To Brits, Trump Makes Dubya Look Smart

Sometimes even those of us who take great pride in our writings come across pieces that inspire us to be more elegant, more precise, just more literate. I have a fondness for the King’s English and once had an editor, a woman in her late 70’s and very, very English ask me why I wrote as though I were writing in the 19th century? I, of course, not missing a beat replied that I thought that was the ultimate compliment. She vehemently disagreed. Oh well, to each their own.

But just a while ago I came across the accompanying article that I found to be so profoundly poignant yet humorous that it led me to one of those moments where my only reaction was the proverbial “I wish I had said that.” So I would like to share it with those who may not have been introduced to such witty repartee as they perused their daily dose of Facebook.

So with no further suspense I would like to offer the following, which appeared on February 11, 2019, on the internet site Quora.com, for your reading pleasure.

Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. 

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. 

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. 

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. 

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. 

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. 

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. 

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. 

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. 

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. (...)

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. 

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. 

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down. 

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: 

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. 

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. 

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

by  Lance Simmens, LA Progressive |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Here’s to Naps and Snoozes

A few months ago, two Americans arrived for a meeting at a sprawling, corporate campus in Sichuan Province in China. (They asked not to be named because their work is confidential.) To get to the conference room, they crossed a vast span of cubicles where hundreds of young engineers were busy at their desks, a scene replicated on every floor of the 10-storey building. The meeting was to discuss a dense, text-heavy document, and it began with the client reviewing the day’s agenda: they’d talk until 11am, break for lunch, have nap time, and then start again at 2pm.

Lunch was in a cafeteria the size of a football field where women with hair nets and soup ladles regulated the movement of a column of people. The visitors lost sight of their hosts, so they got into line, bolted down their meal, and retraced their way to the building where they’d had their meeting. When the elevator door opened, the window blinds were drawn, the computer screens were off, and the whole floor lay in grey shadow. The workday could have been over but for the fact that people lay about everywhere, as switched off as the ceiling lights.

The Americans hadn’t seen anything like it since morning-after scenes at their college fraternities. They had to step over some bodies. Other people were tilted forward in their seats with their faces on their desks, like they’d been knocked out from behind, while others still had cleared their desks and lay on them face-up.

The Americans hoped that their hosts, upper-tier executives, would be awake in the meeting room, but they were just as dead to the world as everyone else. One of the Americans coughed into his fist. No one stirred. There were still 45 minutes to go till the 2pm meeting. So he took a seat and pretended to join the mass nap. He didn’t feel like sleeping and would have felt too vulnerable even if he did, but it was a tight space, the woman facing him, a lawyer, was snoring away, and he was afraid that, if she woke up, she’d think he was staring at her. ‘I figured it was safer if I just closed my eyes,’ he told me.

The ordeal ended, finally, with a gong. The lights came back on, music (a military march) played, and people just opened their eyes and resumed their working posture. Nap time was done.

That the incident seemed strange illustrates how people raised in the United States (or who identify with its values) often think about sleep: we can be dominated and bullied by early risers, and tend to look down upon other customs such as siestas.

These are some of our conventions: a person should not sleep too long – as a matter of personal virtue and social capital, the less the better. The average American sleeps for 6 hours 31 minutes during the working week, the least of any country but Japan (6 hours, 22 minutes). The higher limit of what you can admit to is eight hours. Sleep is a waste of time, robbing you of the finite resource of conscious, productive time. Collective nap times or public sleeping bring to mind nurseries and nursing homes. You don’t sleep with co-workers, ever, in any sense of the term. If you really have to sleep, you slink off somewhere out of view and, if anyone asks, you manufacture an alibi, or say something like: ‘I just wanted to close my eyes,’ as if to plead a felony charge down to a misdemeanour. Or you call it a ‘power nap’, as if it was really a strength-training session at the gym.

