Literary Corner: The Case of the Delayed Devaluations

Joan Miró, L'Été, lithograph, 1938, via Denis Bloch Fine Art.

It's a Story

by Donald J. Trump

Just to—just to finish,
I think a lot of good things
are going to happen, but I
delayed my devaluations.

Monetary, you know, on
the monetary—the devaluations,
my currency manipulations, and also
my tariffs, for a period of a year,
with China, because I wanted to
get as much help as—as they could
give us with respect to North Korea.

That had an impact. So I delayed it.
But there came a time when I couldn’t
delay it any more because it’s too much
money that they drain out of our country.
Just too much money. That’s where we are now.

So I put 50—I hope you can cover
this pretty much as I say it
because you can’t really cut
it out. It’s—it’s a story.

It's actually true that Trump single-handedly brought about a huge devaluation of the RMB, in early July, through the last round of crazy tariff impositions, as Bloomberg reported at the time:

You thought he was nuts: Update

pic.twitter.com/0a25gApyJ6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2018

In comments to the post the other day, we got into the question of the president's new Twitter thing, where they post short videos of him yelling for a camera in the Rose Garden (the most recent example above), who was doing it and what it was about. It turns out, Olivia Nuzzi reports at New York, this is a knowable thing:

On August 18, he yelled about manufacturing and, later that day, he yelled about meeting with foreign leaders. On August 22, he yelled about the stock market. And on August 24, he yelled about the economy. The resulting video clips, which range from 23 to 60 seconds in length, are like stream-of-consciousness infomercials for the flimsy concept of #AIGGADW (America Is Getting Great Again, Don’t Worry). With his hands conducting dramatically at his sides, he began the first episode like this: “Made in America is back! Now, some people would say ‘Made in the USA’ —I personally don’t care. The fact is, we’re back.”

According to — I swear to God — five current and former officials from both Donald Trump’s White House and campaign as well as one former official from the Trump Organization, the purpose of this on-camera exercise is simple: It makes him feel (and, he believes, look) good. It’s also a reminder of a freer time in his life, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, when he first perfected the cockeyed art of digital media virality with an off-the-cuff series of videos called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump and Ask the Donald.

My bold.

Thoughts

Let Me Tell You Just Really Quickly About Something That Didn't Happen

by Donald J. Trump

we have the best economy in the history of our country factories are real jobs are pouring back into the United States we are putting your great Indiana coal miners and still workers back to work we’re reclaiming our nation proud manufacturing Heritage in putting tariffs on foreign producers who cheat our workers and she hour companies not fair not fair as President McKinley once said long time ago we believe in American for American workers American wages for American laborers an American homes for American citizens just this week we made another truly historic announcement we are replacing NAFTA with a beautiful brand-new US-Mexico trade deal have as we speak Canada I will of Canada right but they have to get rid of those barriers and they have to get rid of those big Terence Canada showed up at the White House where the hell did she come from and now tomorrow that’s one person and now tomorrow you’re going to read headlines Trump had protesters all over the place one person one person major

You thought he was nuts before?

Vincent Price in Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968).

New Post added at Balloon Juice - Our Lying Eyes -https://t.co/c5DUOmxW3S pic.twitter.com/hNMdyZaUuN

— Nuck Fazis! (@Johngcole) August 30, 2018

Read the BJ piece, but this looks weirder to me than an unusually crazy lie.

It's true that there are rumors of impending demise for NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, and spread through a venue that is famously on Trump's reading list, the New York Post's Page Six, but they have nothing to do with Lester Holt: indeed, some of Lack's mistakes look like things Trump would have approved of, following the Matt Lauer #MeToo crisis:

there’s still-lingering questions about why NBC News sat on the infamous “Access Hollywood” “Grab em by the p - - - y” Donald Trump tape, and why they refused to run Ronan Farrow’s exposé on Harvey Weinstein before he went to the New Yorker.

