Ahhh, Afghanistan.

Yesterday, I listened to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Ranger with four tours of duty in Afghanistan, and current member of the House Armed Services Committee, say on CNN, “Nobody anticipated the speed of the collapse of the Afghan army and defense forces; I certainly didn’t. I knew that this would be a very difficult time as we ended our combat operations. I certainly didn’t anticipate the speed that we’re seeing right now. There’s going to be a lot of questions on a post-mortem that will have to be done to understand why that happened.”

Meanwhile, on the PBS NewsHour earlier the same day, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, NY Times correspondent in Kabul, said, “At its core, the Afghan military was built in the American military’s image, and that means complex logistics systems, different levels of integration, this expectation tha the Afghan military would kind of operate like the American military. But the American military has its own issues, and exporting that and expecting it to look the exact same without the litany of issues… it’s unrealistic. Not to mention, how long does it take for a military to become a military? Officers, generals, experienced non-commissioned officers, that’s not there. And then, couple that with poor leadership, widespread corruption, and other factors that have kind of led to this moment where soldiers and police on the front line have no faith in their government, they don’t trust their leaders, it’s just all dissolved as the Americans, who have provided air support for so long, and as soon as they kind of eased up on the gas, things started to come apart at the seams. And you know, that’s left the Afghan Air Force, which is a small but professional force, and capable, but not nearly big enough to cover the geographic spread of Afghanistan. And the commando units which have been well-trained, well-equipped, can fight moderately well, because they have core leadership that motivates other rank-and-file; again, it’s not big enough to handle what the Taliban have managed to throw at them.”

So… it seems to me that there are those who could have, and most likely did, anticipate the speed with which Afghanistan’s government would come tumbling down in the face of the relentless onslaught of the Taliban.

I wonder whether those who did piece two and two together were somehow excluded from the highest level discussions surrounding the US pullout from Afghanistan, or whether their concerns were given air, but nevertheless did not sway the argument against further endangering American lives in pursuit of an unattainable goal?

I wonder if we will ever quite understand the dynamics of these decisions.

Today’s tragedy – just one of those things…

It’s so exhausting, the news. I just don’t know where to go with it any more.

What is one to take away from these details?

“As wildfires have become hotter, more intense and more destructive in recent years liberals and conservatives have been locked in a debate over the reasons. During a visit to California in September, Mr. Trump said, ‘I don’t think science knows what is happening,’ when the state’s secretary for natural resources pressed him on the changing climate.”

“‘One camp is saying it’s all climate change driven, and the other is saying it’s all forest management,’ said Malcolm North, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Davis. ‘The reality is that it’s both. I get kind of frustrated at this all-or-nothing type of approach.’”

And:

“And wildfire experts say Mr. Trump’s analysis of the causes of the blazes [he’s in the ‘forest management’ camp] is problematic because most of California’s forests are on land owned by the federal government and their maintenance largely falls under the responsibility of his administration.”

Reminder: this is the 21st century. We were supposed to have flying cars that fold up into a suitcase. And robotic maids to clean up after us. (Ok, that’s from The Jetsons, but still, it’s the image of the future that I grew up with.)

Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires burn in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

We can’t even put our finger on how to measure the size of the problem. Acres? Dollars? Lives? If lives, are we talking about only human lives, or animals too? Remember in Australia, millions of animals were killed, some losing their entire habitats. And among the human lives, do we differentiate between firefighters and civilians? Between Democrats and Republicans? Is one kind of loss worse than another?

If we’re talking about acres, are they federal, state, or private acres? Same question with dollars. In statements like “Infrastructure damage estimates from the fires had exceeded $229 million, Mr. Newsom said,” what is being included here? This figure seems equivalent to the value of, what, maybe 100 homes. 200? Or is it one bridge and seven utility towers?

Whatever it is, it’s terrible. But is that a national emergency? A federal disaster? Why was this single, solitary, cost figure placed in the article, when it confuses more than it explains?

