Decades ago—before videos, before Netflix, before all the myriad alternative ways to see movies—I used to go out to movie theaters quite a bit and I ended up seeing all the big movies every year and many of the smaller ones as well. But I never was what you’d call a movie buff, although I had my favorites and enthusiasms. And as a child I adored certain old movies on TV, what we now might call the classics.
But somewhere along the line I stopped going to the movies much if at all, although I still kept up with the big ones through rentals and/or streaming. But I found myself liking fewer and fewer of them, and at this point it’s extremely rare for me to want to see them at all.
No doubt this is just another sign of my getting older or maybe even Getting Old.
So I care very very little about those lists that appear at the end of every year—this person or that person’s list of the very best must-see movies of the year. But I thought I’d look at one anyway, and the list I chose (rather arbitrarily) was this at Vox. Turns out I’ve not only not seen any of the movies on the list, I’ve never even heard of any of them.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that; it makes me seem even more out of it than I’d realized. It’s quite possible, too, that if I saw some of them I’d actually like them. But in recent years I’ve so often gone to highly-recommended and reviewed films and been either unimpressed or downright bored and/or annoyed that I’ve gotten out of the habit of trusting reviews at all.
That’s where you come in, dear readers. Seen any good films lately? Maybe I’ll even watch one, if you make a good case for it.
Despite threats that they planned to release ISIS prisoners and abandon their front-line positions against the remaining pockets of ISIS fighters, Kurdish fighters of the YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces have not fled.
Even Erdogan’s threats to march East of the Euphrates to massacre the Kurds in their defacto capital in Qarmishli were bluster, Debka argued, referring to a phone conversation between Presidents Trump and Erdogan on Dec. 14, when the Turk promised his army would not cross the Euphrates.
Trump’s White House team also told Middle East allies that the troop pullout would be phased out between four to six months. “During that time, Syria is bound to see many developments that may require Washington to revise its plans,” Debka reported.
“The US and Iraq are in advanced negotiations for the deployment to the Iraqi-Syria border of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) – the “Golden Division” – which drove ISIS out of Mosul. It will stand in the path of Iranian and Iraqi Shiite militias crossings into Syria,” Debka added.
Could Trump and/or his advisors have a plan after all? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.
On the other hand, if Trump had a plan to protect the Kurds, why did Mattis resign and write this?:
My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.
Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.
If Trump plans to protect the Kurds, then what are the Trump views with which Mattis is unaligned? Well, maybe it’s something connected with this:
“I would not go into Syria, but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools,” Trump had tweeted five years ago.
Trump’s actions in Syria encompass his preference for flexibility, quick strikes or withdrawals with no long term commitment. And that’s exactly what frustrates a national security establishment whose watershed moment was still the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan. They foolishly misread Trump by confusing commitment with consistency, and unpredictability with inconsistency…
Trump understands that there’s no point in maintaining a doomed foreign colony of tens of thousands in Afghanistan, or setting one up in Syria. These colonies give meaning and purpose to their populations, experts, analysts, journalists, aid workers, who shape our foreign policy, but they don’t help America.
It still doesn’t really explain Mattis, who was not on board for nation-building. Is it a question of timing—does he think Trump announced the withdrawal too soon?
The press coverage, as you would expect, is spinning this as Trump-caused. A typical one-sided characterization can be found at Vanity Fair: “Trump is digging in, negotiations are at a standstill, and even Republicans are losing patience.”
Oh, so it’s Trump who’s the one dug in, and there really were bona fide “negotiations” that stopped? Everything I’ve ever read from the Democrats involves a refusal to budge at all. Both sides have dug in, and negotiations were always stalemated. The one part of that sentence that’s probably true is that some Republicans will be losing patience long before any Democrats do.
Here’s an article in American Thinker that suggests how the GOP can end the impasse:
Republicans in the Senate have been trying to pass funding for the border wall by ending the Democrat filibuster. This would require 60 votes in the Senate. There is no real hope of getting one Democrat in the Senate, let alone nine. As if this was not obvious enough, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has made it abundantly clear that Democrats will not permit any funding of the border wall…
President Trump, realizing that the border wall funding must pass to fulfill his campaign promise and to protect national security, called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on December 21 to use the nuclear option to pass the funding. However, Senator McConnell made it clear that Republicans don’t have the votes necessary to use the nuclear option. So the nuclear option is also not a viable option for border wall funding.
