I have to wonder how this man can be so good at making money and so unable to reason at a basic level. Is this what is known as an idiot savante? My curiosity was excited by the recent NYTimes article, “How Elon Musk Came to Support Trump.” In the article, the Times reports that Musk told his big money friends that
…this would be the last free election in America — because if President Biden won, millions of undocumented immigrants would be legalized and democracy would be finished…
Well, Biden’s out now, but never mind. My question is why would Biden/Harris/the Dems wait until after they had won this election to do the great voter replacement? Wouldn’t it make so much more sense to do it now, to ensure that he would win? And just how would he carry this out? If he has a way to do it after the election, he/they could certainly do it now.
Ah, here’s the beauty of this craziness. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen. But saying that it will happen is scary, and scared people don’t inquire into simple logical details. Now, there are a lot of really awful things that Dems say Trumpy will do if he is elected, and generally they have a firm basis in reality, e.g. Trumpy will use the Justice Dept. to go after his enemies; or Trumpy will initiate mass deportations that will inevitably sweep up perfectly legal residents, and so on. Still, not all the horrors that people say Trumpy will do if elected will come about if he is. Or so I tell myself.
Anyone watching snippets of the Republican Convention couldn’t help but notice the fervor with which Trumpy’s supporters regard him. It has moved into the realm of a religious cult. The language of divine favor, resurrection, and deliverance were much in use by his followers. Well, perhaps there is something to this.
The annotated image above shows a page from the Beatus Manuscript, The Table of the Antichrist in an twelfth century manuscript of the stupendous eighth century commentary on the Book of Revelation written by Saint Beatus of Liébana, a Spanish monk. The diagram demonstrates that the number of the Beast is 666. This treasure is in the Morgan Library in NYC.
The central area recalls ancient diagrams of the Hebrew tabernacle or schematic representations of Eden, the original walled garden. It is eleven rows high by seven columns wide. 11-7=4. There are five columns on each side. Four (4) and five (5). Forty-five (45). Trump was POTUS number 45!!! Could it be any more plain? Donald Trump IS the ANTICHRIST.
No crazy conspiracy theories here, don’t worry. A would-be assassin took several shots at Trumpy, killing an attendee and wounding two others, that’s for sure. And no, I don’t believe it was a set-up by Biden, the Secret Service, the Democrats, or anyone else. As H. Rap. Brown said, “Violence is American as cherry pie,” despite all the editorial gushing about how this sort of thing has no place in America. It does.
But, I wonder about the odd fact that there is no independent confirmation anywhere of Trumpy’s Truth Social post about how the bullet pierced his upper ear. No eyewitnesses recounting that they saw his ear spurt blood, no Secret Service statement detailing his injury, no statement from the doctors who treated him immediately afterwards, perhaps along the lines of, “We examined the former president, who received a superficial wound to his right ear,” or “whose upper right ear was pierced by a single bullet.” That’s what I would expect to hear immediately. All news sources simply repeat Trumpy’s statement and accept it. Odd.
We know that DJT is a compulsive liar who knows no boundary between truth and fiction when it concerns himself, and certainly he would not be the first public figure to embroider on the truth for dramatic effect. (Recall Hillary Clinton’s invention about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire.) Could it be that the bullet came very close to his ear, that the loud crack it made as it passed by startled him and made him reflexively reach for that side of his head, and that his ear injury occurred when he was tackled by the Secret Service after he ducked down?
Not a very important question in the scheme of things, but I would like to know the facts.
There is an old saying; “Don’t believe everything you read.” Even in the newspaper of record, the New York Times? Well, when it comes to certain topics, at certain times in history, certainly. You can trust The Times, but as Saint Reaganzo said, “Trust, but verify.”
