Archives for February 2022

Monday, February 28, 2022

I want to talk about this idea of an evil Don Quixote. I’d like to call the idea that of the black Don Quixote, but that might be confused as a black man, and I don’t mean it in that way. I also don’t want it misunderstood. I therefore must find a better name to tag this idea. How about The Evil Don Quixote? Yes, that will do.

Don Quixote was, as Cervantes wrote and Man of La Mancha portrayed him, an old man befuddled by the world who saw things that weren’t there and imagined he was on a noble quest, a Spanish Mr. Magoo.

In Man of La Mancha there is that song that talks about being willing to fight and die for the noble cause. 

But what if the cause is not noble? What if Don Q has been mislead? What if in fact he is aiding an evil man or cynical criminal enterprise, what then?

It’s an intriguing question, I think, and one that is confronting us now. Of course, this is nothing new. Just as there are no new vices, there are no new evil political social movements. Only the names, titles, and faces change. As Joseph Campbell pointed out in The Masks of God, the name may change, but it’s the same old idea of god. On the other side of that coin is the more sinister anti-god, evil ideas cast as idealistic, conspiracies where there are none. In this anti-world people are made to be less than human so that one can think it is okay to abuse them.

By stoking fears and suggesting that some race, religion, or group is out to get: you, us, our nation – one can move a lot of people to act irrationally.

We are now seeing the result of that when these same people have to face their reality or choose between on of two “ideals.” 

Ayn Rand liked to write, over and over again, “check your assumptions, one of them is wrong.” Ta-dah. 

I have been reading a John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel “A Deadly Shade of Gold.” Somehow this one eluded my earlier searchings. MacDonald died in 1986. This novel is copyrighted 1965. Perhaps, he wrote it in ’64? What is interesting about MacDonald’s writing is how he so elegantly skewers Florida politics, land development and the national political scene. Here is a passage from page 325:

“Who?”

“Doctor Gordon Face, and his American Crusade. Oh, it’s very big lately. Lectures and tent shows and local television and so on. And special phone numbers to call anytime of day or night. The liberal-socialist-commy conspiracy that is gutting all the old time values. It has a kind of phonied-up religious fervor about it. And it is about ten degrees to the right of the Birchers. The president is selling the country down the river with the help of The Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense that attracts those people who are so dim-witted that the only way they can understand the world is to believe that it is all some kind of conspiracy. The most amusing thing about it is the way Dr. Face keeps plugging for virtue and morality. He wants to burn everything since Tom Swift, and he is not too certain about Tom. He wants a big crackdown on movies, books, plays, song lyrics, public dancing. And he wants to be the one to weed out the evil. …”

That was 1964 – ’65.

Carry on.

Saturday, February 26, 2022

I was thinking about how what Putin is trying to use to invade Ukraine may be used against him by both the Russian and the Ukrainian people. One friend of mine posted something that pointed out that Ukraine has been around a lot longer than Russia. Commentators have pointed out that Ukraine survived Stalin’s imposed starvation, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union. We are seeing much stronger resistance than anyone thought. One person in Kyiv has said what you aren’t seeing on TV are the Russian bodies in the street of which there are many, according to him.

Russia has been isolated, even by the allies it has under its control. Putin seems to not be all there. Some have reported he’s not the man of even a few years ago. All this leads me to wonder if the people will turn against him? Will his own armies say, “Enough.” Do those soldiers really want to kill people with whom they claim to be in common Russian background? 

Oligarchs are being sanctioned. What this means, I am told, is that they will not be able to travel to their favorite western playgrounds. Nor will their kids be able to go to those fancy prep schools. What happens when sweet 17 year old Olga comes home and says, “What the F are you doing Daddy?”

I am heartened to hear that Nato is putting their special forces folks in Poland on the border of Ukraine.

I wish I’d hear something about the imposition of a no fly zone over Ukraine. I also wonder if hit squads haven’t been dispatched to try and take out Putin? Or if Navalny will get busted out of prison and lead an uprising in Russia?

The Russian people seem to have made it pretty clear they don’t want this war. That goes for people inside Russia who have been protesting all across the country, and from athletes that are Russian participating outside of Russian.

Various sporting and cultural events have been moved. It seems Russia is alone and isolated. Will it be enough?

We’ll have to wait and see.

And then there is the Supreme Court Nominee, to say she is qualified is an understatement. Especially compared to the last two bozos the Republicans put on the Court. But leave it to them to accuse this woman of being too liberal, blah blah blah. Kind  of hard to make that point when the Senate has already confirmed her three times before for other lower court appointments.

Friday, February 25, 2022

I find it hard to believe that all the talking heads are asking what Putin wants.

Have they forgotten recent history?

Let’s review:

Ukraine was under the control of a Russian puppet dictator, who got thrown out.

However, when he was in power there was a huge scandal about Ukraine’s gas company.

There was a Russian fellow who had a job at that gas company.

No one knew what he did other than to skim money off the top and pocket it.

