Month: June 2019

I am near my limit on the idiocy I’m witnessing and nothing is more idiotic than the bromance between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. The only positive thing I can say about Trump’s brief (one-minute) visit to North Korea is that Kim may be less inclined to take reckless and provocative actions that could lead to war or even the use of nuclear weapons if he thinks he has some kind of decent relationship with the American president.

Given the unequal balance of power between the United States and North Korea, however, this strategy makes little sense. Neville Chamberlain had some solid reasons for trying to maintain some kind of relationship with Hitler, even if it required him to make concessions and sell out allies. If war broke out on the continent, the United Kingdom wasn’t in a great position to respond. It was compelling then to go the extra mile for peace given the likely consequences of war, and it’s equally compelling now, but it seems like North Korea is that one that should be making concessions in this case rather than the other way around.

Also, do you know what Neville Chamberlain did not do in Munich?

He did not invite Hitler to visit him in London.

After about a minute on officially hostile territory, Mr. Trump escorted Mr. Kim back over the line into South Korea, where the two briefly addressed a scrum of journalists before slipping inside the building known as Freedom House for a private conversation along with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. Mr. Trump said he would invite Mr. Kim to visit him at the White House.

To see how absurd this is, look at the following exchange:

Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Kim in Singapore was the first time sitting American and North Korean leaders had met anywhere, and it produced vague promises to eliminate Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal. Their second meeting, in Hanoi, ended in failure when Mr. Kim made an offer that fell far short of that.

North Korean officials went dark after the collapse of the talks, refusing to respond to either the Americans or the South Koreans…

…The encounter in Panmunjom had been cast as a brief handshake, not a formal negotiation, but the two ended up together for a little more than an hour. After emerging from their conversation, Mr. Trump said he and Mr. Kim had agreed to designate negotiators to resume talks in the next few weeks, four months after they collapsed at a summit in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The American team will still be headed by Stephen Biegun, the special envoy, but it remained unclear who would be on the North Korean side after reports of a purge of Mr. Kim’s team. Asked later if North Korean negotiators were still alive, Mr. Trump said: “I think they are. I can tell you who the main person is. And I would hope the rest are, too.”

Here we have the president saying that he “hopes” the people we negotiated with in Vietnam are still alive. And yet he wants to roll out the red carpet for this madman for a visit to the White House.

I can’t even document all the insanity involved in this event. I think this kind of sums it up:

Mr. Kim said he knew nothing about a possible meeting until the president’s tweet. “I don’t think this kind of surprise meeting would have happened without the excellent personal relationship between your excellency and me,” he told Mr. Trump in Freedom House.

Mr. Trump expressed relief that Mr. Kim came. “If he didn’t show up, the press was going to make me look very bad,” he said. So you made us both look good, and I appreciate it.”

It’s amazing that Trump think he doesn’t look bad. All I can hope is that something good can come out of this. It’s probably a better strategy than his initial “Fire and Fury” approach, but I am not even certain of that.

I’d hit myself in the head with a two-by-four if I thought it would help make this stop.

When asked by The New York Times about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s comments about Western liberalism being “obsolete,” Trump took that to mean literally liberals living on the west coast of the United States.

“He’s sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people,” Trump told the Times.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking,” he added. “But when you look at Los Angeles, when you look at San Francisco, when you look at some of the other cities — and not a lot, not a lot — but you don’t want it to spread.”

You realize that humanity is armed with nuclear weapons, right? If we don’t evolve mentally, eventually we’re going to be extinct. This whole life-on-earth experiment is now down to a group of famished chimpanzees locked in a cage with a giant box of nitroglycerin, half of whom think their leader is Donald Trump or one of the savage sociopaths Trump so admires.

We can’t afford to be stupider than our forebears, yet that is exactly what is happening. We’re never been dumber than we are right now. And every single time we read something like the above, we get even dumber still.

