Truth? Social?

It is hard to avoid news about Donald Trump, particularly since he is President of the United States. That said, it is even harder for me to avoid a chill down my spine, particularly when I am reading online news sources. This morning’s case in point came from a Web page for the San Francisco ABC7 news channel. Presumably, this content was previously broadcast on television this morning; but there is something more permanent about the “printed word,” even when the “print” is actually a Web page!

United States Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (from his Wikipedia Web page)

The headline for the above hyperlink reads as follows: “Trump excuses Howard Lutnick for saying there have been no US deaths in Iran war.” As might be expected, the Web site wasted no time in setting the record straight in response to what Lutnick said:

Eighteen Americans have been killed so far in the conflict, which has now been active for more than six months.

That said, the article continued with “the word from Washington,” which turned out to be just as disconcerting, if not more so. First, there was Trump’s attempt at clarification:

Trump wrote on social media on Thursday that Lutnick had "Venezuela on his mind" when he made his remarks.

This was followed by Lutnick speaking for himself:

Also on Thursday morning, Lutnick posted to X saying he "misspoke" and offering his condolences to the families of the 18 dead service members.

I find it hard to avoid an adage that I picked up in my American History class, presumably related to World War II:

Loose lips sink ships!

My guess is that pretty much every American from the second half of the last century not only knew this warning but also took it seriously. Can this now be said of the United States Secretary of Commerce? Do we now have to worry about whether it can also be said about our President?

Buyer’s Remorse?

This morning I found myself wondering whether all of those voters that elected Donald Trump into the office of United States President (most of them, presumably, for the second time) might begin to be feeling at least some sense of “buyer’s remorse.” Bearing in mind that those voters probably do not turn to Al Jazeera as a news source (assuming that they know anything at all about Al Jazeera), these days even our domestic news sources are beginning to recognize that all is not well when it comes to our country’s economic well-being. Personally, I make it a point to check out the Standard & Poor’s 500 index every morning; and things have not been looking good, even if there seem to be some signs of recovery this morning.

Today’s news presented by an Al Jazeera news reader (from the YouTube Web page)

Nevertheless, this morning’s visit to Al Jazeera got my morning off to a rocky start. This morning I read an “Explainer” article, classified as “News” with the subcategory “US-Israel war on Iran.” The headline was merciless: “Trump’s ‘economic D-Day’ claims first victim: Not Iran, but US markets.” It was reinforced by an equally dire sub-headline: “The US and Israel’s war on Iran has upended global financial and energy markets.”

By way of context, a generous share of my student days were involved with the war in Viet Nam and the many instances of organized resistance to our involvement. For me, the most memorable slogan was “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things,” a slogan created for a poster by Los Angeles artist Lorraine Schneider to support opposition to the war by Another Mother for Peace. These days, that slogan applies to what is currently happening in Iran, suggesting that Viet Nam history seems to be pretty much forgotten.

These days I not only follow my Al Jazeera “feed source.” I often watch a half-hour of news on their television station. I have limited access through an xfinity channel, but I discovered that I could get the “full feed” through the “Al Jazeera English | Live” Web page on the YouTube Web site. (As I write this, the display shows that 7561 viewers are visiting that Web page!) Mind you, I do not dismiss news sources based here in the United States. Nevertheless, multiple points of view, particularly from countries other than our own, tend to be more informative than a single one!

Technology is as Serious as War

Georges Clemenceau (provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive as part of a cooperation project, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license)

My guess is that just about everyone has encountered the aphorism “War is too important to be left to the generals,” which is usually attributed  to Georges Clemenceau, who was prime minister of France during the first quarter of the last century. This morning I was reminded that digital technology is just as important. As might be guessed, the trigger for that association can be traced back our president, Donald Trump.