Between the actual things that are happening in the world, and the sometimes amazing responses to them (I don’t mean that in a good way), from the people who are supposed to respond to them, it’s easy to come away from it all with a feeling of doom. Not impending doom, like something is about to happen. But immediate doom, watching it happen, right now, and we’re in it, in front of it, under it.

And the California fires represent just one of those things. What about the teacher in the Parisian suburbs who was beheaded – beheaded! – in the street – in the street! – for having shown the recently republished cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his students? What about the coronavirus? Or the election meddling?

I’m having difficulty wrapping up this article. Tying it all together; drawing some kind of pithy conclusion. Except to share these words from my mother (and yours, I hope): “Tomorrow is another day.” As bad as the American Civil War was, there was a day after. A week, a year, a decade after. As bad as WWII was, there was a time after. As bad as Covid-19 is (and the loss of American lives to this virus are well into the range of deaths from those other two events), there will be a time after. A post-Covid era. A post-Trump era.

A post-climate-disaster era? Maybe not. But an era in which we at least look at it together, and take steps together, each giving a little, and demanding a little too, but none so much that there are winners and losers, as it feels today… This, I think, is an outcome that we can legitimately hope for. And that hope may be just enough to get us through this day, ready to face another.

The truth is out there

Finally! Jeez, it took this double Manhattan for me to even slightly feel it. I’d been thinking I’d become numb to the effects. I don’t like that. But for my own self-preservation in the current situation, I’ve had to shield myself. Things that in the past would make me recoil, now make me simply inhale for an extra beat. I’ve learned that defense mechanism. To breathe.

But, man. I’m watching the DNC convention. I’ve watched most of it this week, uncharacteristically for me. I’ve seen and heard so many Americans, people that I thought defined America, talking, sharing their stories, their hardships, their hopes. I relate to them; they move me.

And yet, I know that next week, there will be a whole different crew of people, who will be presenting themselves as representative of this nation, with whom I don’t expect to have any connection. I’m dazed and confused.

One thing I’m not confused about, though, is this. The people that we’ve grown to know and respect and trust over the past 20 or 30 years of our lives, are still the people we can trust. They’re not suddenly wrong, or untrustworthy, or fake news. We can’t dismiss a whole life’s worth or experiences to suddenly embrace the world as described by Donald Trump. The world is simply not the way he describes it. We can trust our gut on this. He is the Adversary, and I do use this word in the biblical sense.

I think we all recognize the truth. We know what it looks like; we know what it smells like. We can’t afford to surrender all sense and sensibility to a buffoon who tells us that left is right, and right is left. We know what’s what. We need to remember everything we’ve learned, everything we know, and get ourselves back on the right track.

With our heads glued on straight, we need to vote for Joe Biden for president. It’s not the end of our responsibility. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s the first step of many. But without taking that step, we are like tumbleweeds, swept along by the hot air of Donald Trump.

I, for one, would rather chart my own course.

The path chosen

This news article, and the reality that it’s describing, fills me with an almost overwhelming sense of frustration.

[Scott Morrison rejects calls for more bushfire help]

Two others do the same.

One, regarding the unimaginable shitshow taking place in Iraq right now – the attack on the U.S. embassy complex, and the just-announced killing of Iran’s most revered military leader in an air strike. [Air strike kills Iran’s most revered military leader] The future doesn’t bode well for peace, there or here. With (our) military rhetoric using words like: now the administration’s “aim is to deter further Iranian bad behavior that has been going on now for over 40 years.” Tensions between Iran and the U.S. have been building, and our President keeps squirting lighter fluid into the red-hot situation.

“The game has changed,” [Defense Secretary Mark T.] Esper said. “And we’re prepared to do what is necessary to defend our personnel and our interests and our partners in the region.”

He said that could include military action to preempt militia attacks if U.S. officials learn about them ahead of time.

And if U.S. officials don’t learn about them ahead of time, where will those attacks be felt? In Iraq? Washington D.C.? New York?

