Stories of my travels

I’m home. My travels (for now) are done. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend another International Handbell Symposium. This is the 15th of these I’ve attended. This one was held in Aberdeen, Scotland. I flew from Detroit to Amsterdam to Edinburgh. Because I didn’t want to rent a car I took the train up to Perth for a couple nights. One reason for stopping there is it is the closest rail station to the town of Rattray, the ancestral home of my sister-in-law who died five years ago. The town still has residents, a high school, and a community center, but its small commercial district is all boarded up. That’s not a big deal because there is another town across the river and its downtown is doing reasonably well. Back in Perth I visited the Perth Museum. It houses the Stone of Scone which is placed under the throne when a Scottish monarch is coronated. Since Charles III is king over the Scots (as well as the rest of Britain) the stone was there. I also visited the Perth Art Museum, which includes a neon unicorn. I took the train up to Aberdeen. The convention center is in a business park adjacent to the airport. So there are hotels nearby. But there aren’t any supporting amenities, such as a laundromat. There were over 600 ringers from 15 countries who formed one massive bell choir. We had nine directors from eight countries, each one leading one piece. In addition to spending a lot of time rehearsing the music we had classes in various aspects of handbells and in the culture of various participants. One class was about the Scottish tartan and kilt (no, I didn’t try one on). Another class was about Canadian folksongs arranged for bells and yet another about excerpts of a Hungarian operetta arranged for bells. After the Symposium I spent three nights in Inverness. I took one day trip to Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle and another trip to Dunrobin Castle, which featured demonstrations of hunting by hawk and falcon. I’ve been traveling for many decades. For my first trips I carried travelers checks. For this trip I used my credit card for nearly everything, even for many small purchases. For my time in Aberdeen some type of card or payment system was required because both the convention center’s coffee vendors (which I skipped) and the hotel were cashless. I found I had to be careful in some places because they offered to let me pay in dollars instead of pounds. I first thought this would be good because I could skip my card’s 1% foreign currency fee. But after doing it once I found out the business charged a 3% fee for allowing me to pay in dollars. I had withdrawn £50 when I got to Perth. I used my card so much that when I was back to the airport I still had a £20 bill. And the currency exchange at the airport charge a huge commission. Maybe during my next foreign trip I don’t use the ATM at all. On the flight to Europe I watched the documentary Paris is Burning about the black queer ball scene. I wanted to watch it because the youth at the Ruth Ellis Center in Detroit would imitate such balls. Preparing and participating in a ball could give a young queer person a chance to develop confidence and charisma. All that is good. Alas, by halfway through (and it isn’t very long) I was bored. I did finish it. Instead of watching anything else I tried to get some sleep. On the flight back to Detroit I watched two movies and had time for a third. On the way east I spotted a couple interesting movies, but they weren’t available on the return flight. I did see a couple Disney movies. The first was Zootopia 2 in which cops Nick the fox and Judy the rabbit solve another case. This one plays on the idea that we readily believe that snakes would be the villains. I enjoyed the story and the emphasis on inclusion. The second movie was Hoppers. A hopper is a mind that has been transferred into mechanical robot. The primary hopper is Mabel. Her grandmother introduced her to the glen around a beaver pond. Now with Mabel in college, Jerry the mayor wants to run a highway through the glen. Mabel, transferred to a beaver robot and able to hear what the animals are saying, works to rouse the other animals to stop him. It’s all great fun, though some a bit over the top (such as seagulls flying a shark through the air to terrorize Jerry), and there’s a good message about inclusiveness and the importance of wild spaces. Before the trip I finished the book Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quễ Mai (those diacritical marks are so important!). Part of the setting is the Vietnam War and a dust child is an Amerasian child of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, considered by society to be nothing but dust. The story follows several threads. There is Phong, a dust child whose life is made worse because his American father was black. Phong sticks out because of his dark skin and that he is so much taller than the typical Vietnamese. Because of that he is bullied. In 2016 he is trying to immigrate to America with his wife and children. But he was the victim in a fraudulent previous attempt to immigrate and is refused. Another major thread in the story is Dan, an American suffering from PTSD from the war. His wife Linda hopes a trip to Vietnam will resolve some of his traumas. He wants to find Kim, the Vietnamese girl he fell in love with during his tour in 1969. Linda doesn’t know about her and doesn’t want to lose her. When Kim became pregnant he got scared. By that point he was beginning to suffer from PTSD. He wonders what happened to her child. After being introduced to Dan in chapter 2 I thought these two threads are too convenient. But Dan is white and not the father of Phong. A third thread is Trang. In 1969 she worked at a bar catering to soldiers and took the name Kim to protect her family. She shows us how she and her sister chose to leave their village to work in a bar in Saigon. The short answer is their parents were in debt and an old friend visits, explaining how she is able to dress well. At times I felt the author was not a great wordsmith. But she tells a great story and she does not allow her characters the easy way out. They have to grapple with the issues. One of those is the Amerasian children telling their elders: Did you really have no choice other than to leave me in an orphanage? Why did you wait so long to search for me? In an author’s note she explains that she got involved in an organization that worked to unite Amerasian children with their American fathers. She heard a lot of stories of what the children and soldiers went through. Though the book is fiction the characters are based on the stories she heard. I enjoyed this one very much and recommend it. While traveling I finished three books. A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko. In America that phrase means something is very easy. While the title is accurate it is full of irony as the subtitle shows: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. Walking that park is not easy and can be quite dangerous. Fedarko (the book refers everyone by their first name, so I’ll do that too – this is Kevin) is a freelance writer. One day he visited a company that does boat tours running the length of the canyon. He was so entranced by the boats and the idea he volunteered to join the crew for that summer and several summers after that. Volunteering means he never got paid. He also was never good enough to be in charge of a boat or have paying customers in his raft – so he hauled equipment. A few years into that he met Pete McBride, a freelance photographer. Pete proposed they team up and they became good friends. But Pete did very little planning for his photography trips which sometimes meant what he came to photograph didn’t happen at the time he was there. When Pete proposed they hike the canyon from one end to the other Kevin, who had seen the canyon only from the rim and the river, was all in. They got in touch with Rich Rudow, a veteran canyon hiker and explorer, who with a few friends was planning to hike the whole canyon. Pete sweet talked their way onto this team, though Rich’s crew were planning and training carefully and Pete bragged the trip could be done straight “off the couch.” Pete and Kevin tried to take a great deal of equipment they didn’t need – including Pete wanting duplicates of his extensive camera equipment – and refused many things Rich and team considered essential. The Grand Canyon does not have a paved trail from end to end, and for much of the way there is no marked trail. One must forge their own path, sometimes hiking close to the rim, sometimes close to the river, and the canyon walls between can be thousands of feet tall and steep. In the summer the temperature can be brutally hot and water can be scarce. One misstep and a person can slip right over the edge. This is not a place for amateur hikers. Which Pete and Kevin were. So, yeah, the first section of the hike did not go well. Once they were pulled off the trail some of Rich’s friends took over their training and some went with them when they began their second section. And – eventually – Kevin and Pete do hike the entire length. Along the way Kevin learns from Rich about notable people who have explored they canyon. Those stories are included. When Kevin encounters pottery fragments he begins to understand Native people lived in the canyon up until white people kicked them out. Rich arranges for Kevin to meet Natives working to reclaim some of their land, others working to prevent developers from despoiling the canyon, and yet more who are profiting from the canyon. Kevin is clearly on their side. Because the first part of the trip went so badly, by the end Kevin wonders why didn’t Rich refuse to take them on? Why did Rich’s friends willingly train and accompany them? I quite enjoyed Kevin’s story and he is a good writer. Because of what he learns about himself, the canyon, and the millions who visit it this book gets a high recommendation. Guests of War by Robin Jenkins. He is a well known Scottish author. I bought the book in Scotland. It was first published in 1956 and reprinted this year. At the start of WWII the British Prime Minister told Hitler that if Poland was invaded Britain would declare war. At that time the British government instituted a program where residents, at least the women and children, of cities likely to be bombed were evacuated to rural areas. So the profoundly poor residents of the (fictional) district of Gowburgh in Glasgow were evacuated to the (fictional) well off community of Langrigg. I expected there would be a lot of conflict between the rich and the poor. There is some of that, but less than I expected. For the most part the villagers opened their homes and otherwise supplied their visitors with needed things. One component in the story is the incompetence of the leadership in both locales. They think certain operations must be done in a particular way, and aren’t willing to be flexible when those plans are shown to be unworkable. An example was the demand that all incoming children be inspected for lice, a process that takes way too long when there are hundreds of children. Besides the kids were inspected before they got on the train. Also, assuming that all the kids from the poor neighborhood had lice was a form of discrimination. A forward says the real evacuations usually weren’t planned well. Some of the evacuation trains were woefully short on food. Several women with a large number of children couldn’t be placed in private homes so a quite large estate was opened for them to live together. A woman of the Langrigg city council was sure the poor families would turn the place into a slum – which didn’t happen. A woman of Gowburgh considered herself to be too important to be from that place. She complained her husband, a barber, didn’t make enough money and offered to trim the hair of homeless people. How could he lower himself! She demanded special accommodations for her children because her son would, of course, grow up to be a famous doctor. Not just the people of the rich town could be snooty. I enjoyed the book. The third book was Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and published in 1959. At that time in history, just after Sputnik, there was a “missile gap” in which the USSR had better and more long-range nuclear missiles than the US did. What if the USSR relied on that gap to launch a nuclear war against the US? The first section of the book is leading up to the war. Randy lives in central Florida, north of Orlando. His brother Mark is a colonel in the Strategic Air Command and sends Randy a telegram saying he is sending his wife and kids to live with Randy and ends with the phrase, “Alas, Babylon.” The phrase had been used by a fire-and-brimstone preacher and the brothers adopted it as a way for Mark to tell Randy that the ultimate war was about to start. The nukes hit Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville as well as many other cities and military bases across the country. Randy’s home and town escapes the fallout. Soon residents clear out local stores of all provisions. The dollar can’t buy anything so becomes worthless. The banking system collapses as does communications. Electricity was supplied by Orlando, so that ends. Randy and his small community (including an extended black family) do decently because they live on a river and can fish for food, they have communal access to an artesian well, they have orange groves and gardens, and several of them are proficient with tools and mechanical things. Frank’s message is even with such a calamity humanity will survive. Returning from such a huge technological setback may take decades to centuries, but will happen. In a forward by David Brin, author of a similar post apocalypse story The Postman (which I’ve read and enjoyed, but skip the movie), he says a big difference between Frank’s story and many others like it is that Frank offers hope. But even if great number survive a nuclear war will be devastating to millions of people. I enjoyed the book. There were scenes of the characters faced with the latest crisis balanced with scenes of tenderness. It’s a good one. I stayed up last night to my usual bedtime, though it was about 3am in the time zone I woke up in. Then I woke up at 4am Detroit time. I seem to get over jet lag when I leave home, no matter whether I fly east or west. But once home recovery takes longer.