The source of that trigger was the following New York Times headline: “Trump Plans to Sign Executive Order Granting Oversight of A.I. Models.” The subtitle of the headline is just as chilling: “The executive order, which would signal a shift from the hands-off approach the White House previously took, follows debates over how to gain control over A.I. models without disrupting innovation.” To be fair, a considerable amount of my time went into the theory and practice of artificial intelligence (A.I.) during about half of my undergraduate years and all my research efforts as a graduate student. I suspect that neither of the authors of the Times article, Tripp Mickle and Sheera Frenkel, are as informed about A.I. as well as any students (undergraduate and graduate) and professionals.

To be fair, on the other hand, I suspect that both of those authors are better equipped to make decisions about A.I. than anyone working in the White House (at any level), not to mention those working in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. One way of putting this is that there is a very wide gap between expertise in the digital world and decision-making at just about any level of the structure of our government. Sadly, I doubt that such a gap can be closed, simply because it takes too much time; and those working for the government have their hands fuller than ever.

The View from the “Other Side”

During my morning review of feeds through The Old Reader, I realized that none of my sources in my “World News” category came from the United States. Two of them come from the United Kingdom (BBC and The Guardian); and the other is Al Jazeera, whose news I try to watch once a day, even if the only way I can do so is through YouTube. As might be guessed, Al Jazeera has its own take on how our country’s policies guided by our President are evolving.

Woman walking past a mural in Tehran protesting the United States military forces (from an Al Jazeera Web page)

This morning that take was captured in the following headline: “Trump says US forces to stay near Iran, ready for ‘next conquest.’” As of this writing, there is a ceasefire between our country and Iran, which, ironically, was brokered by Pakistan. Regardless of who was doing what, I felt I could breathe easier knowing that I would not be reading news of further hostilities. Nevertheless, I still had misgivings, first with the noun “conquest” and then after reading the following paragraph in the article with the aforementioned headline:

Yet Trump’s language underscored how quickly the truce could unravel. He reiterated US demands that Iran abandon any nuclear weapons ambitions and ensure safe passage through the vital shipping lane, while boasting that US forces were “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest”.

The Guardian is having a say of its own in this matter. This morning ran an article about George Clooney giving a speech to 3,000 high school students in Cuneo, Italy. (Mind you, this setting allows Donald Trump to accuse Clooney of being un-American!) Here is what Clooney had to say:

Families are losing their loved ones. Children have been incinerated. The world’s economy is on a knife’s edge. This is a time for vigorous debate at the highest levels. Not for infantile name calling. I’ll start. A war crime is alleged ‘when there is intent to physically destroy a nation,’ as defined by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute. What is the administration’s defense? 

This November’s election will have an impact on the membership in both houses of the Congress. I see this as a “litmus test” to measure how many voting citizens in the United States are willing to push back on Trump’s approach to foreign relations. My greatest concern is that this may be too long of a wait!

Olé!

 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/spain-closes-airspace-to-us-planes-involved-in-war-on-iran

Does "Meaning" Mean Anything Anymore?

I have decided that, regardless of what is actually happening in the world, the Republican Party has decided to declare war on the word “meaning;” and what frightens me is that they may be winning:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/rubio-tells-al-jazeera-strait-of-hormuz-will-reopen-one-way-or-another 

The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

A War Correspondent Confronts Truth

Today while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, I happened to be reading Fintan O’Toole’s article for the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a recently published collection of letters written by Martha Gellhorn between 1930 and 1949. The title of the article was “A Moral Witness,” and most of the letters in the collection dealt with Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent.

To many Gellhorn may be known better as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. Hemingway, of course, also wrote about war. While his texts may have followed the stylistic lead of journalism, Hemingway himself was no journalist. Indeed, O’Toole calls him “one of the great spinners of self-aggrandizing narratives,” which is probably the best way to summarize his fiction. Gellhorn, on the other hand, was “the real deal” among journalists that chose to cover battles. Like Hemingway, she followed the Spanish Civil War; but, decades later, she was still “in the game,” going off to cover Vietnam in 1966, much to the consternation of all those government influencers that kept sending more and more of our troops there.