‘Every society is judgmental about its core issues of value,’ said Carol Worthman, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. But when it comes to sleep, the need for safety – versus value judgment – seems to have prevailed in cultures beyond our own. Indeed, in Worthman’s research around the world, sleep has emerged as both more flexible and more social than one would think from the perspective of the West. ‘Human sleep evolved in risky settings that fostered complex sleep architecture and regulation of vigilance in sleep to suit local circumstances,’ she writes in Frontiers Reviews; and those circumstances varied from place to place.

by Todd Pitock, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Jason Lee/Reuters

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Ghost, Come Back Again

A boarding school in the British Isles. Reverent children huddle in a gloomy chamber, watching as one of their fellow students assays a devilishly difficult trick. The boy’s hand trembles. And then — success! A jet of fire, a “cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment,” fills the ancient tower with an indescribable illumination.

Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.

The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.

Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a ­Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)

Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” ­Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic ­Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.

In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”

Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie ­McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.

That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.

In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.

Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-­dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”

by Dan Kois, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rutu Modan
[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]

Bow Wow Wow (Kevin Shields Remix)

Chris Ware
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[ed. Who could have known...? See also: The Other Kind of Climate Denialism (New Yorker).]

St. Vincent & Dua Lipa

It’s Time to Stop Fighting Osama bin Laden’s War

Osama bin Laden is long dead, but his plans live on through American foreign policy.

In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.

Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.

After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.

America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.

by Scott Horton and Robert Gaines, Brietbart | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Yes, Brietbart. Blind squirrels... etc.]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco (NY Times)

Image: Jason Henry
[ed. One of the best weeks of my life. City Lights, North Beach, Chinatown, Rosie Flores at Bimbo's, and the annual Columbus Day and Italian Heritage Parade (with a banquet table set up adjacent to the street, full of antipasto and wine).]

The Making of the Fox News White House

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”

Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, “When I first met him, he was producing Hannity’s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.” Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are so close to each other’s children that they are referred to as “Uncle Bill” and “Uncle Sean.” Another former colleague says, “They spend their vacations together.” A third recalls, “I was rarely in Shine’s office when Sean didn’t call. And I was in Shine’s office a lot. They talked all the time—many times a day.”

Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.

Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”

The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump “will even pick up an error made by Fox,” as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was “seizing land from white farmers.” Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.” (...)

Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K. T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. The White House door swings both ways: Hope Hicks, Shine’s predecessor in the communications job, is now slated to be the top public-relations officer at Fox Corporation. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox. Gorka recently insisted, on Fox Business, that one of Trump’s biggest setbacks—retreating from the shutdown without securing border-wall funds—was actually a “masterstroke.”

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host, and Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business host, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

by Jane Mayer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Comrie; photograph from Getty

Charting Her Own Sushi Path

[ed. See also: Kohada sushi (Shizuoka Gourmet)]

Lou Feck, Argosy magazine, April 1969
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What Democrats and Republicans Drink on Mardi Gras

What Democrats and Republicans Drink on Mardi Gras (Bloomberg)

Image: National Media

Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it's too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.

Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.

Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."

It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.

Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.

The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).

Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.

by Joe Setyon, Reason | Read more:
Image: Olga Vasylieva/Dreamstime.com
[ed. See also: Peace Dividend vs Military Industrial Complex.]

Victor Vasarely, Reklámterv

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Only One Roadblock on the Road to Reform: Mitch McConnell

With the conspicuous perversion of the political system on daily display, congressional Democrats are eager to brand themselves the party of reform. They took another step in this direction on Friday, when the House voted 234-to-193 — along straight party lines — to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping package of proposals aimed at rooting out political corruption and shoring up the integrity of the electoral system.

The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.

To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.

As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote.

Think of H.R. 1 as the Merrick Garland of reform legislation.

