The limits of selective outrage

"Contrary to what President Trump says, Article Two does not give him the power to do anything he wants - and I’ll just give you one example that shows you the difference between him and a king, which is the Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he cannot make him a baron.”

- Professor Pamela Karlan, at the Judiciary Committee

Is that pun clunky? Yes. Most puns are. Was it maybe a bit uncomfortable? Sure. But the degree to which Republican apologists for the Trump administration decided to turn it into a cause celebre (the singularly idiotic Matt Gaetz being an especially glaring example) is an indication of their desperation to latch on to any issue they can to deflect from what was laid out in the committee meetings concerning the Trump administration's actions in Ukraine.

Conversely, it's unlikely that Barron Trump knows anything about a kid named Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez. The 16-year-old Guatemalan came down with the flu in a Customs and Border Patrol detention facility and died, apparently after lying on the floor for several hours without medical treatment.

Barron Trump can count himself lucky that he actually has a family to take care of him. Carlos didn't. Regardless of the accuracy of the ProPublica report - and I have no reason to doubt it as this point - there was no widespread national outrage when he died after laying on a cell room floor unattended for over four hours.

Barron Trump, in comparison, will grow up a child of privilege, probably reach adulthood unhindered and end up avoiding the scandals his father and older siblings are currently awash in if he's lucky. All of the selective outrage over a clumsy but inoffensive pun on his name that was uttered during his teens will be something he'll easily get over. And he'll still be alive.

The other, far less famous kid wasn't so lucky.

And if you're still in a fit of pique over what Barron Trump was or wasn't called, your continued selective outrage doesn't mean a fucking thing to me.

In memoriam: Ted Piwowar, 1965-2019

Ted Piwowar was one of my closest, long-term friends for over thirty years. He died on July 1st.

I didn't find out about it until September 29th.

This is something I'll get back to later in this post, but first, an introduction:

The first time I remember getting into a conservation with Ted about anything was a phone call where I tried getting a ride back from a meeting of the anime club we were both a member of back in 1985. Ted, it turns out, was voted in as the President of the Chicago branch of the C/FO (Cartoon Fantasy Organization) the previous meeting because he was sick. Yes, it literally was the "Congratulations, you're now in charge because you weren't there" excuse. Be that as it may, we were both anime fans, which was a an immediate, common bond between us. I got my ride back that night, and we kept in contact. And, in fact, became friends -  and stayed friends for over three decades, in fact.

Ted's primary interest in life was computer animation, which is the reason he had a deep and abiding interest in anime and manga in the first place. One of his greatest regrets is that he could never get his foot in the door in that industry (he certainly made enough efforts at building a body of work as a student at Columbia College and afterward), and it bothered him immensely that in the 31-plus years after he graduated he had to work in industries related to it but never in the actual industry itself. Part of his game plan was to head out to L.A. to do so. It never happened.

For years, we went to SF conventions as part of a group, Japanese bookstores, concerts at venues like Metro and Tuts or just hung out when we were too broke to do either. We kept in touch all the time, and I helped him move on more than one occasion. The one thing I didn't get to see was him succeeding at his chosen profession, though, and the problem with that was that his growing lack of long-term employability was beginning to wear on his nerves. He was a lot quicker to irritability and even anger as he got older as time and frustration wore on, and the fact that he had to move back in with family on more than one occasion didn't help matters much. He was still trying, though, despite all that.

And then, on July 1st, it all ended.

And I found out the hardest way possible, other than actually being there when the sudden heart attack apparently killed him while he was getting ready for work one morning.

It was through his Facebook wall, because no one in his family told me about this despite the fact one of his sisters got in touch with me after he went to the hospital in 2017 via text, and despite the fact they could've gone through his effects after he passed away to find out who they needed to contact. I'll remember that train ride for a very long time because of that fact. It wasn't a good feeling. Shock combined with anger never is, and that moment had enough of both.

All I know at this point is what other friends posted on his wall the day of the funeral and what two of them told me in instant messages after I contacted them. I'll try to contact his family to get a more complete picture of what happened, but as for now this is all I have to go on. And I'm leaving it at that.

All I know is that end came far too suddenly, and far too early.  He deserved a more complete memorial as well. Hopefully, I or someone else will salvage enough of his artwork to do that, but that's a subject for another time.

He just deserved better in life, period.

The content of his "character"

It's been a good long while since I posted here. But then this happened, and as usual the interesting times (in the worst Chinese sense of the word "interesting") we live in forced me to comment.

