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0062802186
| 9780062802187
| 0062802186
| 4.25
| 18,828
| Apr 10, 2018
| Apr 10, 2018
|
really liked it
| Consider the testimony of a well-educated but not politically minded German who experienced the rise of the Third Reich: Consider the testimony of a well-educated but not politically minded German who experienced the rise of the Third Reich:Comedian Jeff Foxworthy has made a career of a single comedic line, “You might be a redneck.” A few samples from the site Country Humor: -----If you ever cut your grass and found a car, you might be a redneck. -----If you own a home that is mobile and five cars that aren’t… you just might be a redneck. ----If you own a homemade fur coat…if you clean your fingernails with a stick…if birds are attracted to your beard, and so on. It might make a pretty good hook for Madeleine Albright in her consideration of Fascism and the peril we all face from it today. She begins by facing the fact that there does not appear to be a universally accepted definition of the word. She put the question to her graduate class of two dozen, resulting in a Foxworthy worthy list (albeit a serious one) of characteristics that herd leaders (we are looking primarily at leaders here) into the Fascist corral or some other. [image] Madeleine Albright - image from The Christian Science Monitor - she passed away in 2022 ----- If you claim that your in-group, whether based on religion, ethnicity or race, is deserving and those outside the in-group are not, you might be a fascist. Albright offers an eye-opening look at the history of the word, how it was used, by whom and to what ends. [her students] began from the ground up, naming the characteristics that were, to their minds, most closely associated with the word. “A mentality of ‘us against them,’” offered one. Another ticked off “nationalist, authoritarian, antidemocratic.” A third emphasized the violent aspect. A fourth wondered why Fascism was almost always considered right-wing, arguing, “Stalin was as much a Fascist as Hitler.”It is not only applicable to far right sorts who pine for a corporatist authoritarian state. There were leftists in Italy advocating a dictatorship of the dispossessed who called themselves Fascists, as did even Italian centrists (of a sort) who espoused a monarchy. The premier fascists of the 20th century, the Nazi Party, in addition to their wildly inhumane views, advocated for more generous pensions, an end to child labor and better maternal healthcare. Clearly the term is not limited by ideology. Maybe it has more to do with methodologies for seizing power. ----- If you provoke and nurture hatred toward those you oppose, and aim to get revenge for wrongs real or imagined, you might be a fascist. She notes that the word has been tossed about far too loosely to target those to whom one is opposed, regardless of actual political or tactical leanings, rendering it relatively, and sadly, meaningless. Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards to which they are entitled. “It’s not so much what people have,” she said, “but what they think they should have—and what they fear.” Fear is why Fascism’s emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can grow without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street—on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.Albright offers insightful analysis of the origins of fascism, noting in particular its 20th century originator and his prize student. But there were plenty more who found authoritarianism appealing, whether they fit the definition of fascist or not. In fact, Albright offers a survey of many of the 20th century’s all-star team for egregious leadership. Some names will be familiar. You know the Italian, the German and probably the Spaniard, but are likely to be less familiar with organizations and leaders in other countries. Like the Arrow Cross group in Hungary, or movements in France, Iceland, and Romania. The Czech fascist, Itenlein, allowing Hitler to use him to broadcast lies about mistreatment in the country, giving Hitler cover necessary to justify invading. Or The Bund in the USA. -----If you attempt to tear down the governing institutions and electoral processes as biased and unfair, but only if you don’t win, you just may be a fascist. Albright writes of her personal experience with such dark forces, her family having been driven out of her native Czechoslovakia. Her grandmother was among twenty six family members murdered by Nazis. The story of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia holds lessons that still need absorbing. Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price. After 1948, Czechoslovakia had no room for democrats. In that Kafkaesque environment, the Czechs who had devoted every hour of World War II to fighting Hitler from London were accused of having spent their days instead plotting to enslave the working class.She writes about dark days in US history when Joe McCarthy held the stage, and notes many similarities between Joe and you-know-who. -----If you refuse to accept defeat at the polls, insisting, with no proof, that the results are flawed, you might be a fascist. She continues with a look at the many dictators abroad in the world today and in the recent past. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is given considerable ink. She also writes about Erdogan of Turkey, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, Duterte of the Philippines and a cast of the usual suspects known to those who read the international news. She notes in particular how they feed on each other’s energy, copying tactics, and using the excesses of leaders elsewhere to justify their excesses at home. Duterte and El Sissi in Egypt, for example, took great comfort in the public support they received from Swamp Thing. Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.” By contrast, President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.-----If you brag about your ability to solve all problems, despite the absence of any supporting evidence, you might be a fascist. She saves Putin and Kim Jong-Un for last. Albright had dealings with Putin in person, and has an interesting take on him. She finds a surprising (and unpersuasive, IMHO) reason for considering him something less than an all-out fascist. And is surprising again in finally revealing who she considers an actual fascist among the contemporary candidates and who she does not. -----If you fill up on supporters’ cheers by going all macho and threatening violence against your enemies, you just night be a fascist. She looks at larger policy issues that might be helping to create conditions conducive to the rise of fascism and international policy directions that have headed it off in the past. And, unsurprisingly for someone who has been the US representative to the UN, the US Secretary of State, someone who has written and teaches on international relations, she is a strong advocate for international agreements, for diplomacy as a way of reducing the power of nationalistic movements by providing economic and security benefits from multi-lateral cooperation. -----If you regard the press as an enemy of the state, and persistently and knowingly attempt to undermine honest reporting as false, you just night be a fascist. She began this book long before the 2016 election, and would have written it anyway. The rightward drift in the world has been going on for a while, a response, at least in part, to the impact of globalization and increasing automation on employment, to the massive refugee crises that have thrown cultures together in ways that are often problematic, and frightening. But, as she writes, The shadow looming over these pages is, of course, that of Donald Trump. He is president because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should disturb our sleep, but there is a larger cause for unease. Trump is the first anti- democratic president in modern U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself. If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead.It can be no coincidence that many of the actions, beliefs, and attitudes manifested by known fascists from the past and on the world stage today are present in Swamp Thing. In addition to being the most corrupt president our nation has ever endured, he would love nothing more than to cast aside all of our democratic institutions and rule solely by fiat. -----If you think that the resources of the world, regardless of location, are yours for the taking, you just night be a fascist. While I found great value in Fascism: a Warning, I had a few gripes. If one writes a book about such a considerable subject, it behooves to come up with an actual definition. I found Albright’s methodology of defining fascism by its constituent manifestations a bit squishy, calling to mind the tale of blind men touching an elephant trying to describe the beast. Yes, she does distill down to a short def at the end, but it felt unsatisfying. On today’s world stage it seems that China merits more attention than was given here, particularly as China’s current president, Xi Jinping, has essentially made himself ruler for life. But overall, there is much to love in this book, fascinating detail about the nature and origins of fascism, some history that was new to me about relations among Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, more new knowledge about other fascistic sorts in less central nations in the 20th century and a pretty good survey of who the creatures are that we should be wary of today. Swamp Thing may or may not be a fascist, but -----If you walk like a fascist, talk like a fascist, think the rules do not apply to you; if you seek to destroy the democratic institutions of your nation, solely to serve your own personal ends; if you foment racism, violence, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and racial intolerance; if you constantly lie to the people of your country; if you seek to destroy the credibility of news organizations to inoculate yourself against them reporting to the nation about your crimes; if you knowingly collude with foreign powers to undermine your country’s electoral process; if you sell public policy, domestic and foreign, to the highest bidder…you just might be a fascist. Review first posted – 6/8/18 Publication date – 4/10/18 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Items of Interest -----Back in 2015, Trevor Noah on the Daily Show totally nailed who Trump really is. This is must see if you have not been there already and still wonderful even if you have already seen it. - Trump as African Dictator -----June 22, 2018 - NY Times - Definitely worth checking out - Trickle Down Trumpsters and the Debasement of Language by Timothy Egan After a while, people come to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Hannah Arendt, the German-born philosopher, in describing how truth lost its way in her native land.-----October 15, 2018 - A nice short video that puts the current danger into historical context - If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be -----December 31, 2018 - NY Times - Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus - by Katherine Stewart - a very frightening look at how the evangelical right views Trump and justifies his many crimes -----February 22, 2019 - Atlantic Magazine - The Alarming Scope of the President's Emergency Powers - by Elizabeth Goitein - When push comes to prosecute or impeach, do you really expect Trump to accede to the rule of law? This alarming article points out the many tools available to Swamp Thing that might be misused to keep his crooked ass out of jail. Be afraid. Be very afraid. -----March 7, 2019 - NY Times - Nicholas Kristof offers an optimistic perspective on the unlikelihood of a Trump Reich - We Will Survive. Probably. -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. -----November, 2016 (but first sen by me on 3/20/19) - Open Culture - Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism -----May 10, 2019 - This is what it might look like in action - Daily Beast -Here’s a Preview of America’s 2020 Nightmare if Trump Loses - by Michael Tomasky Interviews ----- The Atlantic - Episode 20 – April 18, 2018 – 39 minutes – Albright take on directly the question of whether Swamp Thing is or isn’t. -----C-Span – David Ignatius of the Washington Post interviews Albright – Video – one hour – a lot on North Korea ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 03, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1250192455
| 9781250192455
| 1250192455
| 4.10
| 48,282
| Apr 17, 2018
| Apr 17, 2018
|
it was amazing
| All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.James Come All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.James Comey is a lawyer, and in A Higher Loyalty he has presented a case to the jury of American public opinion. He lays out the steps of his interactions with Swamp Thing, from introduction to long-distance buh-bye. This is what happened, here, here, and there, on this, this, and that dates. This is what was said. This is what I understood those words to mean. And really, who are you going to believe, a public servant with a decades-long reputation for, among other things, honesty, or a feckless serial and possibly pathological liar? [image] James Comey - image from the NY Times One can argue that it was not Swamp Thing’s clear collusion with Russia that constituted Ground Zero for what would become, in effect, a large-scale impeachment inquiry. Given the spinelessness of GOP legislators and the toadying nature of most of Trump’s appointees, given the clear intention of the Trump administration to install such creatures in as many positions of power as possible, it is a distinct possibility that there might have been no Special Counsel investigation but for a single action, taken by Swamp Thing, and his childish inability to keep his lies straight. We would still have the Quisling sorts like Devin Nunes, who could be counted on to cover their boss’s and their own butt cheeks instead of doing their constitutionally defined job of overseeing the executive branch. The hyper-partisanship and cowardice of most Republicans in the federal government have made a laughing stock of our democracy across the planet. That would have been there in any case. But on May 9, 2017, after having failed to gain a personal loyalty pledge, Swamp Thing fired James Comey as the head of the FBI, with the laughable excuse that Comey had mishandled his job of investigating Hillary Clinton, which is not to say that Comey managed it well, of which more later, but that Swamp Thing had previously praised Comey’s actions as courageous. ( Those who support his dismissal by Swamp Thing will likely succumb to right-wing talking points, preposterous though they are, that Comey was a secret Hillary supporter, whose actions strove to bolster her candidacy. If you believe that, please stop reading now. Your brain has ceased functioning and nothing written here will make any sense to you. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.) When he subsequently admitted on a nationally televised interview that his reason for doing so was “the Russia thing,” he opened the door to a world of hurt. In the absence of the Comey firing there may never have been a Special Counsel investigation into “the Russia thing,” but by so blatantly obstructing justice by firing Comey, Swamp Thing placed the target, in flashing neon, on his own back. That is the true starting point of Comey’s book. But, like most well written legal documents, there is considerable backstory, and in a very well written case, there is a central thrust. The tale told here is not just about his few months of interactions with the president. He offers pieces of his life story to let us know the kind of person he is, or at least the kind of person he wants us to see him as, the experiences that molded his character, the personal motivations that informed his adult decisions, and what he portrays as ethical choices made in challenging situations in his career. He wants us to understand that he believes he acted properly, both in doing what he did during the 2016 presidential campaign, and in refusing to do what the tainted president demanded of him. And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the decision will be yours. [image] Image from SusieMadrak.com Here are the charges -----Did Director Comey tell the truth when he testified that the president had pressured him to drop the case against Michael Flynn? -----Is Director Comey an egotistical prima donna who put his personal needs and perspective above the needs of the nation and his bosses? -----Did FBI Director Comey, with forethought and malice, and by choosing to break with FBI protocol, deliberately affect the 2016 presidential election in such a way as to damage the campaign of Hilary Clinton? Questions -----Does Swamp Thing really run his White House as if he were a mafia don? -----Does a guy who’s 6’8” really think he can fade into the woodwork by getting up close and personal with White House drapery that sort of matches his suit? -----Has Comey behaved in a non-partisan manner in the jobs he has held, in the decisions he made in those jobs? [image] Image from @dumptrump33 – Of course we may be raising our expectations a tad high for RM As for that central thrust thing, it is alluded to in the opening quote. Comey bloody hates bullies. He had to contend with them as a not-nearly-oversized teen. He was thrilled, when pursuing his legal career, to have an opportunity to go after some of the uber-bullies of our society, members of organized crime. He was also on the scene when one of our major political bullies, Dick Cheney, tried to wrest a signature from a man in a hospital ward, just so he could continue an expiring domestic surveillance program of questionable legality. In a way, all his life had led up to his dealings with Swamp Thing, a person who is the very personification of the coward as bully. Comey knew what he was facing when Swamp Thing was elected. He hoped to be able to avoid conflicts with him, and see out his ten-year term as FBI head. He knew the odds of that happening were small. We are offered a look into Comey’s upbringing in Yonkers, and then New Jersey. Being an outsider, being picked on, was very painful, but in hindsight it made me a better judge of people. In my life, I would spend a lot of time assessing threats, judging tone of voice, and figuring out the shifting dynamic in a hallway or locker room crowd. Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaptation. Which is why bullies are so powerful, because it’s so much easier to be a follower, to go with the crowd, to just blend in.He walks us through some of his career steps and big moments. These include the successful prosecution of a large chunk of the New York area mafia, prosecuting Martha Stewart, prosecuting Scooter Libby, and the event that made his reputation. He was the acting Attorney General at a time when the Stellar Wind program, an illegal domestic spying undertaking, according to DoJ analysis, was up for renewal. The administration needed a sign-off by the AG, and acting AG Comey refused. Getting wind that Presidential counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andy Card were on their way to the hospital to wrest a signature from the barely conscious John Ashcroft, being treated for a life-threatening condition, he dashed to the hospital himself, sirens howling and lights flashing, calling Robert Mueller, then the head of the FBI, to join him in preventing this blatant malfeasance. It is the stuff of legend. And secured him a place in the pantheon of political heroes for his courage under such withering political fire. The passage could have been written by any of today’s best-selling writers of political thrillers, leaving one breathless, even though we know the outcome. Though the broad strokes are at least somewhat familiar to folks who pay attention to the news, there are details I bet you do not know and will be very surprised to learn. The book is worth it just for that section alone. [image] Attorney General John Ashcroft - image from US News Throughout, Comey talks about trying to do the right, the moral, the ethical thing when confronted with difficult decisions. He is certainly persuasive when he writes about the lessons he has learned over his life from people he has known and respected, and from important people and writers whose work has informed his growth as an ethical person. He cites as a particular influence the writings of religious philosopher Reinhold Nieburh, someone many in government, from both parties, have looked to for inspiration. You may be surprised at some of the other people he notes as influencers. Also a bit of a surprise is his take on various people he has been connected to, most of whom will be familiar. Rudy Giuliani, who had held the US Attorney position for the Southern District of New York when Comey was a prosecutor there, comes in for a look. Though Giuliani’s confidence was exciting, it fed an imperial style that severely narrowed the circle of people with whom he interacted, something I didn’t realize was dangerous until much later: a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings. Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. Attorney’s office. They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice. It was a resentment that was still palpable when I became the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan—and sat in Giuliani’s chair—a dozen years later.Hizzoner’s fondness for the limelight has not faded a single watt. Comey also talks about his dealing with former AGs and others in government. His meetings with President Obama make for fascinating and surprising reading. As with anyone who is presenting himself as ethical, and better than the pack in that regard, he offers up some specifics of errors he has made, including one fairly meaningless lie that he told as a young man, which made him feel particularly guilty. He points out an error of insensitivity he had made when addressing the Michael Brown case, but it is presented in such a way as to show how receptive he is to learning something new. It’s a bit like a job interview when the applicant tries to skirt the “What’s your worst quality?” question with how he works too hard for his own good. Eye roll please. Comey offers fleeting mea culpas on having an outsized ego and an eye for the dramatic, then notes several examples of what a wonderful, thoughtful boss he is. It is clear that he wants us to like, and respect him, and take his “aw, shucks,” demeanor at face value. But it is also quite clear that he is a well-armed, and well armored political in-fighter, familiar with his home turf, sharp-edged, and deft in the art of manipulation. It is a clear thread throughout Comey’s book that his literary RPG is locked, loaded, and aimed at one Donald J. Trump. The things that disgusted him throughout his life, from childhood and in his public career are epitomized by the man who fired him for doing his job. A secondary, related, core is centered on defending his actions in 2016 and 2017, making the case that he should not have been sacked. So what about the charges and questions? I’m almost there. But before that, you should know that James Comey, whatever you think of him as a public official or as a political person, is a wonderful writer. He is able to paint a picture and bring you along with him with seeming effortlessness. No doubt this talent has been honed by his many years of preparing and presenting cases. This book is his case to all of us. Ok, down to the end -----Does Swamp Thing really run his White House as if he were a mafia don? Really? Have you heard anything to offer a more accurate description? I haven’t. Spot on, JC, particularly given his familiarity with less powerful dons as a prosecutor in the SDNY. -----Does a guy who’s 6’8” really think he can fade into the woodwork by getting up close and personal with White House drapery that matches his suit? Yeah, he kinda thought he could. The drapery is taller than he is and the color matched his suit somewhat. [image] Darth on Twitter had a bit of fun with this [image] As you can see from this image from War News Blogspot, Comey was sure to be spotted -----Has Comey behaved in a non-partisan manner in the jobs he has held, in the decisions he made in those jobs? As for being non-partisan, I call BS on that. Comey is a Republican, and, while there have been notable instances in which he has risen above purely partisan perspectives, that bias has, I believe, interfered with his ability to remain consistently above the political fray. He writes, for example, I wanted to find a way to help Bush. This man, whom I liked and wanted to see succeed, appeared not to realize the storm that was coming. The entire Justice Department leadership was going to quit, and just as he was running for reelection.A politically disinterested official would have given such a concern zero consideration. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election…Rather a false equivalence, no? It is pretty obvious how flawed the Republican candidate was, but the Democratic nominee was one of the most qualified presidential candidates in modern history. The deep flaws some insist on seeing were primarily made up of lies that had been broadcast about her for decades by a well-financed and relentless political attack machine. Like one of those augmented reality games that let you superimpose imaginary characters onto a real-world scene. (Pokémon GOP?) So BS on that, too. Opting to go public with a re-opening of the investigation of Hillary so late in the election season, against protocol, and without the prior knowledge of his AG, knowing it would likely impact the election, while simultaneously keeping under wraps the ongoing investigation of Trump for collusion with Russia was really the kicker. I believe this revealed his partisan stripes, however well he may have tried to disguise them in the tall grass of self-justification. Many will find his explanation persuasive. I am not among them. Bias revealed. -----Did Director Comey tell the truth when he testified that the president had pressured him to drop the case against Michael Flynn? Here is piece of how he describes that interaction He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”The preponderance of news coverage, confirmed by Comey’s reporting here, makes it abundantly clear that Swamp Thing did indeed ask for special treatment for his guy, a glaringly illegal no-no. Comey was right to continue with business as usual after getting this appalling directive, which is exactly what it was. -----Is Director Comey an egotistical prima donna who put his personal needs and perspective above the needs of the nation and his bosses? IMHO, Yes, but with significant asterisks. Even Comey’s close friends acknowledge that his great strength is also his great weakness: a belief in his own integrity. “He believes this in a way that creates big blind spots, because he substitutes his judgment for the rules,” says Matt Miller, a former director of public affairs for the D.O.J. - from the Vanity Fair ArticleSee more on this below. -----Did FBI Director Comey, with forethought and malice, and by choosing to break with FBI protocol, deliberately affect the 2016 presidential election in such a way as to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton? Yes and No. It seems to me that Comey’s identification with the departments to which he has belonged or which he has headed, whether temporarily or long-term, is extremely strong. Not a bad thing, per se. But I believe there have been times when he has proven himself unable to separate where James Comey ended and the FBI or the Department of Justice began, leading to situations where Le département est moi. I believe that in some of his actions, Comey, knowingly or unknowingly, became, in his head, one with the department. Therefore, it is impossible to differentiate where actions intended to protect the reputation of the FBI or the Department of Justice leave off and become actions to defend the ego and reputation of James Comey. And there is a considerable ego involved. I would not be surprised if Comey, at some not necessarily conscious level, saw himself as a sacrificial figure, a Prometheus who gave the nation the fire of just cause to investigate Trump’s Russia dealings, or even a Christ-figure, sacrificed, if perhaps not as intentionally as the original, for the greater good. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I moved it to the comments section directly below. Then in 2021 GR further reduced our capacity for including external links in comments making it a challenge to update reviews posted before then. So for the rest of the review, updated June 2, 2022, and EXTRA STUFF, please head over to my site, Coot’s Reviews. Review first posted – May 11, 2018 Publication date – April 17, 2018 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 19, 2018
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Apr 28, 2018
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Apr 28, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062490427
| 9780062490421
| 0062490427
| 4.20
| 33,164
| Apr 24, 2018
| Apr 24, 2018
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it was amazing