The final enormously frustrating and deeply discouraging news story for today [NYPD Arrests Man for Beating Bronx Man to Death Over $1] is about the gay couple in the Bronx who were attacked in what appeared to be a brutal robbery attempt which netted the muggers $1.00, and resulted in the death of Juan Fresnada, nicknamed “Cuba,” after his country of origin, as he tried to protect his partner from harm. The 60-year-old was left lying in the street, and multiple people, cars and even a bus didn’t stop to help him before his partner could come back.

I am Juan Fresnada. Juan Fresnada is me. He did what I would do. He is dead. I would be too.

People can speak glibly about having “leaders” or, shall we say, “people in positions of authority,” who are outsiders, who are “not afraid to speak their mind,” who are bucking the system, turning it on its head. What we end up with is this. All of it. All of this is what happens when you don’t have a plan and you don’t have a clue. When you thumb your nose at the “experts” and go your own way. When the only counsel you keep is your own.

If this course continues, we are simply going down. We’re going to fall. We may have the best words and the best weapons, but they may not protect us from a thug wielding a garbage can at our heads, or from fires or floods destroying our world, our habitat, as we have grown to know it and love it, or from a missile fired at the embassy in Iraq or a suicide bomber in Grand Central Station at rush hour.

To pull a term from too many calculus textbooks: “it is obvious to the most casual observer” that we are going down the wrong path. Going faster and harder down that same wrong path will not make it the right path. In the end, paths don’t bend to our will. They take us to their logical conclusion. We need to change paths if we’re going to survive. We are, right now, in 2020, at the point of inflection, where we must decide what that path is going to be. With the U.S. built as high on the hill as it is at this point in history, the fall is going to be that much more severe, and harsh, progressing with ever-mounting momentum… until we reach the bottom, and it stops. That’s where our current path will end.

There, what was once “the greatest nation on earth,” now lying in a great heap at the bottom of the hill, all the Republicans and all the Democrats; all the liberals and all the conservatives; all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, will not be able to put this particular Humpty together again.

Jury service: A slippery slope

The first time – and the only time – that I served on a criminal jury, we, the jury, found the guy guilty. It was a police buy and bust operation. Should be illegal for the police to do it – it borders on entrapment – but because “we’re only getting him to do for us what he would have been doing anyway,” it’s not considered that.

Add to that, the guy, the defendant, had previously been a CI. A Confidential Informant. He was on the street, but working with the cops. Apparently he, like many, had decided he was working with the cops so he was gonna do some work on his own, and was thinking he was gonna get extra credit. Running his own little (unauthorized) sting operation to get the goods on somebody. But instead, he got himself arrested, and ended up in a trial, with me on the jury.

After testimony, we went to our chambers and discussed. I couldn’t believe how it went. We were so quickly unanimously in favor of conviction… except for one of us. Me.

It was then that the jury politics came in. The self-appointed head of the jury was Walter Cronkite’s Chief-of-Staff. She was someone unfamiliar with not getting her way. She wanted to go to lunch. She had important things to do. Everyone looked at me when I started asking questions. They made good points. But they couldn’t explain the fact that his cop-handler should have been there, and wasn’t there. I wanted to at least hear what he had to say. It seemed like he was hanging his guy out to dry. I wanted to know the back-story before making up my mind. No one else did. I resisted for a while, but on a second poll, I caved.

Now, over 20 years later, I still feel guilty about it. Ms. Adler probably doesn’t even remember doing jury duty. She is now the head of some nonprofit, doing good work, I’m sure, for Syrian refugees. That’s all well and good. But I remember how she ran roughshod over that jury, and how she persuaded me, a reasonable person, to behave in an unreasonable way.

To those whose lives were most affected by our “collective” decision, I am sorry.

The Republican Party Now Must be Banned

I’ve always felt that we need to have at least two strong and healthy political parties to make our system “work.” But based on this week’s events alone – Trump’s statements regarding his “trust” in Kim Jong-Un, the Michael Cohen testimony, and the Republicans’ lack of preparedness for same and refusal to ask meaningful questions – not to mention the tragic and despicable events of the other hundred-some weeks we’ve suffered through under this regime – I am starting to be of the mind that one of them should not be the Republican Party.

