Christopher Meloni, probably best know for his years on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, also played (among other roles) the bizarre character Freakshow in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, though I suspect a lot of people who saw the film had no idea who the actor was. (Here’s a clip of his first appearance in the film.)
Anyway, he was recently on Late Night with Seth Meyers and described taking what proved to be a strange kite surfing lesson. For some reason it struck me as pretty funny, so here it is:
A May 15 article by J Oliver Conroy in The Guardian explains why to many in law enforcement, the biggest terror threat in the U.S. is not from radical Muslims but fanatical anti-government activists, many but not all on the remote fringes of the far right.
Conroy gives a series of graphic examples of politically-motivated attacks on law enforcement officers, often by self-styled “sovereign citizens” who believe themselves essentially above the law. Fortunately the total number of these attacks is not that large, at least in comparison with the overall murder rate, but the breakdown might come as a surprise to some. Quoting Conroy’s article,
According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, at least 45 police officers have been killed by domestic extremists since 2001. Of these, 10 were killed by leftwing extremists, 34 by rightwing extremists, and one by homegrown Islamist extremists.
The pattern is roughly similar for violent extremist acts directed at the public:
In fact, a 2016 report by the US Government Accountability Office noted that “of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far-rightwing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73%) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27%).” (The report counts the 15 Beltway sniper shootings in 2002 as radical Islamist attacks, though the perpetrators’ motives are debated.)
The second-most-deadly terrorist attack in American history, the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 (including 19 children) in 1995, was an earlier example of far-right anti-government domestic terrorism. One of the men convicted for the murders called himself a “sovereign citizen.”
Three countries lead the world in imprisoning journalists
In a column published yesterday (May 15) on the Columbia Journalism Review website, Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalist pointed out that as of the end of 2016 there were 259 journalists imprisoned world wide, the most in recent history. Turkey holds the most, at least 81. China comes in second with 38, and Egypt third with 25. Those three countries count for more than half.
The U.S. has long promoted freedom of the press, but the current administration routinely attacks legitimate news organizations as “fake news,” and in a speech May 3 the U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, announced a de-emphasis on human rights in U.S. foreign policy.
Trump’s bragging
In his latest column in yesterday’s The New York Times moderate conservative David Books makes what should be an obvious point, namely, that Trump’s constant (and frequently dishonest) self-promoting boasting is behavior most people grow out of in childhood. Brooks quotes several recent instances, e.g. Trump’s telling Time magazine, “In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” and bragging to the Associated Press, concerning his speech to a joint session of Congress, “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.”
There are of course plenty of other familiar examples Brooks doesn’t bother to repeat — Trump’s false insistence that his inauguration had the biggest crowd ever and his saying, over and over again, that he won the electoral vote by a historic landslide. His bragging about being famous lets him kiss and grope women at will was obnoxious in many ways, but it was also yet another example of bragging. Brooks’s point is that in this and other things (his notoriously short attention span, for example) Trump’s behavior is remarkably childish.
What puzzles me is why Trump’s supporters — in most polls well over a third of voters — don’t find this behavior more off-putting.
Morning Joe hosts report Kellyanne Conway can after all feel shame
According to Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, “alternative facts” enthusiast and Trump occasional spokesweasel Kellyanne Conway used to say, off the air after defending Trump, “Blech, I need to take a shower.”
There is a sense in which you can’t be too skeptical. Even when people tell the truth to the best of their knowledge, they might still be mistaken. People also tell deliberate lies. No source of information is completely reliable, and it’s fair to say that all knowledge is tentative and subject to correction.
But there is, of course, a difference between that sort of skepticism and just flatly assuming something to be false because you think there’s some reason to think it might be false or because you just don’t like the source. From experience I’m skeptical of Fox News, but that doesn’t mean all, or even most, of what they report is false. They even managed to get the Hello Kitty story right (about an erroneous claim that Hello Kitty was supposed to be a little girl rather than an anthropomorphic cat) when other media outlets got it wrong. See this previous post, in which I wrote, “Amazingly, Fox News managed to report the story accurately, even though generally speaking Fox News is neither a fox nor actual news. (I’m not sure what it is, but given the mix of on-screen talent, it’s possibly a sugar daddy dating site.)”
I hate to sound like an old guy talking about how bad things are now compared with the good old days (though I’m admittedly old enough to get senior discounts without asking), but lately it does seem to me that people may be even worse than they used to be about rejecting information just because they don’t want to believe it. The obvious example is Donald Trump’s repeatedly labeling legitimate news sources as “fake news” whenever he doesn’t like what they report and the tendency of many of his supporters to believe him in the face of evidence.
Here’s a younger guy saying something similar, entrepreneur and popular YouTube vlogger Hank Green. (Yes, I cite Hank and his brother John a lot, but they often have wise things to say, even though Hank’s delivery often makes me think he should switch to decaf.)
As you probably know, Bill O’Reilly was fired by Fox News after it emerged that he and the network had paid multiple women a total of millions of dollars in response to lawsuits for sexual harassment and numerous sponsors had pulled their ads from his show. The network’s former head, Roger Ailes, had recently been dismissed over similar allegations.
O’Reilly was the single most watched news show host for many years and a best-selling author of books on history despite widespread criticism of them from academic historians. But he was also notorious for bullying his guests, riling up his viewers with invented controversies (most famously the supposed “war an Christmas”), and exaggerating his own background, claiming for instance saying in his 2001 book The No Spin Zone, “I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands,” and a few years later asserting in a column, “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash.”
He also claimed, “I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I’m looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.”