So, today, I present a little episode produced by my favorite fact-checking hobby, reports about the environment and the climate. I was prompted to this today by an articlein the paper about the deaths in Saudi Arabia during the hajj. At least 1,300 have died to-date during the annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba, and the heat there is extreme. Of course, Wikipedia indicates that the mean daily high temperature in Mecca during June is 110 degrees F. Haven’t read anything in The Times about that being exceeded this year, only this:
At this year’s hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, at least 1,300 people died as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, nothing unusual here, except perhaps the numbers who chose to visit this year. According to the paper, the Saudis require a permit to do the hajj, and those with this documentation are cared for with cooling rooms, available water, doctors, and so on. But, alas, many choose to come without the required permission, and, well…too bad for them. And climate change..?
But, the push to enhance the facts, or just make things up, continues:
Even as heat kills more people today than any other extreme weather event, there is still a dangerous cultural lag.
No doubt we don’t do enough to deal with the health risks from hot weather, but what about that statement (it’s hyperlinked in the article) that heat kills more people than any other weather extreme? Following the link takes you to another recent NYTimes articlethat treats the same topic, and containing this bit:
Extreme heat killed an estimated 489,000 people annually between 2000 and 2019, according to the World Meteorological Organization [WMO], making heat the deadliest of all extreme weather events.
Sounds like clear cut statistical proof that heat related deaths are the biggest weather problem, but following that hyperlink, to the original source, provides some surprises. It takes you to the WMO report, which includes this bit of text:
Between 2000 and 2019, estimated deaths due to heat were approximately 489 000 per year, with a particularly high burden in Asia (45%) and Europe (36%).64
There’s that 489,000 deaths per year figure again, sure enough, AND, a footnote to the source used by the WMO! Excellent! That footnote refers us to a scholarly article in The Lancet.
64 Zhao, Q.; Guo, Y.; Ye, T. et al. Global, Regional, and National Burden of Mortality Associated with Non-optimal Ambient Temperatures from 2000 to 2019: A Three-stage Modelling Study. Lancet Planet Health 2021, 5 (7), e415–e425.
It seems that Mr. Guo is a man busy researching the topic of weather-related mortality from his perch at Monash University in conjunction with other researchers around the world, and his findings in this study of weather related mortality from 2000 to 2019 are summarized in a webpage from Monash University: World’s largest study of global climate related mortality links 5 million deaths a year to abnormal temperatures July 2021. The following excerpt, with emphasis added by me, contradicts the assertion by the WMO.
The study, the first to definitively link above and below optimal temperatures (corresponding to minimum mortality temperatures) to annual increases in mortality, found 9.43 per cent of global deaths could be attributed to cold and hot temperatures. This equates to 74 excess deaths for every 100,000 people, with most deaths caused by cold exposure.
The study highlights geographic differences in the mortality rates due to extreme weather, and indicates that climate change, warming, will exacerbate the situation.
More than five million extra deaths a year can be attributed to abnormal hot and cold temperatures, according to a world first international study led by Monash University.
The study found deaths related to hot temperatures increased in all regions from 2000 to 2019, indicating that global warming due to climate change will make this mortality figure worse in the future.
It indicates that Sub-Saharan Africa has the greatest mortality rate from hot weather, no surprise given that region’s poverty and climate, but it also has the highest rate due to cold weather!
The data reveals geographic differences in the impact of non-optimal temperatures on mortality, with Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa having the highest heat and cold-related excess death rates.
And just how do hot weather and cold weather related deaths compare, numerically? The tables shown below give the breakdown, and I’ve computed the totals for heat and cold related deaths. The deaths due to cold are more than ten times those from heat! This is not a surprise to anyone familiar with weather related mortality statistics, and it is occasionally reported in the news.
ANNUAL DEATHS DUE TO COLD TEMPS BY REGION: 6,809,000
Africa – 1.18 million
Asia – 2.4 million
Europe – 657,000
South America – 116,000
UK – 44,600
US – 154,800
China – 967,000
India – 655,400
Australia – 14,200
ANNUAL DEATHS DUE TO HIGH TEMPS BY REGION: 637,550
Africa – 25,550
Asia – 224,000
Europe – 178,700
South America – 25,250
UK – 8000
US – 18,750
China – 71,300
India – 83,700
Australia – 2300
Oddly, it seems that the WMO and so, the NYTimes as well, underreport the magnitude of annual heat related deaths! Of course, this is just one study, and perhaps others will question its claims, but it is certainly out of bounds to say that it states that heat extremes are the biggest killer! 🧐
I live on a corner lot, so I have an extra amount ofsidewalk “verge” to maintain, if I choose to do so. Generally, I am in the low-maintenance camp of lawn tenders, as I regard the resources -chemicals, mechanical, human exertion – poured into suburban lawns as wasteful and destructive, and nothing but a ceaseless striving for status and property values informed by defunct English gentry values. Hah! Pretty serious stuff, these crummy lawns. All that fertilizer washing into the streams to promote eutrophication, not to mention the exasperating roar and drone of lawn machines every morning.