This leaves budget reconciliation as the only option to pass the $5.7 billion in border wall funding. Budget reconciliation, like the nuclear option, allows for a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate to pass legislation, rather than the normally required 60 votes. However, unlike the nuclear option, it would not break precedent and would likely enable the border funding bill to pass.
And yet it has not been done. Why? One possible reason is that the GOP really does not want this done. Another possible reason is that just a few members of the GOP don’t want it done, but since the GOP majority is very slim (51 plus Pence in a pinch for breaking a tie) there may be enough of those members to put the kibosh on reconciliation for this purpose.
How many people who think Trump is a tyrant because he does too much by executive decree felt the same way about Obama when he used the same tool? Does the Venn diagram of those two groups intersect at all?
Whatever one thinks about that, I think it’s crystal clear that what was done by executive fiat can be ondone by executive fiat. For example, i heartily applaud the Trump administration move under Betsy DeVos to rescind the following Obama directive;
In January 2014, a “Dear Colleague” letter was sent out that essentially required that students be disciplined in accordance with their representation in the student body. The letter states that even a race-neutral policy that results in more minority students being disciplined will be termed discriminatory and Department of Education will intervene. In fact, arrests of students by law enforcement for school related reasons could trigger federal action against the school system…
The Obama administration directive was one of many that followed the dictates of what is known as “disparate impact“;
Disparate impact in United States labor law refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral…
A violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class. Therefore, the disparate impact theory under Title VII prohibits employers “from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. A facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect.” Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.
The application of this concept is from employment law. The doctrine of disparate impact rests on the fiction that all groups are equal and that all differences among them are the result of some sort of discrimination even if the discrimination can’t be detected and is unintentional. Although I’ve not researched its history (and don’t have a lot of time to do so right now), my guess is that the use of the disparate impact doctrine came about because equalizing the rules didn’t have the desired effect of racially and sexually proportionate hiring.
With school discipline, the Obama-era directive was absurd because it violates common sense to believe that disciplinary problems are evenly spread out among all groups. A person doesn’t have to believe such differences are innate to believe that they exist. They may indeed be mediated by cultural causes and differences, but they are real and to pretend otherwise is to let PC thought run rampant, and the people who will suffer will be the entire school system and the children in it. Those children will be both those who don’t need disciplining and those who do, because no child benefits from a chaotic classroom and fear of aggression or the ability to commit aggression without external controls. However, the left must sacrifice all those children in order to pretend that the world conforms to its vision of what should be.
I’m glad that DeVos has managed to correct this—for now. However, does anyone doubt that if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, the disparate impact directive is likely to be put in place again?
It doesn’t seem likely that it has. But lately I’ve noticed that there’s no spam in my Yahoo email spam folder. That’s a first. Anyone else having the same experience?
UPDATE 12/27/18 12:57 PM:
I’ve discovered what the change is with Yahoo spam. As suspected, they haven’t done away with spam at all. They’ve just stopped showing how many spam emails a person has, so that now you have to click on the spam folder to see.
A step backward rather than forward. The spam is still coming in, although I think there’s less of it than there used to be.
The opioid abuse (and overdose) epidemic isn’t fueled by chronic pain patients. Most of the abuse problem involves the use of illicit drugs by addicts, and then to a lesser extent the selling of drugs left over from short-term prescriptions to deal with acute pain. There are also patients who fake pain in order to obtain drugs.
Many people who truly suffer from chronic pain of a serious type often need to be on opiates in order to have any quality of life at all.
The government is trying to deal with and control opioid abuse, but somewhere along the line the message got garbled and some chronic pain patients have been the ones to suffer, while the abuse statistics continue to climb in the rest of the population.
It’s the worst of both worlds:
Political leaders and government officials often failed to note the bulk — at least 60 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — of the overdose epidemic was caused by illicit drugs, not prescription painkillers.