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[image] Image from the Smithsonian Wait, what? You’re [image] Image from the Smithsonian Wait, what? You’re kidding, right? Say it ain’t so. Well, there is some disagreement about this among paleontologists, but, according to Steve Brusatte, while they may not have matched up to Marc Bolan in a boa, and the feathers in question were maybe more like porcupine quills than the fluffy sort of plumage one might find on, say, an ostrich, those things poking out of the T. rex’s body were indeed feathers. And if you think the notion of a 40-foot, seven-ton eating machine, with ginormous, dagger-like, railroad-spike-size teeth bearing down on you, is scary, consider this. They travelled in packs. Sweet dreams! I have to confess that after reading this chapter, I did indeed have at least one dream that night that included multiple representatives of the T. Rex family. Not a wonderful image to induce one back to the land of Nod, after having bolted suddenly upright from REM sleep in fight-or-FLIGHT mode. [image] Hello, lunch - Image from The Real T-Rex BBC special – this one from the Mirror But I promise, not all the revelations in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will make you reach for some extra alcoholic or pharmaceutical sleep inducement. What we know about dinosaurs has continued to evolve, at an accelerating rate. Some revelations in the book are surprising and delightful, like the fact that new dinosaur species are being discovered at the rate of about one a week, and that this has been going on a while. There is a lot of catching up to be done since we mastered the basic few, Triceratops, T-Rex, Brontosaurus, Archaeopteryx, Stegasaurus, Dimetrodon, and the usual gang of idiots. Much bigger gang to keep track of these days. [I strongly urge you to check out Brusatte’s U of Edinburgh lecture, linked in EXTRA STUFF, for some very decisively feathered other members of the T. rex family. Fluffy indeed!] [image] Steve Brusatte - looking for Triassic vertebrate footprints in a quarry in Poland – image from palaeocast.com (Sorry, dear. I could have sworn I dropped the engagement ring right here!) Dinosaurs had a pretty long reign as kings/queens of the hill, but they had to begin sometime. Once upon a time all the land was one, linked from north to south, called Pangea. Monster monsoons raked much of the Earth, blistering heat, deserts, jungles, except of course at the poles, which were relatively balmy. This time, from about 300 to about 250 million years ago (mya) is called The Permian Period. Then, boys and girls, the earth split a seam. All that hot material that is constantly coursing through the earth found a way out and spewed forth. Not a good time to be an earthling. It is referred to as The Permian Extinction. 90% of all life was wiped out, by lava flows, fire, global warming, airborne particles blocking the sun, and thus a dramatic, if temporary end to photosynthesis, which killed off most plant life. And the ensuing acidification of water did seriously unpleasant things to aqueous life. But, after things settled down again, which took a while, a new class of critters came to dominate, dinosaurs. Yay! [image] From Pangea to now – image from LiveScience.com The Permian period was followed by the Triassic, from 250 to 200 mya, fifty million years of nature gone wild (I have that videotape in the attic, I think). Over the course of the Triassic, things on the land started to look like the world we know today. But the continents would have to drift for many millions of years yet before they would resemble our current landmass configuration. The first true dinos showed up around 230 to 240 mya. But they did not have the planet to themselves. There were reptiles, fish, birds, insects, even mammals, small ones, around at the time. [image] Metoposaurus, Kermit’s g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandma, was an amphibian the size of a Buick, with a coffee-table-sized head, and, unlike those little critters you had to work with in bio lab, these pups had hundreds of very sharp teeth. It hung out by water’s edge to capture anything straying too close. Mostly fish, but watch your ankles. There is interesting material in here about what came before the dinosaurs, (dinosauromorphs, yes, really) and where the line is drawn (arbitrarily) between dino and pre-dino. You, here, you, over there. Like Middle East borders. Brusatte walks us through the timeline of the dinos, from conditions being established at the end of the Permian, their arrival in the Triassic, to their sudden farewell at the end of the Cretaceous. Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Go ahead, repeat that a few times. It’s the sequence of periods Brusatte covers here. The first three come in at around 50 million years each, with the Cretaceous hanging on for about 80. The last three, taken together, comprise what is known as the Mesozoic Era, aka The Age of the Dinosaurs. (Which makes no sense to me. Shouldn’t it be The Era of the Dinosaurs? Or the Mesozoic Age? It’s so confusing.) He shows what changed geologically, and how the changes allowed this or that lifeform to arise. (often by wiping out the competition). He also takes us along with him to dig sites around the planet, Scotland, Portugal, Poland, The American Southwest, South America, China, and more, and introduces us to some of the foremost scientists in the field. The characters in Brusatte’s tale are not all of the ancient sort. He populates each chapter with modern specimens notable for their diversity and sometimes colorful plumage. While they may all be brilliant scientists, many could easily be classified as Anates Impar. It would not be a huge stretch to imagine them populating a nerdish Cantina scene. Here are Brusatte’s description of three of them. There are many more. You can spot Thomas Carr, now a professor at Wisconsin’s Carthage College, from a mile away. He has the fashion sense of a 1970s preacher and some of the mannerisms of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Thomas always wears black velvet suits, usually with a black or dark red shirt underneath. He has long bushy sideburns and a mop of light hair. A silver skull ring adorns his hand. He’s easily consumed by things and has a long-running obsession with absinthe and the Doors. That and tyrannosaurs.Brusatte also shamelessly namedrops every A-list paleontologist he has encountered. Of course, it sounds like those encounters were substantial, so I guess it’s ok, but… I was reminded a bit of Bill Clinton’s memoir, in which it seemed that every person he mentioned had either changed his life or was a close personal friend. In a way, the book constitutes a this-is-your-life look at Brusatte’s paleontology career (boy meets bone?), with appearances by many of the people he had learned from or worked with. (they are legion) In addition to the studies mentioned in the book, he is the author of a widely taught textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology. He is the paleo expert in residence on Walking with Dinosaurs (so much better than the sequel, Fleeing from Dinosaurs) on the BBC. One of the things that has allowed modern paleontologists to make and continue to make ground-breaking discoveries about Earth’s former tenants is the major advance in technology at their disposal. It’s a lot easier, for example, to see inside a fossilized skull to measure the size and shape of internal cavities with the help of a CT scanner than it was before they were available. [image] A new dinosaur, feathered, winged Zhenyuanlong from China - image from The Conversation You will learn some fascinating new information about dinos, some of it startling. This includes how sauropods managed those looooooong necks, why wild diversification happened when it did, why it took dinosaurs as long as it did to get large and take over. There is a fascinating bit on how some dinosaurs can pack an extra punch by getting air while they breathe in and out, surprising intel on how some of the critters you thought were dinosaurs aren’t, and directions on where you can look to see actual living dinosaurs today. He punctures some of the notions from the Jurassic Park movies. If trapped by a T-Rex, for instance, do not remain motionless. Rex has binocular vision and can see you perfectly well, whether you are sitting down in a port-o-san or hiding in or under a vehicle. Wave buh-bye. [image] If you do not know what this is from you need to get out more Speaking of un-fond farewells, Brusatte take us up to and through the biggest bang of them all, on Earth anyway, 66 mya. His description of the horror that marked the end of the dinosaurs is graphic, and disturbing. It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course. T. rex was there to see it.[image] Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…Oh, shit Artwork by Donald E. Davis Brusatte has written an eminently readable pop-science history of the dinosaurs, with accessible info on geology, biology, and the work of paleontologists, who are laboring tirelessly (and maybe obsessively) to find out the answers to questions that are as old as humanity’s awareness of the erstwhile inhabitants of our planet. This is one of those books that should be in every household. You do not need to be a scientist to get a lot out of it. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, bubbling with the enthusiasm of its author, will be an enjoyable and enlightening read for homo sapiens of all ages from pre-teen through fossil. Learning more about Earth’s illustrious, impressive, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes adorable former tenants never gets old. Really, who doesn’t love dinosaurs? Review posted – April 13, 2018 Publication date – April 24, 2018 December 2018 - Dinosaurs may no longer rule the earth, but The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs rules the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for Science. Reached for comment, a spokesman for Mr. Brusatte offered the following response. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages Episode 37 of Palaeocast features Steve talking about Therapods and Birds - December 1, 2014 – 44:00 A presentation by Brusatte, who is a wonderful speaker, on Tyrannosaur Discoveries, at the U of Edinburgh – Watch this, really. Great stuff. [image] In the above, Brusatte talks about feathered dinos, among other things. Meet Yutyrannus huali, (artist’s interpretation) a feathered tyrannosaur from China (but you can call him Fluffy) – image from The Conversation A fun article from the BBC - Legendary dinosaurs that we all imagine completely wrong - By Josh Gabbatiss - 3/21/16 NY Times – April 4, 2018 - Brusatte is keeping busy, publishing, with his team, a new study about the presence of dinos in Scotland, specifically in the Isle of Skye. In Footprints on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, Signs of a Dinosaur Playground - by Nicholas St. Fleur [image] This image of a sauropod print accompanied the above article – from the University of Edinburgh An interesting lecture (33 minutes) on how paleontologists research dinosaurian social behavior and what they have found - Social Behaviour in Dinosaurs - with David Hone Hone's delivery has a sing-song rhythm that can be a bit soporific, but the content is fascinating. Of particular interest is the basis for juvenile clustering. [image] This cluster of dinosaur egg fossils, on display at the Tianyu Museum, dates back 70 million years to the late Cretaceous era - shot by Stefen Chow - text and image from above article It reminds me of that scene in the first Alien film when they discover the nesting site [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] But then in 2021, GR opted to ban the use of external links in Comments. [image] So I had to chop off bits here, which hurts. However, you can see the entire review, including the links deleted here, and the links in Comment #2 below, on my site Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 19, 2018
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Hardcover
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4.47
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it was amazing
| On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes my family different. We don't go to school. Dad worries that the government will force us to go, but it can't because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom.Educated is both a tale of hope and a record of horror. We know from the first page of her book that Tara Westover is a bright woman, a gifted writer with an impressive, poetic command of language. But her early life offered no clue that she would become a Cambridge PhD or a brilliant memoirist. She was the youngest of seven children born to Gene and Faye (not their real names) Westover, fundamentalist, survivalist Mormons, in rural Idaho. [image] Tara Westover - image from her The Times We had a farm which belonged to my grandfather, and we had a salvage yard full of crumpled-up cars which belonged to my father. And my mother was a - she was an herbalist and a midwife. And as children, we spent a lot of hours walking on the mountain, gathering rose hips and mullein flowers that she could stew into tinctures. So in a lot of ways, it was a very beautiful childhood. - from NPR interviewThe children constituted his workforce in Gene’s scrapyard. Father was the law in their household, but it was a rule informed as much by significant mental health issues as it was by his ardent religious beliefs. In a less rural, less patriarchal, less religious community, theirs could easily have been deemed an unsafe environment. The scrapyard was a particularly dangerous place. …he just didn't have that bone in his head that said, this is dangerous; don't do this. And he had a really hard time understanding injuries even after they had happened and how severe they were. I just - I don't know what it was about the way his mind worked. He just wasn't able to do that. - from NPR interviewRuby Ridge had occurred when Tara was five, and fed her father’s paranoia. Everyone had to have head-for-the-hills bags for when the government, Deep State, Illuminati, choose your own boogeyman, would come for them. He had a profound distrust of the medical profession, believing that doctors were agents of Satan, intent on doing harm. He saw the herbalism Faye practiced as the only true, righteous treatment for one’s ills, calling her products “god’s pharmacy.” And he practiced what he preached, for himself as well as for his children, even after suffering a devastating injury. Maybe not an ideal way to make sure your kids reach adulthood in one piece. [image] View from Buck Peak - image from Westover’s site Home schooling was also less than idyllic, with mom’s attention spread not only over seven children but to her work as an herbalist and later, in addition, a midwife. Luke had a learning disability, frustrating mom, who really had hoped to educate them all. Dad undermined this, dragging the kids out to do chores and learn practical skills. Eventually mom gave up. Education consisted of Faye dropping them at the Carnegie Library in town, where they could read whatever they wanted. Dad rustled the boys at 7am, but Tyler, who had an affinity for math, would often remain inside, studying, until dad dragged him out. …there was not a lot of school taking place. We had books, and occasionally we would be kind of sent to read them. But for example, I was the youngest child, and I never took an exam, or I never wrote an essay for my mother that she read or nothing like kind of getting everyone together and having anything like a lecture. So it was a lot more kind of if you wanted to read a book, you could, but you certainly weren't going to be made to do that. - from NPR interviewSuccessful schooling or not, Tara acquired a desire for and love of learning. Tyler, a black sheep, not only loved books but music, as well. This was a major tonic for Tara, who was smitten with the classical and choral music her brother would play on his boom box. Not only did she find a love for music, but she discovered that she has a gift for singing. Being a part (often the star) of the town musical productions gave her greater contact with peers outside her family than she had ever had before. It formed one pillar of her desire to go to school, to college, to study music. (I included a link in EXTRA STUFF to a music video in which she sings lead, so you can hear for yourself.) At age seventeen, Tara Westover attended her first school class, at BYU, clueless about much of what was common knowledge for everyone else, resulting in her asking a question in class about a word everyone, I mean everyone, knows. Oopsy. Her intellectual broadening and education forms one powerful thread in her story. How her natural curiosity emerged, was nurtured, discouraged, and ultimately triumphed. The other thread consists of the personal, emotional, psychological, religious, and cultural challenges she had to overcome to become her own person. The world in which Westover was raised was one in which a powerful patriarchy, fed by a fundamentalist religious beliefs, applied its considerable pressure to push her into what was considered the proper role for a young woman, namely homemaker, mother, probably following in her mother’s dual careers as herbalist and midwife. And what about what was the right course for Tara? There was some wiggle room. Once dad sees her perform on stage, he is smitten, and softens to her musical leanings. Male siblings had been allowed to go to college. But every step outside the expectations, the rules, came at a cost. Do something different and lose a piece of connection to your family. And family was extremely important, particularly for a person whose entire life had been defined by family, much more so than for pretty much anyone who might read her book. [image] Westover as a wee Idaho spud - image from the NY Post A piece of this proscribed existence was a tolerance for aberrant behavior. Father was domineering, and was feckless about physical danger, even as it applied to his children. And distrustful of the medical establishment. His solution for infected tonsils was to have Tara stand outside with her mouth open to allow in the sun’s healing rays. Severe injuries, including Tara having her leg punctured by razor-like scrap-metal, a brother suffering severe burns on one leg, and even dad himself suffering catastrophic third-degree burns in a junkyard explosion, were to be treated by home-brew tinctures. He was also extremely moody, a characteristic that carried forward in some of the family genes. Tara’s ten-years-older brother, Shawn, was a piece of work. She felt close to him at times. He could be kind and understanding in a way that moved her. He even saved her life in a runaway horse incident. But he had a reputation as a bar brawler, as a person eager to fight. Sometimes his rages turned on his own family. And it was not just rage, sparked by trivialities, but cruelty, to the point of sadism. Tara was one of the objects of his madness. Dare oppose him and he would twist her arm to the point of spraining, drag her by her hair, force her face into unspeakable places and demand apologies for imagined offenses. Possibly even worse than this was her family’s denial about it, even when it occurred right in front of them. It is this denial that was hardest to bear. If your own parents will betray you, will not look out for you, in the face of such blatant attacks, then what is the value of the thing you hold most dear in the world? All abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, foremost, an assault on the mind. Because if you’re going to abuse someone I think you have to invade their reality, in order to distort it, and you have to convince them of two things. You have to convince them that what you’re doing isn’t that bad. Which means you have to normalize it. You have to justify it, rationalize it. And the other thing you have to convince them of is that they deserve it. - from C-span interviewHer brother, aliased as “Shawn” in the book, was a master manipulator, who, for years, succeeded magnificently in persuading Tara that what she had just experienced had never really happened. One frustrating aspect of the book is Tara’s dispiriting, but also grating ability to doubt herself, to allow others in her life, bullies, to persuade her she does not think what she is thinking, that she does not feel what she is feeling that she did not see what she has seen. She was living in a gaslit world in which multiple individuals, people who supposedly loved her, were telling her that what she had seen was an illusion, and that bad things that other people did were somehow her fault. Honey, wake the hell up. How many time ya gonna let these awful people get away with this crap? That gets old well before the end. I was very much reminded of victims of domestic abuse, who convince themselves that they must have done something to cause, to deserve the violence they suffer. One can only hope that she has been able to vanquish this self-blaming propensity completely by now. Years of therapy have surely helped. [image] Tara at Cambridge - image from Salt Lake City Tribune She struggles with the yin and yang of her upbringing and finding her true self. Her father was extreme, but also loving. Her abusive brother had a very kind side to him. Her mother was supportive, but was also a betrayer. Her parents wanted what they truly thought was best for her, but ultimately attempted to extinguish the true Tara. The dichotomy in the book is gripping. At times it reads like How Green Was My Valley, an upbringing that was idyllic, rich with history and lore, both community and family, and featuring a strong bond to the land. Their home was at the foot of Buck Peak, which sported an almost magical feature that looked like an Indian Princess, and was the source of legends. At others, it is like a horror novel, a testament to the power of reality-bending, indoctrination, and maybe even Stockholm Syndrome. How she survived feeling like the alien she was in BYU and later Cambridge, is amazing, and a testament to her inner strength and intellectual gifts. Westover caught a few breaks over the course of her life, teachers, one at BYU, another at Cambridge, who spot the diamond in her rough, and help her in her educational quest. Reading of this support, I had the same weepy joyful feeling as when Hagrid informs a very young lad, “Yer a wizard, Harry.” When setting out to write the book, Westover had no clue how to go about it, well, this sort of a book, anyway. She had already written a doctoral thesis. But she did have stacks of journals she’d been keeping since she was ten. In figuring out how to get from wish to realization, one important resource was listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast, with its focus on short stories. And she took in plenty of books on writing. It is certainly clear that, just as she had the wherewithal to go from no-school to doctorate at Cambridge, she has shown an ability to figure out how to write a moving, compelling memoir. Educated is a triumph, a remarkable work, beautifully told, of the journey from an isolated, fundamentalist, survivalist childhood, through the trials of becoming, to adulthood as an erudite and accomplished survivor. It is a powerful look at the ties, benefits, and perils of families. Ultimately, Educated is a rewarding odyssey you do not want to miss. Review first posted – 3/23/18 Published – 2/20/18 November 29, 2018 - Educated is named as one of The 10 Best Books of 2018 December 2019 - Educated is named winner of the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for memoirs, beating out Michelle Obamas's blockbuster hit, Becoming. From a GR interview with Westover Goodreads: Congratulations on your win! What does the award and all the support from Goodreads readers mean to you? [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Although the internet yielded no vids of Tara singing lead in her town’s production of Annie in the wayback, here is one of grown-up Tara singing lead vocal on The Hills of Aran with John Meed Interviews ----- C-Span - interviewed by Susannah Cahalan – video – 1 hour – If you can manage only one of these, this is the one to see -----CBS This Morning - video – 6:41 -----Penguin promotional video – 7:01 -----Channel 4 News - 8:46 -----NPR - with Dave Davies – the link includes text of the interview. There is a link on the page to the full audio interview – 38:18 - This is the source for several quotes used in the review, and is definitely worth a look and/or listen -----GoodReads interview A sample of the audiobook, read by Julia Whelan, , on Soundcloud A brief interview with Westover and Whelan re the making of the audiobook - on Signature -----NY Times - 2/2/2022 - I Am Not Proof of the American Dream - a powerful essay by the author on the need for help to get an education - MUST READ STUFF ...more |
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it was amazing
| I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald T I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald Trump Jr. But they are less familiar with the Russians. And what we’re talking about here is an alleged conspiracy with two halves. What I wanted to try and illuminate was what the Russians were doing. And I wanted it to be contextual, to explain that if you really want to interpret what happened last year [2016] in America, you need to go backwards almost through a kind of wormhole toward Cold War times and you need to be a sort of student of espionage, and in particular of the KGB method. I wanted to marry some of the contemporaneous stuff that we’ve seen in the news with my own reporting from Moscow. It’s also important to look at how the KGB used to do things in order to understand Vladimir Putin and his methods. Putin operates in the manner of a classic KGB-trained spy. He uses strategies of subterranean influence that were tried and tested during the ’60s and ’70s under [then–Soviet Secretary General] Leonid Brezhnev and so on. I wanted to pull that together. - From The Nation interviewAll roads lead to Moscow. In addition to the media frenzy stirred up by Stormy Daniels and her 60 Minutes interview, the buzz this week is still on for the newly released Russian Roulette, another in the flood of books on Swamp Thing, and his history of questionable, illegal, and traitorous entanglements, particularly those involving a certain mafiacratic descendant of the former Soviet Union. Yes, we have that book at home, and will be getting there, but you may not have noticed that back in November 2017 (or four years in Trump time) another book was released that covered a lot of the same territory, Collusion. I would have called it Yes, Collusion!, but that’s just me. [image] Luke Harding - image from 5x15.com When it comes to covering events relating to Russia, Luke Harding has been there and done that. He was the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, an English newspaper of note. In an earlier book by Harding, Expelled, also released as The Mafia State, he reports on his time in Russia from 2007 to 2011. I heartily recommend checking this book out to get a fuller flavor of just what sort of monster Puty is, to pick up some clues as to what lies hidden for now, and get a notion of what may lie ahead. Harding was booted out of Russia due to his coverage, revealing maybe a bit too much of the truth about what was going on among corrupt state officials. He has kept up his reporting, both for The Guardian and in books, offering works on Edward Snowden, on the murder of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, on Wikileaks, and on other related topics. [image] Christopher Steele - image from The New Yorker - by Victoria Jones Collusion looks at the history of connections between Trump, his family and Americans working for and associated with him, and people and institutions in and of Russia. He relies considerably, but not exclusively on the now-famous dossier put together by English private spook Christopher Steele, on further information from Steele, and on information from his own contacts. In doing this, he describes how contemporary intelligence work is done, some of it at least, the bit about developing potential foreign assets, and makes a compelling case that Swamp Thing is not only connected to Putin, bigly, but is vulnerable to Russian blackmail, with damaging impact on US national security. [image] What a tangled web we weave – image from a March/April 2017 Politico article by Michael Crowley - All of Trump’s Russia Ties, in 7 Charts One of the most interesting elements of the book is the history of the Russian connection. Trump had been on Russian radar since 1977 when he married Ivana, a Czechoslovakian. They kept an eye on him through the 1980s. It grew beyond just watching to an earnest interest in 1987, when he was wooed (heaping helpings of flattery were involved) by Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet representative to the UN, to visit Moscow. we can't say that Trump was recruited in 1987. But what we can say with absolute certainty is there was a very determined effort by the Soviets to bring him over, and that moreover, his personality was the kind of thing they were looking for. They were looking for narcissists. They were looking for people who were kind of - dare I say it - corruptible, interested in money, people who were not necessarily faithful in their marriages and also sort of opportunists who were not very strong analysts or principle people. And if you work your way down the list through these sort of - the KGB's personality questionnaire, Donald Trump ticks every single box. - from the NPR interview[image] Carter Page speaking at the RIA Novosti news agency in Russia – image by Grigoriy Sisoev Many of Harding’s chapters follow some of the names we have all come to know and loathe. There is a chapter on Carter Page, titled “I Think He’s an Idiot,” which is a quote from one of the Russians to whom Page is linked. One item of interest is the suggestion that Page, in payment for services rendered to Russian entities, was given inside information on a coming privatization of Russian gas company Rosneft, and a message for Trump, that the Russians had compromising material on him. [image] On December 10, 2015 General Michael Kelly and Jill Stein were guests at Vladimir Putin’s table for an event marking the 10th anniversary of state-owned TV network Russia Today - image from AP, by Mikhail Klimentyev The chapter titled “General Misha” looks at General Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and explores his possible motives for working with the other side. “General Misha” is how Flynn referred to himself in at least one communication with his Russian colleagues. The chapter on Paul Manafort, “He Does Bastards,” quotes another source on how Manafort seems drawn to the worst national leaders to assist. There are alarming parallels, by the way, between Manafort’s Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych, and Donald Trump. Both are thugs who got a political makeover from a professional candidate-polisher. Both are remarkably corrupt. Both have authoritarian intentions. Both want to lock up their opposition. Yanukovych actually locked up his political opponents. Swamp Thing must make do with penal envy for now. Yanukovych stole billions from Ukraine. It remains to be seen how much Trump and his fellow looters will have stolen from the American people by the time they are driven out of the country or into jail. Yanokovuch was ultimately booted out in a popular uprising, and now resides, with his billions, in Russia. One can only hope that our corrupt leader is held to account for his crimes. [image] Viktor Yanukovych and Paul Manafort - image from The Daily Beast In addition to looking at the specific individuals involved, Harding offers digestible chunks of history. Of great interest is how Russia has grown a cyber warfare capability that exists outside the official government structure. He examines the various ways in which Russian oligarch money finds its way to the West, with particular focus on money laundering through Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, and how vast sums of Russian money passed into and through Trump’s real estate developments, gaining Trump not only huge loans at a time when American banks had learned the hard way not to loan him any money, but vast profits. He offers keen insight into the relationship between nominally private institutions and Putin’s government. He looks at the efforts by Steele, domestic intelligence agencies, and foreign intelligence services to inform the FBI what was going on with Trump before the election, and on the bureau sitting on the fact that they were looking into it, while the sainted Mister Comey was doing his best to tilt the election to Trump by making damaging public statements about Hilary Clinton in an October Surprise political hit. Harding looks at the impact of BuzzFeed publishing the entire Steele dossier, while so many other news organizations sat on the info that they all had. Trump’s connection with Russia is a national thriller/action-adventure/comedy/horror/surreality show we are all watching at the same time. But just as the after-show gab-fests that follow popular programs can open our eyes to things we might have missed in what we just saw (I am a total junkie for After Trek, which follows Star_Trek:_Discovery), books like Harding’s can fill in details that we may have missed the first or the first several times we read sundry books on the unraveling horrors, read and/or watched the news and/or the political talk shows, or listened to podcasts. [image] Bosom Buddies - image from CNBC – by John Harwood It seems likely that Robert Mueller has had to install extra sprinklers, offer his staff gas masks, and reinforce the concrete in his offices to cope with the growing store of smoking guns he and his staff have been collecting. But that is not what Luke Harding is offering here. Collusion brings together a diverse range of relevant information in one place. This is what is going on. These are the players. This is how it came to be. If you cannot detect the scent of combustion in this national crisis, you are probably determined not to. Harding points our noses in the proper directions, offers some post-episode explanations, and provides hints as to where the series is heading. We will all be affected by the outcome, whether or not we are tuned in. It is better to know. Published – November 16, 2017 Review Posted – March 30, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Has been moved to comment #1 - looks like GR reduced the allowable character count for reviews. ...more |
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0062796755
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really liked it
| Democracy dies in darkness, opines a great American newspaper, but it would be more accurate to say that it dies by degrees. Where constitutional Democracy dies in darkness, opines a great American newspaper, but it would be more accurate to say that it dies by degrees. Where constitutional democracy has been lost, it has been lost because political actors have broken its rules turn by turn to achieve some immediately urgent goal. Each rule breaking then justifies the next, in a cycle of revenge that ends only in the formal or informal abrogation of the constitutional order.David Frum pisses me off. He is not someone I would normally read. He is a die-hard Republican political commentator, who served as a speechwriter in the Dubyah administration, wrote for the right-wing-toxic editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, was an editor on the neo-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, as well as being a regular opinion contributor on NPR and MSNBC, the latter being where I got a bit more exposure to his views. His Reaganaut take on government is not particularly in synch with mine, but he is among the many, of both red and blue inclination, who find the Trump presidency existentially alarming. More importantly, beyond the distaste any thinking person has for Swamp Thing, Frum is concerned about the road the nation has traveled in allowing such a travesty to take place, and the ability of so many to stand silent, or even to abet, as small-d democratic norms are routinely treated like an attractive woman The Orange One just cornered in an elevator. [image] David Frum - image from Front Page Magazine In terms of factual material, there is not a lot that is new here, for those who keep up with the news. Of course, the daily news churn is so fast and voluminous that it is impossible to keep up with it all. As a result, there is certain to be material in Trumpocracy that is news to you. The danger Frum sees is not the rise of an autocratic, constitution-burning strongman, but a crumbling of the institutional norms that have made the USA, flawed, though it may be, a democracy worth preserving. The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, [clearly, he should have been more afraid of this] but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents’ vulnerabilities: “low energy,” “little,” “crooked,” “fake.” In the same way, Trump has intuited weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off. (well, until the 2020 election, anyway)This is less a book about Trump, the person, and more about the underlying currents that have floated him to the surface of the swamp. Where Fire and Fury was a gossipy look at the personal goings on in the White House, Frum’s book is an intellectual analysis of social and political changes, their impacts, and their implications. He begins with a look at the history of increasing partisanship, citing back and forth pulls from left and right. Frum sees the end of the Cold War as the condition that allowed the parties to commence a further divergence, the shock of the Great Recession as generating a smaller pie, with more competition for the slices, continuing rage over Bush v. Gore, and accelerating ethnic and cultural diversity. Unfortunately, there are instances where the obfuscatory urge clearly overwhelmed and Frum manages to omit some relevant points while making this or that case, devolving to GOP talking points. Bush v. Gore was a judicial travesty, and not one that anyone should forget, ever. It reinforced the notion that corruption rules, the voters be damned. The Great Recession may have taken a slice out of the American pie but some slices are bigger than others. Wall Street, largely responsible for the disaster, got bailed out, except for a few early crash-and-burns, while homeowners got thrown out. Jobs continued to be lost by the hundreds of thousands while profitability, after a dip in 2009, did just fine. And as for diminishing the pie, that may have been true in the short term, but in the years since, the pie has grown large and flavorful, but only the well-to-do have been given forks. Of course corporate profits as a percentage of GDP have gone up while corporate taxes over the same period have fallen as a percent of GDP. As he acknowledges this later, it seems odd that he would cite competition over reduced resources as a rationale for political divergence. Citing an absence of Obama willingness to compromise with Republicans eager to kill Obamacare, he manages to omit the fact that it was Republican legislators who had essentially refused to negotiate, despite pleas from the president. It was purely a one-sided crime. I call BS! He decries all-or-nothing politics as if both sides were equally at fault. While making an interesting point about the legality of DACA and the president’s diverse views on that, Frum then offers another misleading item about the Democratic party being unable to pass immigration legislation despite being in the majority at the time, which, of course, ignores the fact that a majority was meaningless when the opposition was committed to filibustering anything Democrats proposed. He cites Democratic refusal to approve ten of Dubyah’s appellate court judgeship nominations. Fails to mention that Dubyah had diverged from tradition in dumping the usual procedure of submitting nominee names to the ABA for their review prior to official submission. Also, the GOP ditched another tradition. It had been the case that Appeals Court nominations were submitted to both Senators of the state in which the seat was located. And if either Senator objected the nomination was quashed. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch decided that henceforth it would require rejection of a nominee by both senators to kill an appointment. Hatch would then go ahead and ignore his own rule when it conflicted with his political goals, holding hearings on nominees even after both Senators from some appellate seat states withheld their ok, if he wanted that nominee installed. Rules are, apparently, only for the minority party. Frum also neglects to mention that Republicans had killed the nominations of several Clinton era candidates, so a bit of payback was to be expected. And then there were the nominees who were clearly well outside the mainstream of legal thought at the time. Also, Frum does not mention that Dubyah had sixty-one Appeals Court judges approved. So, painting with a wide brush is less revelatory than it is obfuscatory. And he then uses this as an excuse for Mitch McConnell refusing to bring to a vote Obama’s choice to fill the SCOTUS seat opened by the death of Antonin Scalia. I call BS! (I have added a link in EXTRA STUFF to an interesting article that offers some detail on the Appeals Court nominees issue.) Despite his issues on broad-brushing issues like those above, Frum is clear-eyed about more things than one might have expected. His take on the continuing attempt to overturn Obama Care is spot on. He also rightly points out that the benefits of our expanding economy have devolved mainly to those already middle class or higher, with little or no benefit accruing to the poor and working class. He is, after all, a guy who was kicked out of his gig at the American Enterprise Institute for daring to tell Republicans that they were wasting their time opposing Obamacare and should look to making it better. Frum decries what he sees as a rising tolerance for violence. Somehow equating Occupy Wall Street with the white guy who showed up at an Obama rally with a loaded rifle in 2009. He mentions that dozens of rifles were carried at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, but makes no mention of how many unarmed blacks were killed by armed police. I take his overall point that there has been a general increase in violence in the political sphere, (although crime statistics report a decrease in violent crime overall) but the Occupy leaders, to the extent that there were any, rejected the actions of extremists who parasited onto that movement and others, to vent their kinetic spleens. That it occurred at all should not necessarily be taken as evidence that it was actually “tolerated.” And how about Charlottesville, where the white supremacists were planning violence on counter protesters. It seems somewhat tilted to view the people who went to Charlottesville to protect peaceful demonstrators from right wing thugs as the equivalent of those very thugs. Violence on the left has been episodic, with the intrusion of dark elements into otherwise peaceful undertakings, whereas violence and increasing armament on the right has been encouraged by the NRA, and a need to resort to violence to defend against imagined threats has been encouraged by a wide swath of right-wing psycho media. So, while I agree with Frum that there seems a rising tolerance for political violence, it is primarily on the right. Leaders of progressive actions typically reject violent methods. So, for another false equivalence, I call BS! Frum quite correctly points to enablers who allow Trump to be Trump to the detriment of us all, particularly our bear-like enemy abroad, and GOP members more than happy to promote known lies to further political ends. He offers a sharp, if depressing look at the Trump plunder machine A rule-of law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot withstand is a culture of impunity. So long as officials believe that corruption will usually be detected—and if detected, then certainly punished—for just that long they will believe that corruption is wrong. It is for this reason that corrupt regimes swiftly evolve toward authoritarianism, and authoritarian regimes toward corruption.It was certainly clear that the Republican Quislings in Congress would do nothing to stop Swamp Thing from siphoning as much of the national treasure into the accounts of his family and friends as possible, which differentiates the USA from any banana republic how? But Frum notes an international trend toward kleptocracy, as a non-ideological form of awfulness. Makes one wonder if we are better off with a morally challenged, insecurity and greed driven narcissist bent on stealing everything he can grab, or his potential replacement, a religious ideologue, who thinks God speaks to him directly. Frum points out the obvious betrayals Swamp Thing has engaged in, the back-stabbing of erstwhile supporters, the campaign promises laid waste. But then he wanders off into a discussion of deficits that returns us to the missing information methodology that seems to permeate his writing. He gripes about deficits soaring after the Bush administration, yet makes no mention of why it soared. Wonder why that could be. Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the fact that Dubyah and the Republican-supported (with some Democratic help from Bill Clinton) policy of financial industry de-regulation had allowed Wall Street to run roughshod over sanity and cause the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Maybe Frum neglected to note that the amount Obama wound up having to spend to forestall a repeat of the Great Depression was remarkably similar to the amounts that Dubyah himself had proposed before running as fast as he could away from the mess that he’d made. One can only presume that there is dishonesty at play here. Because David Frum is not, unlike Trump, an idiot. And then he offers a cogent analysis of why the Trump White House is such a bedlam. He also understands that Paul Ryan’s economic program is distilled madness, leavened with a Trumpian capacity for cruelty. Frum gets that the Republican bubble has become incapable of considering facts beyond the bubble’s border. Even more alarmingly, he notes that instead of de-regulating industries by reducing state involvement as prior presidents had done, Trump sought to break the state in order to plunder it. His analysis of how Trump treats the press and even truth itself is incisive and frightening. Frum’s policy solutions, aside from the whole raging authoritarian thing, are a sure cure for low blood pressure. He says, for example, that Tax subsidies for college tuition incentivize above-inflation fee increases. And there is probably some truth there. But since Republicans seem hell bent on reducing any form of overt subsidy to actual humans, this would mean that only the well-to-do would have access to higher education. Unless the GOP is eager for a return to heads being lopped in town squares by enraged peasants, it might be wiser to come up with ways to make college affordable for working people, whether that means (heaven forfend!) price controls on higher education, direct subsidies to those unable to afford such a critical means of educational, economic and social advancement, or tax incentives, which really only work for people who already have enough income to take advantage of such things. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that, I moved it, including the c0nclusion of the review and EXTRA STUFF, to the comments section directly below. But wait, there's more. In 2021, Goodreads decreed that it would no longer allow external links in comments, and if there are any in an existing comment, updates of said comment are disallowed. I will be pulling it all together and posting the unified review on my site, Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] In February, 2022, I made some minor edits and reposted this review. Will port to Coot's ASAP. ...more |
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Feb 05, 2018
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3.97
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it was amazing
| “There are 690,000 official DACA registrants and the president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number, to 1.8 million,” Kelly s “There are 690,000 official DACA registrants and the president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number, to 1.8 million,” Kelly said. “The difference between (690,000) and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn’t sign up.”Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to be able to talk about the challenges of immigration without the sort of ignorance and bigotry that is often brought to the discussion? A debate that considers cost and benefits, not just in economic, and political, but in human terms would be a significant step forward. Francisco Cantú, an Arizona native, was a college graduate with an interest in international relations, particularly border issues. He imagined a future in law or the foreign service, but thought he might be best prepared if he had first-hand experience of the border for himself. So he joined the largest police force in the country, the United States Border Patrol (BP). Although it is a police force, the BP re-imagined the agents’ uniforms in a more military style in 2007, the better to reflect what was increasingly seen as a military mission. The outdoors element of the job held particular appeal as his mom had been a National Parks ranger for many years, giving him a taste for nature, particularly the desert. [image] Francisco Cantú – image from Mother Jones – by Beowulf Sheehan Although The Line Becomes a River is divided into three parts, two of the parts live on one side of a line and the final part lives, and struggles, on another. Cantú writes of his training and early experiences in the BP, where he served as a Border Patrol Agent (BPA) for four years. Much of the work was watching and waiting, responding to tripped sensors, trying to track down those who had crossed, sometimes helping the exhausted, dehydrated, and/or injured, and sometimes finding the remains of failed crossers. Many perish in the attempt. (Don’t even think of trying to cross in the summer.) You learn about methods used by the BP to discourage migrants, and the resulting conflicts one might have about employing methods that could be life-threatening. You will get some analysis on how the increase in US crackdowns at the border has pushed the crossing economy into the hands of drug cartels. You will also learn some of the nuances of what various maimings by cartel operatives are intended to signal, pick up some information on how much of the US side of the border is used and sometimes controlled by coyotes and their employers, feel the eyes on your back as Cantú tells about the impressive cartel intelligence network in place, on both sides of the border, to manage the crossings, and see how migrants are often held for ransom by coyotes, with payments demanded of terrified relations, sometimes even when the extortionists did not have the crosser. [image] Image from Wired Magazine The third part of the book begins after Cantú has left the BP. A couple of years in, working as a barista in a local shopping center, he is friends with Jose Martinez, a fellow who does much of the cleaning there, and who shares breakfast with Cantú most days. Martinez is the most reliable, and the best worker in the place, according to the owner. Lovely wife, three kids, church-goer, attentive father, pillar-of-the-community sort. When he learns that his mother is in her last days he returns home to see her off. Problem is, mom is doing her crossing over from the more southerly territory of the great state of Mexico. And, despite his many years in the USA, despite his work ethic, despite his enviable character, Jose was, and is, an illegal immigrant, and now has to deal with cartel-organized coyotes to find his way back home, and the US border machinery once he crosses. The trials of this effort, the support Jose receives from the community, the assistance Cantú offers Jose and his family, the details of what happens when an illegal is caught, all combine to make this a very personal, educational, and moving story. [image] Banner from FC’s site Cantú adds in dashes of regional history pertaining to the establishment and marking of the border, and offers occasional writing about the often frightening beauty of the land. This is not a political screed. Cantú is attempting to look past the rhetoric to the on-the-ground details of the crossing problem. There is a cost to the BPAs, as well as to those they apprehend. Cantú’s mother worries that his soul will become deformed by containment within a government structure, that his idealism will be used by the Border Patrol in ways he might not care for. The cost to the crossers and their families is considerable, immediate, and often lifelong. [image] A view of the U.S.-Mexico border fence on the outskirts of Nogales, Mexico – image from the NPR interview Cantú intersperses his narrative with recollection of dreams he began having while in the Border Patrol. It may feel like a workshopped lit device, at first, until one learns the basis. The first sign that the job was taking a toll for me came in the form of those nightmares, of which I tried to describe a few in the book. For years I would just ignore them. Like in any enforcement or military job, part of the training is designed to normalize these intense traumatic, and often violent, experiences that you’re expected to have. In my waking life, I totally did that. I normalized the things I saw, never thought about it. I think the dreams rose up from that pushing-aside/normalizing not-normal happenings. When I started to realize that, and the reason I write about them, is that there was a recurring dream I was always having. I was wearing my teeth out, grinding the enamel off my molars. That was the first time my dream world manifested in my waking life. That was the point at which I had to pay more attention to my dreams. They were shaking me. - from the Mother Jones interview[image] A Border Patrol vehicle drives in front of a mural in Tecate, Mexico, just beyond a border structure in Tecate, Calif. – image from Nieman Storyboard - by Gregory Bull/Associated Press There are many moving moments in this book. Cantú talked with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about one woman who had been caught crossing. I remember sort of bandaging her feet and cleaning her wounds, which is this very, you know, direct, tangible way of helping someone. I think it's almost biblical, in a sense, to clean someone's feet. And I remember her looking down at me just kind of, like, very tenderly and thanking me. And I felt like, "Don't thank me. At the end of the day, I'm taking you back to a cell and I'm sending you on your way to be sent back to this place that you're literally risking your life to flee." And so, yes, it's true that the Border Patrol does good work and rescues people and saves lives, but there's tension there.There is no legislative agenda here. Francisco Cantú does not offer specific solutions to the real questions of how to regulate immigration. It is certainly clear that he is sympathetic to many he encountered, both while wearing a badge, and while pulling shots. But his sympathies, and empathies are shared with all sides. He knows what it is to be a BPA, and is sensitive to the challenges of the job, and to the toll it can take. He is aware of the physical perils police face, having to contend with cartel-based operations, and the emotional cost of constantly having to cope with desperate people. The Line Becomes a River offers a very human face to what is often a very inhuman conversation. Will it change anyone’s mind? I doubt that many who are opposed to immigration will bother reading it. The ideological barrier around fixed perspectives can be far more unbreachable than any physical wall. But for those seeking a human response to a humanitarian crisis, this would be a good place to gain a bit of perspective. [image] image from KPBS.org I'll never forget as a Border Patrol agent bringing this guy into my station, part of a group that I apprehended, and I was rolling his fingerprints and putting him into, you know, the database to be shipped back to Mexico. And I remember him just kind of like looking around while I was asking him these formulaic questions. And he's like, "Hey, I know there's a couple hours before the bus comes, is there anything that I can do? Can I take out the trash? Can I clean the cells? I want to show you that I'm here to work." Review first posted – February 9, 2018 Publication date – February 6, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to comment #1 below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 2018
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Feb 06, 2018
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Feb 05, 2018
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Hardcover
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1250158060
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| Jan 05, 2018
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it was amazing
| MUELLER IS COMING! MUELLER IS COMING!Michael Wolff has given us a drone’s (dragon’s?) eye view of the competing centers vying to be the power behind the throne, with some looking, in the longer term, at carving paths for their own succession to the highest position in the realm. There is a mad king who needs to be handled. Centers of power arise, morph, wage battles both silent and overt, succeed and fail, rise, die, and sometimes rise again. What we see in Michael Wolff’s Fire and The juicy bits of this book have been everywhere for the last few weeks. It is highly quotable, and the publisher, Holt, the author, their PR people, and the major news outlets have been flooding the zone. Whether on-line or in print, over airwaves on TV or radio, through cable, and probably via the deep-state-news (WDSN?) that beams directly into peoples’ minds, all media have been all agog with the many looks at this elephant to which they have been privy. With so much blanket coverage coming at you, one might be forgiven for wondering whether you first saw the item you just read in the book, or came across it somewhere else. It is a little bit unnerving. I will spare you the further confusion of adding all those bits here. I really have to put some in, though. I mean you know them already, right? How many synonyms can you find for idiot? Fire and Fury is the biggest book of the moment, the Wall Street Journal reporting that it had sold a million copies as of Monday, January 8, 2018, a day earlier than its scheduled release. Remains to be seen, of course, with a steady stream of books on Trump being published, how long this frenzy will persist. But the last time I was aware of people standing on line for hours to get a book, it included the words Harry and Potter. This book, in the words of our former vice president, is a big fucking deal. [image] Michael Wolff - image from Mediaite.com The bottom line of Fire and Fury is that it presents Donald Trump as unfit to serve as president, based not on the dark view and negative press of his opposition, but the been-there-OMG-did-you-see-that experience of his own staff and supporters. Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.Wolff uses named and unnamed sources. It seems clear that his primary go-to was one Steve Bannon, a weaver of webs, a bomb-thrower, a snake in the grass, a back-stabber, a manipulator, a white supremacist, a gifted media manipulator, and a pretty bright and articulate, if sartorially challenged guy. One might be tempted to dismiss Wolff’s book based on this reliance. Don’t. There are plenty of other sources feeding the narrative. The question is whether the image Wolff generates by making a composite of the incoming bits makes sense. Is it plausible? Is it correct? Having seen Wolff interviewed on multiple news and entertainment shows, and attending to the back-and-forths between him and knowledgeable news people, it seems eminently clear that he got it right. There are probably some details that err a bit here and there. Maybe this person was not at that meeting, or a date may be off. I expect that the only inaccuracies to be found here will be of that sort. Niggling, beside the point. And blown way out of proportion by those with an interest in distracting you from the core content of the book. That the president attempted to stop its publication should tell you something. What was, to many of the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win this election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive function. He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.Michael Wolff is a veteran author and journalist, with seven prior books to his credit. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, and accused by people he has written about of fabricating. The absence of actual lawsuits against him suggests that complaints were less than firmly grounded. He is a serious writer and should be taken seriously. It is a bit mind-boggling the access he had to the actual White House, but he lays it out. He hung out in the WH, with a huge degree of access and was able to get input from the people working or passing through there, for months. Was the administration insane for allowing this? You betcha. But they did, another sign of their unpreparedness. Inauguration day offered a look at what was to come. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannon-driven message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”As noted above, the geography through which Wolff’s tale travels is one of sundry kingdoms. I could not help but imagine the opening credits of Game of Thrones as we approach each power center, the models for each of the city-states animating, offering moving, 3-D representations of each kingdom’s imagery and motifs. The three (sadly, not seven) are the alt-right of Bannon and his allies (clearly White Walkers), the mainstream GOP crowd epitomized by Reince Preibus, and the family wing, considered by Bannon to be of a liberal-democratic bent, in the person of Jared Kushner and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, aka Jarvanka. (Cersei and Jamie?). [image] Swamp Thing as Joffrey Baratheon- image from DesignCrowd.com, by way of Huff-Po The forward motion of the story is the events of Trump’s campaign, but mostly presidency up to October, 2017. I know, I know. One of the problems with political books is that they can often be outdated in fairly short order. The several months between October and the book’s publication is a lifetime in Trump years. It is impressive, given the daily churning of personnel and events in the DC universe (not the multiverse) these days that any book on Trumplandia still has relevance by the time ink on paper makes its way to readers. And yet, the issues raised here, the main issue, is momentous, and sticks. Wolff has offered a host of quotes from his sources, many named, that question Swamp Thing’s competence, not just to function as president, but to function as a human being. His own staff frequently mention the applicability of the 25th amendment (although in the real world that is a total fantasy) and the likelihood of impeachment. The sound of Robert Mueller’s approaching steps echoes throughout the work, clearly feeding Trump’s paranoia about being treated unfairly, and boosting his fear of being found out, labeled a squatter or deadbeat, and evicted. In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement what the president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president wants. In the Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s immigration EO, [executive order] flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself (a result that was often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact already had the thought).Wolff, with his title, and content, offers a wonderful Game of Thrones image. But there are plenty more that could easily apply. The Producers is one that he mentions, a particularly apt metaphor, given that it seemed clear to many of us, even during the campaign, that Trump, like Bialystock and Bloom, got into the presidential race for the money, and never really intended to win. This is confirmed in the book. Personally, I think Max Bialystock would have made a better president. Another scenario that Wolff mentions is the relationship of Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, wonderfully portrayed in the novel Wolf Hall (no relation), with Steve Bannon in the Cromwell role and you-know-who as the guy who made such a gigantic mess, because he simply had to have things his way. One could also consider House of Cards (the original), with all the plotting, back-stabbing, and hunger for power that made that series such fun to watch, although, after Bannon as Francis Urquart, the personnel parallels fade a bit. Alice in Wonderland gives us Trump as the single-minded Queen of Hearts. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight might offer an image of ineptitude, if one ignores the fact that Trump has overseen the greatest looting by criminals of the national treasury in the nation’s history. For all his intellectual challenges Swamp Thing is a larger than life character with very little core, a made-for-Television president. [image] Swamp Thing and Bannon as Henry VIII and T. Cromwell - image from NY Magazine One of the things I most enjoyed was Wolff’s take on The Mooch. Anthony Scaramucci is the sort of Damon Runyon hanger-on one might expect to see in Guys and Dolls, or maybe a Batman flick, all puffery and attitude smeared over a core of ignorance, inflated by cartoonishly excessive self-confidence and corruption. From the description in Fire and Fury, it is not hard to imagine him in a too-wide pin-striped suit, shoulder-padded, sporting excessive pancake makeup, swinging a pocket watch from a chain, and laughing uncontrollably as he kicks some poor shmo that his minions are holding down for him, because he was a few dollars short on his protection payment. There are some things missing from the book, of course. There is not the sort of detailed biographical material better found in an actual biography. Forget seeing an autobiography. Anything Trump truly wrote would probably be close to an actual choose-your-own-adventure kid book, given his inability to remain focused for more than a few minutes. There is not a lot about serious international threats, with one exception. In a press conference at his Bedminster, NJ property: “His staff had not prepared him for this, but, in apparent relief that he could digress from the opioid discussion, as well as sudden satisfaction at the opportunity to address this nagging problem, he ventured out, in language that he’d repeated often in private—as he repeated everything often—to the precipice of an international crisis.Thus an increased concern about the danger of someone implementing the launch codes in a fit of pique or confusion. A fair bit of that intercontinental exchange of verbal ordnance occurred after the book was written, most notably the “My Button is bigger than your Button” lunacy. There is little discussion, although it gets a mention, of the potential implications of Trump’s autocratic leanings. The telling of the tale is much more about what has already happened as opposed to what might. It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. “He’s a guy who really hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not going to start liking it now.”This is not a book about policy. It is portrait of a White House as a theater of political warfare, a candidate who never really wanted or expected to be president and a president who is not only completely out of his depth, but who shows not only no capacity, but no interest in learning to swim. Even the people who work for him see him as unintelligent, narcissistic, incurious, and lazy. They even suggest he is losing his grip on reality, presuming he ever had one. It is certainly entertaining, the bits about Trump’s TV addiction, how he manages to cover his bald pate, and his pettiness about not wanting the cleaning staff to pick up his clothes from the floor. I mean, really, is he ashamed of being seen as a slob? Eating burgers in bed in front of the TV will probably gain him more support than criticism. I mean, even I can get on board with that, and I do not have a kind view of the man. But the more serious element is his mental fitness, and the danger this presents to us all. [image] image from Wolff’s Twitter feed, citing the Hollywood Reporter There is zero chance that the Republican Party will allow their sitting president, however damaged or corrupt he is, to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. The best chance for his leaving office is for him to suffer a serious physical health crisis, which might force him to resign. As an older, overweight, out of shape man, this is not far-fetched. Even with a Democratically controlled Congress in January 2019, there is no guarantee that the Senate would come up with the sixty-seven votes needed to convict. The significance of this is that until Donald John Trump is removed from the presidency, by impeachment, ill-health, death, or being voted out of office in 2020, we are all at risk. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is an air-raid siren warning us all of peril, real and potential. (Wolff Hell?) It is must-read material for every American. When the GOP stands in the way of investigations into the administration, they are supporting a president who is unable to function at the needed level, a president who is uninterested in the details of governance, a president who is not in control of himself, a president who places not only himself, but the nation, and the entire world at risk. You need to know what they are protecting. It doesn’t take a stable genius to know that you should be afraid, very afraid. As Dubyah said, “That’s some weird shit.” Published – January 9, 2018 Review Posted – January 12, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. Then in Summer 2021 they decreed that external links would not longer be allowed in comments, where I used to put the review overage. So I have included the entirety of the review, including EXTRA STUFF, on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 07, 2018
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Jan 11, 2018
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Jan 10, 2018
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Hardcover
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1250074312
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| 1250074312
| 4.01
| 2,588
| Jan 23, 2018
| Jan 23, 2018
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it was amazing
| If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harde If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be … For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’ - (Deuteronomy 15:7-11) The law, it its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole FranceThe poorhouse. These days, it’s common parlance for extreme financial misfortune. Someone who has had a particularly bad fiscal spell could be said to be heading to the poorhouse. These days, we do not have literal, brick and mortar poorhouses. Those were usually fetid places, ill-maintained, offering meager shelter and food to the detritus of society, the poor, ill, elderly, and disabled, often requiring labor in return. These days, we have something new. America’s poor and working-class people have long been subject to invasive surveillance, midnight raids, and punitive public policy that increase the stigma and hardship of poverty. During the nineteenth century, they were quarantined in county poorhouses. During the twentieth century they were investigated by caseworkers, treated like criminals on trial. Today we have forged a digital poorhouse from databases, matched algorithms and statistical risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before.The most famous poorhouse resident in literature is one Oliver Twist. In the novel of that name, Dickens intended to highlight the inhumanity of the Poor Law Act of 1834. The world of poverty he described was, while literarily thrilling, a horrifying exposé of man’s cruelty to man. Poorhouses found a home in the USA as well. The first poorhouse in the city of my current residence was established in 1863. In my erstwhile lifelong home, New York, an 1824 law directed the counties of the state to erect poorhouses. Residents could be required to do whatever work the superintendent demanded. Any resistance resulted in being kicked out. Among other sources for the poorhouse population, children younger than 15 caught begging could be legally remanded there until the person in charge of the poorhouse let them out. There were certainly poorhouses in NY earlier than that. The first poorhouse in the USA was in Boston, in 1662. [image] Virginia Eubanks - from her Twitter page Virginia Eubanks has been involved with economic justice movements for over twenty years. She is an associate Prof of Poli Sci at the SUNY Albany campus. Her writing about tech in social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. She is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies project, which looks at how the gathering and use of digital info by government impacts our rights. In Automating Inequality, Eubanks offers a bit of history on the poorhouse, noting, with particular relevance for the operation of today’s prisons, and other bits of outsourcing of government welfare responsibilities, that privately run poorhouses led to the residents being particularly exploited and deprived of necessities in order to increase profits for the owners, not that the publicly run ones were any great shakes. Her central notion is that the physical poorhouse of the past has been replaced in the 21st century by a modern version. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management—automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analytics—retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation that I call the digital poorhouse. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.She takes two approaches. First is tracking the history of how the poor have been treated, noting the Dickensian era preference for punishing the poor overtly, by shunting them into miserable institutions, if providing any aid at all, then a revolutionary approach called Scientific Charity, which employed caseworkers applying the methodology of police work in examining the merits of a person’s application for aid, As Mary Richmond wrote in Social Diagnosis, her 1917 textbook on casework procedures, “the reliability of the evidence on which [caseworkers] base their decisions should be no less rigidly scrutinized than is that of legal evidence by opposing counsel.” Scientific charity treated the poor as criminal defendants by default.the reversal of reliance on private charity with the New Deal, the paring back of benefits in the 1970s, beginning the use of computer technology to exclude applicants, and sundry mechanisms being used today. The second is to offer case studies, on-site looks at three locations. Homelessness is the focus in Los Angeles, the outsourcing of welfare systems in Indiana, and child custody issues at the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) in Pittsburgh. In short, Eubanks offers a history of US public policy on poverty, along with the mechanisms employed in various eras to manage, and limit public outlays to address it, a look at the mechanisms now in use that serve to exclude applicants rather than enhance service, and an analysis of how those systems impact people today. She very successfully bridges the gap between theory and reality with her field studies. This is what’s going on. This is how it affects people. Instead of being shunted to three-dimensional concrete buildings, today’s poor are far too frequently denied public services, while the state, in addition, often erects barricades to the poor finding a way out of their situation by making it more difficult for them to get a job. Apparently biblical predictions were not considered adequate to the task, so we appear to be committed, as a society, to keeping the poor poor. We apparently prefer for them to remain that way. Hating the poor has been a national addiction since the invasion of North America by religious extremists. We are so addicted to hating on the poor that we have managed, with very few exceptions in our national history, to define poverty at such an insanely low level of income that the majority of poor people are denied even the dubious comfort of fitting the official definition. For example, the US Census Bureau defines its poverty threshold as $12,331 for a single person. So, if you are a single person, earning, say, $12,500 a year, you are not considered poor. Congratulations! And if you are over 65, that line drops to $11,367. I guess we seniors must eat less. Right, whatever. I am no stranger to such topics, and while the broad strokes of her Bruegelesque depiction of our welfare system might not be all that surprising, as with the painting, there is much to be appreciated by looking at the details. There were pieces of information in here that were surprising. Did you know that the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era) imposed a cap of 10% black recruits during the Depression, despite the dramatically higher unemployment rate they experienced? Or that half of us spend at least some portion of our lives in poverty? Eubanks offers many instances of Kafkaesque, sometimes deadly results of how people are treated by welfare systems. It is amazing to me that there have not been thousands of incidents of people so frustrated by this mean-spirited, cruel system that they go postal on social service agencies across the nation. Probably because they can’t afford the hardware. God knows it’s easy enough to buy. When you are poor you surrender your rights as a citizen, hell, as a human being. Innocent until proven guilty? Not once you apply for any sort of public assistance. The right to parent your own child? The right to confront your accusers? Not if a hostile neighbor calls in an anonymous false report accusing you of neglecting your kid. The right to choose your sexual partners? Not if the welfare agency deems that person inappropriate. The right to counsel? Nope. You are on your own, with the entire resources of the state aligned against you. Offer any resistance to or question the caseworkers who are assigned your case and you are denied benefits. It’s yes, Massa, no, Massa, or you are out on the street, and in many places you can be fined and/or put in jail for being homeless. While I am a senior citizen, retired, with only Social Security for my personal income, I am blessed with a spouse who remains employed full time. But I have had my share of interactions with the welfare and legal systems. When I was 18 years old, I had my own apartment. But after a significant industrial accident, (I was working at a large Postal Service facility in Manhattan) I was unable to work for a long time, several months of which was spent in hospitals. I was covered by worker’s comp, but it took so long for benefits to begin that I lost my apartment. Thanks, guys. At least I had a fallback, however unpleasant that may have seemed at the time. I have had just loads of fun dealing with unemployment, having endured that most American of experiences, the layoff, more than once. After one particularly frustrating interaction at an unemployment office, I ripped a large piece of hardware off the wall of the men’s bathroom. (Statute of limitations is passed for that one, right?) In another I was denied benefits, because I made a typo (press 1 to be insulted, press 2 to be denied, press 3 to be put on permanent hold) in an interactive system that would not allow human contact. While out of work for most of four years, and being held responsible for child support (while having joint custody) based on what I had earned in my highest earnings year ever, I had my driver’s license suspended by the state of New York, because I was unable, not unwilling, unable to pay the considerable monthly sum. Not a small thing, as many of the companies that hired people with my skill set were located in suburbia. Way to help. It took several years before the court accepted the fact (helped along by the reams of documentation I produced) that I had been unable to get work in systems, and had taken a shit-paying job as a security guard because it was the only thing I could get. The support arrears that accumulated during this period helped force me into dire financial straits. So, while I am decidedly middle-class by education and inclination, I have first-hand knowledge of how systems that at least purport to be helpful can do their best to make a bad situation worse, permanent even. I live in dread of the day when I have to face these systems again. (It will almost certainly come) And I am doing ok. The people Eubanks writes of are, mostly, not. Dealing with welfare agencies, with or without their associated, gun-toting uniformed sorts, or their legal enforcers, is horrifying enough. With the expansion of data collection, and monitoring, real and potential, with the widespread sharing of collected information (privacy rights? You’re kidding, right?) with a vast array of other government entities (and private entities too, where service provision or data collection is outsourced) as well as any law enforcement agency that asks for it, Big Brother has become more like the entire Manson Family. They are watching, and any mis-step, real or imagined, any spark of resistance, real or imagined, any error on your part, real or imagined, can get you cut off whatever public benefit you are on, thus increasing your poverty, reducing your life expectancy and increasing your risk of being incarcerated in what has become that contemporary replacement for the poorhouse of old, jail. There are even systems in place that look at projected behavior, that put one darkly in mind of the film (and story) Minority Report. Virginia Eubanks has written a piercing appraisal of how the new technology of the digital age has given the state unimaginable power over the lives of any who are forced into contact with it. The needs of the poor are not different from the needs of the middle class. But the latter, with the means to take care of those needs in the private market, can minimize contact with the beast that is the welfare/legal system. Once one comes into contact with that beast, a person is marked, indelibly, for decades or forever. What can be done? As is often the case, big problems do not lend themselves to simple fixes. Eubanks offers an array of actions that might be taken to help in the Dismantling of the Data Poorhouse. She has highlighted truths we should be aware of, and notes groups that should be targeted for a bit of consciousness raising. Mostly the proposed remedies sound sane, but unlikely, not a rare thing in books about sociopolitical ills. The strengths of this book are many. I was reminded very much of Barbara Ehrenreich’s perceptive writings on diverse important matters of public policy. Eubanks has dug deeply into the underlying realities of being poor in America and filled in a lot of the blanks. (BTW, it make a perfect companion to the excellent book White Trash), and should find a natural home in college and graduate school classes on poverty and public policy. People who are poor already know a lot of what is in here, although even the reader of meager means will still find fascinating information. The middle class, or wealthy reader will, hopefully, have their eyes opened (dare we say their consciousness raised?), finding serial unsuspected revelations in Automating Inequality. But the most significant group of readers who should read this are those who, like me, have lived at least a bit in both worlds, particularly those who, currently not a part of the public welfare/legal system, expect they never will be, and disparage those who are as lazy or morally suspect. poverty is not an island; it is a borderland. There’s quite a lot of movement in the economic fringes, especially across the fuzzy boundary between the poor and the working class. Those who live in the economic borderlands are pitted against one another by policy that squeezes every possible dime from the wallets of the working class at the same time that it cuts social programs for the poor and absolves the professional middle class and wealthy of their social obligations. - [see recent tax cuts for the 1%]As the powers in Washington, and in many of our states, seek to dim the lights of our shining city on a hill, it will be up to those who are not wealthy or connected, those who work for low wages, those who are jobless, those who earn, while knowing that a layoff could happen any day, those who can see through the porous barriers between the middle class, the working poor, and the distraught, to comprehend and act on the need to join forces in order to rekindle that flame. As Eubanks points out, and as you probably already know, in your heart of hearts …systems designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.It’s enough to enrage and/or depress Dickens. Review first posted – January 19, 2018 Publication date – January 16, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. Then in Summer 2021 they decreed that external links would not longer be allowed in comments, where I used to put the review overage. So I have included the entirety of the review on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 02, 2018
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Jan 15, 2018
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Jan 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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1250117771
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it was amazing
| What frightened me? Certainly the prediction by Bill Gates and his team that an epidemic like the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million p What frightened me? Certainly the prediction by Bill Gates and his team that an epidemic like the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people could happen again today—and that in the first 200 days it could kill 33 million people. That’s almost as many people as AIDS has killed over four decades. Even scarier was the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch assessment that the threat of a global pandemic could claim more than 300 million lives and cost the global economy as much as US$3.5 trillion.There are many things to be concerned about in this world, justifiably. Terrorism, global warming, the undermining of democracy by dark forces. (The Patriots winning yet another Super Bowl) I know that we are, or certainly should be, concerned about the potential carnage that might be wrought by some lunatic (you know the one) doing something in a fit of pique over an insulting tweet, and sending considerable supplies of glowing ordnance rocketing about the planet. Millions would perish. Landscapes would be rendered uninhabitable for decades, if not centuries, if not forever. A worldwide engagement in such insanity would slaughter hundreds of millions. We have experienced large-scale human die-offs before, in wars, of course, but there are other sorts of global catastrophes (defined as events that could wipe out 10% of humanity) that could kill even more. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 may have killed as much as 5% of the world population. Some outbreaks since then infected over a third of the world’s population (e.g., pandemic influenza), whereas others killed over half of people infected (e.g., Ebola or SARS). If a disease were to emerge that was as transmissible as the flu and as lethal as Ebola, the results could be catastrophic. Fortunately, this rarely transpires, but it is possible that it could, for example with the H5N1 influenza virus. - from the Global Catastrophic Risks reportThere may not be a lot we can do about deranged leaders, other than vote them out of office, where untampered voting is an option. But there is a lot we can do to take on the growing challenges of potential epidemics and pandemics. Preventing the emergence of a global deadly pandemic afflicting vast swaths of the world’s people can save as many lives, and maybe even more lives, than averting a nuclear war. This is the point of The End of Epidemics. [image] Jonathan Quick - Image from Scribe Publications Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, MD, MPH, a family physician, has been working in international health since the 1970s, was Director of Essential Drugs and Medicines Policy at the World Health Organization from 1993 to 2003. He is a fellow at Management Sciences for Health (MSH), a non-profit founded in 1971 to assist local communities in distressed nations establish health care delivery systems. He has authored over a hundred books, articles and book chapters, and is a long-term advisor to health care projects in Afghanistan and Kenya. He has gotten up close and personal with some of the worst threats to human health and decided to put together a plan of action after the West African Ebola epidemic killed over 11,000 people and orphaned more than 16,000 children. Once the world woke up to the crisis, there was a generous outpouring of assistance. As the response peaked, I was consumed by nagging questions: Where will we be four or five years from now? Will the world have gone back to sleep? What’s needed to protect the world from future outbreaks? To find the answers, I explored the lessons from epidemics over the last century – smallpox, AIDS, SARS, avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika – and I drew on some of the best minds, experienced professionals and committed citizen activists in global health, infectious disease, and pandemic preparedness. - from the MSH site[image] Influenza victims at Fort Riley, Kan., during the 1918 epidemic - image from the Boston Globe He lays out a seven-step program for averting future epidemic crises, (lofty goals) then drills down into each of the seven to add flesh to the bones, specifics to the generalities. In doing so, he offers considerable historical perspective. This is what happened here at this point in time. This is what was done to address the medical problem. This is what was done to raise public awareness. This is what was done to use the fuel of that awareness to effect change in laws, resource allocation, and results. Here are his Seven sets of actions needed for preventing and coping with epidemics (1) Ensuring bold leadership at all levels (2) Building resilient health systems (3) Fortifying three lines of defense against disease (prevention, detection, and response) (4) Ensuring timely and accurate communications (5) Investing in smart, new innovation (6) Spending wisely to prevent disease before an epidemic strikes (7) Mobilizing citizen activism If your brain works at all like mine, your first instinct is to engage in a little recreational eye-rolling, accompanied by mutterings such as, “uh huh, and how do you define that?” Or, “Oh, really? And who gets to say what constitutes “timely and accurate”, “smart”, and “wisely?” All seven sound like lofty, and very ill-defined goals. But Quick addresses each of these goals using real-world experience and translates them into examples, offering actions that can be taken. I soon parked the snark and took in what was being offered. While there are plenty of short-sighted, self-serving jerks who will stop at nothing to interfere with making the world a better place (Even today, needle exchanges are banned in almost every state in the southern U.S., where the AIDS epidemic is now concentrated and HIV infection rates are ten times higher than in other parts of the country.), there are also a lot of knowledgeable, committed people, care providers, religious, political and business leaders, eager to identify and implement mechanisms for change, for improving access to health care, for developing new vaccinations and treatments, for organizing distribution networks where few or none now exist, for educating populations on the realities of transmissible disease exposure and for working with local communities to address today’s health challenges and defend against potential horrors. [image] The AIDS virus – image from Avert.org There is frightening intel in this book on the sources of new pathogens, from bush meat to factory farms, to unemployed bio-engineers. In addition, there is brain-candy material on how several of the all-star list of epidemic diseases got their start, and how they were brought from their birthplaces to the rest of the world. Fascinating, powerful stuff. One particular bit of important analysis here is on the secondary impact of epidemics. The damage is not just to those immediately afflicted, but to those around them and to entire economies. As with war, where common illness can take more lives than war injuries, epidemics sometimes take more lives from disruption of primary healthcare than from the epidemic itself. Because health workers are diverted to emergency response centers and health facilities are sometimes closed, epidemics can also disrupt routine public health care needs such as immunization, treatment of acute illness, and facility-based births.He looks not only at how we manage to put our hands over our ears and rattle out sound-blocking la-la-la-la-la-la noises, but takes it a step further to try to understand why we do that. He also reports on some remarkable success stories, including, over a long-term, the West coming to grips with the HIV crisis to the point where, while still a major life-threatening disease, it is now a manageable long-term condition and not an instant death-sentence. With concentrated and persistent effort progress can be made. Quick cites some other remarkable success stories in Africa that have received scant coverage in Western media. He gets specific on how much money would be needed to undertake the program he proposes, (chicken feed) and compares that with the cost of failing to do so. New diseases are cropping up at a faster rate than ever before. Since 1971, scientists have discovered at least 25 new pathogens for which we have no vaccine and no treatment. Where do new diseases come from? What is the impact of actions by people on the creation of new diseases? We face threats from bioterror. What would ISIS do with a designer virus? Bio-error presents another risk. I can certainly image a future president (Merkin Muffley?) getting on the phone to a foreign leader to fill him or her in on the oopsy release of an engineered bug, even if it had been intended only for testing and defense purposes. Well, how do you think I feel about it, Dmitri? Hopefully, a sufficient number of forward-looking world leaders will have already established protocols to make that call one that is intended to deliver information, and not induce a retaliatory doomsday panic. And what about unintended consequences from bio-engineered materials that go rogue? [image] The Ebola virus – image from Wikimedia If you are a public health policy junkie (it was my first career out of graduate school, and that monkey took up permanent residence on my back), this is mainlining material. The stakes could not be higher, the need for long-term-planning could not be clearer. We provide considerable funding for the military and charge them with the broad mission of keeping us safe from foreign threats. Given the potential for danger to the lives of citizens, doesn’t it make sense to direct resources toward preventing such losses where the potential for carnage is greatest? And don’t forget that many of the diseases that we fear here have their origins elsewhere, as air travel allows stowaway bugs to cross the globe in a matter of days. So, in our ever-smaller world, resources need to be directed to the sources over there of some of our exposure here at home. [image] H5N1 Influenza Virus – image from Wikimedia I have two gripes about the book. Quick calls his program The Power of 7. Sorry, but that sounds like a Sesame Street segment, or yet another group of Marvel superheroes, maybe a vitamin drink. I am sure there is a PR firm somewhere that would be happy to earn some pro-bono brownie points by coming up with something better. Second, and this is a more passing thing, early in the book the author tended to sound like one of those people whose focus is more on himself than his message. Even if the content of what he is saying is true, it’s just poor form. Sentences like I was hosting a videoconference for the global health nonprofit that I led… or it comforts me to know that I’m part of an organization that’s truly committed to saving lives. Thankfully this sort of thing vanishes pretty quickly, and focus on the message proceeds without further such asides. While I can definitely see this being of particular interest to readers who share my personal addiction, I could see it being used even more productively in colleges and graduate schools. It should be required reading in all MPH (Master of Public Health) programs and in any courses, graduate or undergraduate, that address global health issues. It should certainly find its way to every political leader in a position to impact public health legislation, and to all those charged with managing health care institutions, public and private. It wouldn’t hurt to slip a copy over the transom of every foundation that funds such things. Maybe the Gates Foundation, or a similar entity could see to such a global distribution. [image] SARS-associated coronavirus- image from ThingLink.com The End of Epidemics is reality-based, offers fully-informed analyses of existing and projected medical dangers, and presents a well-thought-out program for averting catastrophic loss of life across the planet. It is a significant distillation of current knowledge on how to go about ensuring that we actually have future generations, and for anyone involved in public policy it is a must-read. For the rest of us, it is a readable, worthwhile, informative look at a potentially imminent global danger. I hope the knowledge presented in this book and the optimism of its author, infects readers, and is passed on to many, many others. Published – 1/30/18 Review first posted - 2/2/18 Added bit on February 2022 reposting - The prescience of Quick’s concerns is impressive, even though his predictions were, in fact, conservative, and based on established science. Thankfully, COVID was not as lethal as Ebola or Marburg. It was, and remains, lethal enough. The importance of this book, looking back from 2022, cannot be overstated. I can only hope that it finds a readership among public health officials and legislators sitting on health-care-related committees. [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages From This Week in Global Health - a fascinating interview with Dr. Quick A short video in which Quick talks about his End of Epidemics project ResearchGate offers a list of Quick’s writings, many of which can be downloaded in their entirety for free. From Science Alert, a short article on the ranking of potentially horrific events - New Report Officially Ranks All The Catastrophes That Could Wipe Us Out in 2016 The report cited by the above article is from the Global Priorities Project - Global Catastrophic Risks - 2016 Flue Near You is a crowd-sourcing system for early detection of you-know-what. It takes data from participants across the country, anonymously. Check it out. January 18, 2018 - NY Times - Flu Hospitalization Rates Are the Highest in Years. Here’s Why. - by Donald G. McNeil Jr in some places — including Southern California, Pennsylvania and central Texas — some hospitals have seen so many flu patients that they had to set up triage tents or turn other patients away. Local shortages of antiviral medications and flu vaccines have been reported, and the C.D.C. said patients may have to call several pharmacies to find shots or to fulfill prescriptions....more |
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Dec 19, 2017
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1455540412
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it was amazing
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First, I want to differentiate between what I thought of the book and what I have to say about Franken’s later travails with alleged sexual misconduct
First, I want to differentiate between what I thought of the book and what I have to say about Franken’s later travails with alleged sexual misconduct, and his resignation from the Senate. That is at the bottom of the review, in a separate section. In Giant of the Senate, Al Franken shows that not only is he a very smart, very serious student of public policy, but also that he retains the sense of humor that fueled his first career. He has been a writer for a long time. As any watcher of SNL knows, some of the entertainment pieces he wrote are wonderful, some not so much. He always had an interest in politics, and in recent years redirected his pen toward more pointed political satire. As with his less political comedic work, some of his books are more effective, informative, and entertaining than others. Thankfully, this insightful and informative autobiography is the best thing he has ever written. [image] Franken and comedy partner Tom Davis - image from the Post-Gazette In Franken’s first career as a writer and performer of comedic material, for stage, TV, and cinema, he initially paired with close friend, and school chum, Tom Davis, doing live performances. Later, they worked together on Saturday Night Live. He tells of his early days in comedy, reporting on various experiences before he made it as one of our premier comedic voices. There are some tales told of his time on SNL, not a whole lot, but enough. He writes about some of the personal challenges in his life, people close to him battling substance abuse, some losing those battles. Post SNL, he wrote several films and began writing political satire. This brought him closer to the political arena. Also, his annual trips with the USO to entertain US troops abroad gave him a taste for one-on-one interaction with regular, non-entertainment industry folks. [Insert snide Leann Tweeden-related remark here] Franken was involved with the creation of the Progressive radio network, Air America. Al had a three hour daily show and never missed a day. He and co-host Katherine Lanpher offered a combination of news reporting, interviews with politically relevant experts, and a fair bit of straight up comedy. Lampooning the George W. Bush administration was high on the agenda. Originally titled The O’Franken Factor to taunt Bill O’Reilly, it was eventually changed to the Al Franken Show. Wiki has a nice description of it. Sadly, Wiki makes no mention of a recurring bit in which Al played an old Irish lady who complained of having a “wee bit of the diarrhea.” ROFL material for me and my wife. We caught the show frequently. [image] Franken with Air America co-host Katherine Lanpher - Credit Ralph Barrera /The Austin-American Statesman, via Associated Press Helping friend and political hero Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone in his re-election campaign gave Franken a great appreciation for the nitty gritty of political life. Unlike many in the entertainment world, he loved interacting with regular folks, and learned a lot through that experience. Enough so that when Wellstone came to a tragic end, Franken felt he had an opportunity to put his political words into action, and ran for Wellstone’s seat. [image] Franken with late Wellstone staffer Will McLaughlin and the late Senator Wellstone - from Franken’s Senate site The bulk of this book is about his experiences leading up to his decision to run, his campaign for the Senate seat, and his steep learning curve finding his way as a newbie US Senator. A good pol could give you an informative insider’s view of being a 21st century politician in the USA, but Franken leads you to laugh along with him at many of the odd and awful things (and people) he sees, without coming across as condescending, well, mostly. He really does recognize his position as a relative rookie and seeks to learn the ropes with all due humility, even eating crow to Mitch McConnell when he transgressed, and knew it. One of the toughest challenges Franken faced was learning to put a cork in it when he felt compelled to say something funny. Imagine a Senatorial staff attempting to intercept joke-laden speeches with the same panic faced by the Trump staff, at least those who do not reek of brimstone, attempting to keep Swamp Thing from exceeding his daily allowance of racist, homophobic, xenophobic, ignorant, insulting, and counterproductive tweets. Ok, maybe a bit less panic, but the same general condition applies, attempting to stem natural urges in a place where giving in to such impulses can often be very costly. Many of these descriptions are LOL funny. He writes with some passion about the Republican DeHumorizor machine, it’s talent for taking words out of context, and making them appear to mean the exact opposite of what was intended. It was one of the heaviest burdens he faced, having to keep his sharpest tool in the shed for so much of the time. You could do a lot worse, looking to learn how the Senate actually works, than to check out Franken’s you-are-there descriptions. He writes a fair bit about instances in which he was able to actually get some good things done, working with members of that other party. It gives one hope, however slim since Newt Gingrich declared war on civility, that some sense of decorum and decency remains in the Senate halls. There is much more in the book, which is not only a highly informative read, but is very entertaining. His descriptions of Ted Cruz and the reactions the ego-bloated and insufferable Cruz evokes from other senators is, alone, worth the price of the book. Whatever one’s political bent, there is good information to be had in Giant of the Senate, and he will make you laugh. Can’t ask for much more than that. Except… =========================THE RESIGNATION Republicans do not have to do all that much to defeat Democrats in the 2018 mid-term and 2020 national elections. The Democratic Party will do their work for them. [image] Al Franken resigns - image from DailySignal.com All crimes are not equal, however much the Purity Posse pretends they are. It is possible to be a schmuck without being a serial and unreconstructed predator, and those two different sorts should be treated very differently. Should Senator Franken have been driven from the Senate for his actions? I do not believe so. The claims brought against him were far from firm, came from sources who were not always willing to be named, many, and possibly all of whom are allied with the Republican Party. Unlike the case with defeated Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore, whose crimes are an entirely other order of business and whose accusers have no political axes to grind, or the case with a president who has boasted on tape of serial assault, there is considerable room for doubt concerning the charges being made about Senator Franken. It seems clear to me that the current wave of outrage about sexual misconduct, justified though it is, will be weaponized and used to diminish the only party whose members are capable of feeling actual shame. You can expect more Democrats to be accused of such misconduct, and I would not be surprised if many of those claims were lies. People who claim misconduct, particularly those who go on the record, should definitely have their accusations taken seriously. Those claims should be investigated, with all due professionalism and speed. But unless we are eager to return to the dark days of seventeenth century Salem, it would be prudent to consider that not all claims of misconduct are necessarily based in fact. And given the right-wing’s fondness for planting false information to affect our democratic processes, the accused, this side of a confession, or a very strong preponderance of evidence, particularly in the political sphere, should be given the benefit of the doubt until proper investigations can be completed. In fact, as I wrote the beginning of this paragraph, the right had already begun, lying about Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to this December 13, 2017 article in the Washington Post - False accusations against Schumer were the latest attempt to trick the media. Schumer’s lack of support for Franken, by the way, was not surprising, given that he had opposed his run for Senate in the first place. More recently, GOP fabrications about NJ Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski continued the all-lies-all-the-time GOP brand - False G.O.P. Ad Prompts QAnon Death Threats Against a Democratic Congressman. Tactically, the Democratic purists effectively vacated a Senate seat that was won with the smallest margin in national history, a seat that was given to a person who, although she later revised her position, initially promised not to run for election in 2020. Thankfully, she won. Please remember that it was Al Franken’s tough challenging of Jeff Sessions in Judiciary Committee hearings that led to Sessions recusing himself from playing any part in the Russia investigation, which was not nothing. [image] Franken questions Sessions in Judiciary committee hearings - image from c-span So, while the purists are patting themselves on the back about what wonderful people they are, they put the entire nation at risk of accelerating the demolition of democracy that the GOP has foisted on us all. While they were busy urging voters to support them as protectors of women, Republican voters continued to support people dedicated to stripping away social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and countless smaller programs that women rely on to survive. 63% of WHITE WOMEN in Alabama voted for a pedophile rather than a Democrat. 80% of white Christians voted for the Brimstone Cowboy. At what point did the Grand Old Party stop being a political entity and take on the characteristics of a cult? Republican voters consistently vote to retain or install Senators and Representatives who will take away their reproductive rights, and pack the Supreme Court with extremist ideologues and partisan hacks who will ensure at least another generation of anti-democratic, pro-business bias on the court, and who, given time, will criminalize abortion once again. (Something all-but guaranteed, given Trump's SCOTUS nominations, and McConnell's refusal to bring up Obama's nominee for a vote) That is, when they take a break from looting the resources of every middle and working class person in the nation to stuff even more money into the pockets of the already rich, and doing their level best to ensure that there is no habitable world left for our children and grandchildren to inherit. Politics has been called the art of the possible, not the art of the perfect. If you want to be holier than thou, join a monastery. I want my representatives to be well grounded in the real world. I am not looking for perfection. And if they behave badly, that behavior should be publicized, criticized, addressed, and, where called for, prosecuted. You don’t execute people for shoplifting, and you should not kill a very positive political career for behavior that merits a much lesser punishment. I am hardly alone in that opinion. Zephyr Teachout, a New York progressive who ran for governor in 2014, feels the same way. Here is her December 11, 2017 NY Times Op-ed on her reasoning, I’m Not Convinced Franken Should Quit. There are plenty more who share our view. I strongly urge you to read Emily Yoffe’s article in Politico, Why the #MeToo Movement Should Be Ready for a Backlash, and Andrew Sullivan's January 12, 2018 piece in New York Magazine It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo. Al Franken, based on publicly information available, did not deserve to be pushed out of the Senate. Censured? Definitely. Publicly excoriated for being a boor and a schmuck? You bet. But we were all put in danger of losing his very important votes on women’s, foreign policy, and other substantive issues just so some pols could preen their perfect feathers, (and establish presidential campaigns) while putting everyone else, and the very notion of due process at risk. Thanks a lot. Review first Posted - 12/15/17 Publication date - 5/30/2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Did not seem much point to putting up links to Franken’s Senate-based sites. His Twitter page seems to still be live. Other Al Franken Books -----The Truth with Jokes -----Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right -----Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot OTHER -----One answer to a question raised in the Resignation section above appeared in the December 15, 2017 Sunday New York Times, in the form of an opinion piece by Amy Sullivan. It is definitely worth checking out - America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism -----March 26, 2019 - The Atlantic - Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake - Emily Yoffe's latest take on the implications of Franken's takedown -----July 22, 2019 - New Yorker Magazine - The Case of Al Franken - by Jane Mayer- an excellent piece on Franken and the accusations against him. ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
| Prologue:I so wish she had said “I think I’m gonna barf Prologue:I so wish she had said “I think I’m gonna barf,” but we can’t have everything. NBC reporter Katherine Bear “Katy” Tur was not alone in feeling that way. In fact, a wave of nausea has been crisscrossing the nation ever since November 8, 2016, a date that will live in infamy, trapped in a seemingly endless back and forth sloshing. Tur had more reason for gastrointestinal distress than most. She had been assigned to the Trump campaign for the duration of the seemingly endless electioneering season. Seeing this guy elected president of the United States would turn your stomach too if you had been seeing what he was really like for over 500 days. [image] Image by Sasha Arutyunova for the NY Times We want our campaign-book reportage to show us something we have not seen before. Of course, it was not always the case that every microsecond of a campaign was undertaken under klieg lights. So, really, what’s left, but the reporter’s experience, things that are not told in her thousands (more than 3800 through the campaign) of on-air reports. What can we learn from Tur’s book that we did not know before? What can we learn about campaigning that did not make the broadcast? What can we learn about the personalities involved, the candidate, the candidate’s team, the candidate’s followers that occur off camera? [image] Tur interviewing you-know-who in July 2015 – image from MSNBC What stands out most, chillingly, is the atmosphere of intolerance and menace promoted by candidate Swamp Thing, toward foreigners, democrats, minorities, but perhaps most importantly, toward the press. Politicians have often, even usually, taken umbrage at the reporters writing about or broadcasting stories about their less-than-perfect aspects. What is unusual is having a candidate who encourages his people to go after them. What is unusual is having a candidate who lies so relentlessly that he attempts to deny reality entirely, a candidate who, by proclaiming every day that reporters are nothing but merchants of fake news, is attempting to delegitimize the major media of our nation from their role as the fourth estate, that entity charged with holding public feet to the fire of revelation. If there is no one left to tell the truth about him, and fewer and fewer consumers of news who accept what the media reports as truth, Trump can go about his vast array of crimes with no fear of being held accountable. Campaign reporters were held in pens at Trump rallies. Trump went out of his way to point them out to his followers, calling them names, accusing them of lying about him, tacitly encouraging his followers to scream at, intimidate, and threaten them. “Look back there! ‘Little Katy,’ she’s back there. She’s such a liar, what a little liar she is!” She was often singled out as the focus of his rage against the media. It was not out of character. Tur notes the growing aura of menace at his rallies, as Trump repeatedly encouraged his followers to brutalize protesters. Katy knew she would have to endure. “I don’t know why he did it,” she said, shrugging. “But I will say this: I know that had I exhibited any sign that I was intimidated or scared of him, he would have rolled over me.”It seems likely that Trump focusing so much on Tur may have been a manifestation of his epic misogyny. [image] KT at NH rally on election eve – Getty Image Tur contends that the rally attendees who screamed “Cunt” at her would never think of doing that anywhere else. She made an effort to talk with Trump supporters. She thinks they are probably decent people who are frustrated at the excesses of political correctness on the one hand and their economic immobility, or even descent on the other. It is not a view I share. What is not really surprising is that there are so many in our country who care so little for facts, and so much for their biases, that they are perfectly fine with Swamp Thing’s relentless lies and bigotry. While frustrations are real, unfairness rampant, and maybe getting worse, what has been let loose is not a rally-sparked mob mentality. I expect the mob is real and more permanent than Kur believes. It was on display in full force in Charlottesville. This IS the dark undercurrent in American society, the undercurrent that thought slavery was fine and dandy, the undercurrent that was cool with Jim Crow, the undercurrent that thought the guys in white sheets were doing the right thing, and that certain people should know their place, the undercurrent that thought Tail-Gunner Joe was the cat’s meow, and that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, the undercurrent that listen to the know-nothing, paranoid demagoguery spewed by the likes of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News as if it is revealed wisdom. Not all Trump supporters are climate deniers, but all climate deniers are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are nativists, but all nativists are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are white supremacists, but all white supremacists are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are fascists, but all fascists are Trump supporters. And it is these darker portions of Trump’s supporters who seem to have been heavily represented at Trump rallies. Having so public an approving mouthpiece as Swamp Thing crying havoc gave them a feeling of license to let slip the dogs of hatred, and now they roam in rabid packs. [image] In the field – image from peanutchuck.com If you want to know what it might have been like on the campaign trail with Mussolini, Hitler, or any of the many other demagogues who have fouled and others who continue to pollute our planet, Tur give you a pretty good taste. She offers first hand, up close and personal witness to mass hatred, stoked by a master demagogue, as monumentally skilled in the arts of theater as he is amazingly incapable in the business of governing. [image] image from MarieClaire.com – shot by Rebecca Greenfield Tur portrays a Bizarro world, in which a rope line of Trump lackeys works to ramp up reporters’ stress by accusing them pre-emptively of bias in order to gain the best possible coverage. This appears to be SOP for Trump, always pressuring the ump to try to gain a sympathetic call some time later in the game. She also lets us in on how disorganized the Trumpzis were, constantly being off message when talking with the press. And it would have been tough to remain on message in any case as Swamp Thing had a habit of contradicting himself only constantly. Another continuing point in the book is the numbing endurance of day after day, hell, minute after minute non-stop, sociopathic dishonesty. It has got to be tough to keep on message, though, with having to remember the lies du jour. We get a very clear sense that Swamp Thing was not really in it to win it. This was the presumption of most of the world at the beginning of his campaign, that he was in the race as a publicity stunt on steroids. That would go a long way toward explaining why he continued trying to make real estate deals in Russia all the way through the campaign. Like Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in The Producers, he figured he could get away with dirty dealings, in this case playing footsie with the primary enemy of the United States, because he did not expect to win. He intended to produce a flop. [image] Image from The New York Daily News The tweeting was a whole other thing. Never before had there been a candidate whose favorite means of communication was the tweet. He was, and remains, compulsive about his tweeting, often tweeting dramatic pronouncements, accusations, and lies at all hours of the day. This impacted campaign reporters, who used to be able to get a break from campaign events. Not anymore. Tur gives you a real sense of what it means to be a campaign reporter, the late nights, early mornings, constant interruptions, competition from other news pros, demands from the bosses, more demands from the bosses, even more demands from the bosses, the challenge of getting to a plane in the middle of a snow hazard to get to a campaign stop half a country away, with single-digit minutes so spare, the need to find clothing and coiffure presentable on air when you are a mess, the need to function at peak efficiency and presentation when you have had next to no sleep for what feels like a lifetime. She also talks about the toll this assignment had on her personal life. Illuminating stuff for those of us on the other side of the TV screen. [image] December 2015 – image from Peanutchuck.com And then there are the personal dealings with Swamp Thing and his minions. She reports on the schizoid way Trump treated her, publicly saying she was a great reporter one day and the next calling her out to his brownshirts at a rally, by name, as unfair, third rate, and worse, to the point that NBC had to provide her with a security detail. It is a good thing that she has, as she calls it, the hide of a rhinoceros. But she also tells of her one-on-one interactions with him, offering passing charm one minute, but angling, always, always angling for favorable coverage. You really get a sense of how creepy a guy he is in person. Tur stays mostly away from Trump’s staff, focusing her recollections on those she had with the candidate himself. Although she does report on a senior, married, Trump campaign staffer who asked her where he could meet single 30-something women. Sadly, no name is revealed. She is too much of a pro to come right out and say that Donald Trump is a world-class asshole, maybe one of the biggest assholes who has ever lived, an amoral monster who puts not only all the people around him but the very planet at risk in service of his tiny mind and incredibly inflated ego, but we get the picture. She is a master of showing without telling. It comes across pretty clearly here that Swamp Thing is not exactly presidential material. [image] image from Marie Claire – shot by Anthony Terrell The book alternates between election night at Trump’s victory party and Tur’s tale of covering the campaign, from being assigned in May 2015. In addition to telling of her reporting experiences, she offers autobiographical details that include some pretty lively material. Mom and Dad were news people, had the first private helicopter covering breaking news in Los Angeles, making a living and a name for themselves breaking new reportorial ground. If you are thinking OJ, yep, they were right on that. The Rodney King riots? Yep again. That was them shooting the beating of Reginald Denny. It is fascinating material. And certainly argues that having a nose for news may have a genetic element. If you are looking for a kiss and tell, dirt-driven spill-all, with juicy scandals aplenty and dark secrets revealed, you will have to try another network. Unbelievable does not offer the sort of anarchic LOL reportage of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. It is not one of those reportorial coups d’etat that will revolutionize how we perceive campaigns, like Theodore White’s The Making of the President. But it certainly does offer us insight into what it means to be a reporter in this new 24/7/365 age of campaign coverage. It gives us a you-are-there feel for what may be the most important campaign of the twenty-first century, an eyewitness account of a particularly dark turn taken in American politics, a sea change in what is considered decent in public discourse and behavior, and a close, alarming look at the man now twitching in the oval office. Hopefully we can learn from what has been going on, and what Tur has seen, and find ways to stem the rise of know-nothing absolutism. But the coming years should be good ones for bucket makers because there are millions of us who, faced with the horrors of a Donald Trump presidency, will find ourselves keeping one near at hand for those all too frequent moments when we announce to the world, “I think I’m gonna barf.” Election night. …don’t misunderstand me. The Hilton is nice. It’s been host to many grand events. But it can’t hold the kind of ten-thousand-person rallies that Trump has built his campaign around…There isn’t even free booze. The bar is charging seven dollars for sodas, eleven dollars for beers, and thirteen dollars or mixed drinks. Trumps advisers claim that Trump is just superstitious. He doesn’t want to jinx himself with a big show event. Cynics—or, as Trump calls them, “haters”—say he’s just cheap. About that cash bar: Red State calls it an “abomination.” GQ rates it pure Trump. “Let history show that up until the moment his fate became official, Donald Trump remained true to himself, a serial grafter and shameless carnival barker who let nothing come between him and the opportunity to get his grubby hands on a few more dollars.” Review first posted – September 14, 2017 Publication -----Hardcover - September 12, 2017 -----Trade Paperback - August 28, 2018 (view spoiler)[I felt this needed to be tucked safely under a spoiler tag, because I have an uncontrollable need. There are some sentences that I feel compelled to write, but which I am ashamed to own. So here goes, the ending to the review my inner child really, really wanted to use. I am very much looking forward to future such reporting from this outstanding journalist, because, of course, one good Tur deserves another.Ok, there. I’ve done it. Don’t judge me. I have a problem and I accept that. (hide spoiler)] =============================EXTRA STUFF Tur’s Twitter feed Trump’s response to the release of Unbelievable was boilerplate. Fascinating to watch people writing books and major articles about me and yet they know nothing about me & have zero access. #FAKE NEWS!Typical September 9, 2017 - A thoughtful, if frightening, opinion piece by Tur - The Trump Fever Never Breaks Articles worth checking out -----Boston Globe - 7 Books on Presidential Campaigns – by Katharine Whittemore -----GQ - Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter - by Michael Hastings -----Rollingstone - Matt Taibbi’s New Book: ‘Insane Clown President’ - an excerpt -----NY Times - Old Page Turners for a New Presidential Campaign – by John Williams -----Politico - The Book that Changed Campaigns Forever – by Scott Porch Excerpts -----MSNBC -----MarieClaire - My Crazy Year With Trump Interviews -----Wonderful interview with Rachel Maddow -----Brian Williams talks with Tur on November 2, 2016 about Trump taunting her by name at a rally Other items of interest -----Madeline Albright’s book, Fascism, is definitely worth a look -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. November 9, 2017 - Unbelievable is among the nominees for Amazon's book of the year - History PS - In the book, Tur tells of a Trump rally at the Mohegan Sun arena in Wilkes Barre, PA. It was the usual rabid event. Following which, Tur and her crew went to the mall across the road, stopping at a Panera for a quick bite. The vibe from the rally followed them into the restaurant. They felt so uncomfortable there that they left in a hurry. One might even say they fled, concerned about physical harm. That location was one of the casualties when an EF2 tornado touched down here on June 14, 2018. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 12, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 30, 2017
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Hardcover
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1101902787
| 9781101902783
| 1101902787
| 4.40
| 11,434
| Oct 17, 2017
| Oct 17, 2017
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it was amazing
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There was a time when millions of us roamed the continent. We fed when there was need. We played in forests and open places. Our kind lived well, from
There was a time when millions of us roamed the continent. We fed when there was need. We played in forests and open places. Our kind lived well, from the warm woodlands of the south to the frosty forests of the north and in the gentler landscapes between. We raised our pups in cozy dens, and raised our voices at night to call out to others. Sometimes, we joined our brothers and sisters in joyous chorus for no reason at all. We lived in a world with many others, hunters, prey, and creatures who seemed to have no great part of our existence. There were people here then. We lived with them, too. But other people came, people with guns, poison, and traps, people armed with fear, hatred, and ignorance. They took our food sources, and when we were forced to look elsewhere to feed, they turned their quivering, murderous hearts toward us. And there came a time when there were practically none of us left across the entire land. [image] Nate Blakeslee - image from Texas Monthly In Eurasia and North America, at least, where there have been people there have always been wolves. They have been a significant feature in the lore of most cultures, usually in a negative way. While the tale of the she-wolf Lupa nurturing Romulus and Remus gives wolves some rare positive press, and native peoples of North America offer the wolf considerable respect, wolves have not, for the most part, received particularly positive press in the last few hundred years. The obvious cultural touchstone for most North Americans and Europeans would be the story of Little Red Riding Hood, followed closely by tales of lycanthropy, and maybe a shepherd boy who sounded a false alarm a time too many. The wolf is embedded in our culture as something to be feared, a great and successful hunter, a rival. Homo sap is a jealous species and does its best to eliminate other apex predators whenever we take over their turf. Such has been the case with Canis Lupus. And we have been taking over lots and lots of turf. [image] O-Six - image from StudyBreaks.com As is so often the case when people are involved, action precedes understanding. European settlers in North America, carrying forward Old World biases, saw wolves as a threat to their safety. Incidents of wolf attacks on people are quite rare, though. Settlers feared for their livestock as well. There was certainly some basis for concern there, but not nearly enough to warrant the response. In fact, wolves serve a very useful function in the larger biome, culling the weaker specimens from natural populations, and thus helping secure the continued health of the overall prey population. The settler response was wholesale slaughter, a public program of eradication, a final solution for wolves. But actions have consequences. The result, in Yellowstone Park, was a boom in ungulate population, which had secondary effects. Increased numbers of elk and other prey animals gobbled up way too much new growth, impacting the flora of the area, unbalancing the park’s ecosystem, seriously reducing the population, for example, of cottonwood and aspen trees, with many other changes taking place as well. Where wolves live they contribute to the balance of their environment. When they are removed, that balance is destroyed. As a science, wildlife management [in the early 20th century] was still in its infancy, and park officials genuinely believed that predators would eventually decimate the park’s prey population if left to their own devices. They didn’t realize that wolves and elk had coexisted in Yellowstone for thousands of years, that the two species had in fact evolved in tandem with each other—which explained why the elk could run just as fast as the wolf but no faster. Wolves were the driving force behind the evolution of a wide variety of prey species in North America after the last ice age, literally molding the natural world around them. The massive size of the moose, the nimbleness of the white-tailed deer, the uncanny balance of the bighorn sheep—the architect of these and countless other marvels was the wolf.It is eminently clear that people are quite accomplished at ignoring reality, and extremely proficient at substituting the mythological for the actual, often helped along by the unscrupulous self-interested, who promote falsehoods in order to preserve their personal investments, enhance their proprietary interests, or enrich themselves or those they represent. But sometimes science breaks through the veil of obfuscation and is able to get a hearing for the truths it has unearthed. Such was the case with our understanding of how wolves impact our world. It was due to this understanding and the persistent efforts of ecological activists that a plan was approved to reintroduce wolves into a few locations in the lower 48 states. Yellowstone was the primary site for the program. [image] Rick McIntyre - image from Earthjustice.com The first wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995. That year a star was born, “21M.” Even before 21 left his natal pack, Rick had known he was unusual. One morning in the spring of 1997, two years after Doug Smith and Carter Niemeyer rescued 21 following the death of his father, Rick watched the handsome young wolf returning from a hunt. With him was the big male who had become the pack’s new alpha when 21 was still a tiny pup. The pair had killed an elk, and 21, already an outstanding provider, had brought a massive piece of meat back to the den, where a new litter of pups had been born.21 becomes the alpha of the Druid pack, manifesting that most important of leadership qualities, empathy. The Druids were like the Kennedys to some, lupine royalty. In 2006, one generation removed, 21’s granddaughter is born, O-Six. It is her tale that Blakeslee tells here. Well, one half of the tale, anyway. There are two paths followed here. One is the life and times of O-Six, a remarkable creature, and another remarkable creature, one who stands upright, Rick McIntyre. [image] Half Black – a Druid pack female - image from the National Park Service We follow O-Six’s life from her puppyhood in the Agate Creek pack to her gathering together the wolves that would make up the Lamar Valley Pack. She is a wise leader, a skilled hunter. As she births pups, the pack grows. But there are other packs of wolves in Yellowstone, and conflict among them is a natural condition. In battle, O-Six demonstrates remarkable courage, in one instance standing fast, seriously outnumbered, against an invading pack, and engaging in Hollywood level derring-do to save the day. She succeeds despite having in her pack an Alpha male and his sibling referred to by watchers as Dumb and Dumber for their limited hunting skills. We see her relocate as needed to take advantage of propitious territorial openings, or quarters removed from hostile forces. One of her moves put her in a location where wolf watchers could follow her pack’s exploits from the safe remove of a park road cutout. It is publicity from the group that gathered to ardently keep track of O-Six and her Lamar Pack’s exploits from this convenient watching site, (and others) that made her the most famous wolf in the world. [image] Wolf watchers - image from the National Park Service Rick McIntyre was constitutionally more of a lone wolf sort, a National Park Ranger, happiest out in the field, whether studying grizzlies in Denali, where he became a top-drawer wildlife photographer, or studying wolves in Yellowstone. He was introduced to wolves by a top wolf biologist, Gorbon Haber, building his expertise and writing A Society of Wolves. The book was published in 1993. It expounded on the culture of wolves, significantly broadening our understanding of the species. His work was instrumental in providing support for reintroduction efforts. This work landed him a spot at Yellowstone, where he slowly improved his people skills, and became a fixture around which study and monitoring of the park packs centered, the leader of the wolf-study pack. He is a charismatic, passionate character and you will enjoy getting to know him. [image] O-Six howling with her mate and his brother - image from NatGeo Wild There are other elements in the book. The growth of the wolf-watching culture and the Yellowstone watchers club is given plenty of attention. The politics of reintroduction, protection, and attempts to remove protection get their share of ink as well. There is much in here that will raise your blood pressure. Impressively, Blakeslee includes a depiction of the man who shot O-Six. It is not the drooling monster portrayal one might expect. Blakeslee takes pains to consider the perspective of hunters. There is a description of a marauding, death-dealing pack, the Mollies, that will remind you of the Borg, or a zombie apocalypse. It is as tension, and fear-filled a portrayal as you will find in any of the best action-adventure fiction. [image] Yellowstone wolf pup - image from NatGeo Wild When studying wildlife, researchers are discouraged from forming emotional attachments to the objects of their study. Few animals live nearly so long as people, so your favorite [insert species here] will, as likely as not, perish before you. But readers of this book are under no such caution. Sitting in a laundromat, parked on a backless bench, book on an attached table, looking through the plate glass, rain soaking Hazle Avenue, drops cascading down the window, my eyes join the mass drip on reading Blakeslee’s description of the death of O-Six. I will admit that this happens sometimes when reading about people, but it does not happen often. I am saved from a public exhibition of heaving shoulders and stifled sobs by the buzzer announcing the end of a wash. If you have any tears left after this, you will turn them loose in an epilogue tale of 21’s mountain top trek as he neared death. [image] O-Six - image from NatGeo Wild I only had one small beef about the book. I understand that researchers are discouraged from naming their study subjects, but it was quite inconsistent in application. Some had names, others were just numbers, and, frankly, it became a bit tough at times, keeping track of which number came from which pack, and was that one with this pack and this one with that pack. Really that’s it. Otherwise, no problemo [image] Wolf #10 of the Rose Creek pack - image from the National Park Service American Wolf is a complex work, offering some science, some history, some political analysis, some prompts to raise your spirits, some that will make you cheer, and some dark moments that will make you turn away, fold the book closed, and wonder just what is wrong with some people. You will learn a lot, particularly about wolf culture. But primarily, it is a tale of hope, of reason triumphing over ignorance, of courage and heroism besting villainy. It joins the intellectual heft of offering considerable information with the gift of being incredibly moving. [image] Unidentified Yellowstone wolf – 1996 - image from National Park Service Tail high, standing tall, the gray alpha raises his muzzle and howls a long call. Pack members miles away lift their heads, point their ears toward the siren summons and begin loping home. There are fewer now than there were, an inexperienced young adult having found mortal peril on the fringes of their land. But still, enough of the pack remained, strong and healthy. They would gather. The gray knew where they would go once joined, into the valley. Caribou were plentiful there. They would fill their bellies before grizzlies stole their prize, and then would carry large chunks in their jaws, for the nursing alpha female. It was not the best of all possible world, but it would do, for now. [image] image from wolf.org Review – October 12, 2017 Published – October 17, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s Twitter feed and a list of his articles at Texas Monthly Video -----a clip from She Wolf -----Learn to draw a wolf -----An admirer speaks fondly of wolves howling - what beautiful music they make -----A familiar item from Duran Duran -----Another from Sam the Sham -----Not quite a video, more an an app about wolves with images and sound -----Yellowstone Wolf History with Rick McIntyre Articles -----Heroes: Life Lessons from Yellowstone’s Wolves - by Haleigh Gullion -----The Call of the Wild - interview with Rick McIntyre -----July 5, 2018 - NY Times - Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist? - Wolf researcher, Rob Wielgus, reports what he can discover, then has to deal with the death threats - by Christopher Solomon [image] Rob Wielgus – Credit - Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times -----July 27, 2021 - The Guardian - ‘An abomination’: the story of the massacre that killed 216 wolves by Nate Blakeslee - the killing occurred over a matter of days -----December 18, 2023 - AP - Colorado releases first 5 wolves in reintroduction plan approved by voters to chagrin of ranchers - by JESSE BEDAYN Other -----Gray Wolf Conservation ----- The International Wolf Center offers a lot of information -----Yellowstone’s Photo Collection - wolves -----The Call of the Wild - free on Gutenberg -----Get your howl on -----My review of Charlotte McConaghy's 2021 novel, Once There Were Wolves in which a small number of wolves are reintroduced to Scotland -----Of particular relevance to this subject is the Farley Mowat enhanced memoir of his field research experience with wolves, Never Cry Wolf, published in 1963, and the excellent 1983 film that was made of it [image] From the film November 9, 2017 - American Wolf is among the nominees for Amazon's book of the year - Science ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 16, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 16, 2017
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Hardcover
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1443451517
| 9781443451512
| 1443451517
| 3.57
| 327
| Sep 05, 2017
| Sep 05, 2017
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really liked it
| The presence of death brings life into sharper focus, makes some things more important and others less so. I couldn’t stop my friend’s death, or fi The presence of death brings life into sharper focus, makes some things more important and others less so. I couldn’t stop my friend’s death, or fight against it. I stood out by the log cabin and the dead tree that night and thought that what I could do was make a journey alongside Joanne—a journey that was about something life-affirming something as basic and fundamental as an apple.Our primitive senses can open pathways long sealed, if not necessarily guarded. I do not think I have ever had a Proustian moment in which the taste of something, madeleine or otherwise, has summoned a rich palate of memory, let alone several autobiographical volumes. My remnant memory cells seem more receptive to tactile and olfactory sensations. A cool breeze on my cheek summons images from decades long past. The scent of mold emanating from a building, for example, reminds me of a house where old Mrs Kelly lived when I was a kid. I worked for her for a brief span, running errands. She had a dog named Johan, which was a name I had never heard before, and another pooch whose name has slipped away, if in fact it had ever settled in. She was not there long, at least I was not long aware of her presence in our neighborhood. But I remember well sneaking into her abandoned house with other youthful criminals, feeling the old floorboards sag, fretting about the possibility of falling through, and twitching my nose at the pervasive aroma of mold. Helen Humphreys is more in the flavor camp. It is the taste of an apple that connects her to other things, although not necessarily memories. [image] Helen Humphreys - image from Chatelaine.com It is an intimate act, tasting an apple—having the flesh of the fruit in our mouths, the juice on our tongues. Ann Jessop bites into an apple in an English orchard in the hot summer of 1790 in the middle of her life, and I bite into the same kind of apple in 2016, in the middle of my life, and taste what she did. For the time it takes to eat the apple, I am where she was, and I know what she knows, and there is no separation between us.[image] Malus Domestica: Acker – 1901 - by Bertha Heiges – from the USDA Pomologic Watercolor Collection The MacGuffin here was the passing of a dear friend, Joanne Page, and the madeleine the associated sensation of tasting, fresh from a tree near an abandoned cabin near her home, specimens of what is reputed to be the best tasting apple in the world, the White Winter Pearmain. I was never entirely clear on how looking into the history of this amazing fruit connected much to her friend. I found the connection between friend and apple mushy, except in a very broad sense, but one can certainly still enjoy her beautifully written recollections of their friendship for their own sake. The book focuses on apples. How had an apple I had never heard of ended up in my particular pocket of southern Ontario? It seemed an impossible task to determine the apple’s thirteenth century beginnings in Norfolk, but surely, if the fruit had made its journey to America, I could find out who had brought it over from Europe.[image] Malus Domestica: Admiral Schley – 1904 - by Bertha Heiges – from the USDA Pomologic Watercolor Collection You will learn a fair bit about this most common of fruits (not the Pearmain, the apple, generically), where it is thought to have originated, how it was brought to North America, and spread once here. (There was a second seeder). How apples were cultivated, how their placement impacted where people lived, and vice versa, their usefulness, their diversity, the difference between wild and cultivated sorts. I have come to think of apple trees as akin to human beings, not just in the fact of their individuality, and their diversity, but also in the brief tenure of their lives. A hundred years is very old for an apple tree, as it is for a person. An apple tree exists for the same length of time that we do, and this gives our relationship to the trees a certain poignancy.[image] Malus Domestica: Alabama Beauty – 1903 - by Bertha Heiges – from the USDA Pomologic Watercolor Collection Humphreys’ historical digging turns up some very interesting information on relations between European invaders and Native Americans around apples. She looks at the importance of apples to the Native, settler and early American economies. It was a great benefit, for example, for different kinds of apples to ripen at different times of year, to ensure a food supply as long as possible. With the central interest being tracing the history of this most delicious apple, Humphreys grafts onto that a bit of art history. The United States Department of Agriculture, in order to be able to answer thousands of queries from apple-growers across the nation, decided to create a national catalogue of the various breeds of apples (among other produce) extant in the USA. A team of artists was employed in this task for decades, producing thousands of watercolor illustrations. Not only does Humphreys tell us a bit about how this came to be, but offers seventeen of these beautiful paintings in the book, lovingly presented on high-quality glossy paper. In writing of this project Humphreys tells of the artists’ lives, a bit, anyway, and relates their experience to visual artists she has known, and also to the art of writing. After years of being an artist, or a writer, it is hard to separate who you are from what you do. I don’t remember a day—a moment, even—when my grandfather wasn’t painting or drawing or talking about art…He believed, and made me believe, that the role of the artist was the most important in the world, and the hand of the artist was everywhere and in everything. “Someone had to think of that,” he would often say, about anything—a book cover, the design on a packet of tea.[image] Malus Domestica: Alstott – 1897 - by Bertha Heiges – from the USDA Pomologic Watercolor Collection This leads to a look at one of the best known (tastiest?) practitioners of that art form and his relationship to apples, Robert Frost. He planted several orchards on sundry properties in New England after gaining an appreciation during a spell in England. She transcends Frost to include some reporting on Thoreau’s affection for apples as well. HDT insisted that they taste better when eaten outdoors. Each of the sundry elements of this book is interesting on its own. I would have preferred a bit, (a lot, actually) more about the science of apples. How did they come to be in the first place? I wanted more of a blow-by-blow of how they ripen, their parts, the diversity in skin types, thicknesses, color, the importance of cider, alcoholic and not, to early growers, more deep core stuff. The strength of the book is Humphreys’ inquisitive mind, and beautiful, lyrical writing, her contemplations of life, death, history, remembering, preserving, rediscovering, friendship, art and plenty more. There should be a word for how the dead continue, for how the fact of them gives over to the thought of them.’[image] Malus Domestica: Alton – 1903 - by Bertha Heiges – from the USDA Pomologic Watercolor Collection You will learn some pretty fascinating information about the pedestrian apple. (no, that is not a breed), not least of which is the impressive number of breeds that once grew in North America. You will learn the size of the largest recorded apple, and some surprising similarities between you and the apple tree. And that she managed to do this with no mention of Eden or of Adam’s laryngeal prominence is impressive. There is knowledge and joy to be had here, and taking a bite out of this scrumptious remembrance and appreciation of people and things past will not cause you to be cast out of anywhere but the shade of pomological ignorance. PS – The watercolor images here are all taken from the same source Humphreys uses, the US Department of Agriculture, but none of the images used in this review are in the book. Review Posted – September 1, 2017 Publication – September 5, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s personal site The USDA National Agricultural Library Digital Collection - The Pomology Collection - mouth-watering ...more |
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Aug 15, 2017
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Aug 16, 2017
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Aug 16, 2017
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Hardcover
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0393246531
| 9780393246537
| 4.11
| 1,027
| Jan 19, 2015
| Jan 19, 2015
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it was amazing
| Some say the heart is just like a wheel. When you bend it, you can’t mend it.The sage counsel offered by the McGarrigle sisters for matters of lov Some say the heart is just like a wheel. When you bend it, you can’t mend it.The sage counsel offered by the McGarrigle sisters for matters of love could just as easily apply to the question of trust. Once betrayed, how easy is it to trust that person ever again. Now kick that up a level or three and apply to governments. When the people who offer to the public the face of government, the leaders, the police, the military, turn out to be criminals themselves, how can a people ever trust their government again? And if people cannot trust their government, that creates a breeding ground for lawlessness and even insurgency. [image] Sarah Chayes - image from The Kansas City Star As Afghans, beginning around 2005, found the international presence in their country increasingly offensive, it was not because of their purported age-old hatred of foreigners. Nor did puritanical horror at the presence of unbelievers in their land enter our conversations, or outrage about Afghan sovereignty trod underfoot. My neighbors pointed to the abusive behavior of the Afghan government. Given the U.S. role in ushering its officials to power and financing and protecting them, Afghans held the international community, and the United States in particular, responsible. My neighbors wanted the international community to be stricter with Afghan government officials, not more respectful. “You brought our donkeys back,” one man put it in 2009. “You brought these dogs back here. You should bring them to heel.”In her brilliant book Ghettoside, Jill Leovy notes the failure of government to prosecute murders against black men, noting the resulting establishment of non-official institutions that would. Sarah Cheyes looks at corruption on a national scale, over a considerable period of time. Government of, by, and for thieves is hardly a modern invention. And lest we think of it as a third world issue, there are plenty of first-world examples brought into the light. She makes the case that government corruption is an incubator for extremism, generating terrorism that extends beyond the corrupt nation’s borders, and presents challenges to other nations. Chayes looks at many examples and kinds of corruption in the world, east and west, and brings to bear the counsel of classic writers who addressed the same issues over the centuries. She cites Machiavelli …there was one vice that Machiavelli admonished his reader to shun if he cared to prolong his reign: theft of his subjects’ possessions. In other words, corruption. “Being rapacious and arrogating subjects’ goods and women is what, above all else . . . renders him hateful,” he wrote. And widespread hatred of a ruler was conducive to conspiracy. And conspiracy reliably brought down governments.There was already, in Machiavelli’s time a considerable body of advice-to-ruler writing, generally referred to as “Mirrors,” from as far back as 700 CE, by an anonymous Irish writer. Another was written in 1018 by a thoughtful Muslim administrator, as an aid to the rulers he served. Another, from the 9th century, was written by a bishop to advise an emperor’s grandson. Erasmus wrote a mirror as well. There are others. She notes eternal wisdom that can be found in these writings, writings that apply well to leadership issues of the 21st century. Chayes came to Afghanistan as an NPR reporter in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban, left that to work on local economic development, and later became an advisor to the US military. She has seen a lot first hand. Currently she is a senior associate in the Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The examples she cites here are from Afghanistan, (the most attention to the place with which she is most familiar) Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Ireland, Iraq. There are plenty more in the world. Her analysis is fascinating and compelling. Autocracy and corruption are far less the product of extremism than they are the causes of it. Attempts to address violence by attacking insurgents is doomed to failure. Only a vision that takes on internal corruption within nations has any chance of succeeding in keeping extremist movements from sprouting up like mushrooms after a shower. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES are driven by the questions their clients ask them. If they have not compiled much information on the security impacts of acute corruption to date, it is because few policy makers have pointed them at that problem.Thus our focus on terrorism rather than its causes. Chayes’ analysis includes diagrammatic representations of the various structures of governmental corruption. She offers recommendations for addressing some of these problems. There is a tendency for kleptocracy to generate and be generated from autocracy, a necessary means for keeping those being fleeced from solving the problem legally or through more direct kinetic actions. In the USA, look at how few police are convicted for killing unarmed black men. Look at how Wall Streeters suffered virtually no jail time for fleecing the entire US economy. Look at how corporations include codicils in every purchase or contract that protects them from legal responsibility. We are headed in this direction. Personally, I would be more than happy to see Wall Street lined with pikes decorated by the CEOs responsible for the 2008 crash. And I am a relatively peaceful sort, no guns, or other weapons, no affiliations with extreme organizations. Just livid that there are two sets of rules in the USA, one for the rich and powerful and another for the rest of us, “the little people.” If I feel this way, I can only imagine how black people feel about the open season that our courts have declared for police violence against black men. It is also clear that there are many who feel that leaders of both parties have stood by while any gains in the national economy were all channeled to the already well off. And it does not help that one of the biggest thieves in the country was in charge of guarding the mint. It is clear by the pattern of his actions, that, if he is capable of planning, beyond his manifest talent for diversion, he would love to turn the USA into his private piggy bank. Refusal to reveal his tax returns, stonewalling investigations into his actions, refusing to divest his properties in order to spare the nation the uncertainty of wondering whether his executive decision-making is being done for the good of the nation or the good of his balance sheet, all lead one to question where his leadership interests lie. When the leadership of a nation, whether Afghanistan. Egypt, Ireland or the USA, is seen as being out solely for its own interests at the expense of the citizens those leaders are supposedly representing, the groundwork is laid for bad results. When the application of law is seen as unfair, the ground is laid for resistance. When elements of the public see the enforcers of the law as corrupt or insensitive to their rights, the groundwork is set for the growth of extra-legal forms of justice and, in the worst cases, insurrection. When those on top cheat and lie without compunction, it encourages everyone to follow suit. We are faced with a growing crisis here in the USA. We expect out commander in chief to accept command responsibility for the actions he has approved. The buck stops in the Oval Office. Except when the occupier of that office is incapable of accepting any responsibility for his actions. A jaw-dropping example of his incapacity is when Swamp Thing actually told a grieving gold star widow soon after her husband had been killed in action that he “knew what he had signed up for.“ Corruption is the seed from which many toxic horrors grow. Chayes details many examples in the nations she describes. And how about at home? How about payments to legislators from those in the business of building and staffing private jails in order to encourage mass incarceration. How about massive contributions to legislators by the gas/oil/natural gas industries to ensure unnecessary tax breaks, and to protect them from responsibility for the ecological horrors they generate? How about contributions to legislators and others from the weapons industry, channeled through the NRA, to ensure that one of the largest public health crises in the nation, death by gunshot, remains minimally regulated. How about the deliberately mis-named Tax Reform proposal that is nothing less than the wealthy, operating through their paid legislative pawns, backing a Brinks truck up to the US treasury and loading up, yet again, leaving the resulting deficits for the rest of us to cover. The rich are taking advantage, by cheating, lying, manipulating, misdirecting, and stealing. So long as there is little or no progress in holding them accountable for their greed-based crimes, the chances increase that the only way to seek redress will be outside the boundaries of the legal framework. Unfortunately, autocracy can sometimes be sustained for generations, but the reactions it is generating these days will continue to make miserable the lives of millions of people across the world, as extremist elements seek to undermine government by proving, again and again, that government cannot protect them. Take a lesson from the past. Take a lesson from the experience of far too many nations across the globe. Corruption kills. It should be the highest priority of this and every nation. Without faith in the relative honesty of government, no government can, or should stand. The horrors we are experiencing in the USA are only the tip of the iceberg of dark possibility. Sara Chayes, in shining a light not only on some of the many corrupt regimes in the world, but on the long history of public corruption and its collateral damage, and on the sage advice offered by wise counselors of the past, offers us a way to understand much of what we see going on, both domestically and internationally, in today’s world. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about good government or who seeks to gain insight into the mechanisms of extremism and terrorism. Check it out before those it describes prevent you from, or arrest you for, doing so. Review first posted – October 20, 2017 Publication date – January 19, 2015 =============================EXTRA STUFF Here is Chayes’ profile at the Carnegie Endowment -----A nice list of several Chayes-related pieces on PRI -----The Atlantic - Scents and Sensibility - on setting up a soap and body-oil business in Afghanistan- by Chayes ---Interview by Tim Lewis of The Guardian – Sarah Chayes: on living in Afghanistan and sleeping with a Kalashnikov In the UK and the US, we’re in danger of letting our republics slip out of our hands without even noticing it and the results could be really devastating over time.VIDEO -----An excellent Carnegie Endowment panel discussion on corruption, focusing on Honduras. One of her points is that the theftocracy twists public regulation to support private interests. See every Trump cabinet appointment for glaring examples -----NY Times - October 21, 2017 - Why Has the E.P.A.Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots - by Eric Lipton -----Rachel Maddow Show - October 21, 2017 - Rachel interview with Chayes - Trump flouting norms risks venal turn in US ----- Relevant music - Everything Old is New Again AUDIO ----- NPR - Sarah Chayes: Taliban Terrorizing Afghanistan - 2009 ...more |
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| On March 11, 1941, in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur spoke the three words he would be remembered by for the rest of his life, “I shall retur On March 11, 1941, in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur spoke the three words he would be remembered by for the rest of his life, “I shall return.” But what about in the meantime?We all know what happened on December 7, 1941. On December 8, 1941, the Japanese destroyed the United States Air Force in Manila, then the US naval presence. In January, 1942, Japan invaded the Philippines, driving American forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, from the islands, defeating the Philippine military forces, and settling in to occupy the nation for the next several years. But their time on the Philippines was not all chrysanthemums and saki. The Bataan Death March did not corral all the combatants. [image] Peter Eisner - from his site Claire Phillips, or Clara Mabel De La Taste, of Howard City, Michigan, or Dorothy Smith, or Mabel C. Enette. Choose one, or several. There are more if you want. The woman we call Claire here went through name changes even more frequently than she went through husbands and boyfriends. Turns out that a degree of flexibility, particularly in wartime, can be a good thing. She had been in Manila for some time before the war, singing for a living, and stayed on once things got hot. She also worked as a nurse, and later applied her cabaret talents to open a bar in occupied Manila. She called herself Madame Tsubaki, and kept her Japanese military clientele coming with cabaret shows featuring both Japanese and American music. She and her staff kept their ears and eyes open, their guests well-treated, and became a major source of military intelligence behind the lines. John Boone, 29, an American corporal who had evaded capture, began recruiting locals to form a guerilla resistance. Chick Parsons, 41, was an American businessman, pretending to be a representative of Panama. He had been an officer in the US Navy for many years, a submariner. He had lived in the Philippines for a long time, as a merchant seaman. He also worked as a stenographer to the US governor, General Leonard Wood, in which job he traveled extensively in the country, and learned its geography. In addition, he married a local woman. Secretly, he had been recalled to duty on December 8, 1941, as a spy. He would become a significant leader in intelligence gathering in the Philippines. [image] Claire - from Eisner’s site Peter Eisner weaves together the stories of these three heroes to paint a portrait of a part of World War II that does not get nearly the bandwidth dedicated to the European theater. Manila was a crucial strategic piece for Japan, allowing them to shorten their supply lines, move their strike capability closer to their targets, and control sea lanes critical to the pursuit of the war. It was critical to them gaining control of all Asia. The Allies were determined to regain control, but that would take years. In the meantime, Boone and his guerillas did what they could to disrupt Japanese supplies. Claire and her operation sent information to Boone, to be forwarded to MacArthur. She also organized aid missions to the Americans and others being held in several concentration camps in and around Manila. The book purports to be about “The Soldier, The Singer and the Spymaster,” and each is covered, but hardly to the same degree. The preponderance of the focus here is on Claire, which is not, necessarily a bad thing, as she is, arguably, the most interesting of the three. In truth, Parsons deserves a book of his own, but Boone is a pretty pure heroic sort, lacking the diversity of intriguing talents and personality that Claire and Parsons tote. The designer of the book cover got this right, but the cover text is a bit misleading, and the title should have been less equivocal. One of the primary resources for the story was Clair’s diary, which certainly leads the story in her direction. Most of us have probably read books about what the occupation looked like in places like Paris and Warsaw, but Manila has gotten a lot less press. Eisner amply demonstrates here how miserable, and deadly, it was to be living under Japanese occupation, reporting on many of the details of daily life, the constant insults inflicted on the Filipino people by a brutish regime. Eisner let us in on details like what foods were in short supply, which Filipino officials were only going along to get along, but were secretly supporting the resistance. He brings to our notice many of the ways in which Claire and others managed to get messages to those who needed them, how they got money, food, medical and other supplies to prisoners, and passed along messages from those prisoners. It is practically a how-to for setting up a low-tech spying network. He also describes some of the softer side, occupiers who were clearly not on board with the demands for brutality from on high. Occupiers who were human. Those people were soon replaced with harsher representatives of the Land of the Rising Sun. The inability of the local occupiers to eliminate the resistance was a sore point with leaders back home. One of the most dangerous elements in the enterprise was the problem of human personality. All it would take was one squeaky wheel, one loose link in the chain, for everyone involved to be arrested and executed. There are several scares along these lines, to the point where things needed to be reorganized to minimize the risk of exposure. And of course, where there are spies, there are counter-spies. So, a risky business indeed. Claire may be a very flawed individual, but she is a flawed individual who stepped up and did a service for her country when she was needed, under terrifying conditions, and did it in a way that few others could have managed. We might like our heroes a little less compromised, but that is one of the things that makes her such an intriguing character. Eisner, an award-winning reporter, foreign correspondent, bureau chief, PBS producer, and historian, continues, after the war, to follow Claire’s life, mostly, and, in particular, her legal battles with the US government for just compensation for her wartime efforts. Also, she wrote a memoir that was probably not entirely truthful and was muddied even more by her editors. It brought her particular fame when it was made into a cheesy movie. The inaccurate depiction of facts there generated some controversy. One particular participant in the spy effort made it a point to challenge Claire’s version of events. Frankly, while I do believe that there is merit in looking at how efforts undertaken in the heart of wartime can be treated so coldly once the war is over, most of this could have been left out, or covered with a brief overview. There is certainly a Casablanca vibe to a considerable portion of the book. One could easily see a pared down version of this story making a wonderful film, rich with romance, intrigue and mortal peril. So, bottom line is that this is a very interesting look at an under-covered aspect of World War II. It may go into a bit too much specificity in its detail, but that is a small downside in an otherwise fascinating look at a time, a place, and a spy most of us have never heard of. Thankfully, you will not have to hide your cash inside wrapped food and arrange to have it delivered to your bookseller by a willing local in order to check this book out. Reading this book will keep you well occupied, and you can do it out in the open, at least until the next war. Review posted – August 11, 2017 Published – May 2, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages MacArthur’s escape from the Philippines ...more |
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| On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said, ‘One of the most On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said, ‘One of the most astounding and pathetic sights I have ever seen. Almost the whole ten miles of beach was black from sand-dunes to waterline with tens of thousands of men. In places they stood up to their knees and waists in water waiting for their turn to get into the pitiable boats. It seemed impossible that we should ever get more than a fraction of all these men away.[image] Image from LearningMind.com In May 1940, things were not looking good for the Allies. Hitler’s armies had made an unexpected run through what had seemed the impenetrable, and thus lightly defended, Ardennes forest, cutting off the British forces from their French counterparts to the south, and thus creating an unwinnable situation for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Although it was not immediately apparent, and consensus was slow in coming, it eventually became clear that the only possible action was evacuation. The BEF retreated to a stretch of coast in Northeast France, Dunkirk. The German forces were closing in. As many as four hundred thousand faced slaughter or capture. Had the evacuation failed, the war would have ended in victory for the Axis, and the world we have inhabited for the last seventy-seven (now 81) years would have been a far different place. British destroyers were not able to get close enough to the beach to rescue anywhere near the numbers trapped there. The English people were forced to come to the rescue. From May 26 to June 4, 1940, they did, helping evacuate the largest number of people in military history. [image] Joshua Levine - from his Twitter page How the vast majority of this mass of humanity was rescued is one of the greatest stories and one of the true miracles of the twentieth century. Operation Dynamo provided Great Britain a second chance in the war, and was inspirational for the people on the western side of the English Channel. The last time there was a film about Dunkirk was 1958. Aside from a compelling tracking shot in the stellar film, Atonement, it has not been the subject of a major film. Christopher Nolan, A-list director of Interstellar, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Memento, and host of other films, had been wanting to make a film of the battle, if you can even call it that, for ages, but it was only recently that he was able to garner the considerable production sums needed to do it justice on the big screen. Joshua Levine, author of many books on World War II, and other conflicts, was brought in as a consultant on the actual history of the time. The book he wrote is not a script from the film. It is an historical telling of the events leading up to and through the evacuation. Levine’s methodology is weighted toward the up-close-and-personal, telling stories from the accounts of on-the-ground participants, and looking also at command decisions, from officers in the field up to the prime minister. Much of what he writes about Dunkirk has particular relevance to the twenty-first century. German children were not being raised to believe in a world of tolerance and acceptance. According to [Bernard] Rust, ‘God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn’t understand the laws of life’s battles will be counted out, as in the boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong will win them. The weak will lose them.’One can, and certainly should, read this book whether one opts to see the film or not. Despite its link to a major Hollywood cinema event, this is a bona fide, stand-alone history of the time, an update of his 2011 book, Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, which had inspired Nolan’s air, sea, and water triptych approach to the film. It is rich with looks at the challenges and contradictions of the era, and shows in compelling detail many of the horrors of war. [image] Ships berthing at Dover with the rescued - from Wikimedia Paranoia was rampant, as one might expect. And many a person was falsely identified as an enemy spy, whether maliciously or erroneously, and executed summarily. An experience that filled the cells of Gitmo in the Afghanistan War and Abu Graib in the Iraq War, and no doubt erupts in most military conflicts. The maintenance of order was paramount and was often enforced in draconian fashion. Levine looks into how what was clearly a major military defeat was transformed into a national source of inspiration. He also offers a look into the culture of the time leading up to the war, some details of which I found surprising. He offers a reasoned explanation for England’s reluctance to engage in another world war, lets us in on the British view of the French military, and the French feeling of betrayal when the BEF opted to flee rather than stand and fight. He looks at decision-making by the Belgians who were in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t position if ever there was one. [image] image from Wikimedia It is remarkable that anyone at all was rescued given how many stupid decisions were implemented and how many mistakes were made, on both sides. But the story is also rich with the courage and hopefulness that led to a successful conclusion of the rescue. One particular example of making lemonade stood out. Opening one of the battalion’s final ammunition boxes, Captain Starkey had been devastated to find that it contained not bullets but flare cartridges. A supply error had been made. But rather than bemoan his luck, Captain Starkey thought laterally. The enemy’s effective mortar fire, he had noticed, was always signaled by a red-white-red pattern of flares. After a while this would be replaced by a white-red-white pattern, signaling the mortar fire to stop and the infantry to attack.There are other examples here of brains beating bullets. An English scientist came up with a way of dealing with the magnetic mines the Luftwaffe had dumped into the waters off the beach. And a pier, made of a very surprising foundation, allowed many thousands to escape, who would otherwise have been left behind. [image] en route to Dover- from the BBC There is much here, as one would expect, on how it came to pass that a flotilla of small private English boats came to the rescue, transporting masses of soldiers, some all the way to Dover, many more to the waiting destroyers, and gave birth to what would come to be called The Dunkirk spirit. Jim [Thorpe] remembers travelling across the Channel many times. He recalls German aircraft strafing the boat, and the soldiers on board firing back with their rifles. But did he realise the importance of the job he was doing?It must be borne in mind that the generally accepted number of 338,000 rescued is a far cry from the numbers who might have been. Thousands were killed, tens of thousands were captured. While Dunkirk will resound through history as a stirring and stunning moment of heroism, it was hardly a total victory. Not much to gripe about in this book. Levine does attempt to center his narrative around several specific participants. I did not find that to be particularly effective. The characters needed to be portrayed in considerably more depth for that to work. Nonetheless, the anecdotal history works pretty well at giving one a sense of the situation, the miseries to be endured, the challenges faced, both physical and psychological, and the determined spirit that rose to the occasion. He references the making of the film from time to time, which may be of value to those who have seen or will see the film, but is a slight distraction for those who will remain film-free. However, he spends the final chapter addressing the film at length. Pretty interesting stuff. I can report that the film is a triumph, most definitely worth seeing, even if it is not viewed on the large screen for which it was intended. Levine’s tale of the time is most definitely worth reading. You will learn a lot. You will be surprised. You might even feel inspired. You will not need to be rescued. Review first posted – July 20, 2017 Publication date – June 27, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s personal and Twitter pages A piece in The Daily Mail on the making of the film - Return to the beaches: Army of extras invades Dunkirk to recreate World War II evacuation of 330,000 soldiers for new movie starring Tom Hardy and Harry Styles (plus some cardboard cut-out troops) The amazing Dunkirk tracking shot from Atonement - Be forewarned there is plenty here that is disturbing. July 21, 2017 -Time Life Books - an excerpt - Not Everyone Escaped at Dunkirk. This Is What Happened After the Rescue August 2, 2017 - NY Times - The evacuees at Dunkirk consisted of more than only English and French men - Dunkirk, the War and the Amnesia of the Empire - by Yasmin Khan ...more |
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| Although I know of no hypothesis that adequately covers the mountainous evidence,” [he] said in closing, “this should not and must not deter us fr Although I know of no hypothesis that adequately covers the mountainous evidence,” [he] said in closing, “this should not and must not deter us from following the advice of Schroedinger: to be curious, capable of being astonished, and eager to find out.”Quiz time. Ok, what is a close encounter of the first kind? Second kind? Third? You might be forgiven for not knowing with much precision the answers to the first two, but I bet you can answer number three. You probably think you have Stephen Spielberg to thank for that particular item. Well, I guess you do. But neither Spielberg nor his writers came up with that structure for describing the levels of possible UFO encounters. In fact, Spielberg was all set to steal the intel until the guy who actually came up with it, hearing about the film project, sent the director a polite letter pointing out the ripoff, one of many. Spielberg had borrowed liberally from the man’s reports on sightings, as laid out in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A scientific enquiry. The scientist in question was one Josef Allen Hynek. Spielberg brought him in and paid him a pittance to be a “consultant” on the film. Hynek even got a cameo, six whole seconds. If you have never heard of him before, welcome to the club. [image] Josef Allen Hynek - from the author’s site J. Allen Hynek, the child of Czech immigrants, was born in Chicago in 1910. He had two careers, often simultaneously. First, he was a world class, forward looking astrophysicist, who, as a young Turk, had the nerve to point out errors in the data put out by the Mount Wilson Observatory, which did not win him any friends. He helped develop a proximity fuse for the US Navy in World War II. Seeing that scientists could be brought together to address large problems in wartime, he was eager to do the same in peacetime, and made good on that dream, developing technology and organizing teams of amateur scientists around the world to track American satellites in the 1950s. In addition. his view of the possibilities of orbital science were ahead of his time. In a television news interview that aired in 1958, Hynek urged the construction of a “National Space Observatory”…claiming that a space based observatory would “pay great and immediate dividends” in new scientific knowledge… “From a space observatory we could see the surface of planets with unimaginable clarity even with a small telescope,” Hynek said. In addition to revolutionizing astronomical observing, Hynek’s proposed telescope could also be trained on Earth itself, making real-time weather data “continuously available to weather forecasters over the world” and leading to “greater knowledge of basic weather causes that would result in more reliable long-range forecasts.”Then there was his other career. Actually, the two converged. Interest in UFOs increased in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as there were more and more eyes on the skies, and equipment with which to record sightings was more widely available. Who hasn’t heard of Roswell? But you may not have heard of Kenneth Arnold, who, on June 24, 1947, while flying his plane across the Cascades to Yakima, WA, spotted nine objects in the sky, that he judged flew at about 1200 miles per hour. He called this ahead to the Yakima field and was dismissed by the personnel there. But when he continued on to Pendleton, OR, he was interviewed by reporters. One took his description of the craft he had seen and added a bit of flourish. Thus was born the term “flying saucers.” [image] The Thing From Another World runs into a bit of resistance Popular media fanned the flames. In 1951, Howard Hawks produced The Thing from Another World, which stoked popular interest. The April 7, 1952 issue of Life magazine, one of the most popular media outlets in the country, prompted even more interest in the subject with a major article on UFOs, despite the fact that the cover photo on that issue may have generated a lot more interest of a different sort. [image] Image from NICAP.ORG The appearance of pips (not led by Gladys Knight) over Washington D.C on multiple occasions during the summer of 1952, gave the military pause, particularly as they sent up fighter jets to intercept the intruders, only to have the UFOs zoom away at incredible speeds. One Air Control radar registered speed in excess of 7,000 mph. As someone particularly knowledgeable about studying starlight and other astronomical phenomena, Hynek was brought in when the government finally decided that the increase in UFO sightings needed some looking into. You may have heard of Project Blue Book, but there were other such programs before it. All pretty much dedicated to stifling sighting reports and using scientific analysis to come up with credible explanations (alternate facts?) for what people had seen. Swamp gas, weather balloons, hoaxes and inebriation were popular. And if you are looking to debunk sightings, there are always plenty of other explanations one can come up with. Hynek’s ability to piss people off did not end with his professional faux pas re Mount Wilson. His work as a paid debunker gained him a whole new population of haters. [image] Mark O’Connell - from his site But one of the things about being sent to check out a large number of supposed UFO sightings is that sometimes it is not so easy to call “bullshit.” Sometimes the observers are highly trained military personnel, sometimes professional pilots, sometimes law enforcement officers with no history of mental or substance weirdness, sometimes the clergy, sometimes very observant, sane, persuasive witnesses. It takes a toll after a while. You start to wonder if there might not actually be something out there. And if you are a real scientist, with commitment to the notion that facts are facts, eventually you find yourself more open to the possibilities. The line had been crossed. [image] Parking for aliens only - from the WB archives While he was still brought in by the government to investigate UFO sightings, it could no longer be assumed that his employers would be getting the answers they wanted. He became a prominent, credible public persona for those who believed that UFOs were real, the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of UFOlogy. He even started his own organization, The Center for UFO Studies. Mark O’Connell’s bio takes no position, well overtly anyway, on the real/not-real positions in the UFO debate. But he includes in each chapter a tale of a credible sighting. He also became an accredited UFO investigator and began hosting a site to report on that experience, so he can certainly claim a leaning. He says: I didn’t set out to prove anything one way or another, and so I never had to worry about painting myself into a logical corner, or closing my book with a disappointing let-down. I think that, by recounting the history of UFOs through the eyes of Dr. Hynek, who was literally on the scene within hours or days of many of the most spectacular UFO incidents on record, and mirroring Hynek’s open-minded approach to these incidents, I give the reader a new way to experience the UFO phenomenon without feeling silly about it. I try not to persuade the reader one way or another, but to present the facts of the cases, Joe Friday-style, as they were reported by the witnesses, by the Air Force, and by Dr. Hynek, and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.He does a solid job of detailing Hynek’s life in science, his entry into studying the UFO phenomenon, and his role in the ongoing research. Hynek’s personal life is given cursory consideration. There are many political skirmishes that O’Connell goes into. Some are significant, debunk-crazed bosses burying data, for example. A major public scientist treating his views on UFOs with withering scorn, if not much actual analysis. Some are less interesting, office politics at an organization he was directing later in his life. The level of detail sometimes gets in the way of keeping the narrative moving. Some smaller battles could have been omitted. A strength of the book is that O’Connell gives us a blow-by-blow account of how UFOs became a public concern. He explains how public interest grew and shows how the governmental response was to stifle reasoned consideration of observed events. Hynek passed in 1986, so there is a considerable chunk of time left unexplored here. I do not know what significant facts have been discovered since then, and this book does not report them. But I am sure the truth is out there, somewhere. [image] I Want to Believe - You know this pair – image from Atlas Obscura One of the most interesting things about the book and about Hynek, is where his scientific leaning led him, re his consideration of possible sources for UFOs. I will not spoil that here, but it definitely worth checking out. Being a Boomer, it was during my impressionable youth that public awareness of and interest in (fear of?) UFOs emerged. While this or that sighting may have been of something other than an alien presence, the impact the large swath of reports had on me, and many others, was quite real. I confess that I am with Mulder in wanting to believe in UFOs, whatever they might be. It is impressive that a world class scientist dedicated much of his life to studying widely derided UFO reports, and applied his considerable skills to trying to figure out their nature. Learning of Josef Allen Hynek bolsters my hope that clear, broadly accepted answers might emerge in my lifetime. If not in mine, hopefully in yours. In the meantime, in light of the fact that UFOs constitute one of the great mysteries of our time, I cannot urge you strongly enough to Watch the Skies!. Review Posted – July 7, 2017 Published - June 13, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal UFO site, High Strangeness UFO and his Google Plus page OK, here is relevant piece of Hynek’s categorization speech. “I divide the close encounter cases into three subdivisions: the close encounter, with little detail; the close encounter with physical effects: and the close encounter in which ‘humanoids’ or occupants are reported,” he told the group. Although the “physical effects” variant was the most appealing to him, he acknowledged that the “humanoid” encounters possessed their own uniquely repellant appeal. “This latter subgroup, of course, has the highest strangeness index and frightens away all but the most hardy investigators. I would be neither a good reporter nor a good scientist were I to deliberately reject data. /there are now on record some 1,500 reports of close encounters, about half of which involve reported craft occupants. Reports of occupants have been with is for years but there are only a few in the Air Force files; generally Project Bluebook personnel summarily, and without investigation, consigned such reports to the ‘psychological’ or crackpot category.Link to the full 1951 film, The Thing From Another World December 16, 2017 - NY Times - Thankfully, governmental interest in the unexplained did not pass with Josef Allen Hynek - Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program - by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Keandec. Also from the NY Times, The Daily offers an audio report on this story January 15, 2019 - NY Times - ‘Project Blue Book’ Is Based on a True U.F.O. Story. Here It Is. - by Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean - reacting to the success of the new Project Blue Book series on the History Channel, the writers look at the actual history, and spot where the series departs from that. [image] Aidan Gillen as the astronomer J. Allen Hynek in “Project Blue Book” on History - image from the above NY Times article May 26, 2019 - NY Times - Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects - By Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean May 9, 2020 - Vox - It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously. by Sean Illing July 28, 2020 - NY Times - Do We Believe in U.F.O.s? That’s the Wrong Question by Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean January 25, 2021 - The New Yorker - Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? by Elizabeth Kolbert February 11, 2021 - NY Times - Aliens Must Be Out There by Farhad Manjoo June 12, 2021 - The Guardian - The woman who forced the US government to take UFOs seriously by So Yuon June 25, 2021 - OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE - UNCLASSIFIED UNCLASSIFIEDOFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - the latest declassified report summary. While very reminiscent of prior reports, doing the full range of ballroom dances about all the possible other explanations, it does at least accept that there are reasonable, reliable records of sightings that are not currently explainable. This made me even more sympathetic to Hynek's view of what might be going on. September 12, 2021 - The Guardian - ‘What I saw that night was real’: is it time to take aliens more seriously? by Daniel Lavelle February 5, 2022 - The Guardian - ‘Something’s coming’: is America finally ready to take UFOs seriously? by Adam Gabbatt ...more |
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ebook
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0062490222
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really liked it
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I confess I find soccer, what the rest of the world calls football, boring. This is not the same as believing that soccer/football actually is boring.
I confess I find soccer, what the rest of the world calls football, boring. This is not the same as believing that soccer/football actually is boring. I am certain that it is not. But as someone who knows pretty much nil about the game, I lack the vision, the knowledge, the insight to be able to identify the finer points, to be able to articulate why this formation or that player are well set up to create a scoring opportunity or defend against a powerful offense. Sometimes it is pretty blatant when a player takes a dive hoping to generate a colored card for an innocent opponent, but other times it is not so easy for my uneducated eyes to judge. I do not know how to evaluate whether the goalie is premier league material or should still be playing in AYSO. But with baseball it is an entirely other story. [image] Keith Law Those who look down their noses at baseball, seeing a painfully slow contest are, as I am with soccer, simply not attuned to the detail, the minutiae of the game. (There are others, of course, who are so insanely driven by the need for constant dopamine drips from their electronic devices that they are probably unable to attend to much of anything for more than the attention span of a goldfish. But those are not the people at issue here.) They see a pitcher taking for bloody ever to throw the ball to the plate. I see a contest between the baserunner, pitcher, catcher, first baseman, second-baseman and shortstop as one attempts to gauge the possibilities of a successful steal, and the defense feints, jabs, and maybe thrusts to prevent it. Will the pitch be a fastball, to give the catcher the most possible time to make a throw toward second? Will the pitcher and catcher opt to focus on the batter at the possible cost of a steal? Maybe the catcher will call for a pitchout. Every pitch has a purpose. Every shifting defensive alignment has the strengths of a particular batter in mind. When you know the details, the game becomes incredibly more interesting, a collection of hundreds of smaller contests within the larger game. One of the small pleasures I have always enjoyed is trying to predict what the next pitch will be. I am fairly adept at it. Baseball is a game I have loved since I was a small child. That love was a gift from my father, one for which I continue to thank him, and one that will accompany me to whatever, if anything, comes next. One can certainly enjoy the game for the skills on display, the balletic artistry of a fielder making a particularly challenging defensive leap, a powerful and accurate throw, maybe from his knees or worse. You might be impressed by the power of a pitcher throwing a fastball past an overmatched batter at over a hundred miles an hour; the gift of a knuckle-ball practitioner making that same five and a half ounce ball dance its way toward the plate as if the laws of gravity had been temporarily suspended, leaving a hapless hitter swinging at empty space, slamming his bat into the dirt and muttering expletives on his way back to the dugout. But it is nice to know that if we care to indulge, there are now new, finely honed tools available that can deepen our appreciation for and understanding of the game we love. There have always been diverse views on how to measure the game of baseball. How can you tell if this player or that is the best hitter, pitcher, fielder or baserunner? We use numbers of course, thousands, millions, who knows, maybe billions of numbers to gauge the value of players, specifically professional players, of what remains America’s pastime. They have changed over the years since 1869 when the Cincinnati Red Stockings played the first professional baseball game. The sport had been around a while before that. For example, there are tales of Rebel and Union soldiers laying down their arms to engage in a friendly competition. While I have no doubt that he appreciates the beauty of the game, it is the numbers that are the substance of Keith Law’s Smart Baseball. And he has the background to offer an informed opinion. He is a senior baseball writer for The Athletic, was a senior baseball writer for ESPN, wrote formerly for The Baseball Prospectus, and worked in the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays. He has many unkind things to say about some of the measures we have used for decades and decades as the basis for assessing the value of a given player. He takes pains to explain why this or that statistic offers a false image of a player’s true worth. His explanations are persuasive. For example, he takes umbrage at Batting Average as a measure of offensive worth, arguing that On-Base Percentage is a much better indicator. This is pretty much old news among baseball fans, but Law adds further tweaks, generating something that probably looks foreign to the casual fan. “wOBA” is not a typo. It stands for Weighted On Base Average, a more precision tool for measuring a player’s offensive production. He takes particular umbrage, as well he should, at the overvaluation of the Win for pitchers. Even the average fan knows that Wins are often assigned to pitchers who do not deserve them, and Losses given to pitchers who have performed admirably. One of the reasons for this, and a theme that permeates Law’s analysis, is that there is a mismatch in traditional baseball stats between team and individual analytics. A pitcher might deliver a no-hitter and still take a loss if his team musters no offense of its own. Not the pitcher’s fault. Likewise, a less than stellar pitching outing might be masked by a superior defense, or a particularly productive offense. Law also looks at the history of futility baseball has had attempting to come up with sane metrics for measuring fielding prowess. One of the big changes in baseball, of very recent vintage, is the broad introduction of Statcast. In the last few years, every major league stadium has been outfitted with advanced tech that allows measurements unavailable before. Things like exit velocity, home run distance, launch angle, pitch rotations per minute, perceived pitch speed. Law points out that this might inform how baseball executives’ evaluate players, but also how the tech might prove useful for medical purposes. For example, a decrease in the spin rate of a pitcher’s fastball might indicate fatigue or even injury. The amount of data being handled is staggering. Teams now must hire tech experts just to keep up with this new store of intel. Law can get a bit literal and harsh. You’ll hear announcers say a pitch must have looked like a beach ball to him, or that his confidence is through the roof. The problem with this myth, as with others, is that the evidence from reality shows that this effect either barely exists or doesn’t exist at all. It’s merely our brain’s attempts to find patterns in data that are pretty close to random.There is certainly room for a line between what qualifies as myth (Babe Ruth pointing for #60) and what is a fair application of metaphor. Griping about the latter goes too far. I found this tone present in the beginning parts of the book, but, thankfully, it tapered off as things got rolling. You will come away from reading Smart Baseball with a greater appreciation for some players, present and retired, than you had before, and will find your analytical toolkit significantly enhanced should you care to avail when considering why so-and-so is such a bum, or why whatshisname is so underappreciated, or why your team really, really should not trade Crash, particularly not for Nuke. I suppose there are many for whom these new measures will inform their decisions in Fantasy Baseball leagues of one sort or another. I consider myself a baseball aficionado somewhere in the upper middle of the fandom bell curve. I played a little, and have watched a lot. I have managed little league teams, and struggled with designing batting orders and fielding assignments. I have some appreciation for the uses of numbers to inform decision-making. I was never a sabermetrics geek, although I did apply some of those lessons in my managing. I can appreciate that new ways of looking at the sport are not intended as hostile attacks on the traditions of the game, but are intended to improve our understanding. In the same way that using a CT scan instead of an X-ray can offer a better, more detailed view of what is actually going on. Law has brought together a collection of tools that will be very useful for people who care about baseball. He has made clear where some flaws lie in our current stat-keeping, and shown how some of these errors can be fixed. Smart Baseball offers a very accessible and readable intro to new ways of seeing baseball, making a bit of sabermetrics understandable, without burying readers in mountains of data and cryptic diagrams. While it cannot offer the visceral thrill of a perfectly implemented steal of home, it can help fuel the satisfaction of readers who apply the tools offered here to predict when it will happen, and to be able to explain why. Review first Posted – April 21, 2017 Published – April 25, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You should know that his personal site is for things unrelated to sports. He has a blog on ESPN, but one must sign in to get the full benefit You can check out an excerpt from the book here Interviews -----Audio - The Poscast with Joe Posnanski – 53:52 -----Print – Fansided - Keith Law And The Business Of ‘Smart Baseball’ - by Chris Illuminati 6/24/17 - NY Times - a fascinating article on Statcast. It includes the surprising bit of intel that in 1926, in a post-season exhibition game, Babe Ruth is reported to have hit a home run 650 feet! The particular tickle for me is that this took place in Wilkes Barre, PA, my new digs. - That Was Hit a Country Mile, or 495 Feet if You’re Into Hard Data - by Filip Bondy 8/29/17 – NY Times - Why Are Some New Statistics Embraced and Not Others - by Jay Caspian King 4/13/18 - NY Times - How Do Athletes’ Brains Control Their Movements? - by Zach Schonbrun - Fascinating article. Maybe the next level in the expanding realm of baseball analysis It would seem to have almost nothing to do with their biceps muscles or fast-twitch fibers or even their vision, which, for most baseball players is largely the same. It would seem to have much more to do with the neural signals that impel our every movement. “It’s like saying people who can speak French very well have a very dexterous tongue,” John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It would be the wrong place to assign the credit.”...more |
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4.25
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really liked it
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May 14, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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4.10
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it was amazing
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Apr 28, 2018
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Apr 28, 2018
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4.20
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it was amazing
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Apr 10, 2018
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3.88
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it was amazing
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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4.47
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it was amazing
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Mar 18, 2018
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Mar 18, 2018
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4.17
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it was amazing
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Mar 20, 2018
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Mar 01, 2018
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3.88
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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3.97
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it was amazing
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Feb 06, 2018
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Feb 05, 2018
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3.44
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it was amazing
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Jan 10, 2018
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4.01
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it was amazing
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Jan 02, 2018
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4.02
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it was amazing
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Jan 30, 2018
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Dec 19, 2017
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4.22
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it was amazing
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Nov 30, 2017
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Aug 31, 2017
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3.96
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 30, 2017
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4.40
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 16, 2017
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3.57
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really liked it
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Aug 16, 2017
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Aug 16, 2017
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4.11
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it was amazing
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Aug 20, 2017
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Aug 10, 2017
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3.69
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really liked it
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Jul 19, 2017
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Jul 20, 2017
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3.64
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really liked it
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Jul 18, 2017
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Jul 18, 2017
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4.01
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really liked it
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May 23, 2017
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Jul 06, 2017
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3.96
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really liked it
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Mar 02, 2017
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Apr 20, 2017
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