PMC Commentary

The resolute ambivalence, and falsity, of Nikki Haley

Strange that Elihu Root (1845-1937), who honorably served two presidents in two positions — secretary of state and war secretary — should be better remembered for one quote than as a prime mover of America as a world power. Also a lawyer, Root once said — famously, as mentioned — that "about half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop." 

The understandable reason behind lawyers' refusal to advise such is that they'd rarely, if ever, obtain new, and long-term, clients. What further advice would be needed? Yet Root's brand of laconic, robust and truthful advice should apply to political consultants as well. The decent ones would tell would-be clients to be themselves. Even many poorly informed voters can spot a counterfeit candidate right off, hence deceitfully adjusting one's remarks to fit only the moment can be dangerous to one's political health.

That brings to mind Ms. Nikki Haley. She's self-unassured and full of guile. The two just naturally go together: Self-unassuredness requires outside advice on how to be crafty. Put another way, insecurity distrusts instinct. And the external influence on Haley's every word is powerfully evident. Consider the following.

Here's Haley on 16 January, addressing the E. Jean Carroll defamation case on CNN.

Dana Bash: How do you feel about your party’s frontrunner being held liable for sexual abuse?

Haley: I mean, first of all I haven’t paid attention to his cases and I’m not a lawyer. All I know is he’s innocent until proven guilty.

Skip to only 12 days later, when she appears on NBC's "Meet the Press." 

Kristen Welker:  The jury has now ruled. They have found hm liable of sexual abuse. Do you trust the jury and their findings?

Haley: I absolutely trust the jury and I think that they made their decision based on the evidence.

The quotes I lifted from Jonathan Last, as I will his reaction, since mine is a match.

That’s quite an evolution.

Haley went from not having any idea what the case was about, because she’d never paid attention to it, to having a thorough understanding of the case, the testimony, the evidence presented, and the law. Her understanding is now so thorough that she is able to determine that (1) the jury made the correct decision and (2) this decision was clearly driven by evidence.

Either Haley spent the last two weeks intensively studying the case, or you can’t trust anything she says.

I believe I'll go with door #2, as pretty much anyone would, which explains why Haley's support is so low. Her partisan backing should be much higher, given the hefty number of Republican voters who either loathe Trump or merely have misgivings. Most of the support she does have comes not from voters admiring her; it comes only from voters wanting someone other than you know who. And almost certainly her base would be significantly larger had she just been herself all along (assuming she has a "self").  

Successful candidates opt for a version of Occam's Razor: The best solution to getting ahead in politics is usually the simplest one. In policy terms, that means grossly misleading voters, since real problems remain problems because they're complex and therefore no simple solutions exist. They are, however, furiously peddled. In terms of personal presentation, the opposite is true: to mislead voters by misrepresenting oneself creates a problem. Being yourself from the beginning is the simplest solution to avoiding one.

Yet conspicuously, Nikki Haley is surrounded by overpaid kibbitzers, thus she is this and that, everything and nothing. That's done her great harm — and been a greater gift to Donald Trump. The only external advice needed by Nikki was Elihu Root's, somewhat tweaked: "About half the practice of a decent candidate consists in telling her opponent that he's a damned fool and should stop."

A cease-fire agreement for Gaza? No problem(s). Well, maybe one or two.

It seems Hamas' political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, once took negotiating lessons from Vito Corleone. But perhaps on occasion he caught him on good days, when the mobster's criminal ethics — "We only kill each other," said co-worker Bugsy Siegel — were running magnanimous. Thus Vito would suggest that rather than holding a gun to his antagonist's head, he could always settle for starting high in demands.   

For now, we can only hope for the latter. Yet in reading the cease-fire proposal presented to Hamas by the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt, in which a truce of six weeks is coupled with the release of elderly, women and children hostages, Haniyeh's counterproposal to Israel struck me as equivalent to Corleone's gun.   

"You'sa really wanna da hostages back? You'sa got it. All's you's gotta do is": agree to a permanent cease-fire; withdraw every uniformed man, woman and teenager from Gaza; rid us of your yearslong blockade of Gaza; rebuild it; and free the Palestinian prisoners you hold. 

Haniyeh's counterproposal appears unyielding, no options allowed. But, as mentioned, it could also be that Hamas' political chief is merely following Vito's secondary advice: Put the gun away, exchange ideas, confab with sincerity and enough with the blood.

His fellow negotiator, the Qatari prime minister, explained the logic of a peace deal. Continued fighting is "not getting any results to get the hostages back."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that "there is some real hope going forward," which, as also mentioned, is about all we have for now. Speaking of which, it's what all the foreign ministers are relying on: "The four-nation meeting in Paris appeared to offer the most hopeful sign in months for a diplomatic agreement to ease the war." 

It has been observed that hope is not a strategy. Sometimes, though, hope is the only approach you can hang your hat on. Or you's hat on.

Warning: a post about "Warning from Space" - and some observations about 1950s sci-fi flicks

I happen to be a fan of 1950s science-fiction films, that decade having produced the very finest of the worst. Interesting how the absolute worst can be so entertaining, although others, such as Tarantula!, starring John Agar and Leo Carroll (always entertaining), or The Day the Earth Stood Still or Invasion of the Body Snatchers are such a pleasure to watch because they're so marvelously well done.

