Ideas and hogwash

For Day 2 of the Washington Ideas Forum we had to go through TSA-like security screening, presumably because Rep. Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century) was first up to bat.

And presumably that’s because, as Speaker of the House, he’s third in line for the Presidency. And therefore worth more than Secretary of State John Kerry (fifth in line), who spoke later in the day, after the guards and scanners were removed.

Ryan, who is way more of a douche in person than on television, did nothing more than flap around a copy of his little pamphlet “A Better Way” (which he grandiosely refers to as a book), the supposed guide to Republican nirvana. And dodge questions, which were as softball as they come.

“I’m tired of divided government,” he sighed. “It doesn’t work very well.”

Oh, gee—ya think? That’s like an arsonist saying he’s tired of the fires.

It obviously doesn’t occur to him that he’s one of the biggest tools in the non-working government box. 

Interestingly, I don’t get the impression that he’s looking forward to a Trump presidency much more than a Clinton 2.0 presidency. He’s obviously not going to get along with either of them. And he’s certainly not going to do anything more towards building a united government than he has in the past.

(I will say that I'm glad that AtlanticLive didn't bring in Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-TheSouthWillRiseAgain (and, God help us, fourth in line to the presidency). Listening to him whine that President Obama should have told the Senate about the full ramifications of the JASTA bill—the parts where it would open the door for other countries and their citizens to sue American soldiers and others for war crimes. Because a chamber of 100 members, which includes 57 who hold JD degrees, apparently cannot understand the clauses of the bill that they not only passed, but they also voted to override the President's veto of it. Could it be that they felt they had to pass the law so they could understand it? Or could it be that they are simply an asylum of self-important loons?)  

Ryan tied for delivering the most weaselly and self-serving answers of the forum with General Pervez Musharraf, who’s no doubt one of his exemplars of how to run a united government: shoot your opponents. Musharraf, who was also served nothing but softballs (from NPR correspondent Robert Siegel—such a disappointment) cracked me up when he insisted that no one in Pakistan—not him, not ISI, not the military (who, BTW, is him—note the “General”, above), and not anyone in the neighborhood—no one knew that Osama Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad for five years.

That sealed compound with high walls, security cams and razor wire? “It could have been a drug cartel.”

Also: “There are a lot of tourists to that city.”

There were intelligent participants. I was especially interested in the discussion by Drew Gilpen Faust of Harvard and John DeGioia of Georgetown, talking about their respective institutions’ history with slavery. At one point, Faust commented that Harvard was challenged somewhat in looking out pre-19^th Century documents. DeGioia broke in to say that Georgetown has better documentation than Harvard because “Catholics keep unbelievably good records!”

I thought it also interesting that one of my tweets about the discussion on slavery brought out a right-wing troll intoning, “Slavery is over…You’re only a slave if you are a liberal!” Thus proving that s/he didn’t bother to read. Or think.

This was my first time at the Forum, although many of the people I spoke with are repeaters. I found the format somewhat off-putting: they covered a lot of territory, from Momofuku to opioid addiction, but they did it at the cost of any kind of depth. Twenty minutes of a journalist asking questions of one to three people, then whoosh—you’re off and the next one is on.

Also, there was no audience engagement—no opportunity for us to ask questions, or even to discuss amongst ourselves what we’d just heard. The pace of interviews was relentless; I didn’t even get out to the lobby for cookies yesterday, because I didn’t want to leave the auditorium. The venue, a theatre, didn’t offer the right space for people to have those conversations. I guess you’re meant to hold it in until you get back to the office to hash out the ideas.

Kind of an interesting approach. Personally, I came home yesterday and got straight into the shower, which I needed after both barrels of Ryan and Musharraf.

Duck, duck, sniffle

Yesterday I was on a bit of a lurp (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol), attending the Washington Ideas Forum, which is put on by AtlanticLive as part of the Washington Ideas Week, here in the District They Call Columbia.

It’s a policy-wonk kind of affair; ish. And there were some heavy hitters speaking. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) announced, “The Senate is out and we did not shut down the government,” as he took off his tie. And CIA Director John Brennan, when asked if the Russians are trying to hack the U.S. elections, said, “What we do at CIA is to look at a country’s capabilities, look at their intent, look at things that they have done in the past and determine whether something that certainly looks like a duck, smells like a duck and flies like a duck, whether it’s a duck or not.”

Then there was Labor Secretary Thomas Perez telling us, “We’re living in a ‘Modern Family’ world and we have ‘Leave It to Beaver’ policies” when it comes to protecting workers in our society.