Donald J. Trump has always been a punchline to me. I considered him a self-absorbed, egotistic boor who I couldn't care less about decades ago when he started gaining attention for himself with his high-profile business dealings (more like business failures,but you know what they say about there being no such thing as bad publicity) and his crass acquisition of mistresses and trophy wives alike. I just couldn't be bothered to care about a man whose main purpose in life seemed to be putting his name on as many prominent buildings as possible because his ego was just that big. He was, on balance, a caricature of the crass, high-living tycoon that shows up in good satire and bad soap operas alike. And I was, at best, indifferent.

And then things changed. 

He got into politics. And eventually got elected President.

And then a whole bunch of other things came to light about him, and he went from being merely unsavory to being outright dangerous.

Donald Trump believes in a wide assortment of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific woo and gives them a level of credence that belongs on a fringe web site. He's effectively used the United States government as a personal business marketing tool more than once, showed his contempt for Constitutional principles and nominated a number of sycophants and corporate lobbyists to positions in his cabinet and got rid of them when they weren't sycophantic enough for his liking.

He got in bed with wonderful international examples of authoritarian-to-totalitarian "leadership" such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Eun and did a number of things of things to insult or destabilize NATO, the European Union and individual allied nations. He uses his adult children as his personal public relations arm and is also dumb enough to personally involve them in his international and domestic political blunders. 

He makes himself out as a cartoonish ubermensch on Twitter, in reports on his physicals that read suspiciously like he personally wrote them and in assertions that he's a "very stable genius". And his racist, sexist and just plain assholish views and practices in and outside of his Presidency are just as well known.

Quite a few of these things are impeachable offenses while others are not, but regardless of whether he ends up getting impeached because of the Ukraine debacle one question remains, and it's a bad one:

How long will it take to clean up the damage he's caused?

Furthermore, will we be able to clean it up?

Rumors concerning my abduction by aliens...

...have been greatly exaggerated. But you might have given them more credibility in the two-plus months I haven't posted here.

An Open Letter (7/4/19)

The following letter was sent to the offices of Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth as well as Representative Jesus "Chuy" Garcia on July 3rd concerning the DHS Inspector General's report on CBP detention facilities in the Rio Grande Valley.)

Good afternoon. I recently had a chance to read the DHS Inspector General's report _Management Alert: DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley_ and was deeply disturbed by the conditions described in the report.

The repeated accounts of crisis-level overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate access to showers and hot food are disturbing enough in themselves, but the fact that the CBP's leadership attempted to deflect this criticism with a response that essentially says "this is the best we can do, given the circumstances" is no real comfort either. The CBP'S role is to detain illegal border crossers and then process them out to ICE within 72 hours of apprehension, not hold them in the equivalent of a overcrowded prison for weeks on end without processing. The fact that a good portion of these _de facto_ inmates are minors is equally disturbing. Likewise, the fact that I saw no mention of detainees being segregated according to possible criminal history is disturbing; are actual detainees with known criminal records or noticeable violent tendencies being segregated from the general detainee population, especially minors and women? Are such screenings even being made in the first place?

What is needed for improvement of these conditions is not merely increased funding of these facilities but thorough oversight by Congress. The Trump administration, as usual, can seem to range from a blase attitude to outright callousness towards this situation. The fact that they would prefer to bring tanks into Washington for an almost Soviet-style "salute to America" instead of working on comprehensive immigration reform speaks volumes about the administration's real priorities. It's apparently up to Congress to initiate positive steps to fix this issue. Please do your part in doing just that.

Thank you.

Now reading

First and Only by Dan Abnett.

Memorial Day, May 27th, 2019

This is technically not my dad's holiday.

After fighting in Europe as a unit of the Army Corps of Engineers attached to the 3rd Army and then transferring over to Asia as part of occupational forces in the Philippines and Japan (he told me how huge the koi were in the Emperor's collection, since he got to see them firsthand), he got to come back home. The only major injury he suffered was a permanently bent finger that he got as a result of a section of a bridge falling on it that he was working on either in northeast France or southwest Belgium. Barring that, he came back intact.

Others weren't so lucky. 

Many others, in fact. And this is their day.

