I’m a bit late with this, but I thought that for yesterday’s Remembrance Day I’d link to a two-part series of mine. I’ve written many posts on the subject of the Holocaust, some of which you can find by doing a search on this blog for the word “Holocaust.” But today I’ll suggest these two: Part I and Part II of “Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma.”
At least Bernie Sanders is being honest
Bernie admits he hasn’t a clue:
“Your agenda has promised free health care for everybody, free college tuition, and to pay off peoples’ college loans. The price tag for that is estimated to be $60 trillion dollars over ten years. Is that correct?” asked Norah O’Donnell of CBS Evening News.
“Well look, we have political opponents…” Sanders began before being cut off and pressed on the question.
“You don’t know how much your plan costs?” O’Donnell responded.
“You don’t know. Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict,” Sanders conceded, leaving O’Donnell stunned.
“You’re going to propose a plan to the American people and you’re not going to tell them how much it costs?” O’Donnell exclaimed.
This differs in only one way from the usual: Bernie isn’t lying. I give him points for honesty, and I’m not being all that sarcastic here. The only way he differs from most leftist politicians (and most Democrats, and many politicians in general) is that he’s admitting to what none other than Donald Rumsfeld called the “known unknowns.”
Of course, leftists – even the somewhat honest ones like Bernie – are nevertheless usually more than willing to stick their necks out and propose sweeping revisions that will redistribute resources in such a way that even if the costs are unknown, it is certainly known that they will be extraordinarily massive. So it suits them to either not even attempt to pin down what those costs might be (the Bernie option) or to simply lie about them or get some other agency to lie for them, and grossly underestimate the cost (and overestimate the benefits, but that’s a separate issue).
And much of the public doesn’t seem to care, because the promises sound so good to them.
ADDENDUM:
Here’s the Rumsfeld quote, one of my favorites:
Impeachment: to call witnesses or not to call witnesses?
Now that the NY Times has come out with another perfectly-timed “bombshell” based on “I heard it through the grapevine,” it seems that enough RINO senators are leaning towards voting to hear witnesses that the gambit of supposed Bolton revelations has worked.
But it’s not at all clear to me that the Democrats will win much if anything by pressing for more witnesses and calling Bolton. Yes, the Democrats’ plan is most definitely to “Kavanaugh” the proceedings. But how did that work out on the end for the Democrats? Yes, it may yield some further grist for the Democrats’ mills. But I doubt it will deflect a single one of Trump’s supporters, and it will open the door for the GOP to call more witnesses, too. That might lead to the GOP’s own bombshells.
After all, we know a lot about what the Democrats’ witnesses might say. Some of it actually exonerates the president. We don’t know what Hunter Biden or the-whistleblower-who-must-not-be-named would say, and it could definitely open up several cans of worms for the Democrats. When last I checked, it’s McConnell who’s in control of who to call if the majority votes to call more witnesses. And even Mitt Romney has now come out in favor of the Republicans getting some witnesses of their own:
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah who wants former national security adviser John Bolton to testify in the president’s impeachment trial, said he supports Republican witnesses being called too.
When the Washington Examiner asked on Tuesday if former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter should be called as well, Romney responded, “I think if you heard from one side, you probably ought to have the chance to hear from a witness from the other side.”…
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told reporters Tuesday he is confident that 51 votes exist in the conference to call witnesses on the GOP list if necessary.
“I’ll make a prediction. There’ll be 51 Republican votes to call Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, the whistleblower, and the DNC staffer [Alexandra Chalupa],” he said.
Senate Republicans said Monday that any deal to call for witnesses will include Hunter Biden.
“If we need to hear from more people, it’s going to be a group of individuals,” said Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, on Monday.
This entire push could boomerang and hit the Democrats squarely in the face.
Trump’s defenders
I’ve only seen the briefest of clips, but I hear that yesterday Dershowitz and company were restrained, particularly compared to the feverish Democrats who preceded them. Of course, the president’s defenders can afford to give a more relaxed presentation because they don’t have to make stuff up.
But I’ve also heard that they were boring. Well, I guess legal speeches have a tendency to be boring unless you’re Clarence Darrow, or unless you’re a fabulist like Schiff. I’m curious, though, what readers who actually watched a lot of it thought about it.