Plus, there’s [Megyn] Kelly’s $20 million-a-year deal personally made by Lack for the ex-Fox News star to host the soft third hour of “Today.” Despite a recent improvement in ratings, her numbers are still down 30 percent in the key demo compared to 2017...

But I can't find any suggestion that NBC newscaster Lester Holt is in trouble, or ever has been, over anything, least of all his interview of the president of 11 May 2017 when he got Trump to confirm, two days after firing FBI director James Comey, that he had done it to halt the Trump-Russia investigation:

Sex, lies, and Catholicism

Seventh-century icon of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, 4th-century martyrs who some believe united in a wedding-like ritual of "adelphopoiesis". Via Wikipedia.

The money grafs, for me, in the Times coverage (by Jason Horowitz, and really worth reading) of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's lurid accusations that Pope Francis has been orchestrating a multiyear coverup of the sins of Cardinal McCarrick isn't the fact that Viganò was involved in a coverup himself, while he was serving as nuncio in the US in April 2014, when he ordered a halt to investigations of sexual misconduct with adult men and seminarians on the part of Archbishop John Niestedt of St. Paul, which I more or less knew, or that he was responsible for embarrassing the pope by arranging a meeting for him with Kim Davis, the gay marriage-license martyr town clerk from Kentucky, which I used to know, but the way he fought against being shipped to the US in the first place:

Throughout his power struggle, Archbishop Viganò had been writing urgent appeals to Benedict to stay in the Vatican.

He said he needed to stay because his brother, a Jesuit biblical scholar, was sick and needed care, and he accused Cardinal Bertone of breaking his promise to promote him to the rank of cardinal....

But Archbishop Viganò’s brother, Lorenzo Viganò, told Italian journalists that his brother “lied” to Benedict that he had to remain in Rome “because he had to take care of me, sick.” To the contrary, he said he had lived in Chicago and was fine and hadn’t talked to his brother in years over an inheritance dispute.

Viganò is really a big liar, a shameful thing to say about a 77-year-old archbishop. If you read his scabrous letter with the understanding that he's probably lying, it reads more coherently, and if conservative Catholics down to our own nuncio Monsignor Douthat are taking it seriously, it's because they really, really want to—Douthat shows he doesn't really believe it by offering his own fictional account of the McCarrick business in which Viganò's accusations are false but Francis is still sort of guilty:

Only the chatter

One of approximately two known photographs depicting Donald Trump using a computer, from Motherboard. He seems to think one plays it by waving at it, like a theremin.

For the record, Donald J. Trump did not Google himself; he still doesn't know how to use a browser. This morning's terrifying tweets (which he entered at some incredible hour like 3 or 4 AM, and then deleted, redoing them, or having somebody else redo them, as a properly constituted threadlet, a little after 8:00)—

....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018

—are based on a piece by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, datelined 25 August,  after she Googled "Trump" in the news tab, nominally showing that Google's algorithm is darkly influenced by Democratic math I should say a lot of sources suggested this, but none of them gave s link, so I'm not going to try to credit them):

It's the Stupid, Economy!

Downtown Phoenix. Photo by Pat Shanahan/The Republic.

Some new research suggests air pollution has a "huge" negative effect on cognitive function, and the effects are most severe on men, older people, and those with less formal education:

The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.

“Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.”

It's the Trump voter!

Annals of Derp: It's also Cognitive Dissonance

Image via Ghoul Friday.

A sighting of the old zombie study proving on the basis of a completely factitious approach to some very dubious data that 5.7 million "illegal aliens"--more than half the total undocumented population--came out to vote in 2008:

This isn’t surprising to those of us who are being honest about the corruption in our political system. https://t.co/p2tc835TB6

— Defend Trump (@Defend_Trump) August 27, 2018

It shouldn't be too surprising, given that the story came out 14 months ago.

But it was always a meaningless extrapolation from unreliable data and it still is. pic.twitter.com/WndyOtTobO

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2018

For the Record: V for Vindictive

Love the quotation marks, and that exclamation point! Via Jezebel.