I'm no pacifist. I'm also no militarist. There are times when you have no choice but in engage in warfare, but armed conflict should always be the last option you resort to and not the first. The stakes in terms of lives lost and troops permanently disabled or psychologically mangled are far too high for anyone to claim that war is some glorious adventure that has no consequences for its participants. Pardon my language, but this is grade-A horseshit. It has nothing but consequences, and this is why any politician who starts advocating war as an ideal solution to any geopolitical crisis is either a opportunistic demagogue or a complete idiot. History has proven over and over that this is not the case. Cemetaries the world over are full of their mistakes, as well as soldiers who died in far more justifiable conflicts. It remains the responsibility of historians and survivors of those conflicts alike to decide which is which. 

So consider this: this is more than a Federal holiday or a nice day to barbecue with friends. This is a far more important day than that, and we should all remember it. And we should also try to make sure that the next time we have to memorialize someone's military service, it gets celebrated on November 11th instead of late May.

"But somehow I got over it"

It's occurred to me that from time to time that I can be a moody bastard. That's far from the entire story with me, but I can have my moods just like everyone else. And those moods, when deep enough, make me feel like walking at the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be easier than the situational depression I'm in at the time. Mind you, I feel that I'm not clinically depressed at those times- for the most part, I can be incredibly motivated and engaged even at times like those, but bad news can get to me just like anyone else. And sometimes, that can be an especially nasty occurrence that makes me go to places in my head I'd rather not. A few examples follow, including one incident that could've far messier for me had I not come to my senses.

Back in 1990, my father died unexpectedly after surgery on his legs to restore full blood flow so he could get around without that damn walker he was forced to use after decades of standing at a pharmacist's station filling prescriptions. My last memories of him prior to the visitation and funeral was seeing him twitch unconsciously for days on an ICU gurney after the blood clot that eventually killed him made its way to his brain. For an entire year afterward, I was able to outwardly function, but inwardly? Not even close. Between low-level, chronic depression and other times where I was just an anxious nervous wreck, things just weren't good for me. But somehow I got over it.

From late 1998 to mid-2003, I had no success in landing a permanent job. I had no luck in landing a long-term temporary job, either. The continued lack of anything tangible in the wake of hundreds and hundreds of resumes sent out over that period gave me a complex about job security that I still have issues with today. This wasn't so much the type of depression that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but the sense of exasperation it caused was still no fun to deal with. But somehow I got over it. 

The second half of 2014 dealt me a real triple whammy. First, I was - or I thought I was - on the cusp of a serious relationship with someone who I was absolutely sure felt the same way about me as I did about her. She said words to that effect herself early on. End result? Forget it. Things imploding like that did are never fun to go through, and as usual I blamed myself far too much. Almost entirely, in fact. Later on I realized that wasn't even close to the actual case, but only hindsight is 20/20 and "we just weren't gonna make this work" comes as cold comfort when you thought you had a sure thing at the time. 

Unfortunately - and at the same time,,which only exascerbated things - I was also positive that my new supervisor at work was going to go through hell and high water to get me fired, union CBA or not. My transferring to another department in November was probably the only thing that saved my ass from impending termination, and that only made my private life's failures seem all the more brutal at the time. It's hard to focus on the positive when you seemingly can't find a positive. 

And then things got worse.

One of my closest friends - a sister to me emotionally, if not biologically - underwent a serious breast cancer scare that nearly terrified me as much as it did her. It was like I was back walking the bottom of the Marianas Trench again just like it was 1990 all over again, and it was only a negative biopsy result that took some of the pressure off my back weeks later.

And yes, I got over all of this. Somehow. 

Except that for once I nearly didn't. 

The sense of despair that all of this caused was something I thought I'd never get out of. It was a perfect storm of self-doubt and situational depression that all of this hitting at exactly the wrong time caused. Which led to this: 

I had a brief moment where I was so down - the failed relationship, the constant threat of being fired from my job, the breast cancer scare one of my closest friends of 25-plus years was going through - that I nearly punched a beer bottle in the toilet in my hotel room at a SF convention with the intent of what you'd expect such a stupid, jerkwad action to accomplish. It was a completely idiotic thought, and I knew I was a complete asshole for even thinking injuring myself in a fit of utter frustration would solve anything, but the thought was there. If only for five seconds, but it was there.

But then I stopped myself.

Why? Self preservation, obviously, but beyond that? What else made me stop from doing that?

Because it wouldn't have solved anything. At all. That's why. It was as if my brain was telling me "Hey. This shit you're thinking of doing? It won't make her change her mind or want you back; it won't keep you from getting fired from your shitty job; and it certainly won't cure your de facto sister if it does turn out she has cancer. And if she does, she'll need you to be there for her, and in one piece. So stop with this melodramatic bullshit. Now".

