Capitalism 101

Evidently, Boeing charges its customers extra if they want safety features that could have prevented the two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft. That’s kind of like Toyota charging extra if you want brakes that work.

Nearly 350 people dead. What a business model.

Having a cow and away with the fairies

Lordy, we seem to have moved permanently into the ghetto of Crazytown.

Only a week ago I thought we’d achieved the pinnacle of idiocy, at least for March. But, hey—turns out we were only at the base camp and had another 500 meters to climb.

Because the Britain Formerly Known As Great is about to carpet bomb its economy and lay waste its future because Prime Minister Theresa May is stuck in a permanent Groundhog Day loop trying to get Parliament to approve the Brexit agreement she struck with the European Union. Her strategy: keep bringing the same damned “deal” to the same damned Parliament that vetoed it by historic margins, apparently in hopes that the lunacy fairies will have sprinkled the MPs with amnesia dust so they will change their votes and support it.

Well, she would be, except the Speaker of the House nixed bringing the same damned deal over and over to the same damned Parliament without any visible changes. So now she’s asking the EU to give her an extension of three months to enlist more lunacy fairies to carpet bomb the House of Commons (or maybe just the grotesquely inaptly-named Democratic Ulster Party, whose sole purpose in political life is to prop up the Protestant Ascendancy like in the good old days of Oliver Cromwell) with amnesia dust.

Like three months is going to make a blind bit of difference.

But hey—the Tories are getting help. From Uday, who got someone with the understanding of English to plant an opinion piece in the Torygraph about how May should have taken his old man's advice on how to Brexit for fun and profit. Man—I even feel sorry for the Conservatives, that they have to put up with this ludicrous guff from the What A Maroon family.

Meanwhile, the Chaos Monkey in the White House is sulking because he “didn’t get thank you’d” for “approving” the funeral last year for Senator John McCain, and he’s in simultaneous Twitter spats with Meghan McCain (over his disparagement of her father) and George Conway, the husband of Klepto operative and alternative facts proponent Kellyanne. Conway has been a thorn in Kapitan Kompromat’s keister for a while. This week he tweeted screenshots of the DSM 5’s clinical diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which prompted even more deranged tweets out of the White House than usual, rather proving Conway’s point.

And that slimeworm Devin Nunes, who can’t be arsed to do any work in the House of Representatives that might dislodge his lips from Kaptain Kompromat’s keister has filed a lawsuit against Twitter and three Twitter accounts—seeking $250M in compensatory and $350M in punitive damages because the three accounts say mean things about him. 

We need a state funeral for irony.

One of the objectionable tweets cited in the complaint was Devin Nunes' Mom calling Nunes a "presidential fluffer and a swamp rat." Devin Nunes' Cow averred that "Devin's boots are full of manure" and that he's "whey in over his head in crime." 

But here’s the grand thing: two of the tweeters are parody accounts (Devin Nunes’ Mom and Devin Nunes’ Cow—the slimeworm’s cover story being his family dairy farm near Fresno that they quietly sold—in 2006—so they could move to Iowa and hire a steady stream of undocumented laborers to work the enterprise on the cheap). The Mom account has been deactivated, but the Cow is still going strong.

And—as of yesterday, a day after the ridiculous suit was filed—the Cow has thousands more followers than the slimeworm.

Also, many other accounts have changed their names to things like Devin Nunes’ Cow’s Mom, Devin Nunes’ Moose and the like. Republicans may not be able to take a joke, but the rest of us definitely can.

Which is good, because—man, this year. Shoot—this month!

Interest statement

Some time ago I came across this pair of vehicles parked at some retail establishment:

Here’s why I found the juxtaposition worthy of shooting:

It’s the history and ethos of Northern Virginia in one spot.

Dance for the dead

The first time I ever saw a haka performed it was during a change of command ceremony for UNPROFOR in Bosnia in the 1990s. The fierce Māori ritual always gets me, partly because of that association and partly because it intrinsically projects warrior power.

New Zealand sports teams—especially the All Blacks—have made it famous, and I’ve even seen videos of wedding parties performing it. It seems appropriate that Kiwis have deployed it in multiple instances to honor those who were murdered at two mosques in Christchurch last Friday.

Here’s one of the many performed by schoolchildren around the city:

And here’s one by a biker gang, in front of the Al Noor mosque:

Gratitude Monday: Awash in sorrow

As of writing, these are the names we know from Friday's terrorist attack in Christchurch:

Daoud Nabi

Naeem Rashid

Talha Rashid

Sohail Shahid

Syed Jahanda Ali

Syed Areeb Ahmed

Mahboob Haroon

Ghulam Hussain

Karam Bibi Raza

Zeeshan Raza

Atta Mohammad Elayyan

Khaled Mustafa

Hamza Mustafa

Lilik Abdul Hamid

Maheboob Khokhar

Ramiz Vora

Asif Vora

Ansi Alibava

Ozair Kadir

Mounir Suleiman

Ahmed Jamal Aldean Abdulghani

Ashraf al-Morsi

Ashraf al-Masri

Abdus Samad

Hosne Ara Parvin

Matiullah Safi

Amjad Hamid

Osama Adnan Abu Kweik

Abdul Fattah Qassim al-Daqqah

Ali Elmadani

Ahmed Jamal al-Din Abdul Ghani

Kamel Darwish

Abdullahi Dirie

Adeeb Sami

There are another 16 dead, and 50 more in hospital.