And when officials did address the portion of deaths due to prescriptions, advocates of safe opioid use argue, they often lumped together pain patients and people with addiction who illegally obtained someone else’s prescribed opioids. That made for a perfect storm, which formed the basis for a slew of hardline state and federal policies, including a Trump administration vow to slash prescriptions by 30 percent over the next three years.
Either in response to the CDC guidelines or as proactive measure to deal with the opioid crisis on their own, at least 33 states have enacted some type of legislation related to prescription limits, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Health care providers and pain patients who have Medicare prescription plans are bracing for January, when the federal insurance program will give its insurers and pharmacists the authority to reject prescriptions that deviate from CDC recommended dosage.
“The CDC guidelines were geared to primary care doctors, but they have been hijacked and weaponized as an excuse for draconian legislation,” said Michael Schatman, a clinical psychologist and director of research and development at Boston Pain Care, a multi-disciplinary pain clinic, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pain Research. “Illicit opioids, not prescription opioids, are driving overdose deaths.”
The article describes some chronic pain patients who are committing suicide as a result of doctors cutting back even now in anticipation of later cutbacks. It’s a sad and terrible situation.
I was a chronic pain patient for close to 13 years, beginning in my early 40s. For much of that time my pain was fairly severe and sometimes very severe, and it was neuropathic pain, a type that’s particularly difficult to control even with narcotics (I’ve written about it here and here). I wouldn’t wish that degree of chronic pain on a dog or my worst enemy.
I never took narcotics, but that was because I was literally terrified of them, plus I was told that opioids wouldn’t even help with my condition. This was a long time ago, and perhaps the medical point of view on that has changed in the intervening years, but I remember one of the first doctors who treated me saying to me, “Nothing will touch this pain, not even morphine.” That made me understand why people with chronic pain sometimes kill themselves.
But it’s been my impression that a lot of people who’ve never faced chronic pain do not understand the phenomenon at all. They imagine a type of pain that’s not as severe as chronic pain can be. But perhaps more importantly, they imagine a type of pain that’s time-limited and that improves on a daily or weekly basis. The thing that distinguishes chronic pain is the fact that it does not improve and the patient sees no end in sight, which saps the two basic ingredients patients require to carry on: energy and hope.
What states have passed these laws limiting chronic pain patients to the CDC prescribing guidelines? How strict are these laws? How many insurance companies will deny drug coverage if a patient exceeds those guidelines? This could be a real disaster for people who are already suffering more than enough.
An award-winning German journalist who was recently found to have fabricated parts of stories may be facing more trouble.
Claas Relotius, 33, is facing new accusations that he solicited donations for orphans of the war in Syria, donations that he ultimately pocketed, reported CBS.
The money he collected was for children he’d profiled, but at least one of them was apparently a figment of his creative imagination. It’s not clear how much money he raised, and it’s not certain he took the money although it’s suspected and will be further investigated. He also wrote other stories about the imaginary orphan and his attempts to bring the children to Germany for adoption, and these tales were also untrue.
Nothing about this surprises me, because a con man is a con man. It’s also unsurprising that there are so many liars in journalism; Relotius is hardly alone in this. After all, a “higher truth” is superior to the mere factual truth, especially when you’re intent on saving the world.
Jay Rosen, a more old-fashioned journalist, doesn’t seem to get it:
I don't know how our journalists came to see "storytelling" as the heart of what they do, and "storyteller" as a self-description. I can think of 4-5 elements of journalism more central than "story." Truthtelling, grounding public conversation in fact, verification… listening.
I think it’s pretty obvious how it came to be so accepted that journalists should be telling “stories” and that these stories have a moral and a political aim. It coincides with the greater use of the word “journalists” to describe what used to be known as “reporters.” It also (as I wrote Monday) has to do with the relative youth of today’s journalists and their lack of apprenticeship in the salt mines of straight reporting of mundane stories. Instead, they tend to be the product of journalism schools.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the vast majority of today’s journalists are liberals or leftists. That’s the atmosphere in which young journalists are steeped. There’s also the influence of post-modernism and its teaching that truth is relative and that the narrative is all.