For once, I took my inner daemon's advice. Maybe Socrates was right about that after all...

Life can be hard. Real hard, even if you have your health and don't end up living on the street. Hard to the point of just giving in or giving up, and it's difficult to say which is the worst choice of not coping with it: an irreversible gesture of futility like suicide, or miserably dragging your ass through your remaining years on this earth without much in the way of joy or engagement with the outside world; in other words, utter surrender. And a lot of people have chosen either one of those. Far too many, in fact.

As for me, I'll surrender when I'm finally dead. If life has taught me anything, surrendering like that means that you'll take any number of insults to your psyche when you do. And that's just not an acceptable option to me. 

I've known some friends who didn't even make it this far and died far too young. They didn't have a choice in the matter, but I do. So what do you think I'm going to do with mine? 

Maybe that's the real secret of getting over it - just not giving up on yourself. Yeah, there'll be moments in your life where you think it's the best - or worse yet, the only - option. It isn't. You have other options. And whatever else you do, you need to stop waiting for that crosstown Express train to come through and run you over. Get up, board another one in the opposite direction instead and get the hell away from that neighborhood. There's nothing for you there. You owe yourself that much of a shot, at least. 

If you think you need help, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) provides information on prevention, treatment and symptoms of anxiety, depression and related conditions. Phone: 240-485-1001.

The time capsule that ticks suspiciously

Back in the day - back before he got on Twitter, and back before he became a Presidential candidate - I didn't consider Donald Trump much more than a caricature of an especially crass business tycoon.

He's far worse than that, now.

If his recent evocation of "executive privilege" and his need to sacrifice his latest handpicked Attorney General to Contempt of Congress charges are any indication, he will never allow anyone access to information that makes him look like anything less than his own bloated self-image of choice. The unredacted Mueller report, his tax returns, even his unedited yearly Presidential physicals. There isn't a damn thing he doesn't want covered up, and there aren't many things he wouldn't stoop to in order to achieve that. The smell of burnt shredded documents are the least of anyone's worries in that regard.

One of the side effects of democracy is that demagogues can and will get elected. This is less a condemnation of democracy than it is of people getting lazy and stupid in engaging in it; electing crass, self-serving idiots to govern us is a two-way street, especially since you didn't have to vote for said idiot in the first place. The worst example is the stealth demagogue who suckered people into voting for him because he was just that skilled a liar. Donald J. Trump lied repeatedly during his Presidential campaign, but that deception was neither skilled or incapable of being debunked. His supporters just didn't care. Period. And despite all the new lies he uttered or Tweeted after his inauguration, they still don't.

And now he apparently wants to initiate a constitutional crisis. He's long been described as an admirer of Richard Nixon, and that comparison fits him to a tee more than any other. No, he's not Hitler. Not even close. But Tricky Dick? Oh, he'd love to be him - provided that August 1974 never happened. But it did, and that's exactly what Trump fears most - falling from the peak of the mountain and plunging into the ravine below. But he's also inherited Nixon's paranoia, which is why so many employees of his are now ex-employees. Even someone as rank as Jeff Sessions found this out the hard way. 

Regardless of how all of this ultimately turns out, consider this a time capsule. If you come back in five years or a decade and I'm not either dead, locked up as a political prisoner or living abroad as an unwilling expatriate, you can call me an alarmist and tell me that democracy still works even when it elects an authoritarian, narcissistic boob as President. I'm hoping you do. But if the opposite holds true, don't say I didn't warn you.

Now reading

Pariah: Ravenor vs. Eisenhorn by Dan Abnett.

The exoneration that wasn't

Despite some of the ridiculous preening and outright delusional statements by President Unintelligible in the wake of the release of the Mueller report, he's hardly off the hook in many respects - especially concerning the idea that he was somehow exonerated by it. Even the four page summary released by his handpicked Attorney General William Barr didn't say that. And then there's this:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

I'll be cautious here and say that there's any number of potential - but entirely hypothetical - reasons as to why that four-pager came off as being an attempt to shove the genie back in the bottle and stopper it up, but one of the potentially most important is that the full report could possibly detail whatever high-level, behind the scenes attempts Team Trump engaged in in terms of intimidation tactics towards Mueller's staff. Besides his Tweets and public statements, that is, and they were bad enough. But the stuff Trump didn't want out in public? It could actually be far worse

"Congratulations", Andrew

Because if you don't think that Andrew Wakefield is still largely responsible for this happening, I'd like to know why he continues to bang the broken drum of his own fraudulent theories like any disgraced snake-oil salesman would. Granted, he's probably foolish enough to think that his constant promotion of anti-vaccination woo isn't responsible for the rise in cases of measles worldwide, but as this article from the Guardian helpfully points out, he's openly getting anti-vax politicians elected in Texas, which has one of the worse rates of measles cases in the US. And this paragraph is especially telling:

But Wakefield’s most substantial contribution to Texas appears to be the network of autism-related charities and businesses he has been affiliated with, and in some instances drew six-figure salaries from, from the early 2000s onwards.