I used to pay a lawn care service when I was working – the time to mow the lawn was better spent reading, relaxing, or being with my family, but now that I am blissfully retired, I save about $2000 a year, mow the lawn every three or four weeks with a dinky battery powered piece, and I never edge! The lawn never looked so good, which brings me to the topic of micro geomorphology and lawn verges.
That strip of lawn verge in the picture above is just downstream of my neighbor’s lot, and the street and sidewalk are steeply sloped there. The darkened area on the verge is my successful (after years or trial and error) effort to replant a section that was repeatedly eroded by heavy and rapid flows during thunder storms.
As you can see in the photos above, my neighbor’s lawn is closely trimmed, each week by a service, and the edges are razor sharp. That’s the preferred aesthetic here in the ‘burbs, and it can look pretty neat, but as a friend of mine said, when those services are done for the day, your lawn looks “scrubbed.” Every stray bit of organic matter is removed by the leaf blowers, and the edges provide nice clean channels for rapid, and erosive, flow during the occasional thunderstorms, which can be intense. Note how the soil has been removed from alongside, and even under the sidewalk upslope of the telephone pole. I have erected a little barrier to divert the flow away from my newly planted portion of the verge, and it does help a lot. I tried this when I used a service, but their machines just broke it up each week – they’re in a hurry to move on. That’s another advantage of dispensing with the service: I have become more intimately familiar with each little bit of my suburban landscape and can devise microstrategies to protect and nurture them. And lo, the seed is sprouting!
The image above shows my edges, soft and sloppy, which slow down the water, capture and retain soil, and give a gentler, less severe look to my little trivial Eden in el mundo suburbo. During the fall, I run the mower over the dry leaves to create a mulch that retains water and eventually creates new soil. (The lawn services blow them into piles and truck them away.) In such little worlds do I lose myself these days.
World for Ransom (1954) is a not very engaging noir that takes place in Singapore. It gets attention because it is Robert Aldrich’s second flick, although for some strange reason, he is only listed as the producer in the credits. No director is cited. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking about it a lot, sucked in by the semi-mindless allure of cinema’s limitless network of cultural referents. Movies! A waste of time, but I spend a lot of time on them.
Dan Duryea plays a private eye in Singapore (Mike Callahan, lifted from a TV series he was in at the time) who longs to regain the love of Frenessey (wasn’t that a hit rhumba tune?) played by Marion Carr. She is married to an old friend, Julian, who has gotten in over his head with some serious Cold War operatives who have kidnapped a nuclear scientist. If Mike can once again pull his old pal out of harm’s way, she says she’ll leave him and make a new life with Mike, but she doesn’t want to desert him. Mike manages to free the nuke-man, but not before he has to confront his old friend while holding two live grenades: they go off, and Julian is dog meat.
Commenters tend to relate this flick to Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich’s fabulous end-of-the-world/end-of-noir film because of the nuke connection, but I was reminded of The Third Man. A down at heel hero, pining for a woman who simply tolerates him, or strings him along, while carrying a torch for a real louse – that’s the dynamic here. There’s even a sewer connection: at one point Mike escapes his pursuers by lifting a grate and descending into the drains, but not too much is made of it.
I love Duryea, but in this flick he sometimes seems to be playing a guy playing a guy in a film noir. I believe that Aldrich even intimated that the film was intended as something of a parody, but if so, it’s just too unexciting to work. There is a nice bit where the big operator, played by Gene Lockhart, confronts the English blimps and lays out his terms. He’s a good villain, and the framing of the scene from the ceiling vantage point is nice.
