Gratitude Monday: Honored dead

It’s Memorial Day, the national day dedicated to the remembrance of those who gave their lives in service to the country. For more than 150 years, the “service” has been specific to the military, but this year it seems much broader than that.

I don’t recall such an extension on Memorial Day of 2002—perhaps because the 3000 or so lost during the 9/11 attacks had been dead for eight months, and we were ramping up another hot war. This time, we’ve recorded 100,000 deaths in the last three months, and the meter’s still running.

(The numbers of both cases and mortalities are almost certainly underreported, for many reasons, both administrative and political.)

For years, the Washington Post printed the names and photos of servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whenever they had enough deaths to fill up the double-page center of the front section, they’d publish them. I don’t suppose many in the Shrub administration paid much attention, but it was important for people to see the names and faces of the fallen.

Yesterday the New York Times filled its entire front page with the names of as many covid19 victims as they could; one thousand. Names, ages, location. For some of the dead, they also include brief insights into their lives—sang in her choir, saved Jewish families from the Nazis, liked his bacon and hash browns crispy.

Inside the edition, Dan Barry writes, “Imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has now been wiped from the American map.”

That city is going to increase in population before we’re done this year; before we’re even done with the summer. And almost all of the deaths will have been needless, the direct result of our national government abdicating its duty to the citizens who elected them.

So on this Memorial Day, as the toll mounts, I am grateful for the journalists and editors who do their damned job, reminding us that the statistics—whatever kind of “per capita” matters to you—were lives cut short. They were mothers, grandfathers, sisters, sons; gifts to their families, friends and communities. They are lost to us now, and we need to remember that.

One for the books

I think we all need this story:

When the owner of an independent bookshop in San Diego unexpectedly had to have open-heart surgery—with his wife in attendance at the hospital and their one employee out sick with the flu—people in the independent bookseller community kept the shop open for a week, until the sick employee was back.

They came from shops around San Diego, and from as far away as LA. To help a competitor. The customers never knew anything at all was wrong. 

And they’re still filling in while the owner’s recovering.

Book people, FTW.

Storm rising

Here in the District They Call Columbia we’ve got dire predictions of a serious snow-plus-ice-plus-rain, starting in the very early hours of today. Virginia DOT trucks have already treated NoVa roads to a couple of passes of brine in preparation. Which—as I look out on my back yard under an inch and with huge flakes dropping more—turns out to have been a good idea.

My cluster parking lot has still not been plowed, though, so I'm not getting out.

Being a fourth-generation Californian, I wig out some when I hear these sorts of forecasts. So yesterday when I got in to work, I checked it out on WaPo. Why, yes indeedy—here are the visuals from around 0700:

Snow:

Then ice:

I also cast my eye over the comments and I was glad I was the only person around when I saw this:

Because welcome to the District.

We will remember them

One hundred years ago today, representatives of the Second German Reich—their armies exhausted, their Kaiser abdicated, their people starving, their cities roiling with revolution—agreed to surrender terms dictated by Allied leaders. At 0500 in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest, they signed the Armistice, which went into effect six hours later.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, guns fell silent across Europe, and after more than four years of total war, the nations stood in stunned relief.

World War I gave us chemical warfare (Germany first, then the rest to keep up with the Huns), genocide (Armenians, by Turks), aerial bombing of civilian targets (Germans on French and British cities), unrestricted (meaning: shooting at everything in the water) submarine warfare (Germany), introduction of tanks (Britain)—all the mod cons of Twentieth Century life. They’d be amplified by technological advancements in the next global conflagration, and then refined in the “smaller” wars of the past 60 years.

In my opinion, it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring, defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and political leaders were ignorant (woefully or willfully? I don’t know; maybe some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was costing as the war wore on.

And after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to stay in it until we win.”

Right up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the Teutons were entitled.

Meanwhile the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of. They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.

And so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated throughout the Twentieth Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the ruling-class youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.

But we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great War. The nearly farcical assassination that started the war laid a pretty straight path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70 years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement. "Germany started it; the rest of us are victims." 

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with it. This is not over.

The Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war, picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still reverberating on the global stage.

Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

Well, by 1918, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. (And since the break-up of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d look at Ukraine and be nervous.) The British empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war. And France—well, a steady retreat as well.

For the United States, it marked our emergence as a major player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there was no turning back.

For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off the First World War. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the 20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal obligations or of the actual cost of wars) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to storm the camps of the veterans of that war.