Of particular interest is the portrayal of women in these films. A young beauty inevitably made her way into a co-starring role, and the era's acceptance of women in need of protection from the handsome male lead provides a bit of culture shock to the modern-day viewer. It wasn't that long ago that audiences of men and women thought it perfectly natural that the starring beauty be unthinkingly supportive of the man, dependent on his superiority, and submissive in every way. 

Adding to one's fascination with these films was that science fiction was particularly popular in the 1950s because of "the bomb," the Cold War, and the many ways in which evil communist threats to virtuous America could be metaphorized through invading aliens. One can't know what percentage of the audiences realized they were watching sheer propaganda, some more obvious than others, but if the large swaths of today's politically clueless voters is any indication, the percentage was small.    

Another element of sci-fi enchantment was that the genre was an enormous challenge for 1950s Hollywood, one requiring special effects that contemporary technology and painfully low budgets weren't capable of producing. Directors had to be especially creative when the proper telling of unbridled imagination needed perhaps tens of thousands of dollars (huge money in those days) and yet producers were handing them mere fractions of necessity.  

Whoa, I have gone on an unintentional tangent, a digression right off. I'm prattling about the age of Sputnik and immature technology and tortured budgets and Hollywood when all I meant to do was introduce you to a Japanese sci-fi film released in 1956, Warning from Space. (I should set a timer when I begin a post, then I'd know while writing that my time is literally running out; hurry up, idiot, get this done.)           

I watched, sort of, parts of Warning from Space this afternoon while also researching a post, sketching an idea for the post, engaging a couple of readers in the comment section, weighing the benefits of benevolent dictatorships versus democracy via email with my brother, replying to a Canadian friend about a Gazan horror he had just seen on Al Jazerra, preparing to leave for a medical appointment, and eating a sandwich. I relate this "way too much information" only to establish that my viewing attention was somewhat spotty; I doubt I saw even 15 minutes of the epic awfulness.  

Which is to say I'm unable to provide you with a competent "plot" summary. But I can tell you that evidently friendly aliens journeyed to Earth to warn its inhabitants — that would be the Japanese, ahem, movie stars — about something bad headed their way; hence the title, Warning from Space. Before commencing their charitable act, the extraterrestrials thoughtfully transformed their unearthly bodies into human form, and sure enough, the first to do so was what became a real beauty of a Japanese woman. Thus the film's creator could check that box.

But here's what I ached to show you: a perfect demonstration of how 1950s sci-fi filmmakers coped with their painfully low budgets and equally painful absence of anything even remotely called a technological wonder. I give you the aliens in their natural, extraterrestrial form:  

Yes, you as a Tokyo audience member would never have known the aliens are actually Japanese actors clothed in what appears to be wool outfits, looking like starfish with one eye stuck in their torsos. I checked Wikipedia's "Production" entry on the film, and learned the costumes were designed by "the prominent avant-garde artist Tarō Okamoto." Boy did he ever pull one over on the producer. I also learned this was "the first color Japanese science-fiction film," and the aliens are called "Pairans." 

We already know Warning from Space had the obligatory looker of a woman. As for themes common in 1950s sci-fi flicks, the film checked only one box. Wikipedia's entry notes its use of the "atomic bomb" as a motif, "but showed how the weapons, which devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade earlier, could be put to good use."

Another passage in the Production section is rather puzzling: "After the success of Toho's 1954 film Godzilla ... many Japanese film studios began to produce similar monster movies, including Warning from Space." The alien Pairans are anything but monstrous. The creature Godzilla, however, was a Japanese metaphor for the bombs that wreaked death and destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I assume that in tying the big guy to the alien beings in Warning from Space the Wikipedia writer was attempting to characterize the latter as similar wreakers of mass destruction — a stretch that failed.  

In sum, what little I saw of the film surpassed all my expectations of exceptionally bad, 1950s sci-fi films. Nothing ethnically biased here, but I will also say the Japanese surpassed pretty much every American picture of that genre in terms of really bad. Anyway, I'm at 900 words now and need to wrap this up. Hooray! I hear you cry. All I wanted to do, but instantly derailed myself, was show you the one-eyed, woolly clothed, starfish extraterrestrials who once journeyed to Earth, to save it. And with that finally done, I bid you goodnight.

Did you know Trump is responsible for Biden's soaring stock market?

I have wondered now and then how Trump (he reacts to everything) will react to the stock market under President Biden reaching record highs — not that that's proof of Biden's economic wizardry, as his predecessor always claimed about a rising market during his tenure. A president's relation to equity markets is perhaps third cousin, twice removed. It's even more distant from the price of gas, which voters seem to believe a president controls. Just one more thing I've never understood about voter cognition.    

But back to Trump and his unceasing, four-year braggadocio about every uptick at the New York Stock Exchange. With every 100-point gain in the Dow he'd jump on Twitter and do what he does best: praise himself. Only he could accomplish such marvels as increases in 401(k)s, he'd remind us like clockwork. So when the market exploded — upward — under "Loser Joe," he had to think of some way to take the credit and erase Biden's. It took him longer than usual, but yesterday, he finally came through.

THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP — EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE.