The phenomenon of “stories” taking the place of truth is multiply-determined.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Merry Night-Before-Christmas and Merry Christmas!]
…a creature was stirring.
Last night was Christmas Eve. I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.
A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.
A mouse. Very much stirring.
I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.
But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?
The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.
What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till he arrived. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.
Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.
But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.
And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.
I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.
And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):
But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.
I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.
My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.
Perhaps you’ve heard of German journalist Claas Relotius. He wrote for the German periodical Der Spiegel and and had won “numerous awards such as CNN’s Journalist of the Year and Germany’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.” I guess you’d say he qualified for the adjective “renowned.”
Well, now he’s renowned for another reason—he’s been revealed as a fabulist on the order of Stephen Glass, who wrote fake stories for The New Republic and was finally exposed and disgraced, but not until after he’d been hailed as a journalistic wunderkind. That was about twenty years ago, and although there are similarities in their stories and methods, there are differences that reflect how far journalism has fallen in those intervening twenty years.
For example, although Glass made up many articles out of the whole cloth, he was aware of TNR’s fairly rigorous fact-checking of the time and created an elaborate back-story for each article to fool the fact-checkers:
[Glass] got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.
It all worked because of his skill at creating incredibly complex scenes and also because of that accommodating personality [of Glass’s].
That’s a tremendous amount of effort expended by Glass. But Relotius didn’t have to work that hard to fool his magazine. Fact-checking of the type that had existed at TNR back in the 90s, when Glass was operating, could be thwarted for a significant amount of time—as Glass’s successful capers proved—but it was difficult to do. For Relotius, however, evading the “world’s largest fact-checking organization” run by Der Spiegel was a relative piece of cake.
How could that be? Well, largest doesn’t equal best. As the WSJ points out:
In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Anderson [one of the authors of a piece that exposed Relotius] wrote in an email that none of the people she spoke with in Fergus Falls referenced in the Der Spiegel article were approached for fact-checking by the magazine.
In an article Wednesday, Der Spiegel wrote that Mr. Relotius “distorts reality” in the article about Fergus Falls. A spokesman for the magazine said that Der Spiegel’s fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” adding that the department reviews each story sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility, followed by a review between the department and the story’s author.
So what appears to matter these days to Spiegel is whether the story is credible (remember that word?) rather than whether it’s true. Another thing that sometimes matters is whether the story suits the editors’ political purposes (anti-Trump, for example). “Too good to fact-check” seems to have really been a practice at Der Spiegel.
Relotius is 33 years old and has been writing for Der Spiegel since 2011, when he was around 26. That’s very young, and is similar to Glass who was even younger (23 when he started writing for TNR and 26 when he was fired).
I don’t think their youth is a coincidence, either (and you can add Jayson Blair, a rising star for the NY Times who was fired for the same offenses at the ripe old age of 27, having started there at the age of 23). Years ago, writers of those ages would have been relegated to learning their craft by covering town council meetings and building dedications. But now they are pushed into the limelight, bask in it, and are willing to lie to get more of it.
[NOTE: Relotius also may have set up a charity scam.]
After the announcement of the Syria and Afghanistan pullout, some Trump-defenders have emerged. One is Rand Paul, who says:
I think the burden is really on Mattis and others who want perpetual war to explain why if there is no military solution we’re sending more troops. I think the onus is really on them to explain themselves…
I don’t think we have enough money to be paying to build and rebuild and build and rebuild Afghanistan. The President is right and I think the people agree with him. Let’s rebuild America. Let’s spend that money here at home…
The President [Obama] promised when we went into Syria, our goal was to wipe out ISIS. We took ninety-nine percent of the land, they’re on the run, can the people who live there not do anything? We spent trillions of dollars arming the entire Middle East, arming Afghan army, can they not do anything? Do we have to do everything? We defeated ISIS. But now you have the– the hawks in the administration and throughout Congress saying, “Oh, now we have to wait until Russia and Iran leave Syria.” Well, that was never our goal and it’s never going to happen. So those people are advocating for perpetual war…
They’re going to fight each other until the end of time. It’s all of them. It’s– it’s a inter-complicated mess that has to do with Sunni extremism versus Shia extremism, and also some other various battles in between. But if we wait until there’s potent– no potential for anybody fighting each other when we leave, we will be there forever.