Sick of religion being used as a cloaking device for hate

I hadn’t heard much of John Fugelsang. I had to look him up to know he’s “an American actor, comedian, writer, television host, political commentator, and television personality” as his Wikipedia page describes him. I followed a link to his Substack to see his comments on Holy Hypocrites, also known as Christian Nationalists.

But nothing says “We worship Jesus, not idols” quite like unveiling a giant gold statue of a reality TV billionaire felon politician at a golf resort. Somewhere Book of Exodus just filed a copyright infringement claim. These same folks who’ve spent years screaming about the “War on Christmas,” just built the Golden Calf Expanded Universe near the 18th hole buffet. I saw this two days ago, and I’m still recovering from an overdose of metaphor. It’s like a deleted scene from the Fall of Rome.

Towards the bottom of the post is a photo of the statue. Fugelsang concluded his short rant with a parody of something Christians will recognize:

The Lard’s Prayer: Our Ruler, Who Art in Florida, Branded be thy name. Thy kingdom, dumb Thy cabinet, scum Thy girth, size fifty-seven. Give us this day our bigly bread; And give us our guest-passes, As we trespass against those who look more defenseless; And lead us now, to more inflation, But deliver us from feminists; Yay Men.

The source of the original link also linked to Fugelsang’s book, which looks like it might be a fun yet important read. The title is Separation of Church and Hate, a Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds. From the book’s publisher description:

For more than two centuries, the United States Constitution has given us the right to a society where church and state exist independently. But Christianity has been hijacked by far-right groups and politicians who seek to impose their narrow views on government, often to justify oppressive and unequal policies. The extremists who weaponize the Bible for earthly power aren’t actually on the side of Jesus—and historically they never have been. How do we fight back against those acting—literally—in bad faith? ... But Fugelsang’s message is about more than just taking down hypocrites. It’s about fighting for the love, mercy, and service that are supposed to make up the heart of Christianity. Told with Fugelsang’s trademark blend of radical honesty, comedy, and deep political and religious knowledge, Separation of Church and Hate is the book every American needs today. It’s a rallying cry for compassion and clarity for anyone of any faith who’s sick of religion being used as a cloaking device for hate.

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on news of the nasty guy’s “anti-weaponization fund” to pay Capitol attackers who were convicted of their crimes. A slush fund. The news is that both California and New York are saying that the tax on any slush fund payout will be 100%. Democratic members of Congress are trying to pass such a provision, but they know it won’t go far, so states, at least blue states, are stepping in.

On Tuesday, New York state Assembly Member Alex Bores—who is currently running for Congress—introduced the New York Anti-Insurrectionist Act to fight the “slush fund created by a lawless president.” “It’s simple, if you’re a New Yorker and you take from this illegal slush fund, New York state will tax 100% of it,” Bores said Tuesday in a post on X. “If you storm the Capitol and you take from this slush fund, too bad we’re taking it.” ... “We can’t stop Trump from breaking the law in Washington. But we can decide that in New York, money you got for attacking American democracy is fully taxable,” Bores told NBC News.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is now saying the same thing. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports:

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from paying any claims through a new $1.776 billion settlement fund for the Republican president’s allies who believe they were victims of a weaponized government. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, also barred the government from moving forward with the fund’s creation while litigation is pending to challenge it.

Oliver Willis of Kos wrote:

According to The New York Times, government data and assessments by experts in drug trafficking show that the Trump administration’s fight against “narco-terrorism” is a dud.

The nasty guy and the war nasty said they were bombing boats to stop the flow of drugs to the US. But the street price hasn’t changed, meaning the supply of cocaine and other drugs hasn’t changed. So the attacks, which have killed people, have accomplished nothing in protecting US citizens. We’re not surprised. In Britain Alan Milburn published interim findings of his government-commissioned review into British youth unemployment. It said that the youth unemployment rate stands at 16.2%, higher than at the peak of the pandemic. Beyond that there are 957,000 (almost a million) youth who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). 84% of them want a job or to be in training. They have essentially stopped looking for work or trying to get into a training program. The reason is the disappearance of entry-level jobs and a big drop in apprenticeships. Employers want work experience and there is no way to get that without entry-level jobs.

Meanwhile the government is spending £25 on benefits for every £1 it spends on helping young people into work. The system is optimised for managing the consequences of youth unemployment, not preventing it.

This is creating a lost generation. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an article in Politico talking of the consequences of Ken Paxton winning the Republican nomination for US Senator from Texas.

“It means that $100 million will have to go to bail out the Texas seat instead of helping win seats in Maine, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and elsewhere,” said the person, who, like many others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Last night will go down as one of the worst self-inflicted political wounds of all-time.” “No one is happier than Democrats. Even if Paxton holds the seat — as is likely, though not guaranteed — donor funds will be diverted from critical races,” a second GOP donor concurred. “And Cornyn, one of the Republicans’ best fundraisers, will be sidelined.”

David Graham of The Atlantic:

The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach. First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel. The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.

Another AP article on Kos reported:

In the next five years, the Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest-year record along the way, according to new United Nations climate projections. The World Meteorological Organization also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change. A hotter globe from the burning of coal, oil and gas means more extreme weather including floods, droughts and heat waves, scientists said. ... There’s a 91% chance that at least one of the next five years will shoot past the 1.5 degree threshold and an 86% chance that one of those years will smash the record for Earth’s hottest year set in 2024, the WMO report said.