But we still preferred to dismiss it from our collective memory. Aside from emulating Britain and France in retrieving remains of an unidentifiable soldier from the cemeteries of Northern France and interring them at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery (Britain’s Unknown lies in Westminster Abbey; France’s beneath the Arc de Triomphe), we scurried back and declined to join the League of Nations. America first, eh?

Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society, however, although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months. That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded that all your people step up to the plate for a total war, it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and send them back to the kitchen or the rear of the bus forevermore.

The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in 1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward came in 1948 when Harry S Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.

Truman had been an artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.

This weekend in Europe, there are public and private commemorations of the Armistice that was signed in Compiègne 100 years ago. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron unveiled a memorial there; Pierre Trudeau paid tribute to Canadian soldiers at Vimy Ridge. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly represented us at a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery near the battlefield of Belleau Wood; Commander Bone Spurs declined to venture out in the rain to honor the fallen. (Well, he is umbrella-challenged…)

It’s fortuitous that the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice falls on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. The Royals and Commonwealth dignitaries will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. There are no longer any survivors from 1918, but veterans from World War II and subsequent wars will march (or be wheeled) past. There will be two minutes of silence precisely at 1100, and then half-muffled church bells around the country will toll for the fallen.

(Throughout the past four years, the Brits have done an amazing job of honoring the war that broke the back of their empire. Starting in August 2014, with the Lights Out campaign and the Blood-Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London, it progressed to a poignant series of public and private commemorations of the centenary of the opening of the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in 2016 that included a performance art piece called We’re Here Because We’re Here of men in WWI uniforms appearing at train stations across the country just as they would have done on their way to Somme. And then there was the statue of the soldier sculpted from Flanders mud, who melted under rain at Trafalgar Square a hundred years on from the Battle of Passchendaele. Finally, for the past week there has been a light and sound installation in and around the Tower of 10,000 torches lit each night by the Warders, accompanied by a new choral work.)

Also today there will be a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe at which I hope to God that moral and physical coward 45 doesn’t shove any of the world leaders out of his way as he impatiently waits for his meeting with Putin. At least he’s not here desecrating Arlington.

Ah, well, perhaps I take these things too seriously. I’ve spent too much time walking the battlefields and graveyards of Northern France and Belgium internalizing the loss they represent. I can think of no more evocative musical piece to commemorate this centenary than “Flowers of the Forest,” the powerful centuries-old lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British soldiers home to their final rest.

It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of the Somme. And if for no other reason, renders me a sobbing wreck.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them

We must remember them.

Order in the court

We here in the US have our share of bizarre court cases, but I have to say that the Brits pretty much wipe the floor with, well, everyone when it comes to over-the-top, premier-league weird. Viz:

I mean, in most places a [male] lawyer apprehended in a G-string and fishnet stockings, in a random woman’s bedroom while loaded would be enough to make the evening news. But in Southwark (London), no, no, no—guy’s got to get off by claiming he thought the woman was a panda.

As one does.

I mean, the clipping doesn't say whether the defendant got done on the breaking and entering or drugs charges, just that he avoided the stigma of having a conviction for a sexual offense.

Small mercies, eh?.

Tremendously red sky at morning

As of time of writing, it’s looking like Florence—that tremendously big and tremendously wet hurricane swirling around the Atlantic—looks like it’s going to strike more toward the Carolinas and Georgia, as opposed to the Carolinas and Virginia. This means that I’ve got a few more days to stock up on bottled water, because they’re still predicting some rain next week.

I also have time to lay in a few bottles from the ABC store.

Here is an official image from the National Weather Service from Tuesday, depicting Florence’s approach to the Carolinas. I am not making this up, it’s a legit image from the NWS:

A couple of things: for—well, ever, really—pols in North Carolina have bashed the warnings about the effects of climate change are having on all kinds of things, including storms. (They aren’t alone, of course; Florida’s another one, and it’s discovering that climate change is real, and it’s biting them in their all-important tourism industry. Boofuckinghoo.) So they’ve not only not done anything about controlling things like carbon emissions and coastal over-development, they’ve not done anything to ramp up hurricane disaster relief or recovery.

(I’m betting that they’re going to go with their hands out to the feds for those latter two, expecting blue state taxes to pay for their reckless disregard for science and their feckless fiscal policies. The legislature is white, so I’m also betting they’ll get it from the kleptocrat’s regime. Even so, FEMA has a $10M shortfall in its disaster response coffers, since that amount was transferred to ICE to build cages for children at the border. Cadet Bone Spurs thought only brown folks are affected by hurricanes.)