The name of the villain is Alexis Pederas, emphasis on the second syllable, but doesn’t it read a bit like pederast? There is a thread of sexual ambiguity and decadence running through the film, including this brief bit of Marion Carr/Frenessey doing a nightclub number that brings to mind Cabaret and Victor Victoria.
Marion Carr is the most interesting figure in the movie, acting in a way that one commenter properly noted as “mannered.” I have seen her in only one other film, Kiss Me Deadly, where she spoke in the same odd manner, as if she was about to lose all her breath.
The ending when Mike has to tell Frenessey that her hubby is dead, killed by his grenades, is the best part of the film, and unlike anything I’ve seen in any other film noir. She is enraged, and accuses Mike of murder, although it was purely self-defense. She reveals her sordid past after her break up with Mike: alone, poor, and vulnerable, she turned to prostitution. Julian rescued her. He didn’t care about her sins, her immorality, he loved her as she was. (Of course, that left him quite free to carry on with his own love affairs.) She is loyal to Julian for that, and despises Mike for loving not her, but his image of her as a pure, lovely, young girl. Mike is devastated, and returns to his old haunts in the decrepit lanes of Singapore.
Ah, but there’s more, or there was to be more. The original script had Frenessey as lesbian, with a purely platonic relationship with her husband Julian. (So that Victor/Victoria get up makes more sense!) Mike couldn’t deal with that, but then, what’s he supposed to do? It puts a spanner in the works for his plans to run away and get married to her. At any rate, the censors wouldn’t stand for it, and that part of the plot was revised. I actually think it works better as it is: less “shocking” and transgressive, but a body blow to the usual male romantic narrative trains.
Several years ago, I read Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James Scott. I had read his book, Seeing Like a State, quite a few years ago. Both books are intriguing and provocative, with many astute insights, but like “Seeing,” which starts strong and then fades to a sort of intellectual rant, “Against” is more plausible than convincing. It never answers, or even acknowledges the fundamental question raised by its investigation, i.e., why did cities form at all?
The title of the book is a multilayered pun. Scott sees his work as going against the grain of received academic wisdom, and he believes that the mass domestication of grain in the early agricultural states supported the growth of oppressive cities with hierarchical class societies, which he loathes, so he is “against the grain” in at least two ways. Personally, I can’t shake the association with À rebours (often translated as “Against the Grain”), the so-called “breviary of decadence” by Joris Karl Huysmans which is about as far from Scott’s point of view as you can get.
Scott’s book begins with his presentation of the “standard narrative” of urban formation: people gradually figured out how to raise crops, grew sedentary, achieved surpluses and superior living conditions to their previous hunter-gatherer nomadic existence, and formed cities. This is quite a straw man, as some reviewers have noted, and I personally, recall reading and hearing discussions in the late 1970s that undermined it by claiming that hunter-gatherers actually had quite pleasant and well-fed existences, but this is a minor point. His rhetorical strategy is telling, however. He has an agenda.
The bulk of the book is devoted to exploding the notion of the city as progress. Instead, Scott describes it as a locale replete with noise, filth, periodic epidemics, class exploitation and forced labor, and minimal increases in fertility supported by rigidly controlled agriculture. The achievements of grain harvesting, writing, warehousing, etc. are all bricks in the wall of class domination by the priest-taxmen who rule. He is quite convincing in his presentation of the doleful picture of city life in the days of Ur and Uruk, and he cites voluminous recent scholarly literature.
He concludes with a chapter titled, with a tinge of irony? “The Golden Age of the Barbarians.” His thesis here is that the early days of urbanism were the best time to be a nomadic raider since the cities were ripe for the plucking. The ex-urban riders had better lives, better health, more freedom, less government, better food, and, I suspect, more fun. The city dwellers were the poor schnooks of the world. But here is the problem: Why then, did cities form at all if they were so awful in comparison to the free and easy life of a nomad? Scott has much scholarly backing for his claims that the early days of cities saw many false starts, cities that formed and dissolved rapidly, failures all around. It was a fragile thing, the early city. Why did people keep trying to make them work?
