Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.