The article also commented on the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet and that the forecast is for warmer and unusually dry conditions in the Amazon basin, leading to wildfires. The region that serves as the world’s lungs, that does the most to pull in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen, might be choked and damaged by smoke and making the whole problem worse. All this will affect the food supply. Back at the end of April, a week after Earth Day, Meteor Blades, Kos emeritus, posted about the Earth Day release of the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization, jointly released a new report — Extreme Heat and Agriculture. Blades titled his discussion of the report “‘Extreme Heat and Agriculture’ report released on Earth Day got less attention than the dumbest Truth™ Social post last week.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now issued six assessments of the climate. The first came out in 1990. By the fourth report in 2007 it started saying global warming is affecting the world’s agriculture now. There is hope (at least a little) that this latest report won’t get put on a shelf. Some numbers from the report: Crop yields drop sharply in the heat. For many crops the threshold is 30C (86F). Livestock productivity and survival drop in the heat. Heat disrupts fisheries. Agriculture workers face health risks in the heat. Blades wrote:

As noted, many staple crop species begin seeing yield declines above roughly 30°C, with some, of course, more sensitive than others. Heat can interrupt pollination, accelerate maturation before grain development, increase water demand, and invite pests whose geographical ranges expand in warmer conditions. But for livestock, thermal stress commonly begins above 25°C (77°F), and at even lower temperatures for pigs and poultry, which cool themselves poorly. The consequences include reduced eating, slower growth, reduced fertility, reduced milk production, and death in severe episodes. One analysis found milk yields fell half a percent for every hour cows were exposed to high heat stress, with effects lingering for days. ... Labor, a topic often erased from food discussions, gets some focus in the report, too. Agricultural workers are among the most exposed people on Earth: long hours outdoors, limited protections, and little bargaining power. In some already hot regions, the report asserts that days unsafe for outdoor work may climb to 250 annually before the end of this century. Think about the cruelty embedded in that statistic. The people least responsible for emissions are asked to work inside the blast furnace those emissions built.

Brazil is a major food producer for the world. It is experiencing climate stress. If its productivity drops it will have a harder time feeding its own as a lot of food goes to export. (That reminds me of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s and the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s – look them up!) Brazil is now a warning to the world.

Cut emissions fast. No adaptation strategy can keep pace with unchecked warming. Protect workers. Mandatory heat standards, paid breaks, hydration, cooling shelters, and enforcement. Build public resilience. Storage, irrigation efficiency, grids, extension services, and local processing. Democratize seed banks and research. Climate-resilient genetics should not be monopolized. Finance justice. Debt relief and grants for climate-hit nations. Diversify agriculture. Monocultures are profitable in spreadsheets and brittle in heatwaves.

Agricultural adaptation can happen with money. But at the moment it is poorly supported by those with money.

Schrödinger’s war

I finished the novel Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller. I saw it during a recent visit to Barnes and Noble and it looked interesting. I pulled out my phone and looked it up on Goodreads and saw the rating was pretty good. So I bought it. The setting is Iceland. Orri is the narrator. He is in his first year at university in Reykjavik and misses the farm where he grew up and his father, his Pabbi, raises cows for beef. When Mamma calls to say maybe Pabbi is depressed Orri uses that as an excuse to leave school (though continues online) and return home. Before Orri left home for school Pabbi didn’t ask him to help around the farm because Pabbi didn’t want his son to realize how hard the life of an Icelandic farmer is. But back from the city Orri is ready to be educated in the difficulties. And much of the story is about how hard such a life is. This is a coming of age story. Orri is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, though he sees he likes the life of a farmer. He also begins to experience love and learns about the tradeoffs love requires. The title comes from the dog Pabbi owns. It’s an Australian kelpie, a herding dog. And this one happens to have red fur. But a kelpie is not the best breed for the Icelandic climate. That sort of thing doesn’t stop Pabbi. There is an LGBTQ character in the book. One of Orri’s high school classmates has developed into a beautiful woman and Mamma tells Orri he should date her. But, the classmate confides she’s a lesbian and rural Iceland is not a good place to find a partner. She asks Orri to be her beard, though has to explain what that means. They remain good friends. The book does a good job describing what life in rural Iceland is like. One has to deal with constant wind, long winters, thin soil, and an occasional volcano that can upend life. That left me wondering how the author knows Iceland so well when the book’s jacket says he worked for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Montana, and currently lives in Vermont. Of course, there are lots of ways that could happen, the author just doesn’t say which. The Acknowledgments at the end do include several names that look Icelandic. I enjoyed the book. The author writes quite well and Orri’s situation is an interesting one. Instead of watching a movie this Sunday I watched and listened to a video of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. I had written about this work when I discussed the book Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler several months ago. The work was part of the consecration of the new cathedral in Coventry, England, which was built beside the remains of the earlier cathedral bombed in WWII. The soprano soloist, large choir, and children’s choir sing the text of the Latin requiem mass. The tenor and bass soloists sing the English poems of Wilfred Owen, who was gay, wrote about the battles of WWI, and died in combat in 1918. The text is, of course, online. There is one of Owen’s poems that is quite meaningful. It tells the story of Abram told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Biblical story ends with an angel stopping the hand of Abram, offering a ram to be sacrificed instead. Owen’s poem ends differently:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son, – And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Reading through the text this time these lines caught my attention:

The scribes on all the people shove And bawl allegiance to the state, But they who love the greater love Lay down their life; they do not hate.

The premier of the work was in 1962. For that the tenor was English, the baritone was German, and the soprano was Russian. I attended a performance of the work when I lived in Germany in 1990. When I was working on my Master of Music degree the composition class featured a modern piece each week and this was one of them. And now I’ve watched it online. This performance was led by Marin Alsop and the choir and orchestra (except the children’s choir) looked to be made up of college students doing a fine job. Alas, the webpage to give more detail of them is no longer online. Schrödinger’s cat is the name of a thought experiment related to quantum physics. No, I’m not going to try to explain quantum physics. In this thought scenario a cat is placed in a box with a vial of poison. A quantum event may or may not break the vial. Is the cat alive or dead? Quantum physics says we can’t know until the box is opened. Put another way, until the box is opened the cat is both alive and dead. Yeah, it is hard to understand. And people wonder what Erwin Schrödinger has against cats and why he came up with such a cruel way to explain quantum physics. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote that what’s going on in the Strait of Hormuz might be Schrödinger’s war – the statements by the nasty guy and his minions are so confusing and contradictory that one could conclude the war is both still going on and concluded. The nasty guy said the war was over so Congress isn’t required to follow the War Powers Act and its 60 day deadline to confirm that he can keep on fighting. The same day he told supporters that people saying we’re not winning the war is “treasonous.” He has said both he rejected the latest deal from Iran and that he knows nothing about it. While saying the war is over he is also saying 15,000 more troops to the region. He tried Project Freedom to escort ships out of the Persian Gulf, but that lasted only a day because he didn’t convince any ship insurance companies that the effort was safe. And the United Arab Emirates intercepted Iranian missiles during a ceasefire. Both concluded and in progress, both dead and alive, at the same time. Anastasia Tsioulcas of NPR reported:

A statue that was erected mysteriously in central London early Wednesday has been confirmed as the work of the mischievous, often politically oriented artist Banksy. The statue depicts a man in a suit hoisting a large flag. The flag's cloth covers the man's face, however, and his proud march appears to be courting disaster, as he steps off the plinth with no ground beneath him.

Banksy may not have gotten permission to erect the statue, but city officials say they welcome it. The NPR article has a photo of the statue from the front. Here’s another view of it from the side. I think it is cool political commentary.

Young girls were just the bait, extortion the payoff

In the comments of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos there is a discussion of the arrest of Andrew Mountbattan-Windsor (disgraced brother of King Charles of Britain). Commenter rugbymom wrote:

The charges against Andrew, from what I understand, don't have to do with having sex with underage girls -- but rather with giving Epstein access to highly classified information when Andrew served as a Trade Envoy for the UK government. The UK authorities and media have been far more attentive to what to me is the scariest (but also promising) aspect of the files: the possibility that the young girls were just the bait, and the money-laundering, political influence, insider information, espionage for Putin and others? was the real payoff. Oh, plus the blackmail and extortion opportunities. To me “Did Trump rape underage girls?” is the least important question. More pressing (and frankly more likely to result in charges?) is who else in the Administration, in Congress, possibly on the Court, was and remains part of a highly compromised circle that included foreign oligarchs, blackmail and extortion, etc. etc. And the UK authorities are looking hard at that, while our social media and even members of Congress are all focussed on “Did he Do It?” (even though he’s likely immune from being prosecuted while he's in office, is probably already incompetent to stand trial, and certainly will be by Jan. 2029).

Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, in an article posted on Kos, wrote that the Department of Homeland Security released a tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. It originally checked immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits but has been expanded under the nasty guy. It now collects confidential data from across the federal government and is promoted to give states a way to look for noncitizens in their voter rolls. The claim is that “millions” of noncitizens are voting. The first finding is that the people flagged as ineligible are actually quite eligible. The error rate is high and verifying their true status causes county election officials extra work. There is no guidance from DHS on procedures to deal with matches. One reason for the false positives is SAVE doesn’t know about immigrants who become citizens. The other finding is that across seven states with a combined 35 million registered voters, the system “identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens.” That’s definitely not “millions.” Which means this is a great deal of effort expended to fix a non-problem, and that means the real goal is something else, such as casting doubt in the security of elections to give a reason to stop actual citizens from voting. Carrie Johnson and Tamara Keith of NPR discuss a particular case of the nasty guy abusing executive power.