I guess I don’t understand the left anymore. If Bari Weiss has described the controversy correctly, the San Francisco school board just voted to destroy a 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural painted in the 1930’s for the then-new George Washington High School. The artist, Victor Arnautoff, was a committed communist who was employed by the Works Progress Administration, and he subversively included pictures of Washington’s slaves picking cotton in the fields, as well as a dead Native American. His message was pretty clear. America’s history is complicated and that includes Washington’s legacy. For the non-white populations, it wasn’t always a happy history.

I would not be surprised if people complained that the artist was a subversive and his art was anti-American and  inappropriate for a school that ostensibly celebrates Washington’s legacy. But that’s not the problem here. Apparently, the depiction of the slaves and the Native American is disrespectful to black and Native American people and dehumanizing and possibly traumatic for children. They’re destroying the mural (rather than covering it up) at a cost of $600,000 in taxpayer money so that no one can come along later and undo their decision.

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

According to Carol Pogash of the Times, 45 out of 49 freshmen who wrote about the decision were opposed to the destruction of the murals, so this isn’t the result of a student outcry or consistent with their wishes.

It seems one key problem here is that the artist’s intent was 180 degrees removed from glorifying slavery and genocide. He included those things so that people would remember them. These same activists would likely be howling if the California university system decided not to include any discussion of slavery and genocide in their American history curriculum, and that’s the same mindset that led Arnautoff to include slaves and a dead Native rather than leaving them out.

It seems like a better solution here, if one is required at all, is to include a plaque that explains the full context of the mural and how artists included subversive messages in their art during this period. Destroying art because you have no sense of irony is not “enlightened” or “woke” or whatever the kids are saying these days. It’s reactionary.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

I started with my now usual pencil grid, upon which I began my sketch.  Note that I draw the same grid over the photo for purposes of an accurate pencil sketch on the canvas.  The result is a reasonably accurate outline sketch of the scene.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

There’s nothing quite like getting concern-trolled by both Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks on the same day. They are warning the Democrats that they’re in danger of throwing away an eminently winnable election in 2020 by moving far to the left of the American people, particularly on immigration policy.

My problem is that I’ve been very reluctantly coming to a similar conclusion. If I needed fresh evidence, I received it yesterday when Nancy Pelosi was forced to capitulate on the emergency border funding bill in the face of a revolt from centrists and “problem solvers” in her own caucus. The flood of asylum-seekers at the border is overwhelming our resources, and that would be true even under a humane president intent on doing their best to manage what amounts to a humanitarian crisis. The Democrats are rightfully focused on the deplorable response of the Trump administration, and there are excellent reasons for Congress to interject itself into the policy debate using the power of the purse as their leverage. The progressives are not wrong about this. Even on the politics, highlighting the brutal treatment and child abuse and endangerment can turn decent people against the Republicans.

But the policy response of the party leaders and presidential candidates seems deeply out of touch with the opinion of even most Democratic voters. Pollster Stanley Greenberg monitored the reaction of 210 Democrats during the two nights of debates, and here is what he found:

Unsurprisingly, the voters said their most important issues were health care and drug costs, by a wide margin. And that issue only became more important to them as the candidates spoke. Other topics that grew in importance over the course of the two nights: “getting immigration under control” and climate change. Climate change was also a singularly animating topic for unmarried women toward the end of the second debate.

The candidates didn’t actually spend a ton of time talking about “getting immigration under control.” They focused much more on the plight of would-be immigrants as they competed to offer the most generous welcome possible. This varied from offering free health care to undocumented workers to decriminalizing illegal entry to granting citizenship to everyone who makes it here and subsequently commits no crimes.

I don’t think this is how most Americans are viewing the crush of asylum-seekers at the border. I think they’re closer to Trump’s view that something ought to be done to dissuade them from showing up in such large numbers. For Sullivan, the main problem is the overly generous terms on which we’re willing to consider asylum cases which incentivizes people to show up and apply, and then skip out and stay if the ruling doesn’t go their way. He’s contemptuous of the idea that anyone who lives in a violence-prone country or is a victim of domestic violence should be presumptively qualified to become a U.S. citizen. Yet, he claims his main concern is that the backlash to these kinds of policies is a new form reactionary and fascistic politics which is on the rise in Europe and here in the United States. He supports a bill called the Northern Triangle and Border Stabilization Act that is currently circulating in Congress.

It proposes increased U.S. aid to Central American countries, to tackle the problem at its roots; a big investment in border facilities to ensure far more humane treatment of asylum seekers; a much stricter monitoring system to keep track of them after processing to make sure they turn up for their court hearings; many more immigration judges to reduce the massive backlog of cases; and it allows for asylum claims to be made in home countries, rather than at the border.

David Brooks goes into a less detail, but he also focuses on how left-wing parties have been losing elections over immigration issues.

Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.

As much I find their scolding tone annoying and insufferable, I can’t deny that they have some solid points on the politics. Voters want to hear not just how we’re going to treat people who arrive on our borders but how we’re going to get at the underlying problems that are causing the crush. They don’t think it’s a fake crisis, so a successful challenger to Trump needs to meet the American people where they are on this, and then perhaps they can show a humane path forward.

One thing this week showed is that the Republicans are much more united on this issue than the Democrats, and that should be a giant warning sign rather than something people just brush off or complain about.  Immigration is what Trump will campaign on, and the Democrats cannot afford to lose that argument.

You may remember that there was quite a dust-up between Turkey and Saudi Arabia after the state-sponsored assignation and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Turkish president didn’t think it was appropriate to do this kind of thing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The Saudi crown prince didn’t like the  accusation of being a current-day Jeffrey Dahmer, but his denials of responsibility convinced exactly no one.

So, you might think it touching that President Trump could serve as a bridge between them— a reconciler-in-chief, if you will.

President Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman posed next to each other for a photo of world leaders on Friday at the Group of 20 summit in Japan, exchanging pleasantries in the process.

Trump and the crown prince could be seen making conversation and smiling as they stood next to each other for the “family photo” at the gathering of world leaders. Trump stood between the Saudi royal and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This is a bit like seeing the adopted parents of one of Hannibal Lecter’s victims serve as the serial killer’s probation officer. After all, Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi national but he lived and worked in the United States. Trump wasn’t overly offended when Mohammad Bin Salman had him chopped into little pieces and barbecued in the the Saudi consul’s home, insisting repeatedly that it wasn’t worth making a fuss over if it might jeopardize weapon sales and certain investments:

The body of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was likely burned in a large oven at the Saudi consulate general’s residence in Istanbul, an Al Jazeera investigation revealed.

New details of the writer’s murder by a Saudi assassination team were reported in a documentary by Al Jazeera Arabic that aired on Sunday.

Turkish authorities monitored the burning of the outdoor furnace from outside the premises as bags believed to be containing Khashoggi’s body parts were transferred to the Saudi consul’s home after he was killed inside the consulate a few hundred metres away.

Al Jazeera interviewed a worker who constructed the furnace who stated it was built according to specifications from the Saudi consul. It had to be deep and withstand temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt metal.

Large quantities of barbeque meat were grilled in the oven after the killing in order to cover up the cremation of the Saudi writer’s body, Turkish authorities reported.

The burning of Khashoggi’s body took place over a period of three days, Turkish officials said.

Trump has been defending the killing of journalists since December 2015 when he defended Vladimir Putin during an appearance on Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski’s morning show. Back then he doubted the evidence against Putin and said that America kills a lot of people, too, which was a novel approach for a presidential candidate: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”

Nothing has changed.

Donald Trump joked with Vladimir Putin about getting rid of journalists and Russian meddling in US elections when the two leaders met at the G20 summit in Japan.

As they sat for photographs at the start of their first formal meeting in nearly a year, the US president lightheartedly sought common ground with Putin at the expense of the journalists around them in Osaka.

“Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia but we do,” Trump said.

To which Putin responded, in English: “We also have. It’s the same.”

Trump presumably meant that Putin doesn’t have the problem in Russia that he has in the United States because Putin kills journalists who report things he doesn’t like. This was what he had previously denied happened at all, but now he was having a little joke about it in front of the news media and the world. Now he was suggesting, half in jest, that he, too, could just “get rid of them.”