The "terrible" stuff that Biden has inflicted on the nation are historic lows in unemployment, a healthy GDP in place of a predicted recession, an inflation-rate reduction of 66%, wage boosts exceeding the rate of inflation and millions of jobs created. Yet Trump and his truth-vacuumed friends have said "everything is terrible" so often they have the public believing it.

As for his excellent Biden-crushing polls, among likely voters he's losing. Perhaps that's what investors are looking at — and counting on. A country's remorseless chaos is rarely a good development for business; with political bedlam capital investments range from hard to impossible to coherently plan. Exporting businesses would be handing out pink slips galore given Trump's intent to slap a 10% tariff on every incoming product from every foreign land. Global retaliation singularly aimed at the U.S. would result. Meanwhile, consumers and importing businesses would bear the cost of Trump's tariff insanity.

At any rate, my wondering about his reaction to Biden's soaring stack market has been answered. I can see why it took him so long. Virtually everything Trump says is stupendous humbug, of course, but the above all caps are in a league of their own. For that he needed a few extra days.

***

Fun fact. As we unfortunately know, millions of voters believe Trump when he sells himself as a brilliant businessman. From MarketWatch, a reality check. The graph above shows what would have happened if you had invested $100 in Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (in red) and another $100 in Vanguard Total U.S. Market Index Fund, June 1995-March 2005. Read it and weep, suckers.

An even quicker hit

In The Bulwark a column by A.B. Stoddard is teasingly filed under "Quick Hits." I'll reciprocate and do it yet more quickly than the Bulwark editors. Her entry, in small part:  

"In November, I wrote that McConnell 'owes himself a better legacy than being run out of town by J.D. Vance, Ron Johnson, and Donald Trump.'"

I agree. I prefer to see him run out of town by the ghost of Chief Justice John Marshall for having cynically denied President Obama his rightful choice of a Supreme Court justice on "principled" grounds, which he rescinded once it was ideologically advantageous to do so, thereby bedeviling America with a majority Court of jurisprudentially half-literate, irrational, misogynistic right-wing religious fanatics for an entire generation. The end.

The presidential campaign strategies; uncommonly simple, straightforward, no frills

The NY Times has entered the game and is cheerfully motivating voters. It describes the presidential campaign season, just now warming up, as an "ugly, dispiriting and historically long slog." So sayeth the paper of record. 

On the other hand ... ugly is in the eye of the beholder; what dispirits one enlivens another; and slogs, by definition, are long. So I take exception to The Times' mopey characterization of this quadrennial season. What's more, has there ever been a presidential contest deemed "beautiful"? — disregarding, that is, the junkie's paradox: the uglier the prettier. And for incurable addicts, every POTUS campaign begins on the 21st of January, inauguration years.

The article notes, "Now that [Trump] looks likely to return to a presidential ticket ... top Biden allies see an opening to draw a sharp contrast." Drawing it should be remarkably easy. The guy on the right, a rapist, a psychotic and frowning ghoul, faces 91 criminal charges, In Biden and The Times' words, he's also "a mortal threat to American government and civil society," while the other guy, smiling, doesn't and isn't.

With that, you have the entire Biden strategy. Trump's strategy has always been known: be as vile and offensive as possible. The other noteworthy difference twixt the two is that while Trump's is easy to pull off as well, in that he's a virtuoso in vileness and for him being an unremitting dick is a breeze, Biden's is easy yet hard to maintain hour upon hour for 279 more days. 

There are in The Times article two items of special interest. One is that the Biden campaign sees the election wrapping up not on November's first Tuesday, as history has had it since 1845, "but on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress will count the Electoral College votes." That's an added little something the nation can thank Trump Inc. for. 

The other interesting item is that the Biden people are chasing Taylor Swift like an enamored 20-year-old male, but for anther reason. They only want her endorsement. Of this factoid I was totally unaware: the pop singer has 279 million Instagram followers. Practically all of them, domestically speaking, would go freebooting on the high seas or stage an invasion of Alabama if she asked them to, so one can imagine the pleasing byproduct of her simple request that they vote for Joe. 

What immaculate justice that Republicans elevated a B-movie actor to the presidency; now Democrats might indirectly trump that with a pop singer who harbors no discernible fixation with politics. There's nothing like an informed electorate — one thoroughly familiar with, and engrossed in, the most important issues of day — choosing the next president of the United States.  

Whatever works. That, gentle reader, is the essence of America's only original, homegrown philosophy: Jamesian pragmatism. So if convincing Ms. Swift to say "I do" is what works, then God bless her, God bless the Biden chasers, and God bless the millions of Swift fanatics. 

Ugly? Dispiriting? A laborious slog? The Times is failing to see the many upsides of this presidential year — foremost of which is that we shall see, at long last, who fundamentally controls the nation: the far-right lunatics who've been around in prominence since Goldwater, or Americans. 

The Biden administration, war, and UNRWA: a report card and a question

On the subjects of Israel and Palestine, there is no Jewish-American commentator I admire more than Peter Beinart.

