help. If the world is insane, the only way to restore a sense of balance is turn your own screws until loose.
Steve Bannon is out. Tune in next week for Steve Bannon strikes back. You’ll be watching. Donald Trump will be watching. Are you not entertained?
Quite. But as long term friends have weary knowledge, I’ve often said that politics is all about entertaining ME[1], although I’ll grant that Trump is an entire family size helping, not the more friendly single serving pile of spaghetti. I’ve not tracked National Review’s political sympathies with any great interest since the election campaign began, but I seem to recall they were in the Never Trump! camp for a while, and then overcame the allergy to be behind him. Perhaps the ride has turned out to be too rough.
1I once mentioned to a friend about to trot out to the fencing strip for a gold medal bout that her entire reason for being there was to entertain ME. She darn near brained me, but then she won the bout, so it’s all good.
All of this year’s cleome – and it’s a lot – are volunteers from last year. And they are working their little hearts out.
Yep, in that last picture that’s actually a purplish cleome, right next to the pink one. I thought cleome only came in pink, but what do I know?
Potation:
a usually alcoholic drink or brew
the act or an instance of drinking or inhaling; also : the portion taken in one such act
Heard on Family Guy, E1 S6.
This one’s easy – a quick consult to Snopes.com sets us straight. First, the email, even with formatting retained:
The City of Dallas, Texas passed an ordinance stating that
if a driver is pulled over by law enforcement and is not able to provide
proof of insurance, the car is towed
To retrieve the car after being impounded,
they must show proof of insurance to have the car released.
This has made it easy for the City of Dallas to remove uninsured cars.
Shortly after the “No Insurance” ordinance was passed,
the Dallas impound lots began to fill up and were full after only nine days.
Over 80%of the impounded cars were driven by illegals.
Now, not only must they provide proof of insurance to have their car released,
they have to pay for the cost of the tow,a $350 fine,
and$20for every day their car is kept in the lot.
Guess what?
Accident rates have gone down 47%
and Dallas ‘ solution gets uninsured driversoff the roadWITHOUT
making them show proof of nationality.
I wonder how the
US Justice Department will get around this one .
* * * *
Just brings tears to your eyes doesn’t it? **
*** GO Dallas ***
Sadly for the author, only the law claim is true.
 |
TRUE: Dallas police may impound vehicles whose drivers fail to provide proof of insurance. |
 |
FALSE: Dallas impound lots were full nine days after this crackdown began. |
|
FALSE: More than 80% of those impounded cars were driven by illegal immigrants. |
|
FALSE: Accident rates have gone down 47% since implementation of this ordinance. |
So let’s spend a moment – no more – taking this apart. The purpose? To spur anti-immigrant sentiment – after all, there’s all those illegal immigrants’ cars, 80% of the total, and the lots are full, and, and, and … ooops, I think our xenophobe just ran out of air and collapsed. So, to finish his lie, we’ll repeat his claim that accident rates have gone down 47%.
So this is why 101 Americans die every day on the roads[1]! Everything makes sense now!
The slightly less obvious point is the usual right-wing anti-government hip-check – “I wonder how the US Justice Department will get around this one,” he says. Spur the cynicism, harvest the embittered voters for the right-wing fringe. Yep, how many did we get this time?
The lesson here? If something comes in without credible citations, maybe do a bit of research. Snopes.com, despite the disdain of the far-right, remains one of the best secondary sources to consult, but there are a few others out there. If you have the time and, when needed, the chops, you could even go for the primary sources – in this case, confirm such a law exists in Dallas, then check the local newspapers and police departments to see if the follow-on claims are also true.
Or you can remain credulous, and when the harvest comes, they’ll take your least valued, yet most important possession from you – your vote.
Is Israel the Likud Party, the party of the Conservatives, is dominant. But something is changing in the body of this organism, as Mazal Mualem of AL Monitor reports:
Talking to Al-Monitor, the husband said that most of his close friends, who all live in Tel Aviv, have joined the Likud Party in the last few months. “We all identify with the center-left. I am actually thinking of voting for Meretz in the next election. We just reached the conclusion that the Likud will remain in power in the years to come, so we want to influence it from the inside. We want to choose who will be on its Knesset list and promote our own interests,” he said.
He insisted on anonymity, since the party is taking a variety of measures to block the New Likud phenomenon. Likud officials claim that it is actually a hostile takeover of the party and part of an attempt to remove its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Aug. 14, Maariv newspaper reported that the Likud Party decided to end online registration for the party on its website. In the next few days, the party’s internal court will decide whether to invalidate the party credentials of several prominent members of the New Likud for allegedly acting against the Likud Party from the inside.
This has happened before, albeit from the other side:
The New Likud phenomenon is reminiscent of the Feiglinites, a far-right group that attempted to take over the Likud in the early 2000s to prevent diplomatic concessions that would include a withdrawal from some of the territories. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and later Netanyahu, fought against them, claiming that they were engaged in a hostile takeover of the party and its institutions. The group had about 7,000 members in its heyday, and it is believed that many of them voted for other parties, mainly on the far right. Despite their strength within the party, the Feiglinites had a hard time getting their leader Moshe Feiglin into the Knesset in the 2013 election.