The other thing is that the luck of the draw gave this hurricane a feminine name. So it’s really cool that the lost-causing, climate science-denying, racist, misogynistic goobers of North Carolina are about to be thoroughly rogered by a Category 4 tremendously big and tremendously wet and tremendously powerful bitch of a storm.

Future, delivered

I’ve loved meal delivery services since the 90s, when TakeOut Taxi brought yummies from a variety of restaurants in the environs of the District They Call Columbia. It expanded on the pizza or Chinese delivery from individual eateries, and it was a boon for everything from coming home from work to an empty refrigerator to being able to call for a full dinner as you started cleaning up from a day of home improvement. By the time you got out of the shower and opened the wine, your wonderful dinner was at the door.

TakeOut Taxi went to hell in this century. I don’t know why. Their fees rose at the same time as their service just crapped out. It must have taken 10-15 years for the Uber Eats model to revive the notion of getting whatever you fancy delivered in accordance with some central SLA. The added benefit is using an app, so you don’t have to deal with cash or credit cards.

(Although, c’mon—don’t be a dick. Tip the driver.)

Well, since all these appy things are deemed the purview of Millennials, it’s no surprise that someone (UBS) has done a study, reported in Forbes, that announces that the young’uns are ordering in at a rate of knots. It goes on to posit that if this sort of thing continues, it could mean the Death of Kitchens (and Kitchen Remodelers), Supermarkets, Packaged Food Manufacturers and Life As We Know It.

The implication is clear: Millennials are ruining things again. Which certainly speaks to the clickbait strategy of Forbes.

I found out about this on Twitter (as per usual), from this tweet:

My response to it is that I’m not a Millennial, but as someone who works full days with hourlong commutes tacked on to the beginning and ending of each day, if I could afford to order delivered meals (or even takeout, although I have to say that delivery beats having to drive, park, pick up and schlep home), I’d do it each work night. From a different restaurant every night.

But I can’t. I take my breakfasts and lunches to work because even getting the cheapest possible thing at local “fast-casual” places or food trucks means $10/day, and $50/week is not in my budget. (I take in ground coffee and use a refillable K-cup at the employee-donated Keurig machine; my employer does not provide coffee or tea, and a small coffee at Peet’s, Cosi or any of the other options is still $3.)

So, I pointed out that these kinds of stories are pure rubbish. And if Millennials are feeling murderous, perhaps they could start by taking out Forbes.

Monkey business

Let’s have a break from local copperheads and Rams; time for a commercial break. So I’ll give you a couple of bits of business news.

This week, General Electric—that erstwhile powerhouse of American blue-chip manufacturing—was tossed out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its place on the exchange will be taken by Walgreen’s.

GE was a founding member of the Dow, so this has got to bite. As recently as the 90s, under CEO Jack Welch, the company was held up as an example of how to company. One of their divisions once flew me up to Connecticut for an interview; I wasn’t offered the job but I never held it against them. However, in recent years, they’ve pretty much screwed the pooch and last year it was the worst-performing stock in the Dow.

They put out a “things are going to plan” statement after the banishment was announced, but the plan involves a lot of pulling in of horns and selling off of businesses, from the railroad to the lightbulb divisions. Sad times.

And at the other end of the business weird-shit-o-meter, yesterday the Kleptocrat might have overdosed on Ambien, causing him to accuse those wily Canadians of…well, I’ll let him speak for himself, in his own word salad:

(I'm not even going to comment on #SpaceCadetBoneSpurs' announcement that he's creating another branch of the military—separate but equal—to conquer and occupy space. And he's calling it Space Force. Because of course.)

It took GE 120 years to screw the pooch as badly as the stable genius Chaos Monkey. God help us all.

Everlasting stream

After this crack-brained week, I’m not quite sure how to view Friday. So, two things to brighten the weekend:

The New York Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against the Kleptocrat’s bigly bogus foundation for a whole spectrum of fraud, surprising absolutely no one with three synapses firing in sequence. She has also sent referrals to the Federal Elections Commission and the IRS, basically inviting them to start digging for election and tax violations. 

Anent this: let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Second: it’s apparently chipmunk season—I’ve seen them in my backyard, in the ‘hood and on my walks. They are such cute little buggers; you cannot watch them without smiling.

Peace out.

If you can't do the time...

You may be aware that, since roughly January of last year, the banner of the Washington Post has included this tagline:

I’m sure it burns the bacon of Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops and all his GOPig gang. At least, those who can read.