He is insistently fair-minded, evenly keeled, relentlessly engaged, and willing to take the abuse of his dogmatic detractors. I confess I am also biased, in that his views on the Middle East's decades-long tensions, centered in the Palestinian issue, are in flawless agreement with mine. I can, and do, admire commentators with whom I disagree on just about everything. In fact I read them far more often than like-minded others. Beinart is the senior exception to my custom of preferring contrary views. His writing I never miss.

His latest newsletter is titled "Biden and Gaza: Is Cruelty the Point?" Therein lies another reason I read Beinart. He's one of those rare birds who is unafraid to depart from his center-left tribe on any given issue. Too many commentators tow the party line, which earns them a steadfast readership. Most online politics consumers will not tolerate a writer they disagree with; so much as one objectionable post and they're gone. That I know all too well. 

Let's move on to his newsletter's topic. The following is a transcript, not written text. Hence its notable informality. Its substance is what I referenced above: a departure from party consensus, although that's unraveling. Once again I find myself in agreement with Beinart. He relates some unusually harsh, critical truths about President Biden's Middle East policies — there's no comforting way to say what he says.

I've written similarly critical assessments of the administration and its unsavory embrace, followed by bare tolerance, of Prime Minister Netanyahu's far-right gang of wanton killers and ethnic cleansers. And yesterday I addressed the U.S.-led perversity over "pausing" aid to UNRWA, as Beinart does below. I offer his views not to preeningly validate mine, but as a reinforcement of impartiality on matters frequently treated with excessive subjectivity. Here's Beinart's offering, somewhat condensed.    

***               

This presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative.

For me, the entire experience of October 7^th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy.... People that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and ... then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA.

What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance—what little humanitarian assistance there is—that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?

What makes this even more awful is that while the Israeli allegations may very well be true, again, that it’s also true that Israel has had a campaign for many years now to try essentially to abolish UNRWA because UNRWA’s existence represents a kind of embodiment of the fact that there are all these Palestinian refugees. UNRWA considers them refugees. Many of them are the children, grandchildren of people that Israel expelled in 1948. Israel wants to abolish UNRWA because it wants to abolish the issue of Palestinian refugees and never have to deal with that question so it can permanently foreclose the possibility that any Palestinians could ever return. This, by the way, in a state that allows Jews to return after 2,000 years, which is an irony that I find remarkable.

And so, the US has basically now become complicit in this effort at really the worst possible time one could ever imagine in terms of the need for UNRWA to keep people alive in Gaza.... And so, I look at these people in this administration that we are taught to see as the good guys in our domestic politics and think, how are the people who are considered benign in American politics, how can they take such a profoundly cruel measure? And even if we’re willing to support them in this election—and I am—I just don’t think I can ever buy into this narrative of good versus evil if the people that I am being called on to call good are complicit in the starvation of children in Gaza. And that is what the Biden administration is complicit in by suspending aid to UNRWA at this moment.

***

Profound, clear-headed, painful — and true, which is what makes it so painful. We understand the thunderingly burdensome politics of Biden's position on Israel, so on that I cut him some slack, even though my willingness to understand has diminished. For the benefit of two million Palestinians suffering from hunger and disease, plus tanks, artillery and airstrikes, should not domestic politics take a backseat to American decency? Yet that could put Trump back in the White House, which would cause more suffering to more people in even more countries. Including this one.

So just as the the Biden administration tolerates Netanyahu & Co., so too do I tolerate the administration's position on Israel, although I continue to think at least the threat of terminating U.S. armaments is advisable. Still, it nags, and it nags with considerable pain. All the same, I'll support and vote for the "good guy" though I feel as Beinart feels: "When I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy." Some truly execrable foreign policies come with no escape hatch.

But UNRWA? Not only did the administration suspend vital aid to the relief organization, it led the international stampede to suspend. Put simply — for this was a simple matter — there was no reasonable cause for the U.S. to cut funding to UNRWA, a financial hit the U.N. says could be felt as soon as February. Israel's far-right fanatics pressured the administration to suspend, but who's the superpower here?

Leading Biden around on a chain regarding the war is one thing; as discussed above, there are understandable reasons behind the president's capitulations. There are no such reasons regarding UNRWA, on which I elaborated yesterday. Again I share Mr. Beinart's pain: "I look at these people in this administration that we are taught to see as the good guys in our domestic politics and think, how are the people who are considered benign in American politics, how can they take such a profoundly cruel measure?" And again I can answer that question if asked about the war. About UNRWA, I'm at a complete loss.  

You might think these critiques naïvely insist on the perfect acting as the enemy of the good. I'm unaware of perfection having ever reigned in a foreign policy, and I don't expect it to. What these assessments are getting it is this: Is there such a thing as benevolent evil? 

"Trump Knows Best," co-starring Jane "Alina Habba" Wyatt

We didn't believe him the first time around, when he promised to hire "only the best people" to staff his administration. Most weren't, and anyone who did meet that honored description soon left, or were fired. Now he's back at it again, making the same promise for a second term. We still know it's malarkey.

For one to say he or she knows something usually calls for substantiating proof. And that, we are most happy to provide. Exhibit A: the attorney, so to speak, whom Trump hired to defend him in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, which cost him $83.3 million. She's a splendid example of the "best people" possibly to come — a gibbering, empty-headed, almost unbelievably incompetent screw-up. 

That's not just this one man's opinion. Defense attorneys and former prosecutors throughout the cosmos took notice of Alina Habba's legal abilities. They could find none. Trump is now appealing the astronomical judgment against him. Yet because he hired a lawyer who appears to have obtained her professional degree from a McDonald's franchise and has since practiced law in her mind only, his odds of succeeding are roughly equivalent to a PowerBall ticket buyer hitting all the right numbers. Are we, then, in any suspense as to his appeal's outcome?    

"Let me ruin the suspense for everyone," says trial lawyer Brian Manookian. "Trump doesn't have an appeal, I know the talking heads on TV who have never tried a case or appealed a jury verdict have to mention it," but "it isn't going to fly." For starters, Habba failed to "preserve a reversible error at the trial level," a must. "This is why you hire competent counsel. You need someone who actually knows the rules of evidence and procedure."

Continued Manookian: "Alina Habba had no clue what was occurring throughout the trial. She not only failed to preserve any remote grounds for appeal, like a moron, she repeatedly and unintentionally waived them over and over," saying "no objection" to objectionable exhibits. Why? asked Manookian. Again, "because she is a moron," one who'd "rather 'play' lawyer than do the research to be a lawyer." (Habba has got to be related to the one and only lawyer I once regrettably hired.) 

That pretty much covers it. But I mentioned prosecutors as well, so I'll let former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman have a say. He called her courtroom performance a "comedy of bumbling errors." He then — dangerously — tried to get into Trump's head. "Alina Habba — maybe in his own mind is like, 'That's a path I can't go on. I've been burned very severely.'" Yes, but also give credit to Trump himself, first from his despicable conduct years ago, to his walking out of the courtroom during closing remarks by Carroll's attorney. I believe it was she who commented, That added $10 million to the judgment.

The point being, in a second Trump term we'd get hundreds of Alina Habbas at higher administration levels, plus another 50,000 replacing career civil servants. The latter would be accomplished through reinstating the infamous Schedule F, shorthand for "Fuck you, America; the world too."

A pause to enlighten the woefully benighted

Having just learned of this myself, I'm rushing it out for your benefit, in case you plan on attending a cocktail party soon and need something with which to first dazzle your co-imbibers and, second, ensure your future happiness. Here it is.

2⁸²⁵⁸⁹⁹³³ – 1

What in hell is that? I hear you cry. Well, as @PhysicsinHistory notes today, it just happens to be "the largest known prime number," containing "24,862,048 digits when written in base 10. It was discovered by a computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche of GIMPS in December 2018." And it's your ticket to freedom. 

Adding that final part, especially, will in itself enable you to look much more knowledgeable than they. You'll want to drop the word GIMPS with an air of, Ya'll know what that means, right? Eyes glaze. You then casually mention it stands for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which (check Wikipedia) "is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers."

Eyes glaze a bit more. Now surely you people know who Marin Mersenne was, you say next with faint disappointment. I mean, who doesn't? — he being the 17th-century frog polymath universally known for writing prime numbers "in the form of M_n = 2ⁿ − 1 for some integer n." 

I saved the best part for last. Should you take my advice and behave like a know-it-all jackass at that next dreadful cocktail party where everyone stands around looking uncomfortable with nothing of interest to say, you'll never be re-invited. 

U.S. retaliation against ... who? what? how? "The Guns of January."

Following events of the last few months has been like reading the braindead lead-up to WW I. More than a dozen countries are inextricably involved in the chronic mess that is the Middle East, most are aligned with much larger powers, few actually want an international brawl, and yet each is gradually being sucked in to one. We can't relive history, some say, but perhaps we can if we just wait long enough.    

President Biden now faces a remarkably undesirable decision: What to do about Sunday's attack on U.S. service members in Jordan (a fairly new player), three of whom were killed. "Credit" was taken by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, described by The Washington Post as "an umbrella group for Iranian-linked militias including Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba." These proxies seem to be everywhere, and each harbors an intense hatred of the U.S. and Israel. 

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. will react "in a time in a manner of our choosing. We don’t want a wider war with Iran" — a sentiment shared by the prepositional subject. "But we’ve got to do what we have to do." Our timely manner is not entirely by choice, for Kirby went on to note that we don't really know who planned and executed the attack. It "clearly had all the earmarks” of either Kataib Hezbollaha or a group supported by Kataib Hezbollah. In this region, it's turtles all the way down.

Sanam Vakil of London’s Chatham House adds further anxiety to tensions by asserting that the killing of American soldiers adds "further anxiety that a regional war is actually here." I see statements like that as similar to our blithe acceptance of Donald Trump's appalling behavior; if we acclimate our minds to a regional war, a regional war becomes that much easier to blithely engage. Then again, I write such things myself, so I shouldn't knock Ms. Vakil. She says containment of this rapidly sprawling clusterbumble depends on "who, what, when and how the Biden administration responds" — an observation that only a highly specialized think tank could conceive.

Vakil expects U.S. surgical strikes on Iranian-backed groups outside of Iran. Biden may make that choice, but if he does he can expect deafening blowback from domestic groups. We know who they are; they're just waiting for grounds on which they can stand and shriek weakness. Having no responsibility for the consequent, tangibly destructive blowback to come from Iran frees them from any motivation to behave reasonably. In a way they're like Iran and its militia groups: attack, attack, attack the Biden Administration.  

Says Iran's foreign ministry: "The resistance groups in the region do not take orders from the Islamic Republic of Iran in their decisions and actions." Probably nine times out of 10 there's truth to that, as I explained here. Nevertheless, Iran is what the law would call a "proximate cause," which bears culpability. Thus the ministry went a bit too far in claiming accusations against Tehran are "baseless," adding that its nation's peace-loving leaders prefer to work "through diplomatic means." At times, sure; on the other hand, such innocent pronouncements coming from a ruthless, murderous, tyrannical regime such as Iran strike one as a trifle hollow. 

The ministry finished its defense with some offense, accusing the U.S. of "exacerbating insecurity" by stationing troops in Iraq and Syria, and now launching airstrikes on Yemen. Again, Iran possesses some legitimacy in complaining about foreign troops so close to its border. The U.S. certainly wouldn't tolerate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard stationing men in Mexico. But it overreached by dragging Yemen into the controversy. The Iranian-backed Houthis are inflicting great harm on international commerce in the Red Sea; somebody has to stop them.

Just as somebody should have stopped Israel's far-right leadership from bombing Palestinians into the Middle East's Middle Ages. Its actions post-7 October ignited this 1914 Balkanlike situation  The death toll in Gaza is now over 26,000, most of the victims, women and children. In short order the Biden administration began scrambling to contain the bloodthirsty objectives of Israel's war cabinet. With each diplomatic scramble, the admin got the finger. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is having far too much political fun claiming his country is facing an "existential threat." It might, if he and his fellow warmongers persist in their Gazan obscenities. 

If not, Israel may become Serbia redux, 1914. Nationalistic fervor out of control, long-standing ethnic hatreds, a small nation leading big nations into a global inferno. The one major difference — so that one man, Mr. Netanyahu, can remain in power. There's still time for somebody, wink-wink, to pull the plug on Israel's martial capabilities. But that time is growing perilously short. 

Rabid squirrel in chemistry lab — crazed human in Oval Office

The subheading of Peggy Noonan's latest WSJ column is "Of course it's too early to drop out. A veteran GOP speechwriter has advice on challenging Trump." The number of candidates remaining in the ... "race"? ... is down to one, but had the others done what the GOP speechwriter advises, race could be typed sans question mark and air quotes.    

The speechwriter whom Noonan called on for forwarding advice is Landon Parvin. He put words in the mouths of Reagan, both Bushes and Arnold Schwarzenegger, plus their occasional extemporaneous remarks. What Parvin has to offer Trump-chellenging Nikki Haley is strikingly commonsensical; indeed every time I read one of these "Here's what [Candidate X] must do" from a consultant, speechwriter or rhetoric professor to the stars, my one thought is: Has this not already occurred to the desperate politician?

It has. Because it is patently commonsensical. Why some pols nonetheless forego the first-edition "Playbook of Campaign Conduct" is beyond me, but that's their problem, not mine. In others, their ego is so gargantuan they always know better — and usually lose.     

Parvin's one-opponent advice to Haley, or at least its thrust: "Speak up for all the Republicans who have been demeaned, diminished and threatened by Trump"; use humor — here I would add, "to demean and diminish Trump"; "make fun of his self-importance and self-regard"; "show that he’s out of control, that he has no rails, no boundaries"; and "don’t try too hard," the opposite of which Nikki Haley does effortlessly. Relax, Guv.

Thrown into this mix is an elegant yet down-home line whose originator I know not. Parvin or Noonan? It's not in quotes, so it would seem to be Noonan's, or it could be a Parvin thought refined by Noonan. It's also not advice, although it's preceded by such: "Admit you are not as entertaining or maybe exciting as he is, but that’s OK, you’re running not to entertain but to lead." Then comes that which is thrown in — a thumping summation that struck me as something beautifully useful against a blunderbuss peasant like Trump:

"A rabid squirrel in a chemistry lab is exciting to watch but can do a lot of damage."

Perfect. In that one sentence there is all. It indirectly speaks up for others demeaned, in turn it humorously demeans Trump, it pokes fun at his God-knows-where-he-got-it self-regard, it emphasizes his total lack of control, and just uttering a funny line shows the orator isn't trying too hard. Were I Ms. Haley, I'd ask Parvin-Noonan for reproduction rights.     

Could be I'm alone in my high estimation of this particular body slam. But it is funny. And nothing gets under Donald Trump's epidermis like making him the butt of a joke. Remember his seething expression at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, where President Obama reduced him to a puddle of humiliation?

That's what Nikki should shoot for. (Christ, now they've got me doing one of those "Here's what [Candidate X] must do" routines.) Trump has no sense of humor, his skin is as gossamer thin as Saran Wrap, when mocked he gets mad — and that's when he's more likely to say something prodigiously, exceptionally stupid even for him.

If I were you, Nikki, I'd deploy the "rabid squirrel in a chemistry lab" every damn day. Then sit back and watch Donald fume, whence he does a lot of self-damage. 

A news story of logic mutilation

I've read the story from several sources in near disbelief. Led by the United States, officials in Germany, Britain, Australia and six other countries said over the weekend they are suspending funds for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, which, as its name suggests, provides humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.

After months of being shelled and bombed by Israeli planes, 600,000 of those civilians are also facing "catastrophic hunger and starvation." The World Food Program says "the scale and swiftness of this crisis is unprecedented in modern times," and should "current predictions continue, we will reach famine by February." 

In view of that grim setting, why would 10 well-to-do nations pause their funding of UNRWA? Some of its employees — 12, to be exact — have been accused by Israel of participating in Hamas' 7 Oct. attack. Neither Israel nor the U.N. has released details of the accusation (a few have been leaked), although a senior U.N. official, who's been briefed on the matter, said it's "extremely serious and horrific." 

Of the 12 accused, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said yesterday that nine had been fired, one is dead, and two have identities being "clarified." He added that "any U.N. employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution."

So far, perfectly logical. UNRWA took swift action — the only action it can take: termination — against the accused, even though they've not been formally charged with a crime. Appearances were enough. UNRWA also pledged to assist in any criminal prosecution to follow, provided the evidence exists, naturally. And the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services announced it will investigate the allegation.

But here's what's extraordinarily illogical about this affair. UNRWA employs 13,000 humanitarian aid workers, and it is they the well-to-do countries are hurting: men and women slogging it out every day in the most dangerous environment on earth. As UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said, the actions of 12 scarcely warrant the "collective punishment" of more than a thousand times that number.

And that's only the tip of this unfathomably irrational berg. Suffering far more will be those 600,000 Palestinian women and children, mostly, facing "catastrophic hunger and starvation." In fact UNRWA recently changed the WFP's prospective facing to present-tense face: "570,000 Gazans are classified as having food insecurity equivalent to famine levels." 

Guterres issued a statement on Sunday pleading with the 10 (and counting, it appears): Don't do this, it makes no sense, you're hurting hundreds of thousands of innocents. The Norwegian Refugee Council relief agency agreed with the U.N.'s top man, writing on social media, "Donors, do not starve children for the sins of a few individual aid workers."

In a further demonstration of a government having lost its soul and defenestrated all conscience, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, "dismissed the secretary general’s statement and called on all donor countries to suspend their support for UNRWA pending a 'comprehensive' investigation." That could take years, as Israel's far-right war cabinet knows.

The cabinet's scruples-lobotomy has caught on. The conscience of 10 nations has been expelled by hysteria's invasive force. "We must make sure that not a single euro of Finland’s money goes to Hamas or other terrorists," said Finland’s minister for foreign trade. A not unreasonable stance, with which the other nine agree. Their assurance, however, is contingent on that aforementioned, time-consuming investigation.

Time that tens of thousands of Palestinians will pay for with more hunger, disease and loss of vital services once provided by UNRWA. All because of 12 alleged fanatics no longer among UNRWA's 13,000 aid workers. Someone other than the ambassador of the far-right government purposely inflicting this pain needs to explain the logic this illogical absurdity.

Oh shit. American service members killed by Iran-backed proxy

Today, U.S. Central Command in the Middle East reported that "a drone attack killed three U.S. service members and injured at least 25 near the Jordan-Syria border." Thus, "Oh shit."

The Washington Post's hurried reporting says "the attack may further inflame tensions that have been rising in the region since the start of the Israel-Gaza war." You think? "The one-way attack drone struck the living quarters of a base, causing injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to brain injuries.... The number of wounded is expected to rise as more troops report injuries."

That, for now, is the totality of the Post's coverage. Politico's emailed breaking news is more expansive, but not by much. "The assault marks the first time American troops have been killed in months of drone and missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and now Jordan," writes the publication.

After briefings from DefSec Austin, National Security Adviser Sullivan and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Finer, President Biden released a statement: "We know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq."

By way of coincidence, this morning ABC’s "This Week" aired a prerecorded interview with Joint Chiefs Chairman C.Q. Brown, who said America's "goal is to deter them and we don’t want to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict within the region." Neither does Iran, I would add. 

Politico's final passage provides some chronologic and intensity context. "Since October, Iran proxies have hit U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East 158 times, though so far they have caused only minor injuries and damage to infrastructure."

The passage should have read not "so far they have caused," but "until today they caused." And until today, President Biden had hoped — that being all he had — that Iran-backed proxies would do no greater harm than those minor injuries.  

Again, the same with Iran. For all we know, Iran's leaders are furious with today's attacking militia group, its attack being more than its sponsor wanted. It's likely, or at least quite possible, the group revealed to Iran nothing of its plan beforehand.

These militants are smart and they're knowledgeable. And one thing they know is that U.S. intelligence has excellent eavesdropping capabilities concerning Iran. Had the militia group provided Iran with a heads-up, U.S. intel would also have been the first to know, as would the targeted U.S. military. The group's plan would have been blown — and become an instantly useless plan.  

(Note: Assuming the above is accurate, Politico's headline is greatly misleading. It announces the service members were killed in "an Iran-backed drone attack." The proxy group is Iran-backed, not necessarily the drone attack. There's a possible regional-war difference.)

U.S. intel capabilities also explain why Iran almost certainly had no foreknowledge of Hamas' 7 October attack on Israel. The Palestinian group knew as well as other Iranian proxies that American ears were always listening. 

This I mention for an encouraging reason. When Iranian leaders explain through backchannels that they were unaware of the forthcoming attack, Biden will probably believe them, since it's also probably true. That, then, would translate into U.S. retaliation against the proxy alone.

Both sides could then return to lobbing only "minor injury" explosives and flying relatively harmless drones. We hope.

The coolest garden ever

Those who know me also know of my once-passionate desire to fly fighter jets, cruelly terminated at the tender age of 22 by the U.S. Navy. After running me through all their tests, the uniformed guys with the cool planes said I met every requirement with flying colors, pardon the pun, except one: they frowned on my marginal color blindness (which I wasn't aware of before the physical). For me, this was a tragic time of unspeakable unhappiness — a regulations-shattering rejection of my very soul. Yes, I wept, as the world did, for it would never see me lose a $50 million F-16 over some godforsaken land, given my directions-challenged brain. I can get lost in my driveway. Anyhoo, I got drunk, and then I got over it. And that's my woebegone story that brings you this equally cool garden, whose relationship to my story is self-evident. (Garden lovers my butt. It's for P-51 and Corsair lovers.)    

😞Sadly, I'm closing my Garden Aircraft Pinwheel Collection. 😢Balancing my full-time career and this passion project has been tough. Before shutting down, I want to share my creations with as many garden lovers as possible.

Shop Now>> https://t.co/vCiSwxuacH pic.twitter.com/H3geEL7Lct

— Protezo (@ProtezoStore) January 19, 2024

Now, take the Republican House. Please!

Except as a Republican football, we read little these days about the proud nation of Ukraine, what with Bibi and Israel playing the roles of Vlad and Russia, a Shakespearean tragedy for the ages and headline news for each morning — news that has elbowed the embattled democracy from the Fourth Estate's vigilance. 

But Ukraine is still there, 80% of it, anyway, and still fighting the invading swarm of orcs and katsaps — derogatory nicknames for Russkies — dispatched by the psychotic Putin. The latter's adversarial, rational counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, by now would now have dispatched the orcs and katsaps right back to Mother Russia, had the free world grown a pair by providing his army with the necessary means to put the psychotic's pair in a vice. 

Instead, in sensationalism and the world's attentiveness the appallingly wrongheaded Russia-Ukraine war has lost out to the equally appalling, wrongheaded Israel-Palestine war, it being more recent and at times even bloodier. Meanwhile Ukraine itself has become, as mentioned, a Republican football; a kind of subtextual prisoner of the GOP's decades-long melodrama of battling equitable immigration reform, a helpless subject of Trumpian game-playing. No vital aid for Ukraine, say House Republicans, until we see an acceptable immigration bill that we can promptly reject. 

A noted victim of Trumpism's unseriousness is former congressman Adam Kinzinger, who, as a man of unTrumpian conscience, is concerned about Ukraine's predicament. About his former partisan colleagues in the House, he gives up. "Imagine having a moment to make a historic difference in world affairs, an opportunity rarely given to members of Congress, and choosing silence," he writes in his newsletter.

"These Republican members would think of themselves as a perfect candidate to 'Quantum Leap' back to 1938 and convince the world to confront Hitler earlier," continues Kinzinger, "yet here they are in our own 1938 moment, cowering because whiney weak Donny has a following." 

Cowering, quivering and wetting themselves for fear of losing, because of some minor misstep, the whiner's conditional love. What a sorry bunch the slim majority in "The People's House" is. These clowns justify and confirm the founders' every worry about what democracy can avail. If they were a plague on only America, so be it, we put 'em there so we deserve 'em. But now they're a plague on innocent others, the courageous battlers of katsaps.

In agreement with Mr. Kinzinger's pro-Ukraine sentiments are the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, Carlos Pascual, John Herbst, William Taylor, John Tefft and Marie Yovanovitch. The diplomats got together and wrote an article for The Bulwark, only their target was one Thomas Graham, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The third-through-ninth minus-eighth ambassadors to Ukraine took powerful exception to Graham's CFR article, "Political Hurdles on Ukraine's Way to EU membership." Disclosure: I didn't read it. I did read the ambassadors' critique of it. I'll abstain from relating their itemization of what they said were Graham's many errors; let it suffice that he "seriously mischaracterizes the state of democracy in wartorn Ukraine and its EU prospects." 

That said, whatever Ukraine's true state of democracy, whether irreproachably informed or in need of some tutoring, to the West it's titanically preferable to the authoritarian tyranny of Vladimir Putin, whose imposed serfdom would militarily spill into neighboring countries and up to the Baltics. No thoughtful analyst of Russian geopolitics envisions anything less.

And that means the U.S. is facing a vastly unfavorable "historic difference in world affairs," to place Kinzinger's words in a dissimilar context. In short, a momentous threat to U.S. interests and national security; a fresh, ignominious international order designed by authoritarian Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.        

Every day, observed the ambassadors, "Ukrainians are giving their lives" — against Russia and for Ukraine, of course — to prevent such an oncoming avalanche of evil. But also as the West's lone defensive line. And "they deserve ... help."

They do, albeit Republicans will countenance the evil if that's the price of a ticket on Trump's train of precarious, conditional love.