The president wants the government he leads to pay him billions of dollars. Trump has filed multiple claims arguing he's been hurt by Justice Department investigations and the leak of his tax returns years ago. Now it's up to his own political appointees to determine whether to settle with their boss — and for how much taxpayer money. "There is a glaring conflict of interest with Trump being on both sides of the claim," said Edward Whelan, a former lawyer at the Justice Department and a political conservative who once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. "It is outrageous that he and those answering to him would be deciding how the government responds to these extravagant claims."

Even the nasty guy has said he “will negotiate with myself.” One of the cases for which he is seeking damages comes from when federal agents seized classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate. Even in the worst cases the Justice Department rarely pays out more than $10 million. So the nasty guy is asking for at least 100, maybe 1000, times the rare highest payouts. The nasty guy thinks accepting all this taxpayer money is just fine because he’ll give the money to charity. And I’ll believe that only if the charities publish acceptance letters.

But at a time when Americans say their top concern is the cost of living and making ends meet, the idea of the president receiving a massive windfall from the government he leads may not sit well with voters — even if it is donated to charity.

The nasty guy’s Board of Peace met for the first time. The primary topic was Gaza. Leila Fadel of NPR didn’t talk about what happened at the meeting (it was likely secret). However, she did talk to Aaron David Miller, who served more than 20 years at the State Department, advising on Arab-Israel peace negotiations. He’s now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One good thing about the Board of Peace is that it is trying to internationalize this problem. Gaza cannot be resolved by Israel and the Palestinians. There are three main issues. Who will govern Gaza? The Palestinian movement is a mess. Who will provide security in Gaza? There’s little hope there. Who will pay for humanitarian assistance, current shelter, and reconstruction? Maybe the Board of Peace can help with that last one. Internationalize means being able to bring in the huge required resources. But if Israel and Hamas can’t align their visions of the future no outside pressure or assistance will help. The Board of Peace does have a huge problem in that there is no Palestinian representation. One reason why that is a problem is that Israel has stated their policy is annexation. Miller said:

In the end, you need leaders who are masters of their politics in Israel and Palestine and leaders who are willing to overlook those politics to a degree to try to address not only their own constituencies' needs but the needs of others. And we do not have those kinds of leaders in the region. And frankly, we don't have them in Washington either.

As for a stabilization force, as long as Hamas and Israel are still shooting at each other, in spite of a cease-fire, no party is going to put boots on the ground.

Gaslighting: insisting ambiguity exists where it does not

My Sunday movie wasn’t a movie, but a series of commercials. Every December the Detroit Film Theater shows the winners of the British Arrows, awards given out for best commercials. They’re a hit in America because the British sense of humor is so different from ours. But last Sunday was still November. Yeah, the Arrows are being shown at the DFT next weekend and I won’t be able to see them then. So I found their website and watched them. And I found out why going to the DFT is an advantage. Their show is just 85 minutes, showing the ones most appreciated by an American audience. I watched over two hours, which wasn’t all of them, and there were many that were just meh. Here are some of my favorites: Paris 2024 Paralympics: Sport doesn’t care about disability. BBC Sport, Welcome to the City of Love – love (of sport) makes us do crazy things. Co-op, Owned By You: A team created animation where each frame was printed on a receipt printer. This explains the process, but alas doesn’t show the final result. Sainsbury’s Big Christmas: A giant gets help Christmas shopping. Barclays, Make Money Work for You: Children playing the parts of adult workers. Apple, Flock: The flock is security cameras with wings watching what you browse on your phone. This is an ad for the Safari browser. Erste Bank, Silent Night: A bit of history and the effect of the most recorded song in history. Montefiore Einsteins Cancer Centre, South Bronx: a video on the rise of break dancing and recognizing the spark in someone else. Papaya, Swing: two guys on gigantic swings (made me wonder about what protected them from falling off). Volvo, Moments: The important ones might be the ones that a good car might prevent happening. This from the viewpoint of a man about to be a father Frameless, Immersive Rembrandt: A piece of art – men in a boat in a stormy sea – brought to life. Scambaiters, Daisy vs Scammers: Daisy is an AI that will happily waste a scammer’s time so they can’t scam you. Report scammer’s numbers to Daisy. British Airways Period Drama: The video explains an airplane’s safety to the residents of a manor house, including showing men on horses how to buckle their seatbelts. Disney, The Boy and the Octopus: This is more like a 4 minute movie rather than an ad. It shows a boy with a small octopus living on his head. Alix Breeden of Daily Kos wrote about how AI is making life worse. Creativity: Stealing existing art to recreate lifeless versions of what humans have made. Critical thinking: AI using students consistently performed worse at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. People ask an AI tool a question and accept whatever answer it gives. Mental Health: About half the people who reported mental health issues used AI for support, though that support probably wasn’t helpful. Workers: Entry level positions are disappearing. In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted David Schuster of Blue Amp:

The New York Times recently reported what all of us with a functioning optic nerve have seen: Donald J. Trump, the once bombastic showman and snake oil salesman, has shrunk his public schedule and limited his appearances to a tight mid-day window. But instead of addressing concerns like an adult, the President keeps raging like a tyrannical toddler. He has denounced the reporting as unfair, sneered at journalists, and bellowed about his “perfect” tests — as if the nation were comprised only of other gullible children distracted by shiny objects. Whereas previous U.S. Presidents embraced the burdens of office at dawn, Trump appears only after most of the nation has eaten lunch. And when Trump does appear, reporters and staff keep seeing moments that look like fatigue overtaking leadership vigilance, the sort of slump that in most offices would prompt a supervisor to ask whether the employee needed time off or a medical check.

In the comments Wolf Hour posted a cartoon by David Horsey. It is captioned “Elon Musk dines alone...” and shows him surrounded by a feast while a black child stares at him.

Musk: What are you staring at, African kid? Child: Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I haven’t eaten since you killed USAID.

Wolf Hour added:

The disastrous DOGE project has now ended in failure but the damage lives on. Estimates put the death toll from Musk's brutal cuts to USAID at 600,000 people, mostly children, in a year. Bill Gates said it was “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.”

Back in October (I think) the nasty guy went to his doctor for an MRI, but afterward couldn’t say which part of his body had been imaged. Of course, the medical report issued to the public praised what fine health the MRI showed. Pundits replied that MRIs are not done without an important medical reason, so they’re not buying it showed fine health. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California did some fine trolling by issuing an MRI report of himself from “Dr. Dolittle.” Excerpts:

His cardiovascular scans are the best we’ve ever recorded – his arteries were described as “shimmering,” and his resting heart rate was so steady the EKG machine asked if he was “meditating or just naturally enlightened.” ... While we do not typically comment on the health of other elected officials, we are aware of a letter released today from the White House claiming that President Trump is in “excellent health.” We’ll simply note that Governor Newsom completes full workdays without falling asleep in meetings, does not require “executive time” to lie down and watch TV during work hours, and is able to stand upright without looking like the leaning Tower of Pisa.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman, writing for his Substack:

The MAGA war on financial stability is being waged largely on two fronts. First, there’s an ongoing effort within some parts of the Federal Reserve to drastically weaken bank supervision — oversight of banks to prevent them from taking risks that could threaten the financial system. ... The second front of MAGA’s war on financial stability is on behalf of the crypto industry. The Trump administration and its allies in Congress — including, I’m sorry to say, a number of Democrats in this case — are moving to promote wider use of crypto. In particular, the GENIUS Act (gag me with an acronym), passed in July, aims to promote stablecoins. And the fact is that stablecoins are effectively an alternative, weakly regulated and poorly supervised form of banking.

