Another giraffe:
This video has some cute closeups (try to ignore the annoying banner on the bottom):
All the lies…
…that are fit to print.
Michael Oren: …I talk about an incident that occurred in May of 2010 with the New York Times when Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he alleged that he insinuated that the Arabs accepted the U.N. partition resolution of 1947, and the Jews rejected it. And I called up the editor of the New York Times, and I said wait a minute, this is exactly the opposite. Don’t you check facts? We [Israel] accepted it. The Arabs rejected it, and went to war against it. That was the war of independence. And the Arabs rejected the first two-state solution. And he says well, that’s your interpretation. Now wait a minute, there are certain in-controversial historical facts, uncontestable facts. I mean, did the Allies land, or did they not land on Normandy Beach in June, 1944? And the editor’s response was [analogous to] well, some people think so.
That’s an interesting aside in an interview that focuses on the Times’ recent publication of a tract by the convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti, whom the Times described as “a Palestinian leader and Parliamentarian.”
[ADDENDUM: Well, it’s even worse than I thought at the Times, and I’ve long thought it’s very very bad.
That Normandy quote wasn’t just Oren making an analogy; it was apparently what the Times editor actually said. I interpreted the Oren quote in the Hugh Hewitt interview as being somewhat ambiguous and thought it was most likely an analogy rather than a direct quote, although it’s clear to me (and has been for a long time) that the Times regularly lies about Israel. I’m not defending the Times editors; I’m accusing them.
I’ve finally found this article from two years ago, in which the matter is clarified:
Oren, who was recently elected to Israel’s Knesset, goes on to recount a bizarre exchange he had with New York Times op-ed editor Andrew Rosenthal after Oren felt “compelled” to respond to an erroneous retelling of history that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas published in the New York Times in 2011. In his New York Times op-ed, Oren writes, Abbas implied “the Arabs had accepted the UN’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it,” which is the exact opposite of what actually occurred.
Oren’s recreation of the phone exchange between him and Rosenthal suggests that the New York Times editor is unable to distinguish the difference between fact and opinion:
When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backwards?”
“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.
“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”
“In your view.”
“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach.”
Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”
So Oren has been telling this story for a while and it’s not an analogy. In his book he named the editor—Rosenthal—and the quote is a bit different, but just as bad or worse. So I stand corrected. I was being a bit too kind to the Times, something I’ve not usually been accused of.
I wonder whether Rosenthal believes the moon landing occurred, or whether “some might say so.” Did any historical event actually occur, according to Rosenthal?]
IHOP: food interlude
I went there recently for dinner—it was conveniently located and I was in the mood, although it’s not a place I associate with good food. Merely adequate. So I was pleasantly surprised when I ordered this and discovered it to be really tasty:
That’s something they call a chicken florentine crepe—a crepe wrapped around chicken, cheese, mushrooms, and spinach. Ignore that yucky creamy stuff on the top—I made them put it on the side, and I was glad I did. (I don’t like creamy sauces, but you may love them.)
The crepe itself wasn’t just an afterthought, it was a mighty tasty morsel. Same with the chicken.
All in all, a real bargain for nine dollars and change. And an unexpected one.
Yes, you can hurt yourself doing yoga
I did: my back and my neck.
Here’s how other people have done it.
It will be a runoff for House seat in special election in Georgia
It’s been interesting seeing the spin on yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
What was at stake was a seat in the US House of Representatives, so whatever the outcome, it wasn’t going to change the composition of Congress. But the contest was felt to be symbolic of things to come, and therefore Democrats were intent on taking the seat away from Republicans.
That might have happened last night if the Democrat Jon Ossoff, 30 years old, had managed to get at least 50% of the vote against a Republican field that featured 11 Republican opponents to split the vote on the GOP side (there were some other obscure Democrats running, too, but the Democratic push was to unite and vote for Rosoff, and they did). Instead, he got 48.1%, with Republican Karen Handel getting the largest number of votes of the GOP candidates and winning the right to face Ossoff in the runoff.