Here’s a little clip to whet – or extinguish – whatever appetite for the proceedings you may retain:
And Pam Bondi finally was able to bring the Hunter Biden issue into view, despite Democrat and MSM efforts to suppress it. That’s the price the Democrats pay for starting this whole theatrical production in the first place; the Republicans get to have input into some of the script. Of course, one wonders whether the news will trickle down, since a lot of people are neither watching it (that includes me) nor following it.
“The age of impeachment”
Coverage of today’s presentations from the Trump defense can be found here.
And see this about the role of John Bolton, his book, and his “bombshell.”
And this is related.
All providing cover to allow “the Eternal Turncoats to turn coat.”
The best laid schemes: Kobe Bryant
I’m not a basketball fan; I stopped watching back in the 1970s. But I’d heard of Kobe Bryant even beore yesterday’s helicopter crash that killed him. He was that big a sports star, and the mourning is widespread.
But although the crash has gotten attention because of the 41-year-old Bryant, he was far from its only victim. One of his four daughters, Gianna (13), died too as well as seven others, including John Altobelli, head baseball coach at Orange Coast College, his wife Keri, and their daughter Alyssa; Christina Mauser (38), the assistant coach for Gianna Bryant’s basketball team and mother of three young children; pilot Ara Zobayan; and Payton Chester, another teen who was on Gianna’s team, as well as her mother Sarah Chester.
The family nature and the youth of the victims lends a special horror and a special poignancy to these deaths. Occurring in adults in the prime of life as well as their children on the cusp of adult lives with a great deal of promise, the deaths twist a knife in most of us because they show how vulnerable we all are, how even the best of luck can run out, and how tragedy can strike with a swiftness and sharpness that can feel unendurable.
As it says in one of my favorite poems
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
May they RIP, and may their families find love, comfort, and strength to endure this and recover some joy in life.
I’ve not yet written a post about the new coronavirus…
…worrying the world. The reason is quite simple: much of what we know so far is fragmentary and suspect. The media loves to fan the flames of panic, anyway. But some is just lack of basic understanding as the authorities try to track its spread, plus skepticism about whether Chinese authorities have been forthcoming on this topic.
Out-of-control pandemics are the stuff of scary movies, but there are many times in human history when they have occurred. The 20th Century’s most enormous and out-of-control pandemic occurred right at the end of World War I and involved flu (I wrote about it here), the scope of which is difficult to comprehend even now. It is a terrifying prospect.
But each time a new flu comes along – and they come along with great frequency, often in China because of the vast urban populations and the close contact with animal vectors – it is hyped as the next enormous pandemic. Some day that may become true. But so far the flu pandemics of recent years, although they can do great damage (I had a friend who nearly died of H1N1, for example), have never reached anywhere near the scope of the 1918 pandemic. Fortunately.
So I will bide my time and see what happens before I hit the panic button that lies close at hand.
In the meantime, to learn about flu origins and China, see this from 2017:
Many Chinese people, even city dwellers, insist that freshly slaughtered poultry is tastier and more healthful than refrigerated or frozen meat. This is one of the major reasons China has been such a hot spot for new influenza viruses: Nowhere else on earth do so many people have such close contact with so many birds.
At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated in the Middle Kingdom and were triggered by avian viruses that evolved to become easily transmissible between humans. Although health authorities have increasingly tried to ban the practice, millions of live birds are still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets each year. In a study published in January, researchers in China concluded that these markets were a “main source of H7N9 transmission by way of human-poultry contact and avian-related environmental exposures.”…
These areas—often poorly ventilated, with multiple species jammed together—create ideal conditions for spreading disease through shared water utensils or airborne droplets of blood and other secretions. “That provides opportunities for viruses to spread in closely packed quarters, allowing ‘amplification’ of the viruses,” says Benjamin John Cowling, a specialist in medical statistics at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. “The risk to humans becomes so much higher.”
All flu viruses probably originate in birds, and the best environment for making the jump to humans is one where densely packed people live closely with birds and animals.
“In Asia we have a huge animal population, a huge bird population and two-thirds of the world’s people living there,” said Klaus Stohr, chief influenza scientist at the World Health Organization.
The population of China alone is bigger than that of the whole of Africa, and 80 percent of the new human flu strains the last few decades appeared in China first.