However, it was back in the days of the Spanish Civil War that Gellhorn realized that not everyone believed that truth was an ideal to be pursued in either journalism or any other genre of writing. Reflecting on that time in 1959, she wrote in one of her letters:

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

It today’s context, one might almost say that her characterization of lies was a bit too polite. It may, indeed, be a habit, but not necessarily one that is either “homey” or “appetizing.” Rather, it is a habit like addiction, not only filling the vast space of cognitive capacity but also determined to make sure that no truths share that space.

Gellhorn died in 1998. She never got to experience either the horror of 9/11 or the military nightmares of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps that was why she never quite grasped just how addictive lies can be and how much damage they can cause. In the context of the current Presidential campaigns, O’Toole’s article could not have been better timed.

Next Month NCCO will Dwell on the Last Century

Next month the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) will return to the Veterans Building. Once again they will be led by Music Director Daniel Hope. This time Hope will share solo duties in a performance of a double concerto for violin, piano, and strings. His fellow soloist will be Venezuelan-American Vanessa Perez, who will be making her debut appearance with NCCO.

Guest artist Vanessa Perez (photograph courtesy of Cadenza Artists)

The concerto was composed by Erwin Schulhoff in 1927, originally scored for flute, piano, string orchestra, and two horns. (A recording of that version was discussed on this site earlier this month.) Schulhoff himself was the pianist at the premiere performance in Prague on December 8 of that year. Since I have been unable to find any information about an alternative publication of violin and piano soloists, there is a good chance that Hope will simply play from the flute part in his performance with Perez.

The concerto was well received, but it was banned after the 1939 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia solely on the grounds of the composer’s Jewish descent. Schulhoff took on a pseudonym to conceal his Jewish identity, and he petitioned for Soviet citizenship. His application was approved in 1941; but, before he could leave, the Nazis deported him to the Wülzburg concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis on August 18, 1942.

Another Czech victim of the Nazis was Hans Krása, son of a Czech father and a Jewish mother. Like fellow composers Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein, Krása was deported by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, which served primarily as a way station for subsequent transfer. All four composers were allowed to pursue their work, providing the Nazis with a powerful propaganda instrument. Nevertheless, accommodations at Theresienstadt were never intended to be permanent; and all four composers were transferred to the Auschwitz extermination camp with the inevitable consequences. Krása will be represented on the NCCO program with a performance of the dance movement “Tanec,” originally composed for string trio in Theresienstadt in 1944.

The program will conclude with another perspective on the dark days of World War II, this time a Russian point of view. NCCO will play Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 110a chamber symphony in C minor. This is actually an arrangement of the Opus 110 (eighth) string quartet made by Rudolf Barshai with the composer’s authorization. In the interest of shining a bit of light in the midst of all the darkness, Hope will begin each half of the program with one of Felix Mendelssohn’s string symphonies. The thirteenth in C minor will begin the program, and the tenth in B minor will follow the intermission.

The San Francisco performance of this program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 23. The venue will Herbst Theatre, which is located on the first floor of the Veterans Building at the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street. Prices for single tickets are $29, $49, and $61. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page. Discounted single tickets will be available at the door, $15 for patrons under the age of 35 and $10 for students with valid identification.

As in the past, there will be an Open Rehearsal. It will be held on Wednesday, March 20, beginning at 10 a.m. The venue will be Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, located at 1620 Gough Street on the northeast corner of Bush Street. All tickets for Open Rehearsals are sold for $15, payable at the door.

Tim Brady’s Eclecticism on Starkland

Earlier this month Starkland released the album Music for Large Ensemble, featuring two compositions by Tim Brady. Brady does double duty on this album, playing solo electric guitar in “Désir,” his concerto for electric guitar and large chamber ensemble conducted by Cristian Gort, and then conducting his orchestral song cycle Eight Songs about: Symphony #7. Allan Kozinn has described Brady’s work as “entirely of his time, which is to say, eclectically rooted in the full range of modern styles, from neo-Romanticism to experimentalism and Minimalism, to say nothing of the great art-rock tradition that informs some of his guitar lines.”

