It’s the awning that surprised me.
A little stroll down memory lane. I was at the Colosseum in 2018. There was a huge downpour, and right afterward I took this selfie and put it on the blog:
California on their minds
Last night I was thinking how the Mamas and Papas song “California Dreamin’,” with its very 60s idealization of California as a magical place for which a person might yearn, could not possibly be written now.
That segued into thoughts of another Mamas and Papas song from that era, “Twelve Thirty,” in which the singer has returned to that idealized sunlit California world after living in New York. It’s less well-known, but I think it probably is familiar to a lot of you:
And then I remembered still another Mamas and Papas song, “Strange Young Girls.” That one’s even more obscure, and although I already was familiar with it I only recalled snatches of the words. What I did remember was a feeling the song gave me of wistfulness and creepiness. For me, the 60s always had that creepiness, that sense that things had spiraled out of control and the final result would not be good.
This is how the song begins:
Strange young girls
Covered with sadness;
Eyes of innocence
Hiding their madness.
Walking the strip–
Sweet, soft, and placid—
Offering their youth
On the alter of acid…
[NOTE: After I composed this post, I noticed this article at American Thinker entitled, “Gone Is the Romance of California.”]
[NOTE II: If you want to read a good but terrifying story about the 60s and the phenomenon described in that last song, I recommend the story “Xavier Speaking” by Charles Baxter. The one-page excerpt at that link is the beginning of the story, which is quite dull (actually, very dull). The story picks up considerably as it goes on and packs quite a wallop, to the best of my recollection. It seems to have been written in the 1970s, but the collection of short stories in which I originally read it was published in 1984.]
More on the Sussman case…
In painstaking detail, Durham laid out in the indictment Thursday how Democrat superlawyer Michael Sussmann used Clinton campaign funds to construct a now-debunked memo and other evidence alleging that computer communications between a server at the Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Tower in New York might be a secret backdoor communication system for Trump and Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election.
Sussmann delivered the package in mid-September 2016 — just weeks before Election Day as Trump and Clinton were locked in a tight race — to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, even after the team of computer experts warned the theory was a “red-herring,” according to the indictment.
And then Sussmann falsely told Baker, the prosecutors alleged, he was providing the information to the FBI solely as a good citizen, and not on behalf of any client.
In fact, Sussmann was working on behalf of a tech executive and the Clinton campaign and charged nearly all the work on the Alfa Bank narrative to the Democratic presidential campaign, including his meeting with Baker, the indictment stated.
The alleged lying, Durham argued, deceived the FBI into thinking the allegations were coming from a neutral source — Sussmann had been a cybersecurity expert — and not an election-motivated client.
“In truth, and in fact, and as Sussmann well knew, Sussmann had acted on behalf of and in coordination with two specific clients of the law firm: tech executive 1 and the Clinton campaign in assembling and conveying these allegations,” the grand jury indictment charged.
“Sussman’s false statement to the FBI general counsel was material to that investigation because among other reasons it was relevant to the FBI whether the conveyor of these allegations was providing them as an ordinary citizen merely passing along information or whether he was instead doing so as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda.”
The article also contains somewhat of a summary of Russiagate, which can be helpful to refresh your memory at this point. It’s still both astounding and disheartening that all of this actually happened, that it affected the 2020 election and the country tremendously, and that virtually no one has been punished – and it’s doubtful that anyone ever will be. That includes Sussman, who was a big player but by no means one of the biggest.
If I’m wrong and there’s a snowball effect here, I’ll be pleased. But I very much doubt it.
About that Tuskegee syphilis study – and about COVID
I’ve seen it over and over – assertions that researchers involved in the Tuskegee study of syphilis, back in middle third of the 20th Century, gave black men syphilis in order to study them. I saw the claim again the other day in an article on COVID and the government and medical establishment, but unfortunately I didn’t take note of where the article was and can’t find it now. However, I do recall that it was by a writer on the right, so this Tuskegee “fact” is hardly limited to dissemination by the left. The “gave black men syphilis” assertion is deeply embedded in the American consciousness at this point and is considered the truth by most people who know little else about the Tuskegee study.
I happen to have written a post on the subject way back in ancient times: 2008. I call your attention to it now. I hope it sets the record straight. The truth about the study was bad enough without lying to make it seem even worse.