Did the new coronavirus originate in birds? We don’t know:
On 31 December 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus, officially designated as 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization, was reported in Wuhan, China, as responsible for the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. By 24 January 2020, 25 deaths have been reported and 547 confirmed cases. The Wuhan strain has been identified as a new strain of Betacoronavirus from group 2B with an ~70% genetic similarity to the SARS-CoV. The virus was suspected to have originated in snakes, but many leading researchers disagree with this conclusion.
More on the disease’s origins:
The initial cluster of pneumonia-like cases showed up in the city of Wuhan mid-December, and most of those patients had some tie to a wet market there—a place where people sell both live and dead animals, including exotic species, from snugly-abutting stalls.
Though nothing has been confirmed, epidemiologists suspect that the novel coronavirus crossed over into humans somewhere inside the market, which has been shuttered since January 1. Tracking down the right viral culprit is paramount to preventing future interspecies spillover. In 2003, when SARS ipped through the same area of China, the outbreak was fully contained only when civet cats, which had passed the virus along to humans, were removed from the region’s markets.
A national task force of Chinese researchers working swiftly to isolate and sequence the virus shared a draft of its genome in a public database earlier this month.
The article goes on to say that a theory based on the DNA evidence indicated that the virus may have originated in snakes, but there’s been tremendous disagreement with that idea:
“It’s complete garbage,” says Edward Holmes, a zoologist at the University of Sydney’s Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, who specializes in emerging RNA viruses, a class that includes coronaviruses like 2019-nCoV. Holmes, who also holds appointments at the Chinese CDC and Fudan University in Shanghai, is among a number of scientists who are pointing out—in virology forums, science Slacks, and on Twitter—what they deem to be major flaws in the paper, and calling on the journal to have it retracted. “It’s great that viral sequence data is getting shared openly in real time,” says Holmes. “The downside is then you get people using that data to make conclusions they really shouldn’t. The result is just a really unhelpful distraction that smacks of opportunism.”
Preliminary analyses of the genetic data released by Chinese authorities suggest that 2019-nCoV is most closely related to a group of coronaviruses that typically infect bats. But for a variety of reasons—including that it’s winter and bats are hibernating—many scientists suspect that some other animal moved the virus from bats to humans.
We don’t know. And the other thing we don’t is how many humans will be infected, and what the death rates will be. Flu tends to kill a not-insignificant percentage of its victims, but usually the vast majority survive. In 1918, the flu was especially deadly not only because it infected huge numbers of people worldwide, but because it killed a higher percentage of those sickened, it often killed them very quickly, and it seemed to focus on an unusual group: 20- to 40-year-olds.
Let’s hope this one is much tamer, although the behavior of Chinese authorities doesn’t indicate business as usual for the flu. Then again, maybe they are just especially determined not to let this one get out of hand. Let’s very much hope it does not.
Nervous intensity
Speaking of the ballet “Agon” – and we were – I noticed this quote from the man cast in the original, Arthur Mitchell, about the qualities of his partner Diana Adams:
Diana’s nervous intensity made the whole pas de deux work because it’s not so much the difficulty of the steps or how flexible you are, it’s the precariousness.
I hadn’t seen that when I wrote the post. But that’s a succinct way to put what I was driving at.
But I wonder whether today’s audiences see or care about the difference. For one thing, you can’t notice a difference if all you’re seeing is today’s often-heartless technical wizardry, in which all sense of what I called “vulnerability” and Mitchell called “precariousness” has departed. Maybe even the idea that “precariousness” would be a value in ballet is foreign to today’s audiences. Maybe they choose technique over everything else.
But one of the values of YouTube as I see it is that it allows new generations to see for themselves and compare, even if it’s only in two dimensions rather than three. I often notice with all the performing arts – and that incudes music – that there are many young people commenting at YouTube who seem to notice and mourn what has been lost, while many others are just puzzled by the technical imperfection of the olden days.
I certainly am one who mourns what is lost. Starting several decades ago, I became far less willing to attend theater, for example, as well as movies and dance. Not only had prices skyrocketed, but quality was uneven at best and often much worse than that, even for highly-praised productions. Art exhibits are suspect too, not only the newer art generally but the relentless PC message of the words posted on the walls to explain even (or perhaps especially) the older art.
No doubt some would say I’m out-of-date, and/or remembering a past that never was. Perhaps these feelings really are part of getting older, and then old. But I think I’m talking about something very real, something that can be seen with the eye and felt with the heart.