But I think one of the biggest laughs came when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sat down and announced, “I have the sniffles and I’m not using cocaine.” He went on to speak cogently and compassionately about issues like immigration and the economy.

The forum is more of an ideas sampling, because we get about 20 minutes per conversation (between a subject matter expert and a journalist; or a journalist speaking with a panel of experts) and then, boom, off to another conversation. It’s like being at a banquet, taking one bite out of something and then having the plate snatched away before you can really taste what it’s all about.

Also, I find it interesting that they’ve made it almost impossible to network—between conference badges that only give your name, not your organization, and no time or space for having those little chats about what you just heard. That seems very odd, especially for a networking veteran of the Valley They Call Silicon.

Tomorrow they start out the day with a whimper—or, more precisely, with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century), and move on to a panel discussion that includes historian and president of Harvard University Drew Gilpen Faust. That should be a slice.

Many people are saying

As I mentioned yesterday, I just wasn’t up to watching or listening to the debate on Monday. As it is, I got plenty of it via Morning Edition on NPR, more than I wanted to hear.

I did scan tweets for about the first 20 minutes before taking refuge in a well-written detective story, and Twitter was all over the Trump sniffle (or snivel; not entirely sure) issue.

As you can imagine, the Twitterverse was having a ball. There's now even a Trump's Sniffle account:

Evidently it was enough of an issue for Trump to confide to his Fox Friends that his ludicrous performance wasn’t his fault. “I had a problem with a microphone that didn’t work. My microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose? My microphone, in the room they couldn’t hear me, you know, it was going on and off. Which isn’t exactly great. I wonder if it was set up that way, but it was terrible. I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling, and she didn’t have that problem. That to me was a bad problem, you have a bum  mic, it’s not that good.”

Right: the baron of birthers doesn’t want to believe in conspiracy theories.

Any road, he followed up by denying that he had a cold or allergies to account for the sniffling.

Well, that opened the door for what any New Yorker who was a man about town in the 80s should have expected. Viz., these comments (in this instance) from Slate:

Naturally, there was a Trump defender, who apparently does not have a problem with conspiracy theories. I just love the responses to him:

Arrgh!

I did not watch what the media are calling “the debate” last night. My life is too short and there is not enough alcohol to get me through something like that.

Particularly since I am sick to death of how the media (with the possible exception of The Washington Post) have done nothing but play by the GOP candidate’s reality TV rules that basically revolve around this simple declaration:

“I can do and say whatever I damn well please and you’ll run around like a pack of hounds trying to get the fox’s scent in the middle of a sausage factory. And then you’ll come back to repeat the exercise.”

The quintessential example of this was his ginning up the press a couple of weeks ago for “a big announcement” to be made at the opening of his made-in-China hotel in downtown DC. As you’ll recall, he pulled them by the nose through a tour of the hotel, then mumbled, “Obama was born in the U.S.” and walked away.

There were a bunch of howls, but at that point I kind of lost sympathy (not to mention respect) for them. Because do they not recall their basic Peanuts?

  

How can they not see that Trump is Lucy and they (and the electorate) are Charlie Brown. And their foot is never going to connect with that ball. Never.

Sheesh.

Gratitude Monday: The season

The last Monday in September, I’m so grateful that the weather has finally begun to lose its summer brutality here around the District They Call Columbia. Yesterday, for the first time since early May, I had the sliding glass door off the living room open, and turned off the AC.

Around 0900 I went out. The morning did not have that nip of autumn, but it was fresh, and I drove around with my windows down.

In a while, the leaves will begin to change color and drop. But I won’t have to rake any, so I’ll enjoy the daylights out of that. And I’ll make cottage pies for supper, and have a pot of green tea in the afternoon when I get home from work.

I love this season. Thank you, God, for autumn.

QED

I’m going to close out this week with a quip from one of my favorite people on Twitter.

Get a clue

After the morning I had yesterday—involving losing my Metro fare card and all the steps necessary to replace it—I was rather taken by this headline at NPR:

Because wouldn’t “Glowing Space Blobs” make a great band title?

As for the fare card saga, I still have a couple more mountains to scale, since—having cancelled the lost card, bought a new one and registered it with WMATA—I must now contact my HR department to transfer the $400 in benefit to the new number. That’s going to be a slice of an entirely different cake.

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.