Ossoff’s total is similar to the results in the district in the presidential contest in 2016 which saw Trump win there by only 1.5%. So yesterday’s vote seems like a pretty unsurprising outcome to me under the highly-charged circumstances, but it’s being regarded as evidence of something far more important—exactly what, though, depends on who’s doing the analyzing.
Donald Trump considers it a victory, considering how much money the Democrats pumped into this race:
“Despite major outside money, FAKE media support and eleven Republican candidates, BIG “R” win with runoff in Georgia. Glad to be of help!” the president tweeted late Tuesday.
Ossoff himself thought he might be able to win it all:
“The campaign’s goal is not to get into a runoff, though we’ll be ready to fight a runoff if necessary,” Ossoff said in early April. “The campaign’s goal is to win this election outright on April 18.”
On Tuesday morning, Osoff [sic] said the campaign was within “striking distance” of that goal, thanks to a surge in early voter turnout. Democrats vowed to press on should a runoff be required.
“Today was a great day. We saw what looks like pretty high expected turnout. And just could not be happier and more impressed with the community leaders who came out not just today but for the past months and built this special movement,” Ossoff campaign manager Keenan Pontini told Yahoo News, in the waning hours of voting.
The money Ossoff raised was unprecedented for a primary race for the House, and he made the goal of his campaign very clear: voting for him was a way to vote against Trump:
Ossoff electrified national Democrats with a message of anti-Trump resistance, running on a platform of “Make Trump Furious,” and pulled in a record $8.3 million by the end of the first quarter of the year, mostly in small donations and with more than 90 percent of the money coming from out of state. Candidates in contests like the GA-06 primary normally raise only $10,000 or so…
In addition to his unprecedented war chest, Ossoff had a deep well of skilled presidential campaign organizers to draw from as staff and volunteers, thanks to the race being the first competitive contest since the recently concluded presidential campaigns. And he had the support of more than 10,000 volunteers ”” both from around the country and from an array of vibrant local Trump-era resistance groups
So this essentially becamse a national campaign on the part of the Democrats.
None of this means that Ossoff won’t beat Handel in the runoff. He could, and that would be a victory. I have little doubt that the Democrats will pour vast resources into the endeavor, in order to rally their angry voters and improve morale by getting an unaccustomed victory in a district where Republicans used to win as a matter of course.
South Korea…
…♥s Trump.
Voice trends
Have you ever noticed how there are trends and fashions in voices?
The rising inflection at the end of sentences is a particularly annoying one. But another trend is harder to describe, and that’s the tendency of young women to use tones that veer into those of cartoon characters. These voices are higher in pitch than voices tended to be when I was growing up, somewhat more nasal, and the vowels can be quite complex.
For example, I was just on the phone and was asked for my number. After I gave it, the young woman on the other end said, “Thank you.” She was obviously a native speaker and had no foreign accent at all, but it sounded more like “Theenk Yeeuw.” But that doesn’t capture it entirely, either, because it’s the metallic and penetrating quality, as well as the high pitch and the exaggerated cuteness factor, that especially characterize the voice du jour.
The voice is especially noticeable in waitresses. Are they trained to speak that way?
Here’s a woman who’s bucking the trend, and is teaching people how to deepen and calm their voices:
I have a somewhat deep and relaxed voice naturally. But it’s not very dynamic. In fact, I’ve been told by a few people (who profess to love me!) that my voice relaxes them so much that they use my conversations as a sleep-inducer.
That is supposed to be a compliment.
Whatever was the Pentagon waiting for?
Or were they really waiting this long?:
Amid warnings that North Korea and Iran have plans to take out parts of the U.S. electric grid through a cyber attack or atmospheric nuclear blast, the Pentagon is taking steps to both protect the nation’s communications and power lifeline.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has charged BAE Systems to map a system that can detect a cyber attack and gin up an alternative communications network for military and civilian use if the grid is fried, according to Defense Systems, the online newsletter.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey has been warning for years that the grid is extremely vulnerable, and recently the Pentagon and some states have taken the warning seriously. Woolsey and former EMP Commission chief of staff Peter Vincent Pry have pointed a finger at North Korea, which is now threatening the U.S.
My guess is that (it’s my fervent hope, anyway) they’re further along with these defenses than the article indicates.