Mr. McConnell called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act”(and a “turkey”) and predicted that lawmakers who back it will suffer come re-election time. As political logic, this is questionable. If the Republican leader really thought the package was a loser, he would absolutely bring it to the floor to force Democratic lawmakers to own it — which is, notably, the path he has pledged to pursue with the Green New Deal, which is supported by many Democrats. The Green New Deal, an assortment of ideas for fighting climate change and remaking the economy, is even more sprawling and amorphous than the For the People Act. Mr. McConnell is panting to have members vote on it.

Asked this week why the two measures were being handled so differently, the Republican leader didn’t bother making up excuses. He said simply, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.”

This grade-school taunt masks a deep current of fear and loathing. Loathing, because Mr. McConnell is a longtime enemy of campaign finance reform. Killing such efforts can seem like his singular legislative passion.

The fear is less targeted, but even more existential. Ever the shrewd political animal, Mr. McConnell is well aware that a majority of Americans favor overhauling a system they see as broken and unfair. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from September, 77 percent of respondents said reducing corruption and the influence of special interests was either the most important or a very important issue facing the nation. Having his members blamed for derailing a major reform package could prove politically risky. Thus Mr. McConnell turns to his go-to move: stonewalling. (...)

H.R. 1 would put an end to at least some of the vile voter suppression practices that Republicans have embraced in recent years. Which goes to the heart of the party’s opposition.

Well before President Trump erupted on the scene, Republicans made the calculation that, with demographics trending against them, their best strategy was to make voting harder rather than easier, particularly for certain nonwhite segments of the electorate. Across the nation, they have pursued voter restriction tactics with vigor. Any effort to expand access to the ballot box sets off alarm bells within the party.

This leaves Republicans in the peculiar position of arguing that weeding out corruption, reducing the influence of special interests and protecting voting rights are inherently Democratic values.

by The Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Pernice and Damon Winter/The New York Times

Don't Be Distracted

Israel and the deaths of Palestinian children

Over the past few weeks, there has been a furious political controversy over whether Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali American Muslim, is anti-Semitic. Omar has been critical of the influence of pro-Israel lobbying on the U.S. government, and said members of Congress are expected to show “allegiance” and “pledge support” to Israel. In response, Omar has been accused of hating Jews. Bret Stephens has said Omar “knows exactly what she is doing” and is intentionally evoking stereotypes about Jewish conspiracies. Meghan McCain nearly came to tears on The View as she described Omar’s remarks as “very scary.” National Review’s Kevin Williamson said Democrats have a “major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos,” hauling out as his prime example Louis Farrakhan, a man whose entire significance in contemporary American politics is being denounced or being the subject of demands that others denounce him.

The reaction to Omar is, as plenty have pointed out, absurd. The specific facts she alleges should be uncontroversial. Politicians of both parties do routinely pledge their heartfelt support for Israel. Here’s Nancy Pelosi: “I have said to people when they ask me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.” And while I think Omar is wrong about the specific way that Israel’s influence in Washington works (it’s mostly ideological rather than financial), there is absolutely a fixed bipartisan consensus that support for Israel should be fundamental for Americans. The United States gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year, which the Congressional Research Service says “has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.” U.S. military aid for Israel, it says, “has been designed to maintain Israel’s ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME) over neighboring militaries.” U.S. politicians routinely go to AIPAC and give slobbering speeches about how much they love Israel. Ilhan Omar’s words may have been chosen in a way that invited more controversy than needed, but the points she was making were quite true.

However: I am not really interested in litigating the controversy around Omar herself. In fact, I think the Left is somewhat falling into a trap here, because we are having the wrong discussion. I see many of my friends and colleagues getting into long arguments over whether it is or is not unfair to call Omar’s remarks anti-Semitic. It is important to fight back against smears, but I am worried that in doing so, we are not spending sufficient time discussing what I think is a far more important issue: the grotesque ongoing crime the state of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. When we are having a fight about the meaning of anti-Semitism, or even having a meta-conversation about the influence of Israel rather than the actions of Israel, we are squandering time that could be spent discussing something far more important: Israel is murdering Palestinian children with impunity.