Tanks for the memories

Interesting, a hundred years after the first deployment of tanks on the battlefield, a museum in Normandy has had to close, and in the process has auctioned off its inventory of uniforms, guns, vehicles, planes and equipment.

Which included two Sherman tanks.

The Tank Museum was only open for about three years. They say it was the downturn in the economy coupled with lower tourism following multiple terrorist attacks in Paris that forced it to shut its doors.

The Cadillac M5 A1 tank went for €230,000; the Chrysler M4A for €280,000. A BMW motorcycle that saw service in the Afrika Korps fetched €130,000. And a 1943 Harley Davidson motorcycle brought in €54,000.

All these headliners sold for much more than their estimated price, which was good news for Patrick Nerrant, an ex-Air France pilot, who built the collection and the museum, starting with a WWII plane he restored himself. He also restored the tanks, all nine of them, which were in working condition as of the weekend.

All told, the auction brought in €3.8 million ($4.2 million). No mention so far as to who the buyers are, or what they plan on doing with the tanks (or any of the rest of the kit).

According to NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley, Nerrant “kept a couple” of tanks for himself. But with the closing of the museum, he’s retiring.

Gratitude Monday: Sisterhood

Today is my sister’s birthday. I won’t tell you which one, but she’s living in retirement in Sedona.

Penny’s one of my favorite people ever. She’s one of those rare individuals with what I call the gift of happiness. Whatever crap happens, Penny does not load up with anger, regret or a chip on the shoulder; she figures out the best way through for her and then carries on.

It’s a remarkable capability.

Penny suffered a hearing loss that began with birth. It wasn’t diagnosed until she entered kindergarten; up until then the family just thought she was kind of slow. Ha, ha!

Yeah, classroom instruction was a challenge. When she started special ed in the 6^th grade, things got better. She took lip reading lessons, and used to practice with Dad in the evenings.

In the 7^th grade she decided she wanted to teach the hearing impaired. All the experts discouraged this ambition—they didn’t see her as the kind of student who’d succeed in the education field. Or even in academia. They thought vocational school was the way to go.

Well, ha, ha again. B.A. in English, two M.A.s in education and a full career in teaching at Alhambra High School with additional stints teaching ESL at night. Every Christmas she had about 80 gifts from current and former students. When she retired they held three separate parties for her.

I’ve always admired Penny’s tenacity. When she fixes her mind on doing something, you’d better just shut the hell up and stand aside, because she’s going to do it. She’s not seduced by instant gratification; once she sets her goal, she keeps her eyes on the prize and keeps going.

I have a theory about how Penny’s been able to accomplish so much: for a good part of her life she literally did not hear the gainsayers, so she developed the ability to not listen to them when she did hear them. I wish I had that kind of confidence.

Over the decades, Penny’s hearing got worse. (People wonder why I'm LOUD? This is one of the reasons.) Every cold caused more deterioration, so that when she flew, she couldn’t sit in the emergency exit row because she couldn’t hear any of the instructions. One time she was coming to North Carolina to visit me, and when the plane diverted to somewhere in Tennessee because of fog at RDU, she didn’t know what was happening until it landed and she could see someone’s face talking about it.

I’ve occasionally thought what a raw deal it was to have to go through life suffering through garbled conversations, not savoring the subtleties of a Chopin étude or only finding out you’re in Tennessee instead of North Carolina when the plane lands. I asked her about it once and she shrugged: that’s the hand she was dealt, so she played it.

In recent years, phone calls with her were more difficult. The last few I had were via a transcription service, so I’d say something, there’d be a pause and then she’d respond. Imagine trying to talk about some personal subjects this way.

But a couple of years ago, she did a lot of research on technology, outcomes and insurance coverage, and she got a cochlear implant. It’s like a complete recharge; back to full duplex communication. One of the first things she remarked about how wonderful it was to hear the birds singing.

Penny has opinions, of course, but she doesn’t waste a lot of time expressing the negative ones. This lends all the more weight to those she does share. Example: a relative-by-marriage spent some unknown amount of money to buy me something I never wanted and that personified the term “butt-ugly”. Stunned, I asked (somewhat rhetorically), “Why would she do that?” Penny never missed a beat. “Because she’s stupid.”

Now that I’m across the country again, I miss the ease of visiting her. We have a Christmas tradition: we cook grilled butterflied leg of lamb with a savory sauce, and saute of two squashes. You’re supposed to be able to make it in 60 minutes but it always takes us longer. Possibly due to the wine that accompanies the effort.

Anyhow—happy birthday, Penny. What a gift you are as a sister and a friend.