However, WaPo’s got nothing on the Aspen Daily News (circulation 14,500):

People: this is what your grannies (and Baretta) have been telling you for generations. Will you never learn?

The price of the morning paper

You may not be aware of this, but today is World Press Freedom Day, a UN declaration meant to drive awareness of the contributions made to civilization by members of the Fourth Estate around the world. Sadly, in 2018, the environment in which journalists work is increasingly hostile, encouraged by dictators and democratically-elected dictator wannabes on all continents.

Thomas Jefferson once said of democracy, “Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” Well, times have certainly changed, eh?

Reporters without Borders puts the United States at 45^th out of its annual listing of 180 nations WRT freedom of the press. That means we’re behind all Nordics (who pretty much have a lock on the top slots), Burkina Faso, Namibia, Estonia, Samoa, Surinam, and all Western European nations except for Italy.

Woo-hoo—we haven’t killed any journalists this year. So far. But the Kleptocrat and his fellow info-phobes are pushing for ever tighter restrictions on press freedom, and the threat is very real. He’s declared journalists “enemies of the American people” (a phrase borrowed from Joseph Stalin, although I’m betting that he has no sense of historical irony, since he has no sense of history); they’re subject to arrest while covering events; they’ve been physically assaulted, as well as being doxed and receiving death threats. Increasingly US reporters’ electronic devices are subject to search at US borders, and foreign ones are denied entry.

You’ll no doubt recall his campaign rallies that featured reporters penned in while his cultists threatened them, with his gleeful egging them on.

Meanwhile, one of Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops’ besties and role models, Rodrigo Duterte (The Philippines, number 133), famously announced, “Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.” The definition of “son of a bitch” amounts to, “if you print things I don’t like,” which of course is echoed in the White House today. Unaccountably, Duterte hasn’t executed any reporters this year, either, although one was murdered a couple of days ago by person or persons unknown.

Vladimir Putin (Russia, number 148) also hasn’t officially killed any journalists this year, but many have been murdered in crimes that go unpunished, and he’s got a lot of reporters and bloggers in jail.

In general, bringing news to your doorstep, your TV or your device is a dangerous business. Last week alone, nine journalists were killed in Kabul in a bombing attack that appeared to target them; another was shot shortly thereafter. Last month three reporters and their driver were kidnapped and murdered in Ecuador. Another three have been killed in India since the beginning of the year. The global toll last year was 82 murdered; so far this year 32 gave been killed, and we’re not even halfway through the twelvemonth.

Here’s a graphic from Reporters Without Borders:

Most of these journalists aren’t even officially war correspondents; it’s just that—these days—the line between combat and non-combat zones has blurred, literally and figuratively. It’s an appalling thought that we here in the land of the First Amendment are sinking into shithole status, thanks to the ministrations of the GOPigs, but here we are.

Yes, I know that there's plenty wrong with the basket of odds and sods that constitutes "the media" these days. And there are plenty of propagandists passing themselves off as journalists. Moreover, the whole business model of delivering news and commentary has suffered multiple body blows during the Internet Age, and it's often hard to tell news from entertainment. (And don't even get me started on that bastard known as "infotainment". Nonetheless, Mr. Jefferson was right.)

Something I recall from my days working on a daily paper is that journalists outdrink just about any class of professionals (including the three branches of the military I’ve been associated with)—with the possible exception of cops. I don’t know about you, but this evening I believe I’ll lift a glass to those stalwarts who risk their safety and their lives to keep me informed. God love ya, all of ya.

Reprisals start at dawn

You know, with all the money that Jeff Bezos has to support the work of The Washington Post, you’d think that some of it could be spent on copy editors. But—as evidenced by their online presence once or twice a week—you’d be wrong.

Viz:

And if they’re not going to cough up a few bob for copy editors, perhaps they could hold lunch ‘n learns to teach reporters the difference between reprise and reprisals.

Frontline

Covering the White House is a tough beat—and that was the case before the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters descended upon it. These days you’re constantly trying to decide whether you need to mainline coffee or Scotch, just to make your deadlines, given the constant stream of shite coming out of the West Wing.

Actor Tom Hanks gets it, so yesterday he sent the press corps a spiffy new espresso machine, causing the best news to ooze out of 1600 since 18 January.

I enjoyed the tweets that responded to the report. This photo, for example, drew horror at the Styrofoam cup, along with comments to the effect that the machine is off-limits to McClatchy reporters, who only deserve instant coffee.

There also was appreciation for the note that accompanied the gift—Hanks is a well-known collector of typewriters.