Brady’s guitar virtuosity is almost immediately apparent at the very beginning of his concerto’s first of three movements, which are played without interruption. As often happens when a virtuoso soloist writes music for himself (think of Niccolò Paganini), the solo work tends to rule over the ensemble accompaniment. However, while Paganini required that the orchestra do little more than amble its way through the concerto’s themes, Brady expects his accompanists to follow his breakneck pace and keep up with the twists and turns of his eccentric rhythms. Since that accompaniment was written for a one-to-a-part chamber orchestra, the performance itself tends to reflect a madcap approach to jamming, even when the players are following the specifics of the notation.

The title of the song cycle is a bit enigmatic. The symphony is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 60 (seventh), which was given the title “Leningrad.” This symphony was completed in December 1941, a time when the city of Leningrad had been under siege by the Nazis for about three months. (The siege would continue until the end of January of 1944.) The work would be given its first performance in Leningrad on August 9, 1942, apparently at the request of Joseph Stalin. As the Wikipedia entry for that performance notes, the work “was performed by the surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, supplemented with military performers. Most of the musicians were suffering from starvation, which made rehearsing difficult: musicians frequently collapsed during rehearsals, and three died.”

The texts of the songs, by Douglas Smith, give voice to Josef Stalin, Nina Varzar, wife of Shostakovich, citizens of Leningrad, a German soldier in the trenches, a prostitute, performers in the orchestra (two songs), and conductor Karl Eliasberg. On this recording they are sung by soprano Sarah Albu and baritone Vincent Ranallo. In theory this song cycle promises to be a fascinating perspective on a particularly dark time during World War II. Unfortunately, practice is another matter.

Part of the problem may have to do with distance from the subject matter. While Smith is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of Russia, he was born in 1962. This puts him at a significant distance from not only World War II but also the Soviet Union itself. Brady was born in 1956, putting him somewhat closer to the “historical source.” However, he was never as close to the siege as Shostakovich was. Indeed, the Soviet authorities circulated a photograph of Shostakovich serving as a fireman in in Leningrad 1942:

from a post by Anna Aslanyan on the London Review of Books blog

Thus, while Smith’s texts are well-chosen, it is unclear how much Brady really appreciated what was happening in Leningrad, what Shostakovich was doing at that time, and why he was doing it. The result is music that sounds more like an intellectual exercise than a reflection of one of the darkest times of World War II translated into music by a composer with direct experience of that darkness.

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Ignoring Consequences Continues to be Dangerous!

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books includes a scathing article bu Geoffrey Wheatcroft entitled "Tony Blair's Eternal Shame: The Report." The report in question is the so-called Chilcot, whose proper title is The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, the review of the motives and consequences associated with Great Britain entering the war in Iraq as a partner of the United States. The report was prepared by a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This is a massive document, 6275 pages distributed across twelve volumes. However, as Wheatcroft observes, it should suffice for most to read the "62,000-word executive summary." To the extent that Wheatcroft's article amounts to a summary of that "executive summary," even that may be hard to take.

As might be guessed from the title, Wheatcroft's major target in former Prime Minister Blair. While he does not call
Blair's relationship with George W. Bush an "unholy alliance," it is clear that he was straining very hard to avoid that phrase. (He does, on the other, rather neatly deflate that concept of a "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom as little more than a deceptive myth.)

The summary of Wheatcroft's summary comes with his concluding assessment of Blair:

And yet in the end Tony Blair isn't a messiah or a madman or a monster. He's a complete and utter mediocrity. He might have made an adequate prime minister in ordinary days, but in our strange and testing times he was hopelessly out of his depth. Now we are left with the consequences.

Since Wheatcroft is British, he kept his attention focused primarily on Blair. Whether or not that description holds just as well for George W. Bush is our business, not his. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize that the most powerful word in that quotation is the last one.