I really should have put a bet on this, which I predicted by some significant number of hours ahead of the Washington Post scooping it:

Trump allowed Scavino to compose a sympathy tweet addressed but not @-ed to the McCain family, complete with a full-length portrait of himself, because what would be better calculated to soothe their grief, but he's evidently refusing to sign off on a formal statement. https://t.co/PnZUqV8vhH

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

RIP, I guess

By Freakshow, via Freaking News.

Reporters in the era when McCain flourished saw themselves as sitting between parties, creatures of neither, equal opportunity cynics, un-ideological, in possession of the most awesome crap-detectors in politics. They also loved him because he reflected this image back to them. 3

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 26, 2018

Jay Rosen's Proustian theory of McCain ("Proustian" doesn't mean it's a joke; it's pretty good) https://t.co/33bmjzkrR9

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

I had in mind one of a number of passages like this one, from À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, as cited in this quotes compendium:

Tell Laura

Laura Ingraham telling better than two and a half million viewers about the plot that has silenced her and all her friends.

Sorry I can't hear you. Your tweet is all strangely muffled. Are you ok?

— Gestating Turkey (@Yastreblyansky) August 25, 2018

I took a look at the Federalist piece Ingraham links, "Despite Twitter’s Protests, The Stifling of Conservative Speech On The Platform Is Real", by David Reaboi and Nick Short, and was taken aback by the opening graf:

Literary Corner: Tucker In

Jephtah Killing his Daughter Judges 1, from the Maciejowski Bible (France, c. 1250), via Pneuma Review.

Thoughts on His Receiving Support From White Nationalist Institutions Like David Duke and the Daily Stormer Website For His Denunciation of Imaginary South African White Genocide

by Tucker Carlson

Joseph Stalin loved his daughter.
I love my daughters. Does that
make me a Stalinist? That's such a
stupid question I don't know what to say.

(AP via Lincoln Journal-Star)

Moral: Don't ask yourself stupid questions. Let somebody else do it.

How does that analogy work, though, exactly? "Nazis love me. I love myself. Does that make me a Nazi?" Well, no, that's not a valid syllogism, but. If a father's love—Iosif Vissarionovich's or Tucker's— for his daughter is a good analogy for a Nazi's love for Tucker, what's good about it? How does it work? Are we saying the Nazi's love for Tucker is warm, sweet, chaste, and somehow inevitable? Are we saying nothing could be more natural, unless it's Tucker loving Tucker? And why would that be?

Mozart

For my dad's birthday.



He died in 1996. He was more unhappy than he should have been, for large periods of his life, and I don't think I did a lot to make it better, but I did do one thing, indirectly. As a little kid in suburban California, where everybody got free instruments and lessons in elementary school, I was thought to be musically gifted—wrongly, I didn't have the necessary drive and focus, I was doomed to be a great listener—and my parents, who didn't know much of anything about classical music, started getting exposed to it, and my father fell gradually in love, especially with Beethoven (who was deaf and tormented like him) and eventually, after the VA fixed his hearing, Mozart. And later than that, I could make him an old-fashioned with Old Forester and he'd nurse it listening to a Mozart quartet, and that was pretty good.

Normless and Gormless

Teddy Gormless.

It's an odd moment, the week a criminal defendant making his guilty plea claims, under oath, that he was directed to commit a couple of his crimes (exceeding the federal campaign contribution limit by something like 1000% in unreported donations that he carefully, though not very effectively, tried to conceal) by the beneficiary of the contributions, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, who thus enters the court record as an alleged co-conspirator (and let's just stipulate that we know it's true because we've all heard the fucking tape in which, rather than saying, "Christ, man, you're getting Pecker to pay McDougal $150,000 to kill the story? Is that legal?" he only says, "Pay with cash") for the first but clearly not the last time—

An odd moment, I was going to say, for Charles R. Kesler of the Claremont Institute to issue an op-ed piece in The New York Times on how

Most of President Trump’s alleged transgressions offend against the etiquette of modern liberal governance, not the Constitution.

and that's a good thing:

Literary Corner: Gestating the Turkey

Image by Getty via Mirror.