When the Democrats take control of the Senate in 2020, I would like to see the Republican Party, as it exists today, banned. Made illegal. A hate group. A terrorist organization.

There are various international standards for political parties to be banned. “The standard of proof for banning political parties, mandated by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg [for example], is high. In societies that value free speech and association, it is not enough to prove even the worst motivation; a party must also have a ‘real potential’ to make good on evil designs.”

[Germany’s supreme court decides not to ban the neo-Nazi party]

While Germany’s NDP party was not banned, even though it bears in principle a startling resemblance to the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, the reason it was not banned was that it failed this critical test. Its numbers had shrunk to a level that could not deliver on its promise.

The US Republican Party is fundamentally different, however. It can deliver on its promise, and is in the process of doing so, to the nation’s deep and possibly irrecoverable detriment. The Republican Party, it seems, does pass this test, and so must be banned.

This will not be easy. It will be a wrenching process. But it is a process we must be willing to go through if, in the words of Elijah Cummings, we feel any obligation to “keep our democracy intact.” If we don’t care about that, then forgive this intrusion. If however we do feel this obligation, to ourselves, to our peers, to our children, then our path is laid before us. It is only for us to walk it, and not to simply cease our journey over its arduousness or inconvenience.

The purpose of this article – more of a note, really; a marker – is not to demonstrate my case. Clearly I have not done so. The purpose is to draw that line in the sand. A spade has been called a spade. Add your own examples. The point is, either we look at where we are, or we don’t. If we do, it’s hard to miss the precipice ahead. We can either turn aside now, while enough of us still have our wits about us, and some level of influence over outcomes, or we can join the mass of those crying out as we go over the cliff.

If you think it’s beyond us to resolve, and instead are looking to God, hoping or praying that He will protect us and fix all of this, or wondering instead why He doesn’t send help, someone to take care of this situation, consider this:

He did send help. He sent you.

Faith restored by cinema, and the library. Thank you, Kanopy.

As one article I recently read starts out, “There’s literally never been a better time to get a New York City Library card.”

I just got mine, after not having one for at least a decade, to be able to watch Kanopy, the film-streaming service connecting libraries and educational institutions around the country with thousands of films that “truly resonate with us, that inspire us, enrich us, and challenge our perspectives” (from the http://www.kanopy.com site). I am literally moved to tears by what is available on Kanopy; it feels like I’ve been given a new lease on life amidst the dramatic downward spiral of Hollywood’s vapid offerings. Independent film houses are few and far between, there are no more video shops to rent foreign or independent films, and nearly all other streaming services are trying to out-blockbuster each other with further mindless and meaningless big-budget content.

Kanopy, it seems, stands alone. And did I mention that it’s free? All you need is a library card. With that, you can watch up to 10 titles per month, so it’s not for binge-watching. But a full life should barely be able to accommodate 10 meaningful films a month… along with concerts, visits to museums and cultural institutions, and books to read, all of which are enabled, for free, with a library card.

Cutting the [cable TV] cord was the first step. The second step is using that detachment to select the material available to enrich one’s own life, on one’s own terms. With so much media and political pressure to join one bandwagon or another, the extent to which we are subject to outside manipulation is not even clear to us, even if we try hard to be vigilant against it. The fact that a group of people spends millions and millions of dollars to make the latest huge new sensational film should mean something, right? I mean, it must be important and compelling. Right?

Contrast that with someone who, with no money, no big resources or sponsors, a pocket-change and credit card budget, but with vision and purpose, would set out to make a film, to tell a story. We are so conditioned to thinking that we need to throw more money, rather than less, at every problem, in order to solve it, that going the other way is one of those things that makes us slap ourselves in the forehead and go, “Duh, why didn’t I think of that?!”

So, thank you, NYPL (or any public library close to you). Thank you, Kanopy. Thank you, NPR. Thank you, PBS. Thank you to all the organizations whose purpose is to enlighten and enrich, to bring the greatest good to the most people. We need that, now, more than ever.

The breaking point is near… the breaking point is here.