Agon: no contest, no struggle
“Agon” is the name of a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, with music by Stravinsky. It premiered in 1957 and was revolutionary at the time, but nowadays it doesn’t seem so strange. It featured a pas de deux between a man – Arthur Mitchell in the original, who happened to be black – and a white woman, Diana Adams, and the interracial aspect was part of its novelty and daring in 1957. Now it would hardly be noticed.
But none of that is my concern. What I’m interested in is the change in performance style and technique between then and now. “Agon” was always part gymnastics, in which the woman’s body is twisted and pulled into poses that are elegant and yet extreme. But in 1957, although ballet dancers were very flexible, they were not so remarkably and almost freakishly pliant as they are today, and that changes this ballet. When the woman’s body was not so loose there was something in the choreography to be struggled against, a heightened tension and stress. Now there is no such thing.
What I see when I view this ballet now is a more athletic exercise, and a gymnastic rather than balletic one at that. Your mileage may differ.
Here’s a dance critic who agrees with me:
In today’s “Agon,” I think, you will see less vulnerability and more boldness, more sex and less pain. Balanchine, by asking so much of his ballerinas, won for them great freedom and mastery, but, some nights, it seems that they traded something—shading, poignance—in the process.
Not just “some nights” – I’d say all nights.
The dancer in this video, Maria Kowroski, makes it quite explicit when she says (starting around 1:50) “Everything came very natural to me” when she learned the ballet.”I didn’t feel like I’m struggling.” Well, I suppose one doesn’t have to feel the struggle in order to convey the sense of struggle that should be there. But it helps. She not only doesn’t seem to feel that sense or convey that sense, but she doesn’t even seem to realize that she should convey it in this particular ballet, the meaning of whose title is not just “contest” but also “struggle.”
From the New Yorker piece:
Arthur Mitchell has said that when he and Adams first performed the “Agon” duet, it looked different from today’s renditions. For dancers of that period, the steps were very difficult, he said, and Adams was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to do them. This made her seem vulnerable. She might also have been nervous about the duet’s sexual frankness.
Here’s the original. You will probably notice almost immediately the markedly reduced flexibility demonstrated by Diana Adams (typical for her time), but also the different emotional quality that critic Acocella describes. This clip shows a bit more of the pas de deux than the first one did, but neither video is long:
[NOTE: I agree with Acocella about how difficult it used to be to view old performances like that, years after the fact. One had to go to a special dance library such as the one at Lincoln Center, and the films had to be viewed there and neither taken out nor duplicated. Now there’s YouTube and an abundance of them – although I believe there are still many that are only available at the library.]
[NOTE II: And by the way, this is not one of my favorite ballets. I can take it or leave it. But I find the then-vs.-now aspect of ballet very interesting.]
The impeachment trial: truth, lies, and narratives
It’s often been said that left and right in this country are watching different movies. We do indeed tend to read different sources of information in which different things are covered and emphasized and others ignored. But regaridng the impeachment trial, we are watching (or in most cases, not watching) the same movie, and seeing two realities.
That doesn’t mean the two “realities” are equally true, however.
When I was in law school, I learned ways to argue for almost any position. That’s what lawyers do if they are to serve their clients – argue the case to the best of their ability. So lawyers are adept at making arguments out of almost nothing at all, and can use emotion or rhetoric or any number of tricks to create what appears to some people to be a sound argument when it’s really all smoke and mirrors.
That doesn’t mean, however, that a thinking person can’t listen to one argument vs. another argument and decide one is correct the other is bunk. Sometimes it is just that clear. But it’s not clear to everyone. People can be swayed by arguments without much behind them, if those arguments happen to touch on certain things that matter to the listener, and fit in with the listener’s pre-existing biases.
In a regular courtroom, our system of law tries to build in rules that encourage a jury to come to the best verdict, one that reflects not prejudice or emotion or a reaction to rhetorial devices, but instead is based on scrupulously validated evidence. Those rules are many and complex, but they include – as an added safeguard against miscarriages of justice – a presumption of innocence for the defendant. Justice does not always triumph, but the idea is to encourage that triumph by those rules.
If has also often been said that an impeachment trial is not an ordinary trial, although it uses the same word. The point of an impeachment trial is different: removal from office. And although the Constitution dictates that a high crime/misdemeanor is supposed to be the charge, there is really nothing to stop the House from disobeying that directive, as we have seen with the Trump impeachment. The voters in the trial portion are neither jurors nor judges, they are senators who will vote to impeach or not, and although they are supposed to be objective they are political actors deeply and personally involved in the trial’s outcome.