Although controversy raged over his use of the Oxford comma, a violation of AP style.

If you look closer, Hanks includes a cartoon from Pulitzer Prize-winning Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who—along with Ernie Pyle—gave Americans the closest look at the ordinary GI in the Second World War. The cartoon is one of many that enraged General George S. Patton, in much the same way (and for many of the same reasons) that the White House press corps enrages the Cheeto-in-Chief. The reference also pokes fun at how news reports don't always hit the mark.

This will be the third high-end coffee machine that Hanks has contributed to the upholders of the First Amendment in the White House over the years. For this reason, I’m willing to overlook that Oxford comma thing.

Besides: Tom Hanks.

Wedding terror

I think this story has moved way beyond the Royal Wedding; I’m talking, of course, about the millinery confection that Princess Beatrice wore to the nuptials.

She—or her hat—has become an Internet meme. It’s even made an appearance on the heads of the Administration team monitoring the Abbottabad raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Where else but the Internet are you going to use “Princess Beatrice”, “hat” and “Osama Bin Laden” in a single sentence?

And now the hat (original, I presume) is going to be auctioned on eBay to raise money for charity. 

Strange commerce

Apparently 2016 is the Year of No Copy Editors. Although I suppose AOL in all its permutations can’t be considered the kind of media that cares about communications. Their primary focus is on getting clicks.

At any rate, here’s something from the landing page that I found…well, bizarre:

Which is what their headline writer should have used, because—even though I don’t give a toss about who this Krauthammer guy is, or what advice he might be giving the Kleptocrat—the advice was not, in fact, related to commerce.

Just more right-wing crackpottery.

As for the copy editors—wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying your leisure. Some of us miss you sorely. Others, obviously, never knew you were around.

Love in the news

Yeah, let’s take a swipe at one of the much-reviled mainstream media, but this time for good, solid reason.

Christmas Eve dinner and complex card game with friends, then Boxing Day party with a complex game of Catchphrase plus a 45-minute drive home late last night left me crawling into work this morning feeling a bit like Bob Cratchit telling Scrooge, “I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”

So I was trawling Washington Post this morning, trying to ease myself back into work, and lookee what I found: a frisnic (well, I don’t think it really qualifies as a “story”) in their Style section about (and by) someone who used Tinder to find what appears to be more than a one-off hookup. 

Well, yippee.

However, what piqued my real interest was the headline in the left-hand rail teaser:

Fiancé, as you well know, is the male half of the betrothed couple. I looked at the writer’s name and thought, “Well, isn’t that very post-Obergefell v. Hodges?”

Okay, no, that’s not what I thought. I thought, “Oh, WaPo, WaPo—do you have no editors of any stripe who understand the whole fiancé-fiancée thing? Is your copy-editing algorithm so pig-ignorant that it doesn’t even flag this for a human?”

So I clicked on the link, because I wanted to see how many corrections appeared in the comments. As it happened, there were no comments, but here’s how someone or something “fixed” the head:

Well, what do I know—maybe “wifé” is a whole thing, and I’m just behind the times.

Thank you, WaPo. For I can now continue to make rather merry.

UPDATE: as of 1400 today, this is what has been showing for at least three hours (they changed the head, but didn't reload the article, because "wife" still shows in the URL): 

I may be making rather merry, but inside I'm weeping for civilization.

The wheel's still in spin

Man—you talk about an October surprise: the Nobel Prize committee announced yesterday that it has awarded the 2016 prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. You can debate if you want to about whether he’s a world-class poet; he’s sure as hell captured the zeitgeist of generations of people for the last five decades.

(And, look: if you're down with the prize going to Hemingway, you got no squawk with it going to Dylan.)

I’m more open to the question about Dylan as a performer: the one time I shelled out good money to go to one of his concerts, he came out on stage, played and sang with a zombie style and literally when he wasn’t doing either of those he turned his back to the audience. Evidently that was a phase he was going through, but it sucked.

Also—the guy definitely did not hit songwriting homers every time he came up to bat. Case in point would be "Don't Think Twice (It's All Right)". I expect it's intended to be the anthem of the free-wheelin' yout of the 60s, but all I've ever heard was irresponsible claptrap. And my reaction to the lines, "I wish there was something you could do or say/To try to make me change my mind and stay" is to tell him, "fuck you and the horse you're riding away on." Because who needs that kind of tsuris?

On the other hand, I’m one of those generations that have his lyrics woven throughout their lives. It would be impossible for me to pick my “favorite” Dylan, but here are some that I have embraced wholeheartedly.