[NOTE: And I hope it doesn’t become clear that I need to start a “North Korea” category.]
The unintended effects of hikes in the minimum wage
Unintended, yes. But effects such as these should not be unexpected:
San Francisco’s higher minimum wage is causing an increasing number of restaurants to go out of business even before it is fully phased in, a new study by the Harvard Business School found.
The closings were concentrated among struggling, lower-rated restaurants. The higher minimum also caused fewer new restaurants to open, it found.
“We provide suggestive evidence that higher minimum wage increases overall exit rates among restaurants, where a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,” report Dara Lee and Michael Luca, authors of “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” The study used as a case study San Francisco, which has an estimated 6,000 restaurants in the Bay Area and is ratcheting up its minimum wage. Restaurants are one of the largest employers of minimum wage workers.
Now, you might say that this is market forces at work, with the bad restaurants being winnowed out. Then again, minimum wages are not set by market forces; they are set to override them. The purpose? To help workers at that level to earn a more viable income. But of course, if the sources of their wages close up shop, and fewer such workers are employed, you have a smaller pool of workers earning a bit more.
The pie is the pie; it’s just sliced into fewer pieces.
On tax day: the taxman
[NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay of mine from the past.]
Today is the last day to send in your taxes.
Ah, paying taxes. What fun! Along with close to 100% of Americans, I hate the process. It’s an attitude that unites us like almost nothing else. In recent years it’s even worse than usual, because the IRS has proven itself to be beneath contempt.
But to go back in time—tax day always reminds me of my father. He was both a lawyer and a certified public accountant, but it’s the latter profession that conjures up the April memories for me. He was not the Taxman (see video above) but the Taxmiddleman, the one who prepared tax forms—often of a very complex nature—and did it all by hand back in those pre-computer, pre-calculator, pre-Turbotax days. Actually, I suppose there were calculators back then—clunky mechanical ones, much like the calculator our neighbors had in their house to use for their business. But my father disdained and distrusted calculators, preferring to rely on his lightening-fast abilities with pencil and paper.
Every year starting around February—when my parents always went away to warmer climes for about ten days, in preparation for the long hard slog to come—until mid-April my father would come home from work every night, eat dinner, and go immediately to a small table in our living room. There he’d set up shop until bedtime, around midnight, and then repeat the entire process the next day. Weekends it started earlier. No TV for him, and almost no relaxation, just this quiet sitting in a chair, bending over papers and fiddling with small figures.
For those months, we kids were instructed to tiptoe around in the evenings and not disturb him. This was a tense time. We could see it in his exhausted face and bloodshot eyes.
And so in our house tax day was a very happy day. That’s probably true for all the Taxmiddlemen/women.
[NOTE: The video that appeared in the original version of this post is now unavailable. The one I inserted here instead—Indonesian titles and all—is the only one I could find right now that isn’t a cover version or a later solo by George Harrison. So in case you were wondering “why Indonesian?”, the answer is “because.”).
North Korea: a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis?
The NY Times writes:
What is playing out, said Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who tracks this potentially deadly interplay, is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” But the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up, as President Trump and his aides have made it clear that the United States will no longer tolerate the incremental advances that have moved Mr. Kim so close to his goals.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has said repeatedly that “our policy of strategic patience has ended,” hardening the American position as Mr. Kim makes steady progress toward two primary goals: shrinking a nuclear weapon to a size that can fit atop a long-range missile, and developing a hydrogen bomb, with up to a thousand times the power of the Hiroshima-style weapons he has built so far.
While all historical analogies are necessarily imprecise ”” for starters, President John F. Kennedy dealt with the Soviets and Fidel Castro in a perilous 13 days in 1962, while the roots of the Korean crisis go back a quarter-century ”” one parallel shines through. When national ambitions, personal ego and deadly weapons are all in the mix, the opportunities for miscalculation are many.
It’s a very imperfect analogy, as the Times authors David E. Sanger and William J. Broad note. And when they add that the roots of the North Korean crisis go back a quarter-century (or more, I’d say), they also are implicitly although not explicitly acknowledging that it has challenged and stumped Trump’s predecessors from both parties.
There are other big differences between the Cuban crisis (which was really with the USSR) and the North Korean one, as well. The Soviet Union of the nuclear age may have been an evil empire, but it was headed by fairly rational actors regarding their weaponry. North Korea is headed by a person who might be a lot less stable than that (and his father before him was only marginally better than he).
The Soviets already didn’t just have the bomb, they possessed a fully functional arsenal of them, and the issue during the Cuban missile crisis was whether some of that arsenal would be stationed very near us. The North Koreans are trying to develop the capacity to reach our shores from across the Pacific, not to station bombs right off the US coast. And at the time of the Cuban crisis, the Soviets were a major power beholden to no one, whereas North Korea is dependent on a seemingly more rational actor than itself, China, which might be willing to discourage North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Nevertheless, there is a game of chicken going on between the US and North Korea, and it’s been going on for many decades.
Sanger and Broad also give Trump some credit when they write: “So far, Mr. Trump has played his hand ”” militarily, at least ”” as cautiously as his predecessors.” They add:
Still, the current standoff has grown only more volatile. It pits a new president’s vow never to allow North Korea to put American cities at risk ”” “It won’t happen!” he said on Twitter on Jan. 2 ”” against a young, insecure North Korean leader who sees that capability as his only guarantee of survival.
Mr. Trump is clearly new to this kind of dynamic…
Trump is indeed new to this kind of dynamic applied to the enormously important and dangerous issues of nuclear weaponry and war. He’s not new to the dynamic itself, however: cajoling, threatening, pressuring, negotiating, backing off, pushing.
Obama was also new to negotiating about nuclear weaponry, and he was more naive about it, too (or, if you subscribe to certain other theories about Obama, less intent on protecting the US). And I’ll take Trump’s advisors over Obama’s advisors (Ben Rhodes, anyone?) any day. But the truth is that every president since at least Clinton has faced a terrible and exceptionally challenging dilemma in dealing with North Korea and its drive to become an effective nuclear power.
Turkey’s referendum: the path to tyranny
Yesterday there was a referendum in Turkey that used a democratic process to give Erdogan dictatorial powers.
The pro-Erdogan forces didn’t call the powers the referendum would confer “dictatorial,” of course. But that’s what they were.
Erdogan has declared victory:
With nearly all of the 47.5 millions votes counted, state media reported that 51.4% had voted in favor versus 48.6% against, revealing deep divisions within the country over its future rule.
Voters were asked to endorse an 18-article reform package put forward by the ruling Justice and Development Party that would replace the current system of parliamentary democracy with a powerful executive presidency.
Can you imagine changing the constitution so fundamentally and installing a dictator, with a one-time vote that’s won by a slight majority? Well, a lot of people in Turkey can’t imagine it either, especially when this sort of thing has been happening:
Alongside claims of voting irregularities, the “No” campaign said they faced intimidation and threats of violence, and independent monitors say that state media slanted coverage in favor of the president.
Erdogan and his party already had plenty of power, enough to intimidate a lot of people. Now they’ll have more. I see him as the Turkish/Muslim equivalent of Hugo Chavez.
What are the changes that loom so disturbingly? There are many, but the ones that trouble me most are these:
The president alone will be able to announce a state of emergency and dismiss parliament.
Parliament will lose its right to scrutinise ministers or propose an enquiry.
Even Hitler felt he had to ask Parliament to vote to dissolve itself when he managed to coerce, manipulate, and terrorize them into voting for the Enabling Act. Erdogan will be able to do something similar with greater ease, by declaring a national emergency—for example, after an act of terrorism—if he thinks the time is ripe.
The Turkish legislature now retains this one stop on Erdogan’s overwhelming power:
However, [the Turkish Parliament] will be able to begin impeachment proceedings or investigate the president with a majority vote by MPs. Putting the president on trial would require a two-thirds majority.
Good luck getting that 2/3 majority. I don’t foresee that in Turkey’s future.
[NOTE: It’s not the first time Erdogan has twisted the supposed democratic process in such a way that it circumvents that process in order to give him more power. I’ve written many posts on the subject, but I suggest reading this one and especially this post I wrote last July, during the time of an attempted anti-Erdogan coup.]