Later, when it was pointed out that the closest he came to the actual Falklands War was Buenos Aires 1200 miles away, O’Reilly insisted, “I never said I was on the Falkland Islands,” and that by his reference to the “war zone” he was talking about violent demonstrations in the Argentine capital. But those claims were disputed as well by other reporters present at the time. O’Reilly’s response was to imply that the other reporters had been sheltering in their hotel rooms while only he, O’Reilly, had the courage to brave the streets, but in fact other reporters were on the scene. For more on this see Politifact and Salon.
On a more amusing (and stranger) note, I’ve read that though O’Reilly is a quite tall and imposing, he insisted that his guests sit in shorter chairs in order to make himself look relatively even bigger.
Interestingly, O’Reilly reportedly comes across as much nicer in person, quite friendly and soft-spoken. Stephen Colbert said that O’Reilly once told him his Fox News persona was merely a role he played.
Below The Daily Show and its host Trevor Noah offer a retrospective of O’Reilly mainly in the form of clips that suggest he, or at leasts his television character, could be a pretty nasty person.
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA was an image from the Curiosity rover showing what was at some point in the past very probably a beach on Mars and before that the bottom of a lake. NASA is confident enough in its analysis of the terrain that it has named the location Ogunquit Beach.
The YouTube clip below is interactive, provided you have a browser that supports 360-degree images. (Safari doesn’t appear to work, but Chrome and Firefox do.) Just click the play button, then after it loads click on the picture and drag it around. It’s a mosaic of many individual photos, so expect some blank areas. Note that by clicking the dashed box icon at the lower right you can make the picture full screen.
Incidentally, Curiosity was expected to work for only about 90 martian days (“sols”), after which the solar panels would be too covered with wind-blown dust to produce enough power. Instead it’s still roving after more than 13 years. Somehow the solar panels keeping getting the dust cleaned off them, sometimes overnight and sometimes over a period of a few days, in so-called “cleaning events.” This is most likely caused by high winds (which would feel like gentle breezes on Earth, no matter what The Martian implied) combined with going up and down hills, thus tilting the panels (see this 2004 article in New Scientist), but of course on the Internet it’s been ascribed to conscious extraterrestrial help. I suspect the blank bits of the image below will be ascribed by some to censorship of areas showing aliens with squeegees.
Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are moderating influences on him, and this may be true. But in the clip below John Oliver points out that there’s not much hard evidence one way or the other. Ivanka is very good at sounding calm and reasonable without actually saying much of anything, while Jared is noted for saying almost nothing at all.
Odds are you’ve already seen this, but I’m putting it here anyway in case you might not have. It’s from the May 1 broadcast of his late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live in which he described what happened to his son Billy, born April 21 to Kimmel and his wife Molly, their second child.
Kimmel described how within a few hours of Billy’s birth a nurse discovered a heart murmur that led to emergency surgery and his and his wife’s understandable reaction. He thanked the doctors, nurses, and other professionals who saved his son’s life.
He also pointed out that his son now has a pre-existing condition that in the past, prior to Obamacare, would have made insurance for him either impossible to obtain or prohibitively expensive to buy in the individual health insurance market. His son will likely need more treatment, including another surgery in his teens.
Incidentally, the reference to Matt Daman is a joke. He and Kimmel have a pretend-feud going as a sort or running gag.
The last part of his remarks, starting about 10 minutes and 23 seconds in, have attracted, and deserve, particular attention, because it applies to many, many American families:
President Trump last month proposed a $6 billion cut in funding to the National Institute of Health, and thank God our congressmen made a deal last night to not go along with that. They actually increased funding by $2 billion, and I applaud them for doing that, because more than 40 percent of the people who would have been affected by those cuts to the National Institute of Health are children, and it would have had a major impact on a lot of great places, including Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which is so unbelievably sad to me.
We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all. You know before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a preexisting condition. You were born with a preexisting condition, and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance, you might not even live long enough to even get denied because of a preexisting condition.
If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make. I think if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?
At least two people from the Trump White House responded. OMB head Mick Mulvaney said, “Everyone, I think, agrees with Jimmy Kimmel that we have enough money in this country to provide care for those type of folks.” Would that this were true! He added, “If we give more control to the states they can figure out a way to best provide for children like Mr. Kimmel’s baby.” But the Supreme Court gave states the option to refuse the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, so in states like mine, some young working families are left unable to afford insurance and unable to get Medicaid, meaning that they can’t afford to pay for such lifesaving surgery. If it happens anyway, the families will likely be forced into bankruptcy and the hospitals and doctors pass on the costs to their other patients. So no, Mulvaney, leaving it up to the states isn’t the answer as we know from direct experience.
A bit later Sean Spicer claimed that Trump was working to protect people with pre-existing conditions. But the bill just passed by the House and celebrated by Trump would in fact allow states to eliminate provisions of the law that currently require insurance companies to cover the care in question and not charge astronomically higher amounts to people with pre-existing conditions.
Pretty much the entire program can be seen via this playlist on the YouTube channel for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
I enjoyed almost all of it, but the very last segment, one in which Samantha Bee roasts presidents at imaginary Correspondents’ Dinners going back to Woodrow Wilson, struck me as oddly unfunny and rather pointless. It’s basically a recitation of presidential evils in imitation of film and clothing styles of the eras in question. The history is worth recalling, but I thought the attempted comedy a consistent failure. The very end, set in 2018 with President Pence apparently presiding over a country out of The Handmaid’s Tale, is the best bit. Tastes differ, but if you find yourself not enjoying the first part of that segment, I don’t think you need to sit through the whole thing in the hope it will get better.
Not The White House Correspondents Dinner was a benefit for the Committee to Project Journalists, a worthy organization whose website is here: https://www.cpj.org
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