Didn’t the weakening of bank regulation lead to the Great Recession of 2008? Goodness, people have short memories. Then again, a slogan of that time was “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Detroit was hit quite hard. So there might be brutal logic here in that the rich don’t lose (much) yet the poor are oppressed more and again. For many rich people widening the gap between themselves and the poor is desired because that makes themselves look all the better in comparison. Meteor Blades, a Daily Kos Staff Emeritus wrote there are two questions to get to the truth about that Venezuelan boat that was struck twice. The second strike has been described as a war crime. Or murder, because we’re not (officially) at war. Secretary of Defense Hegseth has blamed Admiral Frank Bradley. Hegseth might talk tough, but he’s not going to be responsible, similar to his boss. Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have opened investigations into the incident and done so with bipartisan votes. So Admiral Bradley will appear before them. Blades said Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker could accomplish what’s needed with two questions:

“Did Secretary Hegseth order a second strike on the two survivors of a first strike or did you make that decision on your own with no input from him?” If his answer is that Hegseth gave the order, the follow-up question should be, “Did you warn the Secretary that a second strike would be illegal?”

A week ago an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that the Georgia election interference case has been dropped. This is the case that was started with the nasty guy calling the Secretary of State of Georgia asking him to find 11,780 votes (if my memory is good). Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did the research and produced 101 boxes of evidence plus an 8 terabyte hard drive. She indicted the nasty guy and 18 others in August 2023. The nasty guy got her removed from the case claiming she had a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor she had hired. Peter Skandalakis, executive director of Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia took over the case last month. He told the court he decided not to pursue the case. So the judge dropped it. While the case against the nasty guy probably wouldn’t proceed while he’s in office, there were still cases against 14 of the co-defendants. They’re also dropped. All4Truth of the Kos community wrote a rebuttal to the decision to drop the case.

When court-assigned prosecutor Peter J. Skandalakis dismissed Georgia’s election-interference case and justified his decision by claiming that “reasonable minds could differ” about Donald Trump’s conduct — and that therefore Trump was “entitled to the benefit of the doubt” — he wrapped a fundamentally misleading conclusion in the language of legal neutrality. But scratch the surface, and the entire rationale collapses. Worse, it shifts the burden of confusion onto the public, asking people to doubt what the evidence clearly shows. That is the essence of gaslighting: insisting ambiguity exists where it does not.

All4Truth offered these reasons: 1. This wasn’t about one phone call. It was a coordinated, multi-front effort involving pressure on state officials and a plan to overturn a certified effort. That means Skandalakis was not offering caution, but confusion. ... 3. “The ‘benefit of the doubt’ standard applies when evidence is uncertain — not when prosecutors refuse to review it. Claiming otherwise is manufactured ambiguity.”

This is the move that most resembles gaslighting: inducing the public to question the clarity of the facts while ignoring those facts entirely.

4. “Prosecutors do not owe ‘benefit of the doubt’ to a convicted felon with an established record of deception.” 5. “Multiple grand juries already determined there was probable cause. Dismissing that is not skepticism — it is disrespect for the system.” ... 7. “The statements follow a classic gaslighting pattern: asserting doubt in the face of overwhelming clarity.”

If we can demand the Epstein files be released, perhaps we should also demand the full evidence in this case at least also be released publicly.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a tweet from The Bionic Bee, though the original author is not named.

My leprechaun can’t find his gold. My imaginary friend got kidnapped. The voices in my head won’t talk to me. And my dragon flew away. Oh my, I’m going sane.

Because of the upcoming events on my calendar I probably won’t post for at least one week and maybe not for two. Events include entering my performing group’s concert season and Brother coming for a visit.

Feeding young men a steady diet of grievance

My Sunday movie was Just Friends, a Netherlands movie released in 2018. It’s less than 90 minutes. It’s a gay love story. One of the lads in Joris. His father died ten years ago when Joris was 11. The movie opened with the family reclaiming the urn holding the father’s ashes. I pieced together that urns are held in a mausoleum for ten years and Mom didn’t want to pay the rent for another ten years. She has her own issues around being widowed so young. Joris tries to leave the urn somewhere around the house, but it is always returned to him. He wants a connection with his father, but not through the urn. Yad is the other lad. He had been a medical student in Amsterdam, but after passing out at a party he returns home to the community where he grew up. His mother is annoyed he has no occupational ambition. He gets a job as a domestic for a woman living in senior housing – who happens to be Joris’ grandmother. When the two lads meet they immediately start flirting. Did they sense the other is gay? Since both are out to their families had Grandma told her help about her son? A problem in the budding relationship is that Joris’ mom isn’t so keen on Yad being Muslim. He was born in Syria and the family moved to Netherlands as refugees, where he grew up. The story goes where expected. I may say that a lot, but it isn’t always a bad thing. I enjoyed it. Kos of Daily Kos discussed the gender gap as political chasm. He begins with stats to show the stark difference between young women voting for Harris and young men voting for the nasty guy. Then Kos included a tweet by Steve Kornacki about the results of a poll he helped conduct through NBC News Decision Desk. It asked Gen Z adults, men who voted for the nasty guy and women who voted for Harris, whether various things were important to their personal definition of success. I’m pretty sure the numbers represent the percent of respondents who said an item is important. Some of the items are similar in both groups. 21% of both men and women said having no debt was part of their personal definition of success. Making family and community proud was similar, 23% of men, 19% of women. 33% of men and 32% of women said financial independence was important. Then the items with widely differing importance. 34% of men but 6% of women said having children was important to success. 29% of men but 6% of women thought being married was important. Having money to do things you want, 28% men, 46% women. Having a fulfilling job, 30% men and 51% women. Having emotional stability, 9% men, 39% women. Kos wrote:

Both men and women highly value financial independence and a fulfilling career, but women—with higher educational attainment—are increasingly competing for and winning those opportunities. That leaves a generation of men who want families and children—while their female peers don’t—struggling to secure careers in increasingly competitive fields. Enter the manosphere and its influencers—a sprawling network of podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media accounts feeding young men a steady diet of grievance. The core message is always the same: Men are owed women—women to bear their children, keep their homes, and provide sex.

If men don’t get what they’re owed, they blame feminism, liberalism, and “woke culture” as corrupting women away from their biological destinies. This worldview, pushed by the manosphere, tells men they’re victims. The message is the same:

True masculinity means reasserting rigid gender hierarchies—by any force necessary. It’s toxic and dangerous. These ideas don’t just encourage resentment; they legitimize violence. When men are told that society has “stolen” their futures, it doesn’t take much for frustration to turn into radicalization.

Alienated and disaffected young men are a threat to both left and right – to the right if they feel betrayed or ignored. Radicalized young men are combustible. We channel their energy constructively or we face violence. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, he takes on why conservatives love guns so much. I think he gets quite close to the answer I’ve come up with. He of course begins by listing some of the statements over the years of conservatives declaring their love for guns, or at least their refusal to regulate guns. And that love is much more than the NRA handing out lots of money.

Conservatism embraces gun culture as an attempt to control things. Much like right-wing fear of diverse cities, conservatism asserts gun rights—despite the threat to public safety—because guns are seen as a way to control things. The right has a deep-seated issue with growing gender and racial diversity, so guns are seen as a way to keep that in check. Guns are also used by the right to reinforce a culture of faux machismo. Many on the right believe that owning and using guns is a display of strength, while they deride purported feminine weakness from groups like Moms Demand Action for opposing gun violence.

Using guns to keep things in check doesn’t say what “in check” means and why they want to control things. So to my understanding: Guns are the best way to enforce the social hierarchy. They prove the person with the gun is socially superior to the one they’re aiming at. If the target dies the death shows the shooter is superior because the shooter was able to take the life. If the gun doesn’t go off it’s usually because the target managed some act of submission, of acknowledging the superiority of the other. The nasty guy is in England to visit royalty. There was also a far right rally with a turnout that was maybe up to 150,000, way too high for comfort. NPR host Mary Louise Kelly spoke to Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament with British-Caribbean ancestry. Lewis could look down at the crowd from his window. Many held far right banners and many others were people he knew – old school chums and neighbors. He recognized these people liked what they’re hearing but aren’t yet far right. Some of that feeling of being powerless comes from many British institutions – railways, health system, water system – that have been hollowed out. The people have lost trust and feel they’re not being heard. Lewis talked about fellow MP Nigel Farange. He champions wealth, but is now moving towards a position of public-private partnerships. It is those on the right who are the first to say we hear you and will change things. Lewis said he saw American conservatives use Charlie Kirk’s assassination as an opportunity to increase political repression, to say their freedom of speech has greater weight than other’s. From what Lewis said I saw another instance of the pattern that is playing out in America. The rich cause public services to disintegrate and oppress the poor by limiting their opportunities. Then the rich are much faster at capitalizing on the angst. They blame immigrants and offer solutions that protect their own position. All of it can stir up the voters. None of it will actually make their lives better. The rich still control everything to protect their position at the top of the hierarchy. In Monday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted a pair of tweets. First Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain:

I think the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country is that the left glorifies death - particularly of adversaries and the right does not. And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.