So much for the Hippocratic Oath. There's a very powerful profit motive in promoting quackery, and it appears Wakefield would take the almighty dollar in a heartbeat over the health and safety of children - actually, of anyone - threatened by a resurgence of preventable diseases caused by science-free opposition to vaccination. And I can't even feign surprise at that.

Fuxit

Unsurprisingly, the continued effects of Nigel Farage's folly are that Theresa May is probably going to go down as the most ineffective British Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain, at least in terms of coming up with a cunning plan to get Parliament to approve a method of letting go of "a far away country..." sorry, Europe.

Farage and the rest of the Brexit supporters hither and yon probably weren't thinking of letting go of Scotland, either, but that's now a real possibility again. It just doesn't pay to be a supporter of nativist-driven initiatives these days - in the UK or the US. Because even if you "win", the unintended consequences won't have to jump very far to bite you in the ass.

Now reading

Hereticus by Dan Abnett.

My sentiments on Super Bowl LIII

I'll just leave this here.

Our National Dunning-Kruger Nightmare continues

As if President Unintelligible's inability to listen to any opinions that contradict (or even mildly differ) his wasn't bad enough, Time pointed out that his inability to listen to daily intelligence briefings is especially disturbing:

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on the U.S. intelligence community this week, senior intelligence briefers are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.

Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.

What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.

Fantastic. And you thought that his ham-fisted approach to domestic politics was bad.

Oh, but it gets better. If you're into gallows humor, that is.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), which oversees the spy satellites that map and photograph key areas, had tried to impress upon Trump the size and complexity of the North Korean site. In preparing one briefing for the President on the issue early in his administration, the NGIA built a model of the facility with a removable roof, according to two officials. To help Trump grasp the size of the facility, the NGIA briefers built a miniature version New York’s Statue of Liberty to scale and put it inside the model.

Intelligence officials from multiple agencies later warned Trump that entrances at the facility that had been closed after the summit could still be reopened. But the president has ignored the agencies’ warnings and has exaggerated the steps North Korea has taken to shutter the facility, those officials and two others say. That is a particular concern now, ahead of a possible second summit with the Kim Jong-Un later this month.

The briefers’ concerns are spread across multiple areas of expertise. Two briefers worry that a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping could produce a trade agreement that the President can trumpet but that fails to address China’s espionage, its theft of intellectual property that ranges from circuit boards to soybean hybrids, its military buildup, and its geopolitical ambition.

Three other officials worry about what one of them calls “precipitous troop withdrawals” from Syria and Afghanistan and a peace deal with the Taliban that in time would leave the extremist Islamic group back in charge and wipe out the gains made in education, women’s rights and governance since the U.S. invaded the country more than 17 years ago.

I have to wonder if I need to start stocking up on antacid, or just cut to the chase and start buying an over-the-counter proton pump inhibitor. Because if all of this this isn't ulcer inducing...

Now reading

Malleus by Dan Abnett.

The kind of Fearless Leader we're stuck with

Lose your majority in a house of Congress lately? Most Presidents would at least give lip service to the idea of possibly talking compromise on certain issues. Not President Toddler, though, since partial Federal shutdowns are apparently the price everyone gets to collectively pay these days for paranoia-induced vanity projects not getting built.

Then again, for Trump this is probably a great distraction from certain other issues - not the least of which includes some very private conversations with a very special friend of his where even his own interpreter was personally warned to keep his yap shut in front of other members of the administration. As morbid as my imagination can get, I can hardly imagine what the subject matter of that series of conversations amounted to. And considering some recent revelations about the FBI's thinking on Trump in 2016 and 2017, I hardly want to.

The alien abduction failed!

So I decided not to use a more pedestrian explanation of why I haven't posted for over a month. So sue me.

I have been busy as of late, though, especially with the anime programming for this particular convention, so please attend it in mid-February if you can.