Naturally, I first heard “My Back Pages” sung by The Byrds. And at that time in my life I didn’t understand what the refrain was about, it was just deep, you know? It was Dylan, man. Here’s a version a whole lotta legends got together to sing at Dylan’s 30^th Anniversary Concert more than 20 years ago:

And yes: that’s Eric Clapton screwing up the refrain.

Another song that’s been at times a lifeline is “Forever Young”. I first heard Joan Baez sing it at a concert in Illinois. But here’s a cover by Norah Jones that may have displaced Baez in my heart:

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard “I Shall Be Released” and felt, “Yeah—any day now…”? Here’s Chrissie Hynde knocking it out of Madison Square Garden at the 30^th Anniversary concert:

And one more from that concert: Tracy Chapman singing possibly the most iconic of Dylan’s works:

One way or another, the order is rapidly fadin', and the times they are indeed a-changin’.

Semper fi

Here’s a story that totally messes with the narrative put forward by the Republican presidential candidate: an Iraqi refugee, a woman, who is serving in the very military that he dodged five times in his youth.

Amanda H. Issa first encountered Marines as a child in Mosul, where she admired all the qualities that the candidate does not possess: discipline, sacrifice, comradeship, skill… So after a period in a refugee camp in Turkey, she and her family came to this country in 2011, settling in Michigan. Since then she’s graduated from high school and junior college, and joined the Marines she so admired as a child.

Ironically, during her bootcamp training at Parris Island earlier this year, Issa suffered a foot injury on a conditioning hike. It was so bad that USMC doctors told her she could be separated from the service. Issa refused to consider that and was graduated as PFC last month. Unlike the candidate, who used bone spurs to get his multiple deferments from the draft.

And she’s the kind of person that buffoon and his followers would like to exclude from our country.

It's 2016: do you know where your money is?

Here are some numbers from the Wells Fargo & Company widespread fraudulent practices that brought CEO John Stumpf to Capitol Hill yesterday.

- Phony accounts created without customers’ knowledge or permission: 565,443 credit cards, 1.5 million deposit accounts.

- Fees charged to customers/victims over a period of years: $400,000 and counting (including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees)

- Credit scores lowered or ruined: unknown

- Fines assessed to WFC by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: $185 million, which they’ll find between the cushions in the sofas in the executive lounge 

- Low-level bank employees fired…two weeks ago: 5300

- Senior managers (or even mid-level ones) who’ve had their salary, bonus or job security affected: bloody sod all.

Stumpf spent about an hour dodging questions at a Senate hearing, mostly from Democrats; Republicans may have been busy planning their next statement on why they’re not considering the President’s nominee to SCOTUS. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gave Stumpf an earful, as he kept maintaining that he and other executives knew nothing about the systemic practices, even after they launched a half-hearted “investigation” into allegations…back in 2013, and that it’s up to WFC’s board to make any, you know, decisions on whether anyone with a C or a V in their title should expect a lower bonus this year. Not his.

(Warren used words on Stumpf that he is probably and surprisingly unused to hearing. "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission." Warren has a bigger set of brass ones than all 99 of her colleagues in the Senate have rolled together.)

No, he doesn't know anything about making monetary decisions, as the CEO of a major financial institution. “I’m not an expert in compensation,” he said.

But I’ll bet he checks his direct deposit notifications religiously and accounts for every penny in bonus and executive entitlements.

I wonder if his accounts are with WFC?

Stumpf’s disclaimer and crocodile apology (“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public. I want to apologize for violating the trust our customers have invested in Wells Fargo. And I want to apologize for not doing more sooner to address the causes of this unacceptable activity.”) follows the usual pattern for his ilk. He’s not sorry that his company of 265,000 employees embarked on a multi-year predation of the most vulnerable of its individual customers; after all, think of all those years he was raking in his salary and bonus. He’s not even sorry that they got caught at it. He’s only sorry that it’s looking like there might be some negative consequences to him personally.

He doesn’t give a rat’s about anyone else, up or down the food chain.

Those numbers at the top of this post? None of them is of the least concern to Stumpf. The only one that matters is that he keeps his $19.3 million annual package.

You know what’s really wonderful about all this? As in “I wonder what the actual fuck is going on”? That it’s 2016, nine years after all those too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages were first exposed as engaging in industrial-strength long-term fraud. (And, when caught, went all Uriah Heep in the company of their multitudes of attorneys.) 

And yet here we are again.

WTAF.