That reminds me: From the right an accusation is actually a confession. But on to a rebuttal from Sarah Longwell:

One reason you get deranged takes like this from people who used to oppose Trump, is that the mental and moral gymnastics it took to become a Trump supporter/apologist requires a simple mantra, “The Left is worse.” So you work to constantly convince yourself that’s true.

Max Burns tweeted a thread now on Threadreader:

A Gen Z colleague described the "blackpill mindset" to me in a way I'd never heard before: For younger kids today, especially men, there's a pressure to either "get rich at any cost" or "get famous at any cost." They use irony and crude memes to mask the deep anxiety they feel. What stood out to this person was the "lol nothing matters" attitude Kirk's assassin tried so hard to project in his ironic bullet inscriptions, political-but-mostly-stupid meme Halloween costumes, and the gamer culture he was steeped in. His politics almost feel secondary. We're seeing an uptick in "ironic" phrases written on bullet casings and manifestos that are peppered with Very Online references meant to be read and understood not by the media, but by these shooters' online peers. They want to be remembered as the people who "went for it." It speaks to an alienation that younger Americans (disproportionately men) try to heal not through therapy but through online game communities, Discord, and validating themselves online. Their goal isn't news coverage - it's to be cheered on their niche forums of choice.

In the comments the cartoon Twonks comments on fitness devices.

Woman: Right, I’m heading out for a walk. Couch potato man: Can you take my watch with you?

The worth of a musical memorial

I finished the book Time’s Echo; Music, Memory, and the Second World War by Jeremy Eichler. It is a history book, what I’ve seen called a micro-history, focused on one or a small number of things. In this case it is the history of four classical music compositions that commemorate World War II and the Holocaust. I found the book fascinating and recommend it, though I realize classical music, especially heavy duty classical music, may have limited appeal. The four compositions are A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, War Requiem by Benjamin Britten, and Symphony 13, “Babi Yar” by Dmitri Shostakovich. Definitely heavy duty stuff. Along with a discussion of the pieces there is enough of a biography of the composers to explain why they came to write it. The story actually begins with the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn in the 1740s. There began to be an understanding of common humanity between Germans and the Jews who live among them. There was a striving towards a German-Jewish culture. Of course, to build that culture many Jews felt they needed to convert to Christianity. That included the Mendelssohn family and Arnold Schoenberg. All that goodwill fell apart when the Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I. Schoenberg saw who the Nazis were and shortly after Hitler took power he left for Paris, then moved on to New York. He settled in the Los Angeles area where a lot of other musical and intellectual Jewish refugees had settled. Prior to this Schoenberg wasn’t very religious. But Germany’s rejection of his Jewish ancestry restarted his Jewish faith. He felt he could inspire the Jews of Europe to rise up or flee. His efforts didn’t get very far. As a composer Schoenberg stretched tonal music (all popular and folk music is tonal and not very dissonant). Schoenberg pushed into atonal music and developed the tone-row method of composing (I could explain it, but for now I’ll stick to saying it is really dissonant, sounding harsh and disorienting, and most classical music lovers hate music written this way). But for *A Survivor from Warsaw*, with a narrator describing Nazi brutality, this method of composing actually works. When I taught how music works, I sometimes used it as an example. The piece had been commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who had commissioned a lot of music in the 1920s to 1940s. But when he got the score for A Survivor he did nothing with it. The premier was actually held in Albuquerque. Richard Strauss is not the Waltz King (that’s Johann Strauss). He wrote the theme that was used in 2001 A Space Odyssey, tone poems such as Don Juan, and several operas such as Der Rosenkavalier, the most famous living German composer at the start of the 1930s. As such he was invited by the Nazis to lead the music division of the culture ministry. He took a long time to see who the Nazis really were, though he could use his position to protect his daughter-in-law, who was Jewish, and his grandchildren. He could not save her siblings and parents. The Nazis eventually released him from his post. But because he had worked for, and did not denounce, the Nazis few wanted anything to do with him. He retreated to his home south of Munich where he wrote *Metamorphosen* as a way to express his grief of his country and the world. I hadn’t heard of the piece prior to reading this book. I have now listened to it on YouTube. I much prefer his Four Last Songs, written after Metamorphosen, and depicting the end of life. Britten and his life partner Peter Pears had applied for and gotten conscientious objector status during WWII. Just after the war Britten persuaded violinist Yehudi Menuhin that he should be the accompanist on a tour of Germany to play for those made homeless by the war. Britten was deeply shaken by the extent of the devastation. Early in the war Coventry Cathedral was bombed, leaving just the outer walls and bell tower. There was talk of rebuilding, but that changed to preserving the old cathedral as a memorial and building a glorious modern cathedral beside the old. When I went to England with a cousin in the 1980s we stopped to see the old and new cathedrals. The new one is bright, modern, and radiates joy. When the new one was consecrated in 1962 Britten, as the most famous composer of the land, was commissioned to write a piece. He wrote this War Requiem. The text is the Latin Mass for the dead, interspersed with poems of Wilfred Owen, who was also gay and died in WWI. Owen’s poems deal with the brutality of war and do not lead to catharsis. One of Owen’s poems is about the ancient story of Abraham and his son Isaac. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. At the last moment an angel tells him not to, and provides a ram to sacrifice instead. In Owen’s version Abraham kills his son anyway, then kills all the sons of Europe. I heard the work performed in concert. It’s quite an experience. It was also discussed in a composition class when I was working on my Master of Music. Shostakovich, throughout his life, was under the watchful eye of he Soviet regime. Some times he could do his own thing, sometimes the regime cracked down. Many times he wrote what the regime commissioned him to write, meaning he had to support their ideology, and not his own. Even so, his symphonies supported the regime in a coded way. They were celebratory in the required manner, but with an undertone that doesn’t fit. An example is his Fifth Symphony, written to bring himself back into good graces after his first denunciation. I think Shostakovich’s symphonies are the most interesting of the 20th century. He also wrote string quartets and because these were meant for small audiences he could let his true feelings out. Early in Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union the German army reached Kyiv. There they demanded all the Jews of the city assemble for relocation. The next morning 33 thousand Jews were escorted out of town to Babyn Yar, a valley nearby, where they were all murdered. The valley became their mass grave. The Soviets were pretty good covering it up because they didn’t want Jews to be singled out when a great number of Soviets also died. When Shostakovich saw a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko written about Babi Yar and antisemitism he knew that would become the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. The same poet provided more texts for four more movements. The Soviet regime did quite a bit to make sure the premier didn’t happen. The work wasn’t banned until later, but the regime could make life difficult. But after a lifetime of compromise Shostakovich was done. He had a text he firmly believed in and he provided music to fit. He did not back down. The premier happened. I’ve heard the work, or at least part of it, but it’s been a while. So I listened to it this evening while following along in the score. The whole piece is about an hour. It is for a bass solo, a choir of bases, and orchestra. The text is, of course, in Russian and the score does not provide translation. So I found a translation online. The first movement is about Babi Yar and a recounting of many of the antisemitic acts through history. The second movement says that emperors have not been able to command, buy, or kill humor. The third is about the endurance of Russian women as they do what’s needed for their families. The fourth is about fears, how they slither everywhere and subdue people; but a new fear is parroting someone else’s words. The last movement is about whether one is advancing their career by telling the truth or saying what the authorities want to hear. After the premier of War Requiem Britten sent a recording to Shostakovich. The two became good friends, though they rarely met. Each saw the other and someone who understood what they were trying to accomplish through music. Eichler also discussed the meaning and purpose of memorials. Can any type of memorial, including one of music, help future people to adequately understand the horror and devastation of World War II and the Holocaust? No. Memorials can also make us think we’ve encountered the past enough, we don’t need to delve deeper into the event. But music has (or can have) an endurance that exceeds the lives of survivors of horrific events, so can keep their stories alive. And music has an emotional immediacy that archives and websites can’t produce. Musical memorials are a whole lot better than no memorials at all, than letting the events fade into dry history books. Of course, Eichler discussed memorials in a lot more detail. As I said the book was fascinating to me, though I understand the limited appeal.

The largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich

About a year ago I discussed the book Tyrant, Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt. One of the tyrants discussed by Greenblatt is the English King Richard III. But what if Shakespeare portrayed Richard III not as the man actually was, but how the following Tudor dynasty portrayed him? Richard III, the last of the Plantagenets (Wikipedia says he was the last of the Yorks) was followed by Henry the VII, the first of the Tudors. And the Tudor line, especially Henry VIII, is the fodder of a great number of novels, plays, TV series, and movies because of how bad they were. My Sunday movie was The Lost King, based on a true story. That story is that the bones of Richard, lost since his death in 1485, were found under a car park in Leicester in 2012 (so we know how the movie ends). The woman behind the excavation was Phillipa Langley, an amateur historian. She lives in Edinburgh and is inspired to do the search after seeing Shakespeare’s play. Phillipa gets help through the Richard III Society, those who believe that the king’s reputation was slandered by the Tudors. She also sees an apparition of Richard, who sometimes answers her questions, and sometimes not. The big one he doesn’t answer is: What happened to the two nephews in the Tower of London? (I’ve read a science fiction story about the boys, posing another answer to what happened to them.) Eventually she gets to the University of Leicester and the City of Leicester. She’s dismissed because she is an amateur, a woman, and claiming that Richard was not what historians and the royal family say he was. Eventually they help her – and then claim the credit. IMDb added that Langley was not the first to accurately conclude where Richard III was buried and how that land was now used. She was the one to act on her conclusion and dig up the car park. I enjoyed this one. Though Shakespeare may or may not have accurately portrayed Richard III, that play is accurate in portraying how a tyrant may rise to power, what happens when in power, and how the tyrant falls. Last evening I was in my car and listened to about ten minutes of the NPR show Fresh Air. The topic of this episode was the book Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. In this 44 minute segment Terry Gross talked to Tapper. This is the book discussing Biden’s mental decline and the cover-up by Jill Biden and senior staff at the White House in the last two years of his presidency. Tapper says that cover-up – insisting that Biden was mentally fine while covering for him on days when he obviously wasn’t then insisting he was healthy enough for another term – is why we have the nasty guy in the White House. In the part I heard Tapper lays out a pretty good case. That included an excerpt of Biden being interviewed by the Justice Department in October 2023 about what he knew about mishandling presidential documents found on his property. The deposition was the same day that Hamas attacked Israel. I remember the uproar when the interviewer said the DoJ would not bring charges because the jury would see Biden as a forgetful old man and would not convict him. In that excerpt Biden did indeed sound like a forgetful old man. During the last 18 months of Biden’s tenure, on days where he wasn’t good, the senior staff acted as a five-person presidential board. When Biden had to speak publicly on a not-so-good day he speech was prepared for him and he read it from a teleprompter. He could still do that. I didn’t listen to the whole episode, so maybe my question was answered. That question is: Why did Jill and senior staff cover up the decline? What were they trying to protect? Joe’s reputation? Sure. But his reputation would be better if he made a graceful exit before a decline. The chance to keep a Democrat in the White House? That didn’t work. The good of the country? That backfired. As I thought about it I became more disappointed in what the Bidens chose to do. First, of all, they should have prevented him from running for a second term. That was Tapper’s point. Even better, they should have convinced him to resign or used the 25th Amendment to have the Cabinet force him out, handing the presidency to Harris. That would have given her time to show she was presidential material. It would at least given challengers time to mount a campaign and go through the primary process. It would also shifted the “too old” meme onto the nasty guy. Even though what Tapper documented is likely accurate, showing the “too old” messages of the campaign were justified, the book still feels like a hit-job because there is no corresponding book on the nasty guy, detailing his own mental decline and his much more obvious poor mental health and dangerously fragile ego. Alas, too many people – billionaires, Republicans, white nationalists, and the MAGA faithful – like what the nasty guy is doing (at least until the faithful discover his agenda biting them in the ass) and don’t care about his mental state. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the big bill (no, it’s not “beautiful”) being considered in the House. It hasn’t passed the House yet, and I’ve heard an important committee voted it down. It would also have a hard time in the Senate. But if it did pass... Singer begins her report:

President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" that House Republicans are trying to ram through the chamber would be the "largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history," according to a report published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. The bill, if passed, would lead to at least 13.7 million people losing their health insurance. It would also impose massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—better known as “food stamps”—that would put nearly 11 million people at risk of losing the ability to feed their families. And it will make college more expensive by eliminating subsidized federal student loans, meaning loans would start accruing interest as soon as students take them out rather than once they leave school. And Republicans are doing all of this only to partly pay for an extension of the tax cuts they passed in 2017, which have overwhelmingly benefited the richest taxpayers while giving the lowest-income Americans pennies.

The bill is in a bit of trouble because some Republicans say it cuts too much and other Republicans say it doesn’t cut enough. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that Republicans have found a group they can raise taxes on. Republicans don’t mind raising taxes. They “just hate to be perceived as raising taxes.” And one way to do that is to tax people whose complaints they can ignore. They propose to tax remittances. A remittance is sent by a person in the US to family in their home country. This is usually money the people back home desperately need. The money is usually sent through a financial institution set up to protect the transaction. Republicans propose to tax those remittances at the 5% rate, but only if sent by a noncitizen. This idea has been floating around for a while. It won’t raise much money for covering the huge budget deficit. But it will make immigrant lives harder – which is what Republicans really want. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted tweets by Aaron Fritschner who quoted Brendan Duke who included a chart by the Center on Budget and Policy and Priorities. The chart shows the change in income both in percent and dollar amount for various income groups for year 2029. For the top 10% their income increases by 3.4% though for the top 1% that is $52,050 a year. Percentages drop from there. The second 20% (from the bottom) get an increase of 0.6% or $260 in a year. The bottom 20% would lose 0.5% or $100 a year. Duke:

The bill is even more regressive when you look at 2029 when tax cuts for families expire & tax increases resulting from cuts to ACA premium tax credits grow larger.

Fritschner added:

But here is the thing Per JCT, Congress’ official scorekeeper, the bottom 20% of households – tens of millions of Americans – will see a Tax Increase beginning in 2029. Republicans are cutting taxes for billionaires and raising taxes on working people. This isn’t a nit-picky point based on a technicality or an asterisk. It isn’t analysis from a far left group, the White House sent these tables out and posted them on their website.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Occupy Democrats:

A tiny Chinese company owned by the same people that own TikTok just bought $300,000,000 of $Trump Coin. Now why do you think they did that? Foreigners are literally bribing Trump with hundreds of millions to get favors!

Also, paulpro posted a cartoon by Christopher Weyant. Two girls are talking. The girl of color says, “My first choice college is the one with an endowment big enough to protect me from the government.” In today’s news was a story about South African president Cyril Ramaphosa visiting the White House. The nasty guy lectured him about “white genocide” which Ramaphosa tried to refute. But like the infamous visit by Ukraine’s Zelenskyy it didn’t go well for the visitor. Last Saturday Oliver Willis of Kos wrote about the Republican fixation on white genocide. This fixation includes the nasty guy admitting fifty white South African refugees not long ago while refusing refugees from other countries. The SA refugees were welcomed because of this false white genocide. Willis explained:

The “white genocide” myth is being invoked in U.S. politics because conservatives long ago embraced the politics of victimhood. Even when the right is in majority control of U.S. political institutions, like right now, it still claims that it’s a persecuted minority. ... This mentality perfectly combines with the conservative embrace of white supremacy. Claiming that a “white genocide” is underway, even when the data disproves it, becomes a way of being racist while simultaneously laying hands on the mantle of victimhood.

Also, the whites of South Africa (and no doubt in America) felt the law that distributed land from white to black owners (as in back to the original owners) was an “attack.” And an attack on their land was equivalent to an attack on their body. I thought of the claim of victimhood this way: When those at the top of the hierarchy (and Republicans declare they are) feel challenged in any way they will claim they are the victim, even if their position in the hierarchy is still quite secure. An attack on their position in the hierarchy is to them equivalent to an attack on their body. They feel they are the victim because in their position in the hierarchy no one is supposed to be able or allowed to challenge them. No one is supposed to be able to make them feel uncomfortable. This article in Kos linked to one in Salon by Michael Bader from January 2024 discussing claims of victimhood. Some of Bader’s points: Those claiming to be victims use it as a rationale for striking out at others without guilt. These acts of violence are reframed as revenge or a twisted form of self-care. Conservatives can use fear to claim liberals are trying to replace them. That makes their listeners feel they are victims. That, in their minds, justifies violence. The “victims” become victimizers. For example, if an election was “stolen” stealing it back makes moral sense. They don’t need to feel guilty about hurting others because they quickly come up with a story on how those “others” were first hurting them. Bader also compared the use of “victim” by liberals and conservatives. Liberals identify actual victims, people actually injured by racism, war, or other form of oppression. They try to defend these victims and care for them. Conservatives use victimhood as propaganda, to stir up a mob. They then use the mob to get rid of the democratic norms that restrain the political aims of the conservatives. Those political aims are always to oppress some other group. Because of that incitement to violence claiming to be a victim is dangerous. Denise Oliver Velez of Kos, in her Caribbean Matters series, reported that Pope Leo has Louisiana Creole ancestry through his mother, Mildred Martínez. Her parents were described as black or “mulatto” in historical records. They lived in New Orleans Seventh Ward, a Catholic area and melting pot of people with African, Caribbean, and European roots. The pope’s brother John Prevost said that while growing up in Chicago he and his brothers always considered themselves to be white. Passing for white has a long history in the US. But his ancestry would have marked him as “colored” in Louisiana as recently as 1982.