José Andrés, another famous chef, went to Puerto Rico immediately after Hurricane Maria, to help figure out how to feed the people. Instead of figuring it out, he and his associates found themselves simply doing it, from the moment they landed. Actually before they landed, in calls to as many chefs as he could reach there, the plan was, “Let’s not plan, let’s not meet, let’s start cooking!” FEMA didn’t grasp the urgency of it. It wasn’t about “how to feed the people in the weeks to come.” It was how to feed the people NOW.

I am learning about this from a TED Talk (“How a team of chefs fed Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria”) right now. I love TED Talks. They keep me sane.

So, the first Monday they were there, they did a thousand meals. By the following Sunday, they were doing 25,000. They kept outgrowing their spaces. 25,000 became 50,000. They moved their operation to the Coliseum. They became the biggest restaurant in the world. They were making close to 70,000 meals a day. From one location alone.

Volunteers showed up by the hundreds. At any given moment, 700 volunteers were working on feeding the hungry. This was not plastic food. It was real food, food that people recognized, food that brought comfort, as well as sustenance.

Get this: at one point, FEMA was actually asking him, “How are you able to do this? How are you able to get the food to prepare?” He replied, “Simple: by calling, and paying, and getting.”

And at this point in this Talk, I just paused and cried for a few minutes. I don’t like crying! But every day I’m simply stunned, at some point during the day, by what our current president and his administration are doing to this country. And what they are NOT doing FOR our country. And Puerto Rico is part of this country. What they did there should be enough for every one of them to be impeached at the very least, or perhaps sentenced to death. Instead, they skate by, lying their way out of one accountability after another.

When it comes to people, families, feeding people, making sure that people have roofs over their heads, that the sick are being cared for, that people have at least some glimmer of hope for a meal and a place to lay down their heads… these are the bedrocks of basic civilization anywhere, everywhere. And in this country? We don’t even think about these things, because we take them so for granted. So to look at these people here, in Puerto Rico, or the people (yes, people!) rounded up at the southern US border, separating parent from child so that we can then apply our “unaccompanied minor” handling protocol… these things are NOT the marks of a civilized country, they are NOT something to be proud of, they are NOT Christian or Muslim or Jewish or atheists’ values! They are an absence of values, an absence of morals or ethics, an absence of a backbone or a soul or a heart.

The things that our government is doing (or not doing) are not normal, not acceptable. Don’t be fooled! It’s not anyone else’s fault. It’s not Obama’s fault. It’s not the Democrats’ fault. It’s not the law’s fault. It’s the people in charge, and the people in charge right now, who are causing all of these things to happen, are Donald Trump and his administration, Paul Ryan and his party loyalists in the House, and Mitch McConnell and his loyalists in the Senate. These people don’t need to be impeached; they must be tried for treason, and, once found guilty as they are, sentenced to the same sentence given to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or to Sacco and Vanzetti. Their crimes have already cost thousands of lives, and have perhaps irreparably harmed the nation’s economy (the real economy, the people’s economy), the environment, and the entire future of the United States.

At this point, there is no idly sitting by, watching it through a lorgnette. To paraphrase even George W Bush – demonized a few short years ago, who now looks like a saint by comparison – “Everyone has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with Trump.” There is no middle ground. There is no “Let’s wait and see,” no “give him a chance.” All of that is behind us now. The wait is over. The chance has been given. At every conceivable opportunity – and more often than not, even before we were aware that there was an opportunity – the path that leads the opposite direction from all grace and goodness has been chosen as the path all of us are by implication forced to take.

Are you comfortable being labeled as the generation, or the era, or the society, that allowed this to happen? I am not. I don’t want to get arrested, or lose my job, or lose my home. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to sit on my fucking ass either, as if there is nothing to be done. At some point, in spite of the horrendous risks, there necessarily comes a point at which no more can be tolerated. I have a high tolerance, and a lot of trust in “the system;” trust that things will work out, eventually. But this is a terrific test we are being put through. I don’t know how much more bending the entire system can take, without actually breaking. I feel that we are getting precipitously close to that threshold.