I have long held that we have become a culture that has tried to banish the word "consequences" from our working vocabulary. The last time I expressed this explicitly was in March of 2015. The idea emerged in my writing through observations that everyone seemed to be eager to jump into new technologies without thinking through the implications that technology might have for "unanticipated use." In other words we think only about the cool things we shall be able to do, assuming that they are also good things, totally overlooking the possibilities that "the next new thing" may serve more nefarious purposes we never bothered to consider. By all rights the aftermath of our adventures in Iraq should have been a wake-up call to us all to think about consequences before taking action, yet in today's immediate present, it would seem that few are bothering to think about how the vote they case in November (or the decision they make not to vote) is likely to have consequences on the same magnitude of those examined by Wheatcroft.

Is it All About Having the Biggest Gun?

Today is one of those days on which history has designed some ironic coincidences. In Japan it is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, based on our logic that it would take two such bombings to convince Japan to sue for peace. On our own soil it is the first anniversary to the death of Michael Brown by police shooting, a memorial occasion that was interrupted by the firing of six more shots, whose origins have yet to be determined. If that were not enough to remind us that the juggernaut keeps rolling, last night gunfire broke out at a home in Harris County in Texas; and, by the time the shooting had stopped, six children and two adults were dead. Such is the legacy of a country that seems to believe that conflict can only be resolved though violent deaths.

Clash of the Idiots

Gary Wills had a great post on NYRblog yesterday. The title was "Holy Ignorance," which he appropriated from Olivier Roy, a French anthropologist who specialized in studying belief systems. The basic argument is that fundamentalists are immune to argument based on reason. They see the use of logic to justify any with which they disagree as a test of the strength of their faith, which makes them hold to their beliefs with even greater strength. Wills wrote this in an analysis of the Pope’s decision to write an encyclical on climate change and its connection to selfishness. Almost immediately five Catholic Republicans who are part of the rush to candidacy in the next Presidential election denounced the Pope for knowing nothing about science, regardless of the fact that they knew even less (even collectively)! Clearly, Wills saw all five of them as evidence of “holy ignorance!”

What is interesting, however, is that a parallel line of argument can be developed about Muslim fundamentalists. This, in turn, may tell us something about what makes IS tick. While they are not necessarily grounded in Islam, their goal is to subvert all Western forms of government in their territory and replace it with a caliphate. This actually turns out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they are determined to reinstate a pre-Enlightment approach to governance based on little more than raw power. However, at the same time they know they can appeal to Muslim values to win others to their cause. Ironically, they do all this through some of the most sophisticated Internet advertising (yes, that is ultimately what it is) yet to be designed.

Perhaps the Pope should pay more attention to the book of Revelations. The prediction of the great war of Gog in the land of Magog could well involve Christian Fundamentalists in battle with Muslim Fundamentalists (hence the inspiration for my own choice of title for this post)! That is quite a change from the early nineteenth-denture hasidim, who thought Napoleon was Gog (worth remembering on this anniversary of Waterloo)!

On Following the Money to Iraq

Here is a sentence from an Al Jazeera report worth considering:

Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armoured vehicles when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group overran the northern city of Mosul, according to the country's prime minister.

Bearing in mind that it is not particularly easy to "follow the money" in wartime (particularly when it is not your war, or at least not supposed to be), it is worth pondering just who should be taking the financial hit for the expense behind all that fancy hardware. My guess is that the Iraqi government did not pay for the stuff, meaning that it was given to them, presumably by the Department of Defense, rather than the corporation that actually builds the vehicles. In that case this is the sort of thing that amounts to a bad investment. Does that mean that DoD will be able to write it off as a tax loss? (The thought that the DoD is immune from paying taxes is as chilling as it is realistic.) In my own private fantasy world, the bill would be sent to George W. Bush, since he basically created the predisposing conditions behind the loss of the hardware. For better or worse, those, I know that my fantasy world is not a "reality world!"