Not a Constitutional crisis but a Supreme Court crisis

I finished the book The Underground Library by Jennifer Ryan. Yeah, I read it in about a week. In 1940 at the start of the London Blitz the Bethnal Green Library was hit by a bomb and damaged. The library moved its undamaged books and shelves to the nearby Bethnal Green Underground station and reopened. This was a logical move because the Underground stations were already being used as bomb shelters whenever the civil defense sirens went off. This part of the story is true. All the rest is well researched fiction. The main characters of story are three women. Juliet was engaged to Victor, but he was reported as an army deserter at Dunkirk. Since her parents weren’t all that loving she escapes to London and gets the job as deputy librarian at the Bethnal Green Library. The head librarian isn’t too thrilled to hire a woman (this is 1940) but a lot of men are a part of the war effort. She has ideas for programs at the library. He isn’t interested. The student intern says do them anyway and the boss will pretend he doesn’t see. At the rooming house she meets Sebastian, nephew to the landlady. He was injured and sent home from the front and now works for the war effort. He’s not looking for a life partner (yeah, we know where this is going). That student intern is Katie, about to go to college and able to do that because so many men are at war. Her boyfriend Christopher is at the front and she gets word that he went missing and presumed dead. Shortly after that she realizes she is pregnant (glad she works at a library and can look these things up as sex ed was rather Victorian). At the time an unmarried woman brings shame to herself and her parents. And her parents are desperate to maintain their respectability. The third main character is Sofie. She is Jewish, originally from Berlin, and got to London on a visa to fill a job as a domestic. Her boss is quite demanding. She is trying to find out what happened to her sister, who wasn’t able to flee with her. Some residents of Bethnal Green don’t like her because she has a German accent. Through her story I learned that the Isle of Man was used as a detention center during the war and life there was rather pleasant. As in several of the Underground stations during the Blitz the people who slept in the Bethnal Green station developed into a community. In this station the library went a long way to make that happen. This community becomes important to the story. Another big part of this story is romance. Juliet is torn between Victor and Sebastian. Katie still longs after Christopher. And Sofie has Mac, a fellow Jew whose contacts started the search for Sofie’s sister. Though this story has a wartime setting (spoiler alert) every thread has a happy ending. At times I felt a bit annoyed with all that cheery news. Even so, I enjoyed the book. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia about the Supreme Court’s somewhat vague decisions on immigration cases and the nasty guy who seems determined to ignore those decisions. The discussion focused on two rulings by the Supreme. The first said that deportees must have due process, but the case went through the wrong forum, so start over. Frost called this ruling “frustrating.” The second case is the one involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The lower court was specific in their language saying the government must get him out of that El Salvador prison and return him to the US. The Supreme Court decision said the same thing but in a weaker manner. And the government is taking advantage of that weak language to do nothing. Kelly said to Frost:

It sounds as though they are issuing rulings that are so carefully worded that they tiptoe up to wishy-washy. ... Listening to you, it sounds like you see this more as a Supreme Court crisis right now than a constitutional crisis.

A constitutional crisis would be the nasty guy openly declaring he would not follow court rulings. But he doesn’t need to say that because the rulings are so weak. He doesn’t need to ignore court rulings when he can get away with this misbehavior. Frost said:

President Trump said, if the Supreme Court orders him returned, I will do it. And then the Supreme Court issues a weak order that I think suggests it's now afraid of the constitutional crisis that would come if the Trump administration were to ignore its rulings.

Frost is suggesting the Supremes water down their ruling to avoid open defiance and a constitutional crisis. Which to me sounds like a democracy crisis – that and their ruling giving the nasty guy immunity for official acts. Every year the US State Department produces a report on the human rights in countries around the world. These reports are carefully read by both authoritarians and activists. Graham Smith of NPR explained a State Department memo demanding significant changes to this year’s report. Congress uses these human rights reports to determine how to spend taxpayer money overseas in security assistance, weapons, or other aid. When Marco Rubio was a Florida senator he praised the report for shining light on failures to respect citizen rights. Now as Secretary of State he is responsible for the reports. The law says the report must document internationally recognized human rights. But the memo instructs editors to delete references to more than 20 rights, to bring the report in line with executive orders.

Gone are violations against the right to peacefully assemble, the right to a fair public trial, to privacy. The directive eliminates everything that's not separately listed in the language of the law.

The report on El Salvador is no longer cited for terrible prison conditions. Sections in reports for other countries no longer mention government corruption. Gone are sections on the sexual exploitation of children and women, the denial of rights of political minorities, and violence and discrimination of LGBTQ people, religions or ethnic groups, Indigenous people, and internally displaced people. I’m sure there are many more things to be deleted. From Paul O'Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA:

What you've just read me out is a list of civil and political rights that are essential. So what this is is a signal that the United States is no longer going to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms, the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize. ... Any constraints or pretensions around protecting vulnerable populations writ large seems to be going away.

From Christopher LeMon, who served at State under President Biden:

You can't overstate the value in the real world of the annual State Department human rights reports being credible and impartial. You also can't overstate the damage it will do to that credibility if the Trump administration's edits are seen to diminish not just the scope of what are defined as human rights, but also if those edits are seen to play favorites.

O’Brien is worried that the deletions aren’t just about how the US views rights in other countries, they are also about how the administration views rights in the US. I’ll work through several browser tabs to clear them out before movie night and rehearsal nights and the corresponding days of collecting more stories in browser tabs. I’ve mentioned that many Republicans got a fierce public response when holding town hall meetings with constituents. They were so bad (from the view of the member of Congress) that Republican leadership suggested stop doing them. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa did one anyway. He was met with a lot of jeers, demands he do his job, and to actually act on the oath of office he took.

Grassley continued to act powerless, pointing to the fact that the “only tool” for Congress to discipline the president is impeachment. “And you missed that opportunity in his first administration. You had two opportunities for that. That was probably one of the only reasons we're having this situation now,” the attendee responded.

Alex Samuels of Kos reported that the Associated Press had been banned from White House press briefings because it refused to use the nasty guy’s name for the Gulf of Mexico. A US District Judge ordered the administration to let the AP back in. The AP remains locked out.

This isn’t just petty—it’s calculated. The strategy’s clear: Bully the press into compliance, and if that doesn’t work, slam the door shut. Outlets that hold the line—like the AP—get punished. Ones that cozy up to Trump, like The Washington Post, get a pat on the head and a few flattering social media posts.

The nasty guy has also ranted against CBS News and “60 Minutes” because of stories he didn’t like. He has also ranted against ABC News and NBC News because he claims they gave Harris preferential treatment during last year’s campaign. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that since the administration has sidelined legitimate media organizations from the White House press briefings, those briefings “have turned into a playground for pro-MAGA outlets.” They aren’t interested in providing a clear picture of the administration. Instead, they amplify the conservative falsehoods and bigotry. An article by Sharon Lerner of ProPublica posted on Kos reported the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants, coal mines, and companies that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, and other polluters from having to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The data guides policy decisions and is submitted to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. The data allows for accountability, to record which region or factory is emitting how much gas. The “government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.” It also makes climate policy more difficult and would be devastating for the world’s ability to limit climate change.

“The bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”

A couple weeks ago Kos of Kos again looked at how the nasty guy could get a third term, in spite of the 22nd Amendment saying “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.” I highlighted the key word to this possible scheme. One possible route would be to be elected Speaker of the House. The Constitution does not say this has to be a member of the House. Then the people actually elected to president and vice president resign, and the nasty guy steps back in. But how likely are two people, who just went through a grueling national campaign, willingly give up the chance to be president? Especially for him. Other routes are to be appointed President Pro Tempore of the Senate (and three people would have to step aside) or Secretary of State (four people...). There is another route, the one he tried in 2021.

But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.