When things finally do break, as they ultimately will, it’s never a pretty sight. It’s never better than it would have been had things been arrested just prior to breaking. It’s always better to stop when it’s still bending. But we have to accept that it’s going to break. We have to accept that we are at the limit. We can’t have some say, “No, I think we are not there yet. I think we can go a little further.”

Do we really have to wait till it actually breaks before we all acknowledge that the limit was reached? Granted, there’s still wiggle room while it’s bending. He said this, she said that. “We’re not that close. It’s still in flux. It’s still working. It’s still…”

SNAP!

Is that what we’re all waiting for?

Signature Bank earnings down. That may not be so bad.

I wish we had not gotten everything so backwards.

It used to be that there were companies, who wanted to make money, and customers, who wanted to spend less (and get more). There was an old saying, “the customer is always right,” or “the customer is king.” Companies did what they could to attract and retain customers. Without the customers, they knew that they had nothing.

Now, enter stockholders. Suddenly these companies have a new source of revenue, and a new set of deliverables, that has nothing to do with whatever it is that they “look like” they do. It’s just a return-on-investment scenario. Companies are favored that are making the most money. Investors naturally think it’s a great thing if companies they have a stake in are making a lot of money. But so too do people who don’t own the stock. They get confused, and all up in the hype. Random people think it’s great for these companies to be making huge profits. They think it’s a sign of healthy economy if companies are making a lot of money.

If a company is making a lot of money, though, the customers are getting less, and paying more. There are no two ways about it. Everybody behaves as if they own shares in X Company, even if they don’t, and they all get super excited when the stock performance numbers are good. But those shareholders, or wannabe-shareholders, are the exact same people who, when wearing their consumer hats instead of their shareholder hats, will complain about the prices, or that they aren’t getting enough for their money.

It’s kind of like the “aspirational voters,” who vote Republican because that’s how they see themselves – they want to be rich people – even though every time they do so, they are actually rewarding the people who are cutting their chances of “making it,” that much more. They are voting against themselves as they actually are, and voting for themselves as they wish they were.

Signature Bank earnings down $100 million thanks to dud taxi loans

So yeah, Signature Bank’s earnings are down. This is a bank that said yes to the medallion loans when other said no. This is a bank that said yes to the company I work for (disclosure), and gave the most favorable rates for business expansion. This is the bank that will open a branch office on the 12th floor of an office building at $50 a foot rather than using street-level retail spaces at $250+ per square foot. From a customer’s perspective, this is a great bank (as banks go). Perhaps from a stock-ownership perspective, it’s not.

But we have to ask ourselves, who, really, is king nowadays? It’s certainly not the forgotten customer any more. That’s just the poor sod who actually buys the products. The only players you ever hear about are the shareholders. But far more of us are customers, of far more companies, than we are shareholders.

Why are we continuing to vote against ourselves?

The glass broke.

At first, while listening to this TED Talk, I wasn’t sure that it was relevant, though I wanted it to be. It’s a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to.

Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think.

The speaker hit on the example of “the vase broke” vs “he broke the vase,” and the implications of these two different KIND of observations implicit in our language constructs (different in kind, not in degree), and my thoughts went immediately to my own home, as recently as two nights ago.

I had opened the cabinet in the kitchen to retrieve a glass, a very particular one I had just recently bought, and it was cracked. I asked Phoenix – my other half – about it. “It broke.” This didn’t satisfy my English-language-fueled blame-lust, so I pressed on, saying something like, “Oh, I guess it just decided to break itself.”

Phoenix has lived in the U.S. a long time, but he was not born here, and English was not his first language. His was Tagalog, heavily influenced by Spanish.

So perhaps his way of describing such events does not show an unwillingness to take responsibility, as I have would have had it. Perhaps instead it shows an acknowledgement of the actual change that has resulted in the physical make-up of the world, to be weighed in its own merit.

I’d like everyone to watch this Talk, and identify ways in which their own thinking or behavior might be swayed by the ways we tend to describe things.

In truth, yes: “the glass broke.” I think I can learn to be ok with that.