Sonnet: Eight-Hour Turkey

by Donald J. Trump

I have tremendous respect for China. I mean,
the energy, the genius… it's incredible what
they have done. We can't do it, it's got to be
a two-way street. We have only one-way streets.

You know what bothers me? I have people
coming to me, some people in Congress,
"Sir, can you get this deal done immediately?"
It's got to gestate. The word "gestate". 

Like when you are cooking a chicken. Time… Time…
Turkey for Thanksgiving. My mother would say eight hours.
I said, "Eight hours?" She made the greatest turkey
I ever had. It takes time. It takes time. So when they run
and say, "Can you do Nato right now, can you
sign it next week?" I say, "Wait a minute…"

Even a 30-pound turkey should not spend more than five and a half hours in the oven. At eight hours it will be a desolate inedible monster, a thing a rat or a raccoon wouldn't touch. Even mold won't eat it. Sort of like Jared's peace deal in the Middle East. As to China, I suppose if there were going to be a deal it would have been done by now. I'm not surprised some "people in Congress" have been bothering him about it. Soy farmers all over the country are facing huge losses. The Shanghai steel market is enjoying six-year highs, while American manufacturers who use steel in their products are facing unsustainable price increases. Maine's lobstermen are dying while the Chinese buy from Canada. Trump's deal is "gestating".

The only possible thing left is for Trump to retreat and go back to the status quo ante, to bury the "deal" in the backyard and apologize to all of us for his stupidity. And for the cabinet officers who helped him create this dessicated turd, criminal Wilber Ross and idiot Steven Mnuchin and crazed Peter Navarro, to resign. Oh, and Trump's a criminal too, if you hadn't heard about that, and he should resign too.

Trump EPA Unveils New Plans to Kill 1,400 People/Year

To own the libs, presumably. Via Lisa Friedman/NYT:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday made public the details of its new pollution rules governing coal-burning power plants, and the fine print includes an acknowledgment that the plan would increase carbon emissions and lead to up to 1,400 premature deaths annually.

The proposal, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, is a replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which was an aggressive effort to speed up the closures of coal-burning plants, one of the main producers of greenhouse gases, by setting national targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions and encouraging utilities to use cleaner energy sources like wind and solar.

The new proposal, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, instead seeks to make minor on-site efficiency improvements at individual plants and would also let states relax pollution rules for power plants that need upgrades, keeping them active longer.

Fire tornado, east of Santa Maria, CA, July 2017, photo by Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department/AP via Newser. Didn't know those existed, but it seems pretty clear there are more of them than there used to be.

Of course the Trump administration acknowledges that implementing the Green Power Plan would actually avoid killing 1,500 to 3,600 people yearly by 2030 (by reducing the PM 2.5 particulates in the atmosphere), but they explain that would be illegal (it would "force electric utilities to use greener energy sources", and they claim in what sounds like a very Scott Pruitt argument that it's against the law to do something like that—surely it's worth 1,400 lives a year, and maybe 48,000 new cases of asthma every year too, don't let's forget that, to preserve the sacred American liberties of our power companies).

Witchcraft

English witches making a spell, engraving, 1489, Bridgeman Library. Via AllPosters.

A comment from Geo X over at Alicublog gave me a lot of food for thought, and I thought I'd leave it here, for the record—

Okay. So the idea is that news organizations are going to have jurors whacked if they don't find against Manafort, and the evidence for this is miscellaneous incidents of people being mean to right-wingers. So...this is an insane thing to believe, right? I don't mean "insane" as a general term of abuse, but rather "insane" as in "you are having paranoid delusions and should seek immediate mental help." Does it seem particularly plausible that a bulk of wingnuts should be suffering so? Well, I can certainly believe that some of them have literally driven themselves insane with rage, but I have to wonder: what percentage of them actually believe this, and what percent just claim to because it is mandated that one must always believe the worst possible things about people who are not part of The Tribe--the same phenomenon that leads worryingly large numbers of republicans answering in the affirmative to polls asking "is Obama literally the antichrist?" Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but either way, it's pretty fucking alarming.