Justified SCHADENFREUDE

When it comes to an arrogant display of military might, there is some justification in taking pleasure when things go wrong, as long as no one gets hurt. No one got hurt during a rehearsal for the parade in Red Square marking the anniversary of the Second World War. However, as Patrick Reevell reported for ABC News, there were probably an abundance of red faces (not with connotations of former Soviet might). One of the stars of the show was supposed to be the new Armata T-14, which apparently has been recognized by both Western and Russian experts as the most advanced tank in the world. Unfortunately, the damned thing stalled during the rehearsal run, right in front of the Kremlin to boot. Reevell's article includes a hyperlink to a YouTube of a failed attempt to tow the tank out of the way of the parade. (Has anyone ever successfully towed any tank?) Eventually, the tank started up again with the same sort of arbitrariness with which it had halted. It would not surprise me if the authorities are now convening to decide which heads will be rolling (hopefully, only metaphorically) as a result of this episode.

The Battle over the word "Genocide"

This morning Belen Fernandez submitted a fascinating opinion piece to Al Jazeera English entitled "The Kardashian factor and the G-word." The "G-word" is, of course, "genocide;" and it has been attracting a lot of attention in the weeks leading up to the 100th anniversary of the killing of some 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks. To call the word sensitive is the height of understatement. Switzerland convicted a Turkish politician for denying that the noun was appropriate, while Turkey itself will only allow the word if it is quarantined by scare quotes.

Fernandez, however, is not interested in the roots of this controversy. Rather, she felt obliged to write about how it had been overtaken by public relations interests, particularly pertaining to member of the Kardashian and Clooney families. (Amal Clooney represented the Armenians in a case argued before the European Court of Human Rights.) She feels that all this emphasis on public relations, much of which spins off into marketing, has reduced a major issue to inanity.

Is she correct? There is a Gedankenexperiment that might warrant or refute her hypothesis. Simply find an appropriate sample space of subjects, each of whom will be shown Fernandez' headline. Ask them all what the article is about; and, if we want to have some fun, ask the question twice, before and after they have read the article. If, indeed, the substance of Fernandez' message has been obscured by a "Kardashian halo," then she has made her point.

East is East

The latest issue of The New York Review has a fascinating article by Steve Coll entitled "Hitler & the Muslims." It basically involved efforts by the Nazis to transmogrify precepts of Islam for their own propaganda purposes. Adolf Hitler himself was active in this process; but even more active was Heinrich Himmler, who apparently admired the discipline of Muslim troops in battle. Most interesting, however, is the history-repeats-itself irony that surfaces towards the end of the article:

Still, as in Berlin between the wars, failure has proven no deterrent to persistence in Washington, where Pentagon planner continue to act as if they can win wars in the Middle East by deftly manipulating and arming tribes, sects, and Islamic leaders in scattered territories they barely know.

It takes guts to find a parallel between Nazi and American reasoning; but, considering the mess our country has made out of its relations with the Islamic world, a swift "boot to the head" may be what it required to bring a bit of sensibility into the decision-making process.

Taking Militarization to the Next Level

There is now an article on the CNET Web site with the title "Here's how you put an asteroid boulder in orbit around the moon." The article consists entirely of images except for the subheadline:

NASA has a bold new plan to steal a boulder from an asteroid and bring it back for orbit around the moon, to help test an Earth-defense system.

I suspect I am far from the only one whose most salient memory of Generation Kill was the guy who said he became a Marine so he could "blow shit up." Well, this sure takes blowing shit up to a new level! I suppose the project grew out of someone who remembered Armageddon better than Generation Kill and thought that the best way to protect the planet from any large object falling out of the sky would be to destroy the object. Needless to say, anything we learn in the interest in defense may subsequently serve us for offense. After all, what would we do if we were menaced by a large space ship full of hostile aliens? When do we start designing rules of engagement to determine when we use those boulders as weapons?

Ignorance of History Strikes Again

Given our country's track record of dealing with apocalyptic Christian extremist cults, particularly on our own soil, our failure to understand what Malise Ruthven called the "Lure of the Caliphate" on her recent NYRBlog post and the power it exerts in both pursuing its vision and recruiting others for assistance is nothing short of catastrophic myopia.