America needs to get out of its state of denial. We’re like parents who don’t want to admit that their son is a sociopath even after they find the bones in the basement and listen to his confession. We have a president who spends his time abroad chumming up to people like Mohammad Bin Salman and Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t condemn their crimes but rationalizes and even praises them.

We obviously don’t want to admit what is right in front of our eyes, but the evidence is conclusive. Our president is incapable of showing any moral leadership and actually sides with the world’s worst monsters.

Texas Republican John Cornyn isn’t satisfied with simply BEING an asshole. He wants to make sure you know he’s an asshole too.

I may have to change banks: Bank of America will no longer do business with companies that run detention centers – CNN https://t.co/8xG7hlvlOG

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 27, 2019

Far be it from me to defend Bank of America, but at least they’re not as bad as John fucking Cornyn. He literally thinks dying and sick children, snatched from their mothers, is something to joke about—and let me remind you that this twit will turn on a dime and start piously quoting scripture as if he’s a sincere Christian.

I honestly do not understand what would drive someone to laugh at sick children, other than brain worms and a steady diet of Fox News. Nonetheless, I say we give the asshole from Texas the attention he wants. You can find his offices here. Call him up and tell him what you think of him: feel free to use terms like “child abuse,” “human rights,” and “what’s it like to work for a bona fide Nazi?” Try 202-224-2934 first, but his local offices are all available at the link. Tell his staff I told you to call!

And then sling a few bucks to ANYONE who’s challenging the pasty, white turd. Here’s one.

Looking at everything Marianne Williamson said in the debate on Thursday night, it seems less like mesmerizing lunacy than a non-threatening version of what we see routinely from major candidates in Republican debates. Instead of narrow-minded and spiteful banalities, she offered nearly contentless appeals to our better angels. I’d actually be interested in hearing her expand on her ideas, but only in the same sense that I enjoy listening to wise old hippies share their thoughts on how things should be. I’m glad that there are a lot of people like this in the world and it’s a shame that the world is harsher and dirtier than anything that exists in their dreams. Williamson seems like a nice lady but she doesn’t belong on a stage with serious presidential contenders.Yet, she’s hardly alone in that distinction and I hope people can get something positive out her presence while it lasts.

I also enjoyed listening to Andrew Yang speak. He actually has novel ideas that should be welcomed as kind of disturbances in the Force.  If it weren’t for a strong performance from Kamala Harris, Yang might have actually won Thursday debate. He was the only also-ran on the stage who helped himself. From the group of one-percenters (in the polls), I think only Yang and Washington governor Jay Inslee (on Wednesday) really did much to improve their position going forward. I might have put Bill de Blasio in that category too, but then I found out he inadvertently quoted Che Guevara (“Hasta la victoria, siempre”) at a Thursday campaign stop in Miami and realized that he’s probably the dumbest man alive.

“This is the problem that we run into all the time,” Annette Taddeo, a Colombian-American state senator who spoke at the rally before de Blasio, said of the nuances of campaigning in South Florida. “The left has [some] people that are just clueless as hell.”

I don’t think it’s possible to be more clueless, that’s for sure.

It was pretty clear that Beto O’Rourke flopped in the Wednesday debate, but no one really stood out as a complete failure on Thursday. Buttigieg has some truly rough moments, but he compensated for them with some good moments. The Coloradans, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper did little more than occupy space and defend capitalism against socialism, which is perhaps needed to some small extent but is still less exciting than watching reruns of Hardball with Chris Matthews. Perhaps the most irritating performance was delivered by backbench congressman Eric Swalwell who tried to sell himself as the leader of his generation.  Kirsten Gillibrand tried to land some punches and had some degree of success, but nothing she did will be remembered when people wake up in the morning.

Overall, the Thursday night debate was dominated by Harris, Sanders and Biden. That’s bad news for Buttigieg, but it was also bad news for Biden because he took a true beating from Harris over his record of opposing busing in the 1970s. The exchange will dominate all the post-debate news coverage, and for that reason alone it was a bad night for the former vice-president.

