She had a troubled life in certain ways, but boy could that woman ever sing.
Most people think of “Respect” as Aretha Franklin’s anthem, and I suppose it was. I liked a great many of her songs very much—including that one—but this one had a special place in my heart:
RIP, Aretha Franklin.
San Gimignano is a lovely place, but not quite as lovely when all the parking lots are full and you must circle around and around the town loop looking for a space to open up in one of the lots, along a lot of other circling cars. And it’s really really hot climbing up those hills. On the other hand, if you can climb in a patch of shade, it feels much better.
This is the beautiful setting:
And one of the entrances to the town taken from in-town:
Good. The only bad part about the news is that it gives Brennan the golden opportunity to be in the limelight again, and to fume against Trump—his favorite position and his favorite occupation.
I really don’t question this decision of Trump’s, which is one of those overdetermined moves:
“Erratic” properly describes [Brenna’s] shrill and often mindless attacks on Trump. Moreover, his hatred of the president is so palpable that one can easily imagine him using access to secret information to harm the administration.
To be sure words like “erratic,” “shrill,” “mindless,” and “hatred” are not objective terms…
However, in Brennan’s case, objective factors also support Trump’s decision. Brennan was caught lying about breaking into the computers of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s staff. And, reportedly, he’s in jeopardy with the House Intelligence Committee for lying to Congress about the anti-Trump dossier that collection of falsehoods gathered by partisans for partisan purposes. Indeed, Brennan appears to have played a significant role in promoting the dossier as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump.
A guy like that really ought not have a security clearance…
Brennan, of course, is talking about how his freedom of speech is being curtailed as he gives interviews about the subject of how intimidating this could be. Well, he doesn’t seem at all intimidated and it probably wouldn’t intimidate most people who are no longer in jobs that require such clearance. It also might serve notice to subsequent heads of the CIA or ex-heads of the CIA not to leak or to lie, or to demonstrate extreme partisanship and animus against a president, and still expect to get access to sensitive and confidential information (after retiring) that they will then try to use to destroy that president. Works for me, no matter who the president might be. No president owes such people anything at that point. And they remain perfectly free to talk.
But there’s another factor regarding Brennan and his clearance, one I discussed at some length in this previous post, which can be summarized as the fact that I think Brennan should never have gotten a security clearance from the CIA in the first place, much less become head of that organization.
I also believe—as I wrote in this post—that former officials should not automatically retain their security clearances after leaving office.
Seems that socialism is no longer a dirty word these days in the US as long as you call it “democratic socialism.” How did socialism get rehabilitated?
I suppose that enough kids have finally matured who got little at school to counter the idea of socialism (or who actually heard it touted), and who don’t personally remember Communism and the Cold War. They think there’s something very nice about socialism; can’t we all just be more equal?
And then in 2016 the candidacy of Bernie Sanders legitimized it. Grandpa the socialist was surprisingly attractive to a lot of young people. He also made the Democratic primaries far more interesting than they otherwise would have been.
I believe that initially Sanders was mostly there to give Hillary Clinton enough competition to stop the Democratic race from being such a big snoozefest that no one paid attention. He wasn’t expected to be competitive–old white Jewish socialist guy–but when he appeared to be developing into a serious challenge to Clinton, it was probably panic time for the Democratic party establishment, who set about making sure he didn’t actually get the nomination. They had no intention of letting him do that, and it didn’t happen (superdelegates, anyone?).
But Bernie’s candidacy was the gift that kept on giving to the growing leftist wing of the party, because his popularity let the Democratic Party know what they hadn’t known up till that point and probably didn’t see coming, either: that it was now possible for them to claim the mantle of socialism and give it voice. No need to hide any more—although they may be a bit premature on that.
If you take a trip back in time, Bernie Sanders used to be quite cagey and secretive about the socialist that he undoubtedly was and is. I find these quotes pretty extraordinary in their open admission of deception:
Sanders, 73, has been preaching socialism for nearly half a century, and he cites Eugene Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, as his hero. But he hasn’t always embraced the label.