Last week, an independent commission of the UN Human Rights Council released a report on Israel’s 2018 conduct in Gaza. Last year, there were a number of protests by Gazans at the border. Israel responded to these protests by opening fire with live ammunition, killing 183 Palestinians. A further 6,000 were wounded with ammunition. (...)

The UN report provides far more disturbing details of Israel’s actions at the protests. Not only were thousands of Palestinians shot, but many of them were shot far from the border wall, and many of them weren’t even participating in the protest. Worse, those shot included children, disabled people, journalists, and paramedics. Journalists were even shot while wearing PRESS identification and paramedics were shot in uniform. And this wasn’t some “fog of war” situation: These people were shot by precision snipers. The UN report concludes that there is strong evidence Israel committed international crimes, by intentionally shooting children, disabled people, journalists, and medics.

Here are some of the individual accounts from the report. They are disturbing in the extreme:

• Israeli forces shot a schoolboy in the face as he distributed sandwiches to demonstrators, 300 m from the separation fence. His hearing is now permanently impaired.
• Mohammad was a footballer. At approximately 9 a.m., Israeli forces shot him with a single bullet in both legs while he was walking alone approximately 150 m from the separation fence. His injuries ended his football career.
• Naji, a mechanic from the Bureij refugee camp, was killed with a shot to the abdomen by Israeli forces as he stood wrapped in a Palestinian flag, 300 m from the separation fence.
• Israeli forces shot Yousef, a student journalist, in the legs with two bullets in immediate succession. He was wearing a blue vest marked “Press” while photographing the demonstrations approximately 800 m from the separation fence. His right leg had to be amputated.
• Israeli forces shot Mohammad, a student athlete, in the back of his right leg as he gave onions to demonstrators to relieve tear-gas symptoms, approximately 300 m from the fence. His leg had to be amputated.
• Israeli forces killed Abed, from Beit Lahia, when they shot him in the back of the head as he ran, carrying a tyre, away from and about 400 m from the separation fence.
• Bader, from Jabaliya, was killed by Israeli forces when they shot him in the head as he stood smoking a cigarette 300 m from the separation fence.
• Israeli forces injured a schoolgirl with bullet fragmentation. As she lay on the ground, four men attempted to evacuate her. The forces shot three of them, killing Marwan Qudieh (45) from Khuzaa village and injuring a potato seller and another man in the legs. One of the rescuers had to have a leg amputated. (...)

The most upsetting crimes in the report are the murders of disabled people. 

• Israeli snipers shot and killed a double amputee in a wheelchair, and two men who walked with crutches:Fadi, from Khan Younis, had had both legs amputated following an Israeli airstrike in 2008. On 14 May, Israeli snipers shot him in the chest at the Abasan Al-Jadida protest site, where he was sitting in his wheelchair with two friends approximately 300 m from the separation fence. He died immediately. [Note that the reason Fadi was a double amputee in the first place was that Israel had bombed him.]
• Ahmad, from the Jabaliya refugee camp, walked with crutches, having been injured by Israeli forces during a demonstration in 2017. On 20 April, Israeli forces shot him in the back of the head as he sat on a hill approximately 150 m from the separation fence. He died that day.
• Mohammad, from the Jabaliya refugee camp, walked with crutches. On 26 October, Israeli forces killed him with a shot to the head, approximately 200 m from the separation fence.