Harris showed that she’s serious about winning the nomination by her willingness to challenge Biden so forcefully. It was something she needed to do because she can’t allow him to maintain his current support in the black community and have any hope of winning primaries.  She definitely knocked Biden down a peg and guaranteed that his campaign will be on the defensive going into the July 4 holiday, so she can consider the debate a success. Sanders and Warren may benefit more than she does, at least initially, but we’ll have to wait for a new round of polling next week before we’ll know if these debates changed the dynamics of the race.

What I expect to see is a slight tightening of the race, with Biden and Buttigieg’s numbers down and Warren and Harris’s numbers up. As I said above, perhaps we’ll see Inslee and Yang move up a tick above the rest of the bottom-dwellers, while O’Rourke may settle at the bottom with the other no-hopers.

What I’d consider a modest surprise is if Sanders drops to third or fourth place. I’d consider it a major surprise if Biden slipped into second place, but not quite as shocking if he finds himself in a tie for first.  I’m just not sure who he’d be tied with in that circumstance.

It won’t be Marianne Williamson. That much I know.

 

Hello photo lovers!

The series of foto flogs continues on the revamped and revitalized Progress Pond.

Posting photos should be easy. Do you have images hosted somewhere? You should just need an url. Once you place an url of your photo into a comment, your photo should post just fine. No need for any code any more. I host some of my personal photos on Flickr. I think some others use Imgur and find that hosting service satisfactory. Whatever works.

The Foto Flog was curated by a lot of people over the years. At one point, they were even themed – Foto Fairs. For now let’s keep it loose. This week, let’s enjoy some desert flora. I took this one during a visit to the Fullerton Arboretum. And I will make a plug for these resources. If your community has an arboretum, make sure to visit and support it. These are spaces that enable us to educate ourselves and each other about the vulnerability of many of our plant species and the role the climate crisis plays.

To participate in the foto flogs, you don’t have to be a pro. I am definitely an amateur hobbyist. I’ve been taking tons of photos – mostly of landscapes and cityscapes – since I was in my early teens. Currently, I use my LG ThinQ 40 for everyday use. I do have a 35mm camera that is a good three decades old, although one of my daughters seems to have commandeered that one. I’ve always been impressed with the folks who have posted their work in the past. So, let’s make this come to life.

Cheers!

On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi felt compelled to the capitulate to the White House on the border supplemental spending bill. A revolt from within her own caucus was the cause. With the Senate insisting on their own bill and the July 4 recess looming, moderates and “problem-solvers” on the Democratic side were unwilling to engage in a game of chicken or go home without emergency funding having been appropriated.

Pelosi announced that she will pass the Senate bill without amendments and then had a preliminary vote on the rule.

A sign of the dissatisfaction on the left: More than 70 House Democrats voting against the rule governing floor debate on the Senate-passed border spending bill. Majority party typically votes in unison for a rule

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 27, 2019

This exposed a massive division on the left, as liberals and progressives strongly objected to giving the White House this money without more strings attached to assure that it is spent on people in need rather than on more brutal enforcement practices.

I'm told that @RepDebDingell is resigning from the Problem Solvers Caucus in the wake of its co-chair @RepJoshG organizing opposition to the House border bill that would have mandated improved conditions for children in detention

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 27, 2019

That’s a reference to Reps Debbie Dingell of Michigan and  Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey.  Gottheimer represents an historically Republican district in the affluent New York City suburbs. Evidently, he didn’t like the politics of withholding funding in an effort to force compromise. He was speaking for a good number of other Democrats in similarly precarious districts.

This blowup is a good indicator of the divide on immigration that exists in this country, as there are Democrat-held districts where Trump’s policies are popular and others where they’re considered an abomination.  Pelosi was caught in a vise between them, which is exactly where the Republicans want her to be.  In this case, she sided with the people most likely to lose and cost her the majority, but it caused seventy members to defy her rule, which is a punishable offense.

This was definitely a good day for the GOP, as they got what they wanted an did some real damage to the unity of their opponents. It’ll be interesting to see who, if anyone, defends Pelosi’s decision in the debate on Thursday night.