Though the Feiglinites began as a foreign element within the Likud, over time they became an integral part of the party landscape. This is because many Knesset members asked for their support in the primaries. As far as results, however, the group did not achieve its objectives; it failed to prevent the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip and had no real impact on the party’s agenda. It fell apart before the last election, and most of its members left the Likud.
I suspect a history of the GOP would be similar in approach – more and more conservative people joining the party and then forcing out the members already there, aka the RINO approach. In this way the prestige and moral position of the party is assumed by those who haven’t earned it – and we see that today with the the current GOP Congressional leadership, being both extremist compared to their forebears, as well as bloody incompetent.
The problem lies in that parties are perceived to be composed of relatively permanent attributes, but in reality they are truly just the results of their membership’s leanings. Change the membership, change the party. But the typical citizen hasn’t the time or inclination to monitor the parties and its positions and doesn’t realize they may be slowly changing as the years pass.
Democracy is the right to take part in government – if you can find the time.
The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned en masse, and sent him a letter:
Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville. The false equivalen cies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions. We are members of th e President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The Committee was created in 1982 under President Reagan to advise the White House on cultural issues. We were hopeful that continuing to serve in the PCAH would allow us to focus on the import ant work the committee does with your federal partners and the private sector to address, initiate, and support key policies and programs in the arts and humanities for all Americans. Effective immediately, please accept our resignation from the President’ s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
And then goes on from there, with a soothing conclusion:
Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.
Well, I thought it was soothing. But it’s rather like bopping the chihuahua on the nose with a newspaper. Will he learn from it? Probably not.
Working at home today, my Arts Editor has been shouting news throughout the house to me, starting with the announcement of the resignation, or perhaps firing, of Mr. Bannon from the Administration. The New York Times reports on Mr. Bannon’s various clashes, but this is what caught my attention:
Mr. Bannon, whose campaign against “globalists” was a hallmark of his tenure steering the right-wing website Breitbart.com, and Mr. Kushner had been allies throughout the transition process and through the beginning of the administration.
But their alliance ruptured as Mr. Trump elevated the roles of Gary D. Cohn, his top economic policy adviser and a former official at Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell, a former Bush administration official who also worked on Wall Street. Mr. Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he and Ms. Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as being antithetical to Mr. Trump’s populist message.
So we’re served up the vision of Mr. Bannon, an alleged white supremacist, Leninist, and all around bad guy, losing out to Mr. Kushner, son-in-law to President Trump, whose portfolio is enormous, his competence unproven at best, and he achieved his position through … nepotism. It’s like watching The Joker get his butt kicked by Mr. Freeze, where the winner of the fights gets to work for The Riddler[1]. It’s all fun and games when it’s in the corporate sector, but not when nuclear weapons are involved.
The bigger question, though, is how this is all going to play with the President’s base. Mr. Bannon, as former editor of Breitbart News, was definitely an icon for the far-right, even as he bad-mouthed them:
Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”
Will his loss result in a hit for the President? Or are they such a small segment that their loss will be immeasurable? Perhaps more interesting will be the ascension of Mr. Cohn. If President Trump is ignoring ideological strictures in favor of his Wall Street idols, it may eventually kill his support among Republicans in general, although the Trumpists won’t hold it against him.
Speaking of, prominent Trump supporter Julius Krein wrote an article of apology for The New York Times Sunday Review:
It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.
Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardizing any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life.
So what dragged him down the rabbit-hole?
Although crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign, Mr. Trump eschewed strict ideologies and directly addressed themes that the more conventional candidates of both parties preferred to ignore. Rather than recite paeans to American enterprise, he acknowledged that our “information economy” has delivered little wage or productivity growth. He was willing to criticize the bipartisan consensus on trade and pointed out the devastating effects of deindustrialization felt in many communities. He forthrightly addressed the foreign policy failures of both parties, such as the debacles in Iraq and Libya, and rejected the utopian rhetoric of “democracy promotion.” He talked about the issue of widening income inequality — almost unheard of for a Republican candidate — and didn’t pretend that simply cutting taxes or shrinking government would solve the problem.
Sure he did. I remember him stating that he’d cut taxes and drive up military spending during the debates.
He criticized corporations for offshoring jobs, attacked financial-industry executives for avoiding taxes and bemoaned America’s reliance on economic bubbles over the last few decades. He blasted the Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz campaigns for insincerely mouthing focus-grouped platitudes while catering to their largest donors — and he was right. Voters loved that he was willing to buck conventional wisdom and the establishment.
What conventional wisdom? All of these are well-known problems. But here’s what Julius apparently missed – too often, Trump wanted to wind the clock back.
That is emblematic, and it’s diagnostic – diagnostic of Trump’s search for votes, not his innovative solutions. All he offered was a return to a mythical Golden Age, rather than looking ahead at new solutions, new challenges, and how to make it all work. This is where Mr. Krein shows he’s a novice.
But it’s a convenient focus for me to vent. Trump didn’t offer solutions, he just offered a look back at what used to work – but no longer does. From big, big Military to coal to denying climate change to Bannon’s retreat into provincial nationalism. Add in the lies, lies, lies, and Trump was the joke on the stage – and enough Americans bought it.
1All Batman adversaries. Sorry if my reader isn’t a Batman fan. Neither am I.