On a single day, 60 demonstrators were shot and killed. Many survivors are now permanently disabled, and will live for decades in chronic pain and discomfort. A witness describes the scene:

What was notable was the amount of injured people. And the slow, methodical shooting. Every few minutes… you would hear a shot ring out and you would see someone fall. And then another shot and another person fell. It went on for hours… I saw a man who had been shot in the throat, I didn’t see it happen but I saw the immediate aftermath. He was covered in blood. I saw a man who had been shot in the head… There was a constant stream of bloody bodies being carried back towards the ambulances. It was surreal and endless. It became almost normal, it was happening so often. A shot, a person falling, people carrying the body away. The number of wounded was astonishing. I couldn’t say how many people I saw who were shot because it was so high. I have covered wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya. I have never seen anything like this. The slow methodical shooting. It was just shocking…

This is monstrous. Sickening. Thinking about what the Israeli government did should turn your stomach. This was not a “both sides” situation. Some demonstrators hurled stones, but these are unarmed people going up against one of the most powerful and sophisticated militaries in the world, with billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry. The demonstrators did not rain terror down upon Israel. They tried (and failed) to cross a border, and they were murdered in cold blood. Israel made it clear that they would tolerate no challenge to their authority: This was not about a perceived physical threat, it was about a threat to their legitimacy. Dissent could not be tolerated and had to be punished through the harshest possible means.

You may be wondering why Israel, The Middle East’s Only Democracy™, would do something like this. Aren’t they the good guys? In Bret Stephens’ article condemning Ilhan Omar, he says it’s “a shame” Omar doesn’t like Israel, because “Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion.” (“When was the last time there was a gay-pride parade in Ramallah?” he asks.) Stephens does not mention the mass murder of dissidents, because it would make this argument seem somewhat ridiculous. It’s also hard for some to believe—Israel brags about how humane and restrained it is, why would they deliberately shoot disabled people? Here I think the answer is quite clear: Israel did not necessarily shoot disabled people and paramedics because they were disabled people and paramedics. Instead, snipers were given free rein to fire at will at the demonstrators, and because Israel has spent so long dehumanizing Palestinians and treating them as a terrifying threat to its security, the snipers simply found targets and took them out.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Why Does Congress Care More About Jewish Feelings Than Palestinian Rights? (Forward)]

Is Japan Losing Its Umami?

Yasuo Yamamoto has a secret – or more precisely, 68 of them. On a recent morning on the Japanese island of Shodoshima, the fifth-generation soy sauce brewer slid open the door to his family’s wooden storehouse to reveal 68 massive cedar barrels caked in a fungus-filled crust. As he climbed up a creaky staircase into his dark, cobwebbed loft, every inch of the planked walkway, beams and ceiling was covered in centuries’ worth of black bacteria, causing the thick brown goo inside the barrels to bubble. The entire building was alive.

“This is what gives our soy sauce its unique taste,” Yamamoto said, pointing to a 150-year-old wooden barrel. “Today, less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is still made this way.”

Until 70 years ago, all Japanese soy sauce was made this way, and it tasted completely different to what the world knows today. But despite a government ordinance to modernise production after World War Two, a few traditional brewers continue to make soy sauce the old-fashioned way, and Yamamoto is the most important of them all. Not only has he made it his mission to show the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste, but he’s leading a nationwide effort to preserve the secret ingredient in a 750-year-old recipe before it disappears.

Different dimension

Soy sauce (shoyu) is arguably the single most important seasoning in Japan’s Unesco-inscribed Washoku cuisine. It’s found in every kitchen, used in nearly every meal and placed on every table in Japanese restaurants from Tokyo to Texas. More than just a flavour, its signature umami savouriness is an entirely different dimension of taste – so much so that umami was added as one of the five basic human tastes alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter in 1908.

When it’s aged and fermented in a wooden barrel, soy sauce can be as sophisticated as a fine wine, but today, most of the world dips its sushi in the equivalent of a cheap cask rosé. That’s because in order to keep up with demand and increase production in the late 1940s, the Japanese government encouraged brewers to ditch the traditional wooden barrels used to ferment food, known as kioke, adapt stainless steel vats and cut the multi-year fermenting process to just three months.