Scott pays a lot of attention to the role of force, armed force, taxation and debt as a control on peasants, to keep residents in the city: The lure of the free range always beckoned. How ya’ gonna keep ’em down on the plantation? But why were they there in the first place? Armies come from cities, so you can’t have a free roaming army rounding up poor peasants and forcing them to citify.
Scott’s ode to the barbarians suggests one answer to the question, but not one that Scott would like. Perhaps the nomadic barbarians forced people into settlements where they would form cities. They created the communities so they could periodically loot them. Interesting logic, but not too plausible. Another path to urbanization that is suggested by Scott, and at least one reviewer, is akin to Al Gore’s frog in the pot analogy. (Frogs sitting in a pot on a stove don’t notice the temperature is rising until it is too late to escape. Of course, frogs don’t act that way, as anyone who kept lizards and amphibians as pets as a child would know.) People grouped together, got some settled agriculture going, battened off the harvests, liked the situation, and almost without knowing it, a city grew up around them and before they could escape to the hinterlands and ride with the nomads, a priestly caste had taken over and pretty much enslaved them as agricultural laborers.
I find this scenario hard to credit: just as frogs are sensitive to any temperature change and show it in their behavior, rather than being oblivious to the change, wouldn’t people have noted changes in their lives, compared them to their previous lives as free-rangers, and resisted, if only by leaving? I think that they would, unless there was something keeping them in place, and that had to be something other than an organized army, as I noted above. What could that be?
Scott never once asks if there was anything positive in the urban experience, but perhaps his omission is exactly the answer. Perhaps ancient men and women found living in large groups exciting, fascinating even. Maybe it made them feel a part of something interesting and thrilling, despite the negative aspects of crowded urban life. Isn’t that the essence of urban culture, the desire to be part of it, to see and be seen on the urban stage, to play a part in it, even if it’s just a tiny walk-on role? Could it be that the intense social nature of human beings was the secret sauce, the fundamental glue, that kept the cities together despite the beckoning of the open range, and the squalor in which most urban dwellers lived?
Moment of totality, North Hudson, NY. If you zoom in on the photo, you can see the black disk of the moon over the sun (obscured by overexposure) and a planet, probably Venus, to the right of the sun/moon.
I watched “The Public Enemy” (1931) for the first time; blown away, totally. Once again, I am floored by James Cagney’s power as a screen actor. I’ve seen many excellent analyses and histories of the film online, including this one, that rightly emphasizes the sexual aspect of Cagney’s character, i.e., his rather mama-infantalized nature, andthis one that focuses more on its place in cinema history. As the latter study notes, despite being associated with the classic gangster-flick story arc of rags to ill-gotten riches, and then downfall, Tom Powers never gets to be more than a successful hood working for others. And his character never grows out of the adolescent stage of frustrated inarticulate rage at the world and fixation on his Ma, not unlike his character in “White Heat.”
The scene shown in the image above is one of the most famous in Cagney’s career, so much so, that he came to regret having done it. People were always sending grapefruits to his table as he ate in restaurants. There are a lot of stories about the scene and how it came to be: Cagney claims that he and Mae Clarke improvised it as a joke to shock the stage crew and that the director decided to work it into the final cut. I first saw a clip of this scene when I was very young, and I always heard it referred to as a moment of supreme pre-code comedy, but that is a misreading of the scene, as pre-code.com points out.
Tom’s mistress is trying to have a conversation with him over breakfast about their relationship, its present and future, if it has one. Tom is already bored with her, and he’s playing the field, getting ready to make it with the Jean Harlow character. His response to her attempts at dialog is to growl and push a grapefruit into her face. Seen out of context, you could take it as comic, but in the context of the film action, it is simply a brutal revelation of the stunted mental life of Tom Powers. Another spoiled, violent, mama’s boy who is a war with society, and women, and reacts with violence when he’s drawn up short by his own inadequacy and inability to articulate his feelings.
Posted by Lichanos 
Journey to Perplexity 