“I myself don’t use the word socialism,” he said in 1976 in the Vermont Cynic, a student publication at the University of Vermont, “because people have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech.”
Brainwashed, eh?
Here’s one of my favorites:
“I’ve stayed away from calling myself a socialist,” Sanders said in the Boston Globe in the aftermath of his win in ‘81, “because I did not want to spend half my life explaining that I did not believe in the Soviet Union or in concentration camps.”
Wouldn’t want to actually have to answer any questions about where leftism has so often led, would we?
And here’s Bernie’s definition of socialism. You can see where that “democratic” label came from in the recent move to call it “democratic socialism”:
All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small ‘d.’ I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who’s making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well.”
You see? Socialism is just economic democracy, my friends. Nothing to fear.
…now there’s a new ebola epidemic. So far this one seems to involve a higher percentage of health care workers than previous epidemics.
But now there are more tools to deal with ebola than ever before. There seems to be a vaccination that helps, for example:
…[T]he WHO is continuing its strategy of contact tracing for vaccination, with more than 600 potential contacts already identified. Ghebreyesus said that 260 have already been vaccinated, including some from cities, but that vaccinators are being moved from Guinea and hope to be on the ground today in Bene and Mangina. Healthcare workers have also started to be vaccinated, he added.
Ghebreyesus noted that in addition to vaccines, five people were treated with a monoclonal antibody, and he characterized those who received the treatment as doing “well.”
Good.
They seem to love the roundabout concept here in Tuscany. I think roundabouts are abominations, but I’ll forgive the Italians their rondaboutphilia because this is nevertheless a great place to visit.
Many people in yesterday’s thread mentioned the Italian expertise at industrial design. Agreed, except for one thing—the toilet in my hotel. Anyone other than a giant is insecurely perched up so high that their feet don’t come near touching the ground. And instead of being relatively flat, the seat itself sticks up in a kind of ridge, which has the effect of heavily digging into any body parts making contact with it.
I was at a neighborhood pot luck dinner here on Wednesday evening that involved the neighborhood of the enormous rented villa at which some of my relatives are staying (a residence to which I’m slated to transfer myself this Saturday, with a view that reminds me very much of Napa, California). It turns out that Italian potluck has much the same menu as potlucks in my New England experience: heavy on the couscous salads, the pasta salads, and the green salads.
But I’m well aware that Italians know how to cook and they know how to eat. I’m looking forward to visiting a few restaurants for a lot more than pasta salad.
Tomorrow I do my first sightseeing. The plan is to visit this place, then back to the family villa for a little dinner for about 25.
Here I am in—Italy!
Why Italy? Well, why not.
But August is not the time to visit Italy I hear you say. It’s awfully hot, and besides the whole country is on vacation.
True, but here I am. I didn’t choose the date. It’s a family event and a reunion of sorts, in Tuscany. I’m not the greatest of travelers, especially long distances, and I’m still recovering from what turned out to be about a 24-hour trip and jet lag. Not to mention the fact that the hotel I’ll be in till Saturday keeps throwing me offline and not letting me get back on. I’d planned a lot of already-prepared posts for you as well as some new stuff. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men…and bloggers…
I assume this will all get straightened out soon, and I’ll be posting and vacationing at the same time. But for the moment please bear with me and keep checking back.
One or two observations about Italy—
I landed in Rome in a thunder and lightning storm. Fun! But the enormous airport there was a model of efficiency, at least in my experience. The international arrivals building was loaded with people from all over the world, pulling their wheeled luggage and hurrying wherever they were hurrying, and the helpful signs at the airport were numerous, keyed with lots of graphics and arrows that actually turned out to point to the destination they said they were pointing to, amazingly enough. The signs were in Italian and English for the most part, but as I said the graphics would help even people who don’t speak either language (fortunately for me, I’m adequate in one).