According to Yamamoto, a kioke isn’t just a vessel, it’s the essential ingredient needed to make soy sauce, as the grain of the wood is home to millions of microbes that deepen and enrich the umami flavour. Because this bacteria can’t survive in steel tanks, many commercial companies pump their soy sauces full of additives. So unless you’ve visited an ancient craft brewer or artisanal store in Japan, you’ve likely only tasted a thin, salty imitation of a complex, nuanced brew.

More than soy

For the past 150 years, the Yamamotos and their millions of microbes have been making the family’s Yamaroku soy sauce by mixing soybeans with wheat, salt and water, and letting it ferment in a four-year process. But as more and more of Japan’s soy brewers have swapped their wooden barrels for steel tanks, a big problem has occurred: the country is running out of kioke, and almost no-one knows how to build them. In the last seven years, Yamamoto has set out to learn this ancient craft and teach it to others to try to ensure its survival.

What’s at stake is something much bigger than soy sauce. Until a century ago, Japan’s five main fermented seasonings (soy sauce, miso, vinegar, mirin and sake) were all made in kioke. Today, only 3,000 kioke are used in Japan to make soy sauce, and far fewer are used to ferment the country’s other seasoning staples. When these natural fermentation chambers are replaced with steel vats, you lose the authentic taste of traditional Japanese cuisine. And if they were to vanish completely, so would part of Japan’s cultural and culinary soul.

“Base seasoning is mostly mass produced. Hardly any real products left,” Yamamoto said. “When the ability to produce kioke barrels disappears … the main ingredients will also disappear. There is a need to preserve the real thing and pass it on to my children and grandchildren’s generations. That’s our mission.” (...)

Kioke custodian

Today, there are more than 1,400 soy sauce companies in Japan, and Yamaroku is one of the last to only use kioke. While this distinction has helped Yamamoto revive the family business in a more craft brew-friendly era, it also means that his family’s fragile ecosystem faces an uncertain future. Because kioke can only last about 150 years, Yamamoto’s ancestors never had to make them. Now, many of his barrels are on the brink of becoming unusable.

Before World War Two, hundreds of companies across Japan built kioke for shoyu, sake, mirin and other seasonings. Today, there’s only one: Fujii Seiokesho. When Yamamoto contacted them in 2009, he discovered that they hadn’t received an order for a new kioke in 70 years, and had spent the past seven decades repairing the ageing barrels still used around Japan. What’s more, he learned the youngest cooper at the three-person company was 68 years old, had no successors and was retiring in 2020. So, while Yamamoto could buy his barrel, soon no-one would be available to fix it.

Recognising that the future of his company and all authentically fermented Japanese foods depended on the continuation of this craft, Yamamoto and two carpenters travelled to Fujii Seiokesho’s workshop outside Osaka in 2012 to learn the ancient art for themselves. After three days of instruction and a year of practice, they made their first barrel in 2013.

Hidden treasure

Making these mammoth 4,000-litre barrels requires a team effort. More than 40 planks of 100-year-old Yoshino cedar are rounded and laid vertically to form a cylinder. To lock the planks into place, Fujii Seiokesho’s craftsmen told Yamamoto not to use glue, but bamboo. After talking to a neighbour, Yamamoto learned that his grandfather had planted a bamboo grove decades earlier for exactly that reason, knowing that someone in the family would one day need to build more barrels.

For each kioke, Yamamoto searches in the grove for just the right shoot, cuts it and shaves it down to make elastic strips that he slowly weaves into braided bamboo hoops. These cylindrical hoops are then hoisted atop the barrel and carefully hammered into place to prevent any liquid from seeping out.

Since 2013, Yamamoto and his colleagues have constructed 23 barrels, but he hasn’t kept most of them. As word of his quest to revive kioke craftsmanship spread, Yamamoto has started receiving orders from other fermented food producers across the country. “When these three people [at Fujii Seiokesho] retire, they won’t be making barrels anymore, which means I’ll be the only person left who can make them,” he said.

by Eliot Stein & Mari Shibata, BBC | Read more:
Image: uncredited