I cannot even imagine listening to Schiff and Nadler and not recoiling in revulsion from their obvious lies and the tremendous weakness of their case. Just to take one small example:
“They said things over and over again that are simply not true,” Cipollone added. “One of them is there is no evidence of Donald Trump’s interest in burden sharing.” Yet Burden-sharing was discussed in the transcript of the call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. The lawyer quoted directly from the transcript of the call.
Democrats, on the other hand, see and hear something quite different, cheered on by the gushing MSM:
The excessive fawning by pundits and reporters over a middling speech by a middling congressman was just insufferable.
If you think I exaggerate, take Greg Miller, a national-security correspondent for the Washington Post, who contended that Schiff is perhaps the most “underestimated” politician California has ever produced, and “will leave a mark on history, exceeding nearly all contemporaries.”
Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine — and now an advocate for overturning the First Amendment — declared: “When we get back to teaching civics in this country—as we must do—Adam Schiff’s sweeping, beautifully-wrought opening argument, should be on the syllabus.”
CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, an ostensibly unbiased observer, prefaced his remarks by saying, “I don’t want to sound like a partisan,” before praising a “dazzling” performance — the second-best courtroom appearance he’d ever witnessed. “Adam Schiff knows the facts. That is something that you can’t fake,” Toobin told the panel.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin disagreed with both, insisting that Schiff had delivered “the most brilliant legal presentation I have heard. None comes close. The tone, the facts, the anticipated defenses. I am in awe.”
It’s mind-boggling, and yet it’s not. The first element here is confirmation bias. The second is that even I must admit that, given what Schiff had to work with – essentially, nothing but innuendo and lies – he made the most if it in rhetorical terms. It’s hard to see how a better argument could have been made, given the same utter lack of evidence of wrongdoing, the presence of evidence that contradicts the reasons for the impeachment, and the absence of a requisite crime, as well as the high degree of suspiciousness in the actions of the Bidens regarding Ukraine.
So these commentators actually might be in awe of the fact that Schiff managed to use rhetoric to create some sort of case out of nothing.
But I think the heart of it for the MSM is that it’s a good thing the public has mostly tuned out, because then the MSM can create its own narrative, as it so often does. If their readers haven’t been watching Schiff, except for a few moments here and there, and mostly get their news and opinion from the MSM, then the media can act as though Schiff made the incontrovertible, undeniable case for Trump’s guilt that Schiff himself insists he made, and none of their listerners will be the wiser.
Hey, shouldn’t the Democratic candidates who are senators…
…recuse themselves from the impeachment trial because they are running for president as Trump’s opponents, and his removal through a “guilty” verdict would benefit them greatly politically?
Actually, that’s true of all the senators in the sense that, whether they support a guilty verdict or not, and whether they are running for president or not, they have a vested and personal political interest in the outcome. It will affect them, pro or con.
I’m not seriously suggesting they should recuse themselves. I’m merely pointing out one of the many absurdities of the Democrats’ position towards Trump’s Ukraine call when they assert that it is suspect because investigating Hunter Biden could harm Joe Biden politically and thus help Trump politically.
All politicians make decisions for many reasons, and one of them is almost always for personal political benefit. The real question is whether the person has the constitutional and/or statutory power to make that decision, and whether the person follows the proper procedure in carrying it out, and whether there are independent reasons and arguments for wanting it done.
There are two big stories…
…that I’m not going to cover in exhaustive detail today. But here are some links.
The first story is about the 2016 White House meeting with Ukainian officials to discuss Burisma and Biden, and its significance.
The second is the FISA court’s determination that at least two of the FISA warrants for the Carter Page investigation were invalid.
That could certainly help Page win any lawsuits he might be contemplating.
More:
The FISA court order also noted that it is a federal crime for any federal official to “intentionally…disclose[] or use[] information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having any reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized” by law. The following sentence of Boasberg’s ruling is redacted, raising questions about whether the government used any information obtained pursuant to the now-invalid Page surveillance warrants in other cases.
So, will this ultimately affect the validity of some of the convictions that followed from evidence obtained during those investigations? And will anyone big who signed off on those warrants get into any significant legal trouble as a result?
I think the answer to the last question is “no.” The answer to the first one is “perhaps.”