The present-day reaction of the government, the politicians, and the health agencies and much (although not all) of the medical establishment to the COVID pandemic has been shocking in its willingness to impose Draconian measures using unknowns or even falsehoods, and in its intense politicization of an issue that should always have been above politics but never was. The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence involved has made it even more likely that people will believe that all the previous horror tales were true. A great deal of mistrust is, alas, justified. But I still think it’s important to try to get the stories straight.
Oh, and while we’re at it, you might want to read my 2007 post on the similar story that the US army purposely gave the native Americans smallpox-infected blankets in order to start an epidemic to help decimate their population.
Staying away from the computer for 12 daytime hours yesterday…
…to see a friend meant that I skipped writing about a ton of stories. That happens anyway in these days of fast-breaking news flurries. But when I take a significant chunk of time off, it happens even more.
So another roundup is in order.
(1) Biden – the guy who’s never been right about foreign policy in his lengthy public life – was sold by the Democrats, the MSM, and the NeverTrumpers on the preposterous idea that he would be the man who would be restoring our relations with our European (and other) allies, post-Trump. I didn’t see them as all that damaged in the first place, although Europeans certainly looked down on Trump’s style and didn’t like his calling them out on certain failings of theirs. But anyone familiar with Biden’s history should never have thought he’d help the situation – except perhaps through abject capitulation.
So now we have France recalling its ambassador over a nuclear submarine deal Biden made with Australia without informing France.
(2) On the right we already knew – and have known for weeks – that the much-touted post-Kabul airport attack drone strike by the administration on a supposed terrorist was actually almost certainly on someone who had helped the US and included the deaths of a host of children. Now the Pentagon has admitted it.
Watch Rand Paul a few days ago (prior to the admission), questioning Blinken on that (“You’d think you’d kinda know before you off somebody”…:
(3) Illegal immigrants under a Texas bridge.
(4) Another aspect of the recent Woodward book on how Milley’s China call circumvented President Trump in a coup-like action is that the WaPo reporters sat on the explosive story all this time – apparently, in order to sell the book. Here’s Mark Levin talking about it:
(5) Mollie Hemingway has written a book about the 2020 election entitled Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections , which will come out on October 12.
(6) Rapper Nicki Minaj strikes a blow for liberty of thought and against cancel culture.
Open thread 9/18/21
When these people look you in the eye, the intervening years seem to vanish:
Remember Durham?
Well, He actually indicted someone.
I’m somewhat shocked.
From the article:
A federal grand jury indicted a former attorney for the Democratic National Committee Thursday, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not advising Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
The case against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at powerful Democratic firm Perkins Coie, is just the second prosecution brought by special counsel John Durham, who was tasked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019 with looking into how the FBI’s investigation into claims Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian government officials came to be.
Sussmann is accused of a single count of making a false statement to federal authorities on Sept. 19, 2016. The indictment was returned just three days short of the expiration of the five-year statute of limitations.
This reminds me somewhat of Durham’s previous charge, which was against FBI lawyer Kenneth Clinesmith, who ended up receiving probation after pleading guilty. Big deal.
But others think this may lead to bigger fish – for example, see this. Jonathan Turley also sees further possibilities. He lists various people who might end up implicated – although perhaps not indicted, since the statute of limitations may have run out on some. Then he adds this:
The final fight may be over the report itself. Many in Congress and the media may not want it to see the light of day since it is likely to be an indictment not just of the FBI but of the establishment and an enabling media. Yet these same figures demanded “full transparency” over the Mueller report, including secret grand jury material barred from release under federal law. Even in a city that lives on political spin, reversing that narrative to demand secrecy or major redactions may be difficult to achieve in front of an increasingly distrustful public.
I think Turley is naive. Democrats have had no trouble reversing, or turning inside out, every other principle they once said they held dear. Why not that one? And the public is indeed “increasingly distrustful,” but this administration and the Democratic Party in general don’t seem to care about gaining or regaining the public’s trust. They have power, and they appear to think they will hold onto it no matter what.
It’s hard to argue with this Mencken quote
H. L. Mencken was a famous pundit in the first half of the 20th Century, known for caustic wit.
I’ve never been a Mencken fan, and I don’t share his contempt for people in general and for Americans in particular. However, the guy had a gift for the turn of phrase. And maybe half the time he was right. So I give him that.
For example, in the following quote from 1920, he makes a prediction about the presidency. He blames the problem he’s describing on the stupidity of the American people – Mencken, ever the cynic who thought himself highly superior, looked down on what he called the booboisie, which was the general American public. I don’t think the problem lies primarily with the public – although there certainly are problems there – so much as in the mendacious and arrogant press and “elites,” who are the main conduits from which the public receives its information.
Here’s Mencken’s prediction from about 100 years ago:
But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
It’s hard to argue very strenuously with that.
Mencken thought Harding came quite close to that unlofty goal. I contend that Biden makes Harding look like a giant:
Describing the prose of President Warren Harding, Mencken quipped: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights; it is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”
Better than Biden, I’d say.
Open thread 9/17/21
So the Woodward allegations about General Milley and China were true
John Hinderaker explains here:
Now, based on this statement by Joint Staff Spokesperson Col. Dave Butler, it appears that Woodward’s reporting is, shockingly, accurate. Col. Butler’s statement was issued in response to Woodward’s report and the firestorm of controversy that it ignited. Thus, the most significant fact about the statement is that it does not deny the truth of any part of Woodward’s account. Rather, Col. Butler tries to put Woodward’s reporting in a sympathetic light…
So Milley did talk with his Chinese counterparts at the time alleged by Woodward. His only defense is that those conversations were normal. They “convey[ed] reassurance.” Well, that is what Woodward wrote: Milley told the Communist Chinese that if President Trump intended to launch an attack against them, he, General Milley, would betray his country by giving them advance warning. No doubt that was reassuring to the CCP.
The Joint Chiefs spokesman’s statement also confirms Woodward’s claim that Milley met with other senior military officers to instruct them not to obey certain possible orders from President Trump…
The Democrats and the MSM and Milley’s people are trying to spin this as business as usual. Ha! But when you have the MSM on your side, you can often get away with just about anything.
Hinderaker adds:
The idea that President Trump was likely to order a nuclear strike on China is fanciful, to put it politely. That the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs took such a fantasy seriously demonstrates how out of touch he was, and is. Trump, for better or worse, was the least warlike of presidents. Did he ever order American servicemen into a new conflict? Unlike just about every president since Eisenhower? No, he did not.
General Milley is obviously a slave to left-wing ideology, which is why he has inflicted Critical Race Theory on America’s fighting men and women. This far-left ideology is also reflected in his view that President Trump, against all evidence, was some kind of warmongering loose cannon, and his even more sinister view that the leaders of China’s armed forces were his peers and his allies in undermining the foreign policy of the United States.
This of course brings up the old old question: knave, fool, or both? Hinderaker seems to come down mostly on the side of “fool” – that Milley has such poor judgment about Trump, as a result of Milley’s own leftist political bias, that he is reading him all wrong.
And that could be the case. But there’s the alternate “knave” theory. As I wrote earlier today in a comment:
They don’t call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for nothing.
Yes, [Pelosi and Milley] were either deranged or the whole thing was a sham and a pose and an excuse for undermining Trump once again, and dropping a rumor that Trump was acting so deranged that they had to do this, as patriots.
And, as commenter “Insufficiently Sensitve” writes:
That catechism [Pelosi and Milley] recited back and forth was simply their pledge of allegiance to one another. Once their fealty was established, the next move would be to find the means sufficient to deliver the desired end, and that would take whatever law-bending was needed to emplace Milley’s ‘authority’ sufficiently to displace that of the President. Hence the oath-taking by those Officers – who’ll make fine witnesses in case Pelosi and her stooges can’t head off Congressional investigations, or a military court-martial, of dear General Milley. Stay tuned.
I lean slightly to the “knave” explanation here. But the “fool” is also possible.
I predict that nothing much will happen to Milley, although perhaps he’ll resign. Unfortunately, he’s already done inestimable damage to the US and to the world.
What’s happening in Afghanistan?
To a certain extent, when the Vietnam-era draft ended people lost interest in news of Vietnam. There was a flurry of renewed attention when we finally left and then cut off most of the military aid years later, including the famous “helicopters on the roof” story. After that, every now and then some boat people would arrive and that would get a bit of coverage, too.
But for the most part we turned our backs on the suffering there. It’s not just that we weren’t intervening any more, it’s that most people simply weren’t aware of what was happening and of the role our abandonment played in it.
The left was rather happy about that because it got them off the hook, and they learned that they could repeat the process when they caused us to exit any war. In fact, none other that President Biden is reported to have explicitly cited this in 2010 when he wanted to get out of Afghanistan and the Obama administration wasn’t doing his bidding:
Holbrooke, who was the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010, asked Biden whether the US had a moral obligation to remain in Afghanistan to protect people like that little girl.
“F— that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it,” Biden replied, according to Holbrooke’s diary, as cited by the Atlantic.
I would argue that it wasn’t Nixon and Kissinger; it was the Democrat-controlled Congress (with some Republicans voting along with them) that pulled the plug on the South Vietnamese. The Democrats didn’t pay any price for that, either. Au contraire. Carter was elected in 1976 and the Democrats continued to have huge Congressional majorities.
So it was not difficult to predict that, once the nasty and actually disastrous pullout occurred in Afghanistan, coverage would fade and we would not learn the details of what was happening in that country as a result. Perhaps a few stories here and there, but whatever horrors are presently being perpetrated there are not going to get major coverage from an MSM dedicated to supporting everything Democrat – although you know that there would be wall-to-wall coverage of atrocities if the pullout had happened with Trump at the helm.
As far as I can tell, only the right is reporting on things like this:
As the Taliban consolidates its hold on power, reports of executions and mass killings are coming in from all across Afghanistan. The Islamist militia beheaded two boys aged 9 and 10, the media reports on Wednesday said.
Taliban fighters are hunting down former Afghan government officials and security personnel. Besides targeting people connected to the deposed government, the Taliban death squads are murdering their family members — including minors, Jean Marie Thrower, a former U.S. Army officer working on getting stranded Americans out of Afghanistan, told the National Review.
The National Review reported the gruesome beheadings, citing Afghan Rescue Crew‘s (ARC) Jean Marie Thrower:
Even retired members of the Afghan army are marked for death by the Taliban. “We’ve got people who retired, ten, 15 years ago. They killed the Taliban, and the Taliban don’t forget,” Thrower says. “We have one guy who was just working on cars. He said, ‘I haven’t done this, I haven’t been in the resistance for 15 years, but they have my name and they’re calling me.’”
Thrower disputes the U.S. State Department’s characterization of about 100 Americans being left on the ground; she said that as of a few days ago, the figure her group had was closer to 1,000 — although she noted that every group making a rescue effort has its own list, potentially leading to overlap with one another in certain cases. The 1,000 figure may include U.S. green-card holders, too, which the State Department is putting in a separate category. (…)
She describes the case of an American child whose Afghan uncle was recently killed by the Taliban. “We have had people shot, beheaded. They’re taking the kids. If you’re on the run, and they find your family, they’ll hurt your family and put the word out in the neighborhood that ‘we’ve got your brother or son or daughter.’ They cut off the heads of two boys that were nine and ten.”
You might ask why we should care at this point; after all, awful things happen all over the world with great regularity. And while that is the case, it is also the case that these things were not happening in Afghanistan when we were there, and they are happening now as a direct result of our leaving in the obscenely stupid and/or purposely destructive manner in which we departed, and it’s happening to people who had helped us and whom we had promised to rescue if it ever came to that.
Biden and the rest knew it would happen and they did what they did anyway, and shrugged at it. And the Democrats and the MSM not only shrug right along, but praise the administration and Biden himself for what they did.
I’ve been thinking about this letter written during the time we were washing our hands of both Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s, and I’ve been trying to decide in what context to quote it. It may as well be here, although I may have occasion to quote it again:
The epitaph for the U.S. involvement in Indochina had been given earlier that month before the fall of Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. Just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation.
“I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.
“But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.”
Today is Yom Kippur
It is the most solemn holiday for Jews. For the observant and particularly for the Orthodox, it involves fasting and atonement and is usually spent entirely in a synagogue.
This is a Leonard Cohen song that’s based on one of the Yom Kippur prayers:
“Who by fire” is Leonard Cohen’s version of the Hebrew prayer “Unetanneh Tokef”, chanted on Yom Kippur. It was released in the 1974 album “New Skin for the Old Ceremony.” This is one of the main songs of the album and one of Cohen’s best known songs.
The prayer Cohen heard as a child in the synagogue describes God reviewing the Book of Life and deciding the fate of every soul for the year to come – who will live, who will die and how. The line: “And who shall I say is calling?” can be understood as a break from faith in God. According to Cohen that element of doubt is what made the song into a personal prayer for him.
Here’s the relevant part of the prayer’s text:
On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree.”