He got arrested in Italy. Bail was, I believe, $160,000,000.00.

He wrote a check and left for Austria where he has been ever since.

This is the same guy that Giuliani’s pals Igor and what’s his name were at Dulles Airport when they got arrested were going to go see. So was Rudy.

He has been linked to various cash infusions into our elections. Remember Rudy’s buds put lots of money into Trump’s election? Illegally.

This fellow in Austria is tied closely to Putin and that money gives Vlad a slush fund to finance stuff.

Let’s also remember that Trump’s Secretary of Commerce was on the board of a bank in Cyprus that was laundering money for the Russians and he himself was implicated in those transactions. Also, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, was laundering money for the Russians via New York real estate deals. During the campaign he was known to have shared internal polling with a Russian agent.

That Ukrainian Gas company hired Joe Biden’s son to try and get close to the Obama administration and to clean up their image. Biden went over to Ukraine to bolster support for that gas company to act more legitimately and to bolster the army (after said dictator was overthrown.)

So some say this is complicated. I say Really? What’s complicated?

Putin wants  a government in Ukraine that fauns over him that he can control. He wants to be able to skim money off any Ukrainian gas deals. He wants to return to the Soviet hegemony.

There are two people who seem to know what to do, and what they are talking about. One is Colonel Vindman, and the other is Hillary Clinton. Vindman wrote a piece in the Atlantic outlining what could be done and the opportunities the United States missed to help the Ukrainians. 

It would have been polite of Joe Scarborough to have let Vindman tell us what he would suggest rather than interrupt him and  prattle on about what he, Scarborough, thought Vindman was saying, and never give him a chance to say what he would have done and what we should do, but that’s not what he did. Like he does ever day to Mika he interrupted and talked over. This was especially impolite because the question Scarborough asked was what could the U.S. have done. Would have been good to hear a person who his spent his life studying this give us his opinion.

At least Joe shut up long enough to let Hillary speak. Remember Hillary said she would stand up to Putin? Yeah, not like that whiney bitch in Mira-la-Traitorvile or his former Secretary of State.

Oh and then a certain Media channel who has the word News in their name, yet isn’t, was quick to call out Biden before the invasion for fomenting a giant scam and saying how it wasn’t true and wasn’t going to happen. Then the next day when the invasion happened they said he hadn’t been strong enough in his response.

Classy.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Okay, I missed day 222222222 or whatever. 

So Ukraine has been invaded and the former president calls Mr. Putin a genius. His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo is parroting similar nonsense. What has happened to these guys? Meanwhile, Putin says it’s not an invasion but a peacekeeping mission. Peacekeeping from who? Himself?

One thing we could do is to join Russia in their peacekeeping mission and send in a crap load of personnel. It seems to be the only thing he understands.

But we are going the sanctions route. Okay, then freeze all the Russian money and interests, like the sports teams those oligarchs own. 

I’m outta here.

Wait. 

Last night on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC he introduced Barb McQuade and a 26 or 28 page “model prosecution” document she wrote on the Orange One (OO?) or (TOO?)

It’s apparently what a prosecutor would write up to make the case to go after someone.

Here’s the link to the episode:

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/mcquade-memo-details-jan-6-criminal-charges-trump-could-face-133810245505

I found the link to the document on a site called “JustSecurity”

United States v. Donald Trump

Read and Review.

Later.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Olympics are almost over. Bobsledders were still bobbing yesterday as were the curlers. This morning I watched some of the closing ice skating performance. The girl who won the gold in figure skating looks so young. Nathan Chen did a series of quads and finished with a back flip. “I didn’t know he could do that!” remarked the commentator, probably, Tara Lipinski. I remember a black woman who was a skater 30 some years ago. She did a back flip during a practice and got reprimanded. Some thought it endangered other skaters a I think was allowed in performances. She also did quads in practices.

NBC rolled final credits after thanking the staff that put it all together, 2,000 to 3,000 people and three thousand hours of video. Yikes. The final credits rolled on the right side of the screen while the left showed highlights. I couldn’t take my eyes off all the memorable moments.

Aside from stunning performances there were also tales of redemption and dealing with disappointment. 

Mikaela Shiffirin’s interviews were especially memorable. How she had to think about each event she missed out on. How she dealt with it were examples for people to take home. I saw an article from the President of Barnard College that was excellent on this topic. Top athletes do what they do on muscle memory, almost unconsciously. Replaying your mistakes and errors over and over again can lead to going down deeper and deeper. Rather, it is better to put them in context of a longer run. Hopefully, Shiffirin will do that, and she appears to already have done it. 

I think it was on the third time she missed a gate she was asked what went wrong. Nothing, she seemed to say. She said she was skiing really well and the practice runs had been really good. She didn’t know what happened at that gate. She was doing what she intended. I notice other skiers had a problem at that gate and one of the commentators mentioned that perhaps there was a slight hole at that spot, which was unseen.

I was amazed at the level of performance these athletes are at. One snowboarder withdrew from a competition because she was told having the word PRADO on the bottom of her board was not allowed. This after she had already used it in another competition. She covered it up with magic marker, but it so slowed her board that she didn’t feel she could safely compete.

In the men’s halfpipe finals the wind came across the pipe so hard that it caused swirling and if a contestant got caught in a gust they could literally be blown off course, despite the large canvas wind screen that was erected down one side of the 650 foot pipe. Those winds resulted in some terrible mishaps on some runs. 

I hope that some of the Russian skaters are able to get out from under the oppressive coaches and state machinery that seems only interested in their performance and not their development. 

Then there were things I chose to at first misunderstand and then revel in the thought.

Then there were things I chose to at first misunderstand and then revel in the thought.

There was a hash tag that read something about kites, then I realized it was a conflation “ski” and “test” or maybe “team” which I misread. It wasn’t kites but skitest. Get it? do you see kites in there?

In the men’s final hockey match between Russia and Finland, it was Walmart against Khrushchev. Well, that’s what I heard. Turns out there’s a guy on Finland named “Walmark,” close enough. Never did figure out the Russian guy’s real name.

Moving on to Ukraine, there are photos of a military pontoon bridge across a river in Belarus pointed directly at Ukraine’s capital city. I don’t think Vlad wants a few provinces. He wants the whole thing.

And dear old Donnie, what can I say? He is close to being broke in the real estate biz, but he has now parlayed his political stuff into announcing a social media platform that suckers, I mean intelligent investors, can buy into. This is a perfect transition for him. Many think politicians are selling heated air. Others think there is a l of software out there being touted that doesn’t exist. It’s known as vapor ware. Add in a social media component to a political scam artist and it’s a whole lot of nothing. Talk about sand castles in the air!

Of course he has a few problems dogging him. He keeps losing in court. We still have a few institutions that depend on evidence and fact. Don’t know how long that will hold up, but so far DJT has lost every court grievance. He’s been compelled to testify in the New York tax fraud case. Don’t know how that works. What if he doesn’t show? etc. etc. etc.

Rudy is supposedly cooperating with the Jan 6th committee. Donnie Brasso, one of Trump’s minions who if I’m not mistaken was caught funneling illegal campaign contributions from foreign countries to Republican campaigns. Brasso is now cooperating.

Everyone keeps asking, “when is he going to get arrested?” Soon, soon, we are told.

Also, “What is main Justice doing in this regard?” Arresting Jan 6th rioters. Are they crawling up the food chain or not? We have no hint they are. 

Now the Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Steve Bannon got arrested is now claiming he’s broke and filed for bankruptcy protection. There is a complicated bunch of entities where his assets have been funneled off to that are being untangled, however the point remains he and others are now wriggling around trying to avoid their fates. 

And DJT and Ivanka and Jr are subpoenaed to show up in New York to explain how an asset can be worth two very different values at the same time. It’s not clear to me what happens if they don’t show.

And there has been Fox, which was all over a claim that Hillary had sent people to infiltrate the Trump campaign. Where did they get this tip? Why from something that independent counsel left over from the Trump admin had filed. It’s sounded bad. Then the same counsel who filed these papers in court said various news sources got it completely wrong. The words and language Fox used don’t appear in the document at all. Huh? Honest mistake? Well, let me ask you this, if an organization that made such claims was a reputable news organization wouldn’t they correct the record? Yes, of course. But Fox is silent. That’s about all one needs to know about them. But let me continue. Remember when Jon Stewart made fun of them for using the wrong crowd picture of a rally? The rally they were pushing had a much smaller size than the picture they showed. Sean Hannity said it was “an honest mistake.” I’m waiting for Trevor Noah to grill them.

And to finish up with Fox I attended a luncheon wherein a person said that no one could pass through the Van Allen Belt to get to outer space. He went on to ask why no one had been to the moon in years. (Maybe, the two statements were the other way around.) So I did an exhaustive search. Okay, I put in “Van Allen Belt” into google and lo and behold there’s an article about the very thing.

Discovery of the Van Allen Belt goes back to the days of the earliest satellites: Sputnik, Echo, Sputnik II, and Telstar. the Van Allen Belts are two large donut shaped areas of radiation surrounding the Earth held in place by the Earth’s radiation. 

In 2004 a person sent a letter to Dr. Van Allen which said based on a 204 Fox documentary that people could not survive passing through these belts. Nasa scientists knew the radiation levels of these belts to be too weak to hurt an astronaut. Nevertheless, they provided screening and they charted a course that avoided most of both belts. Van Allen wrote on a letter sent to him asking him to verify the veracity of Fox’s claims from their show. He wrote, “claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense.”

So this nuttiness has been with us for quite awhile. We unfortunately are getting stupider as a nation.

And before I got to post this Putin has invaded Ukraine. He says they are peace keepers. Right. I think we should aid in the peacekeeping efforts and deploy some of our peacekeepers. I think we have a missile called that. We could start there. Then a few aviation exercises showing planes practicing knocking out tanks.  Purely an exercise, nothing to worry about.