Since Mexico hasn't been forthcoming with those checks for the Wall, some of the trumpets have rallied around the brilliant idea of pooling their own money via a GoFundMe page. Turns out the GoFundMe page is a con, and they're funding a con artist's yacht. Least. Surprising. News. Ever. https://thesternfacts.com/source-build-the-wall-gofundme-just-paid-for-a-nearly-1-million-yacht-not-a-wall-72958836bd0c In the photo above, the con artist in question -- Brian Kolfage -- is on the left. I don't know if that's the yacht in question behind him. His friend wearing the necktie is Kris Kobach, a Kansan politician of some renown.
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In the period of Near-Eastern history beginning with the conquests of Alexander, there were by the standard accounts that have come down to us four great schools of philosophy: the cynic, the stoic, the epicurean, and the skeptic. Each of the first three of these four may be defined by a clear conception of the ideal life. For the fourth, the ideal life is more of an unspoken implication. For the cynic, the ideal was renunciation. For the stoic, indifference. For the epicurean, a sort of sustainable low-intensity pleasure. For the skeptic, it was the bursting of balloons, a ruthless honesty about the fact that no one (else) knows what they think they know. There was a distinction between the Academic and the Pyrrhonistic variants of skepticism, but in both cases the underlying glee seems to have been the same, the conviction that most people in the world have minds full of balloons, hot and airy ideas easily burst by sharpened logical arguments. What fun!
I enjoyed the Times scoop about Trump's losses through the late '80s and early '90s. Why does it matter? Because Trump sold himself as a successful businessman and a great deal-maker, and as someone who would bring those skills into the Oval Office. The tax returns contribute to a very different picture. He was a rich kid playing with Daddy’s money, and losing it (and other peoples’ money too) at great speed. He was eventually bailed out when he learned that he could PLAY a successful tycoon on television — THAT was what he turned out to be good at, and THAT is the skill he brought to politics with him. With this background, his recent efforts at negotiating with North Korea, with our two NAFTA partners, and even with the Democrats on infrastructure, make sense. This isn’t multi-dimensional chess. He’s an old man still trying to teach himself checkers.
I wrote last week about one passage from Judith Miller's memoir, THE STORY (2015). Here's another. Early on in her chapter 15, Miller, writing about being embedded with a team that was assigned to look for Saddam's supposedly hidden cache of weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq War in 2003, tells us: "Col. Richard R. McPhee, forty-seven, who commanded the eight-hundred-person XTF, had insisted I wear a uniform if I wanted to travel with his METs." Jargon translation there. The XTF was the "Exploration Task Force." It was made up of Mobile Exploration Teams (METs, but not a New York baseball franchise.) So, the Colonel in charge wanted her to wear a uniform. Why? "A reporter in civilian clothes was a natural target, he said He was not going to be the first commander in Iraq to get his embed killed." I'm curious why this is? An Iraqi sniper would aim for the civilian? Why? Or just because it would make her conspicuous? Well...
The great Cuban chess player Jose Casablanca once said, "I can draw any game against any player in the world." It sounds like a fairly equivocal sort of boast. It is actually a profound observation about life. Casablanca was saying that if he played to draw, he could get a draw. Against anyone. Because he was THAT good. But he was also admitting that he could lose, IF he played to win. The search for a win is what would create the risk of a loss. Deep. But of course one might expect depth from the sour looking but well dressed fellow in the photo here.
It's been four years since publication,so I'm late to the fair. I'm only now looking at Judith Miller's book, THE STORY (Simon & Schuster)-- chiefly a memoir of her years with The New York Times. That covers a lot of years. The Times hired her in 1977, and she was forced out in 2005. In all the controversy about the supposedly hidden "weapons of mass destruction" in Saddam Hussein's hands in the run up to the Iraq War, Miller is for me the most fascinating single character. I am happy to report that the book doesn't make her seem less so. A terminological point: she doesn't use the phrases "first Gulf War" and "second Gulf War." She refers to the war of 1990-91 as the Gulf War -- there is only one -- and the war of 2003 as the Iraq War. Today, I'll quote a bit of what she wrote about the Gulf War, the war associated with George H.W. Bush, portrayed above. The Times' coverage was coordinated by Johnny Appl...
Funny Stuff. The guy on the left side of this photo is Karl Popper. Renowned for the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of what is and what is not science. Psychoanalysis was a primary example, for Popper, of something that makes false claims to science. That is all you need to know to enjoy the following. http://existentialcomics.com/comic/285