After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.
Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?
There’s a great deal of food for thought there, both from Paul and from Sullivan. To tackle it in depth would require a book—and probably a lot of information I’m not privy to—but let me just take the obvious things that occur to me.
There are different criteria for going into a country and for staying in a country. Sometimes one administration decides to send troops for a certain purpose, and another administration (sometimes with a very different outlook on foreign affairs and on military intervention) comes into power. Does the mission continue? How to decide such a thing? Do we want our foreign policy to seesaw wildly based on whim? Are there any objective criteria that would transcend the vagaries of shifting politics? If so, what would such criteria be?
And what if the situation changes? It’s often referred to as “mission creep,” but what about the “creep” that occurs in the situation we might face? What is a cost-effective intervention both in terms of money and in terms of American lives and limbs sacrificed? How much is too much? Is it a question of money? Is it a question of number of troops? Is it a question of casualties? Is it a question of time?
I think that way too many people are ignoring the complexity of these matters and the extreme difficulty of coming up with answers. We prefer simple black or white solutions, and there aren’t any. The truth is that Islam is involved in a centuries-old civil war, but that war has also involved us directly when it spills over into terrorist activity by Muslims, activity which is somewhat connected to that civil war and somewhat independent of it.
There’s much much more to the complexity of the thing—including all the larger geopolitical ramifications (i.e. Russian involvement)—but that’s a little sample of what I mean.
When Andrew Sullivan writes about our troops on the ground in Yemen—the Green Berets that are engaged in a “secret war”—he includes a link to this NY Times article. How many of his readers will click on that link and read what the article says? Well, I did, and I discovered this:
…[L]ate last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.
With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities…
There is no indication that the American commandos have crossed into Yemen as part of the secretive mission.
But sending American ground forces to the border is a marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters who are deep in Yemen…
A half-dozen officials — from the United States military, the Trump administration, and European and Arab nations — said the American commandos are training Saudi ground troops to secure their border. They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen.
More at the link, but the main thrust of the article is that there are a dozen of these troops, their activities are designed to help the Saudis and hurt Iran, they are on the border and not in Yemen itself, and that the general policy (possibly minus the troops) was actually started under Obama and escalated ever-so-slightly under Trump. I can’t get my tonsils in an uproar about such a mission, which seems extremely limited in terms of mission creep and to be at least possibly cost-effective in limiting Iran somewhat (and by the way, Sullivan is very misleading when he says of Yemen that we have “troops deployed there”).
Sullivan adds that “I simply do not believe that the West has the knowledge, the will, or the ability to shape the extremely complicated and endlessly vicious politics of the Middle East.” I can’t argue with that; I don’t believe that we have that knowledge either.
But there’s a little matter of degree. Because we cannot “shape” the politics of the Middle East doesn’t mean we should have nothing to do with it and that refraining utterly from any action there would be better. The questions I’ve asked earlier in this post are the ones we should be asking, and trying to answer.
Sullivan adds “what’s astonishing this time is how the Democrats and much of the liberal Establishment now supports an unending occupation of yet another Middle Eastern country.” Nope, it’s not the least bit “astonishing.” It’s utterly predictable. If a great many Democrats are dedicated to the idea that whatever Trump does is bad and whatever he doesn’t do is good, their pro-intervention attitude makes perfect sense. If Obama had suggested such a pullout it would have been just fine with the Democrats, but since it’s Trump it’s terrible.
What’s needed is an objective analysis of the situation and the actions and alternatives to those actions, irrespective of party or who is president. Ha! Dream on, you say. And I’m afraid you’d be correct in saying that.
[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again.]
This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.
The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.
Flora’s Lebkuchen:
(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)
1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice
Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).
Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.
Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.
Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.
Grease and flour two 9X9 cake pans. Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.
Meanwhile, make the frosting.
Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.
Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).