—with my response:

I think one answer is they don't so much think it as chant it. They don't imagine the consequences of how things would be if it were true, or act as if they lived in a world where newspapers and TV stations have their own staffs of hit men (or former secretaries of state would be involved in pimping child prostitutes from a pizza parlor, or whatever). They live as if the world is more or less as it actually is. They just talk about this bizarre shit and email the stories to one another.

It's like the Azande people of Sudan studied by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who believed any harm that comes to a person is the result of witchcraft practiced by malevolent neighbors. If you really "thought" that, you'd live in constant terror and passivity, in the belief there was nothing you could do to better your life, but that's not what they did—they lived comfortably at two levels, a normal one where they took care of themselves and their families and got on fine with their neighbors, and a religious one where they protected themselves against witchcraft by performing the appropriate rituals.

It's a horrible feature of Western civilizations that we feel this pressure to have every article in a religion be literally physically true (and therefore obviously wrong, to anybody who's thinking straight), and constantly fail to understand the difference between these two levels of our realities. Liberal theists, God love 'em, are pretty relaxed about it, but conservatives (for whom the ideology does have an absolutely religious character, in cult beliefs like "American exceptionalism" and the intrinsic wickedness of people of color and/or chronically poor people) are desperately messed up, and we all live with the terrible consequences of this.

For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

Literary Corner: Trump's Foxtrot

For all its heft and strangeness, the president's poetry has a few defects, of which the one that always bothers me is the lack of a proper pulse: there's rhythmic energy, but it's always getting blocked by a syllable that doesn't belong. If it were a car you'd bring it in to the mechanic, "What's that irregular clanking sound whenever I'm going over 30? Do I need to worry about that?" Something about this morning's Unhinged Tweets made me want to just chop them up and rearrange them a good deal more radically than I'd normally do, to make them sing instead of clanking, with some unexpected results: a lyric for a tune that might be in the same mood as Cole Porter's 1934 When They Begin the Beguine:

The Angry Democrat Thugs Fox Trot

by Donald J. Trump

where’s the Collusion, darling?
they made up a phony crime
they called it Collusion, and then it wasn't there

and when there was no Collusion
they made up a phony crime
they called it Obstruction and it never existed

[CHORUS]

they're enjoying ruining people's lives
they're refusing to look at corruption
the lies, the firings, the emails, and sooo much more!
Mueller's Angry Dems
are looking to impact the election
they are a national disgrace!

those Angry Democrat Thugs
they spent 30 hours with the Councel
only with my approval looking for trouble

if you FIGHT BACK, darling,
about that Rigged old Witch Hunt
or if you say anything bad they'll scream Obstruction!

[CHORUS]

they're enjoying ruining people's lives
they're refusing to look at corruption
the lies, the firings, the emails, and sooo much more!
Mueller's Angry Dems
are looking to impact the election
they are a national disgrace!

Literary Corner: Epic

Study the Late Joseph McCarthy

by Donald J. Trump

The Failing New York Times wrote
a story that made it seem
like the White House Councel had TURNED
on the President, when in fact
it is just the opposite - &
the two Fake reporters knew this.

This is why the Fake News Media
has become the Enemy of
the People. So bad for America!

Some members of the media are
very Angry at the Fake
Story in the New York Times.
They actually called to complain
and apologize - a big step forward.

From the day I announced, the Times has been
Fake News, and with their disgusting
new Board Member, it will only
get worse! Study the late
Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!

Study for Mast (for Ingmar Bergman), 1988, by Robert Motherwell. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The Failing New York Times wrote a story

That's Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, of course, "White House Counsel Has Cooperated Extensively With Mueller’s Obstruction Inquiry," bringing us word of the 30 hours of interviews Counsel Don F. McGahn has had with the investigation since last November or so, detailing particularly, Schmidt and Haberman believe, his observations on the president's obstuction of justice since the Inauguration: