Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Goldengate

Zeus visiting Danae in the form of a shower of gold, by the Russian artist Aleksandr Sigov (1980).
That's my proposed pet name for the scandal in which "golden showers" of micturation—the pleasures of urolagnia—play such a prominent role.
If golden showers
Should come your way
You'll linger hours
In fragrant spray
No, stop that. I have no difficulty believing the Trump could be into such things, which goes along with my sense of his sexual infantilism, as in that desire, discussed in the Billy Bush tape, to assault women with showers of kisses:
 I just start kissing them, it's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait.
He has a baby's desires and preoccupations, as I was saying back then,  and your excretory functions are a central part of that, and so is the interest in humiliation and being humiliated. When he says, to prove the story can't be true, "I'm a germophobe!"—well, of course! And yet the peeing parts of the body are central to sex. Fear of and fascination with urine heighten his excitement.

Sorry about this. And sorry to get all Freudian on you, but sometimes that stuff just works.

An argument from The Guardian suggesting something wrong with the Russia dossier:

What does the dossier say?
It refers several times to the “Alpha-Group” of companies. This a basic and inexplicable error. The prominent consortium headed by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman is the Alfa Group. Fridman also runs Russia’s biggest private bank, Alfa Bank.
Is it true?
The spelling blunder dents the report’s credibility. Anyone with genuine intelligence about Fridman and company would get Alfa right. We don’t know if the report’s author has ever lived in Moscow, or speaks Russian. The use of “Alpha” suggests the author hasn’t been to Russia recently, and/or that his or her knowledge of the country is second-hand.
I think the skeptics are completely wrong on this; if the source hasn't been to Russia recently or knows about the country only at second hand, where would he get this idea? To my mind the only way he could have come up with the spelling is from original Russian documents, in which the company name is Алфа, which could be transliterated either as "alpha" or "alfa", depending, but since the word's primary meaning is the Greek letter alpha, that would be the obvious first choice. He chose that specifically because he's only looking at original documents, not at English translations, and he's not familiar with the company in English.

If I were editing the document I'd Google the company name to find out how it's styled in English, but hey, most people aren't editors. In any case he's more used to reading about the country in Russian than English and is thus considerably more first-hand than The Guardian's writer.

Another apparent error as noted in the Buzzfeed story is:
The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is "reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates." It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.
I don't see how you can read this as in contradiction with the facts; it's obviously not "reserved for close associates" in a formal sense, as if a wouldbe resident has to provide proof of close association with a member of the top leadership. That can't be what the source means. Rather, it means simply that's who lives there. And as you should know the close associates of top leadership in Russia and the very wealthy have a lot in common, in that they are the same people, in Russia more than most places, which is why we call them oligarchs.

I may come back with more of this stuff... We'll see.

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