These are the names of those who sparked love, joy and gratitude in their community. We should remember them, not the despicable monster who shattered them.

Beyond that, I have nothing to say about gratitude today, so I’ll share this from Australian writer, lawyer and news commenter Waleed Aly.

Weather report

On the eve of the Ides of March, I had my patio door open and made my first pot of iced tea for 2019.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a blizzard next week, but I’m certainly enjoying it for now.

Law & order

Yesterday I was in the midst of following a BuzzFeed reporter live-tweeting the Manafort sentencing, when I had to dash out to a doctor’s appointment. Forty minutes later I returned to work to find 12^th Street blocked at H by cop cars, and actual police-line-do-not-cross tape. Our building guard was in the space between the outer and inner doors, but when I asked her what was going on, she said she did not know.

So I hightailed it to my office and spent the next forty minutes or so alternating between U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson not buying any of the faux contrition Manafort was trying to sell her (I absolutely loved her remark about his lawyers claiming that other criminals convicted on charges stemming from the Muller investigation got shorter sentences because the other judges recognized that the charges weren’t from the core of the investigation: “It’s hard to understand why an attorney would write that.”) and the events transpiring outside my window.

Some flavor of mom-mobile had been stopped (my colleague from three floors above my office said it had started around 15 minutes earlier). By the time I commenced watching, all the doors were open and a clutch of cops were very interested in its interior.

Then I noticed that the cops were not DC, but Secret Service:

I don’t know about the bike police—does the Secret Service have bicycle cops? Also, another colleague tells me that the devices on the trunk of 0336 are license plate recognition thingies.

Whatever—they brought in a sniffer dog (sorry, no pix), who did not seem particularly interested in any part of the van.

And then I noticed there were three people (one man, two women) standing against the building across the way, with three cops. At first I thought they might be witnesses, but then I realized they were cuffed:

My colleague said that weapons had been pointed at them while this happened.

Back at the intersection, car after car approached the right turn onto 12^th, saw the lighted-up cop cars blocking and waited for the way to be opened magically for them. Because “I’m only going just there.” They were disappointed.

As Manafort got his partial just deserts, the cops uncuffed the two women. A female officer walked one of them around the van, pointing at the front bumper, and then at the sticker on the driver’s side windscreen. She also retrieved a mobile phone from the passenger side and gave it to the other woman, who made a call. When I next looked out, the two women were walking toward New York Avenue. But the guy had his jacket pocket contents emptied into an evidence bag, and he was patted down. Eventually a Secret Service van drove up, and he was transported somewhere.

Another set of cops showed up, pulled stuff out of the van, and photographed the living daylights out of everything. They also removed the rear license plate.

And then I had to go to lunch with my colleagues. By the time we got back, all the law enforcement crowd (there were more than 25 of them) had decamped, along with the mom-mobile.

According to their website, the uniformed division of the Secret Service protects the White House, the Naval Observatory (VP’s residence), the Treasury Department building and diplomatic missions here in the District They Call Columbia. And according to a WaPo story from January, “Secret Service officers, in uniform and driving marked police cars, patrol an area around the White House and can make traffic stops and intercede in other crimes.”

Huh.

Whatever this guy is charged with, he faces way more time than Manafort. He’s not an old white man who spent decades engaging in multiple frauds totaling millions.

This year...

Man—2019 is a veritable Dalì painting.

The Kleptocrat in the White House just submitted a budget for 2020 that must have originated in a crack house. Prime Minister Theresa May has suffered another humiliating defeat in Parliament and the formerly Great Britain is about to pour over the White Cliffs of Dover on the way to a no-deal Brexit. And the once and future presidential candidate from Massachusetts and Utah marked his birthday in the Capitol by plucking candles from his Twinkie® cake and blowing them out individually.

And that’s only as far as Tuesday.

So, mood:

How much?

Every once in a while, it’s amusing to start an online search and see what Google’s idea of what you’re looking for is.

Viz:

Gratitude Monday: I get by...

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two job interviews, one faux-electronic and one with an actual hiring manager. I wrote about the “video interview” a few days ago.

And, BTW, since writing, another objection to this format has arisen in my mind: while it’s true that given every candidate the exact same questions to answer, within the exact same parameters (time to prepare response, time limit for response, number of retries allowed) does give the appearance of an egalitarian approach. But it doesn’t eliminate any inherent bias on the recruiter’s part. Appearance, ethnicity, speech patterns—any number of things can spark a negative—even if unconscious—reaction in the viewer of the video, and your chances go straight to the bin. They haven’t solved any problems of diversity by this approach.

Well, nevermind. It’s Gratitude Monday and I’m not focusing on how pissed off this ploy makes me. I’m grateful that when I prepped for both these interviews, I had friends (who started out as colleagues) I could call on for expertise and encouragement. (The real-human interview was for a marketing job, and I needed some guidance on the vocabulary. Turns out I’d done much of what’s required; I just hadn’t known the official terms for it.)

In both cases, I went into the interview feeling much more confident. In the case of the video interview—meh, it turned out to be only about a 3 on a scale of 1-10 of ghastliness. But my friend’s guidance alleviated a considerable amount of my anxiety and made it easier for me to just crack on with it. In the case of the 60-minute call with the VP of Marketing, I spoke with assuredness and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often, because of getting a crash course from another marketing VP.

So—here’s to friends who come through in the clinch. I hope I’m that kind of friend, too.