The luggage came immediately, and contrary to rumor and fear, it was all there. But it was the bathroom sinks in the airport that I loved the best. Each one was large and had three operations for the weary traveler. The first was a faucet that turned on automatically, something most airport faucets do these days except ordinarily more than half of them are malfunctioning. These functioned perfectly. Likewise, each sink had its own automatic soap dispenser to the right of the faucet, working perfectly as well. But the piece de resistance (how do you say that in Italian?) was the individual hand drier to the faucet’s left that sent forth a small but intense blast of hot air that was focused and effective, drying the hands in about three seconds flat.
Beautiful.
More anon! It’s better than endless chatter about the most pressing issue of the day, Trump and Omarosa, isn’t it? But that’s a low bar.
Oh, and Italy? Beautiful, too.
Surprise! I’ve been traveling for close to 24 hours. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow or later tonight (well, not all about it, but something about it).
I still plan to post regularly during my trip, on the usual eclectic mix. But every now and then I may throw in a bit about where I am and what I’m doing. I’m not turning into a travel blogger, though.
Till later…
In certain times and places, the left and the religious fundamentalist right become closely aligned—if only temporarily, as they were during the Iranian revolution of 1979. Their togetherness was puzzling to me at the time, but I later decided that it was an alliance of convenience in which each group thought it was using the other to effect the downfall of the Shah, and each thought it and it alone would be the eventual winner.
Turned out the mullahs won that bet.
In a recent re-reading of Stephen Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism I came across some passages that described other ways in which these two extremes—which appear to be opposites but in many ways are not—resemble each other. In this passage, Hicks isn’t discussing Iran (he was mostly speaking of Europe), but he writes:
What links the [collectivist political] Right and the Left is a core set of themes: anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialization, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group violence, conflict, and war. Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet for all their differences, both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly consistent view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialization, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups…
While the details are messy the broad point is clear: the collectivist Right and the collectivist Left are united in their major goals and in identifying their major opposition…
…liberalism did not penetrate deeply into the main lines of political thinking in Germany…By the early twentieth century, the dominant issues for most Continental political thinks were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option—but rather exactly when it would collapse—and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the socialism of the future.
Those last paragraphs are about Europe (and there’s much much more in Hicks’ book). But I think you can see that with a few tweaks they apply to Iran as well. And not just to Iran. Liberal capitalism—the Enlightenment, Locke and the rest—did not take hold in most of the world. It did take hold in much of the West, although to different degrees in different areas. I would say that although Britain was an early stronghold, the US surpassed it. It made advances in some former British colonies as well, to a very slightly lesser degree than in the US (Canada and Australia come to mind, with Australia beating out Canada). France and other Western European countries were devoted to a lesser extent, and Germany to a far lesser extent, as we can see from the events of the first half of the twentieth century. It is possible that eastern Europe, having had the Left collectivist experience forced on it, has now recoiled by becoming more liberal capitalist than some of western Europe.
In Iran the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right duked it out, and to the extent that liberal capitalism had been imposed by the Shah (and it was not very liberal, either) it died. There was very little fertile soil in which it might have rooted, but the collectivist Left and Right combined to destroy whatever buds might have been growing. Now? I think the youth of Iran have absorbed a certain degree of desire for liberal capitalism, gleaned from looking at the world as much as they’ve been allowed to. But there really is no strong tradition of it there, and that’s one of the difficulties.
..keeps on…trucking.
I never had a taste for whatever it is she does. But anyway, she’s still doing it. At nearly 60.
It was only 1984. And it was racial humor. But this Saturday Night Live classic is so much more gentle than today’s humor, and I think it’s genuinely funny. Murphy is mocking white people here, for sure, but he’s also mocking black people, albeit in a more subtle way. He was an equal opportunity mocker:
Did you first see that video when it initially came out? (I did.) Or did you first see it at some later point, but before today? If so, has your opinion of its humor changed between your initial viewing and now?