The White Helmets Takes You On A Short Trip To Syria

Netflix is showing The White Helmets, a short documentary about a group that rescues people immediately after bombings.  It takes you into Allepo and into a training program in Turkey.  It gives you a close up look inside Syria.

When I googled the movie to find out more, I did find an interview with a Dr. Tim Anderson of the University of Sydney who claims the White Helmets is a terrorist group and the movie is total propaganda.  I also found this article which argues that Anderson is merely parroting the Asad and Russian line.   There is also an article in the Australian which looks at Anderson's past.

Judge for yourself.  I still recommend the movie if you have Netflix.  Oh, yeah, they're showing it because it won the Academy Award for best short documentary.  It's very well made.

Remember That Muslim Kenyan? It Seems He Tapped Trump's Phone Too

Let's see.  The next step will be a call to have him removed from the US as an illegal alien.

The New York Times is reporting that FBI director Comey wants the Justice Department to deny Trump's claims:

"The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement."

I found the next sentence interesting for what it tells us about Comey (assuming, of course, this is accurate at all):

"Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said." (emphasis added)

Back in October when he told the world about reopening the Clinton email investigation, he wrote to FBI  employees:

"Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed." (emphasis added)

Comey seems to have a strong need to protect his own reputation, which may skew his judgment.  

Back to the phone tapping allegations, the Washington Post fact-checker searches down references to FISA court requests and gives Trump four Pinocchios.

Sounds to me like the heats on over Russia and Trump's using his usual tactic of a diversionary attack to get people's attention off Trump.  I guess his mother didn't read him the story about the boy who cried wolf.  

If A Bus Driver Acted Like Trump . . .

the passengers would choose from several (not mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive) options:

• Think it's exciting to have a crazy driver
• Sit tight, trust in fate, and hope to survive
• Pray
• Get off the bus at the very next stop - assuming this was a city bus with lots of stops
• Call 911 for help
• Try to disable the bus, say, by turning off the ignition 
• Get the driver out of the driver's seat
• Jump out of the emergency exit

But what does a country with democratic traditions do?  The wheels of democracy turn slowly.  We're bound by the rule of law.

We also thought we were bound by tradition, but we now have a president who ignores those traditional restraints that are necessary in a civil society.   Miss Manners can only tell us what is proper, she has no enforcement powers to prevent the child-president from violating any tradition or policy that isn't backed by statute.  And getting the Justice Department or Congress to enforce the statutes is also problematic.

This seems to be the situation we're in.  So many rules of national etiquette are being violated, but the law doesn't deal with that.  And getting enough proof of statutory violations takes time, especially with the president's nominal party in control of Congress.

Norms are enforced by enough people agreeing the driver needs to be taken out of the driver's seat.

But Republicans in Congress are hoping the driver will go by their favorite neighborhoods (where they can, say, repeal ACA or cut corporate taxes) before the bus crashes.

That leaves it up to Democrats to put up as many roadblocks as they can until enough Republicans realize the futility of this Trumpian bargain.

You can play this exercise with other occupations.

• If your doctor acted like Trump
• If your high school teacher acted like Trump
• If your pilot acted like Trump
• If your boss (of the job you really need) acted like Trump
• If your priest acted like Trump

It works less well where there is a one to one relationship - like a doctor-patient relationship where the patient could just leave.

 It works better in situations like a teacher, or a supervisor of many people, situations where one risks something if she stands up alone.

Using these analogies may help identify strategies to stop this president before he does something so terrible (where the damage can't be undone) that the timid can no longer stand by and do nothing.

Actually, that kind of damage is already happening, but to marginalized and demonized people that the majority of Americans don't identify with, so they don't feel the damage or the personal threat, yet.

And that is part of the danger - that violating the long-standing traditions becomes the new norm.

Think about how people reacted to his speech to Congress Wednesday.  Because he didn't rant and rave, they thought it was an improvement.  It's like he has been running 20 minute miles, and now he ran a 15 minute mile and people think that's great.  Except that great runners do a mile around 4 minutes. And when you are president, you shouldn't be mediocre.

This also reveals how people pay more attention to tone than to content.  Although he didn't have any outbursts, his speech was full of factual errors and generalities. No details of how he's going to get all those jobs, improve education, or pay for that wall.

I predict that as Republicans realize that the ACA is not going to be repealed until they offer a health care plan just as good or better (in which case Obama's goal is still fulfilled), as they realize that Trump doesn't care about the deficit, or international political and economic stability, they will join the Democrats in stopping this bus driver.  Let's hope this happens before there's a spectacular crash.


This Andrew Sullivan piece echoes these ideas about the reaction to Trump's speech, but he puts it in the context of how abused spouses feel when their abuser is nice to them.

"Fascism is a more natural governmental . . ."

Sun Magazine has a series of quotes, called Sunbeams, at the end of each issue.  January's were related to democracy.   Here are a few.  You can see them all here.  They are worth thinking about these days.

"Fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live."
Norman Mailer

"The most important political office is that of private citizen."
Louis Brandeis

"You lose a lot of time, hating people."
Marian Anderson

"The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bullshit."
Lars-Erik Nelson

I've linked the people quoted, lest someone not know who they are.  (There's one I didn't know.)

The Views Were Glorious, But There Was Also An Actual "Glory"

From Weather Online:

"The Brocken spectre (or Brocken bow) is an apparently greatly magnified shadow of an observer cast against mist or cloud below the level of a summit or ridge and surrounded by rainbow coloured fringes resulting from the diffraction of light. The effect is an illusion. Depth perception is altered by the mist, causing the shadow to appear more distant and to be interpreted as larger than normally expected. 

Actually the Brocken Spectre is what meteorologists call a glory. Most air travellers have already observed glories. They are most easily seen when one is riding on the shadow side of an aircraft above the clouds."

When I studied in Göttingen, the Harz Mountains were nearby, so I like the name Brocken bow.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185941/Rare-phenomenon-gives-airplane-heavenly-glow.html#ixzz4aEMQmKKV
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

But then we flew over the mountains to Anchorage.  Below is a picture of Flattop, from behind, at least relative to how most people see Flattop, from Anchorage.  It's the nub on the left end of the lower loaf of snowy mountain.  Denali and Foraker are in the background.  A chunk of Anchorage is in between.

Clicking on any of these images will enlarge and focus it

Then we were over the Inlet.  I thought these branches looked a bit like monsters creeping up to attack Anchorage in the background.

There was a very low tide uncovering the mudflats in the middle of the Inlet and down Turnagain Arm.  Below is another view down Turnagain Arm.  Almost no water (some was in the rivers in the mudflats).  Mostly frozen mud.

I wasn't really going to add these photos to yesterday's views, but my battery wouldn't start and after my neighbor helped me start it, I needed to drive a bit to recharge it.  So I went a ways down Turnagain Arm and got these views of the frozen mudflats from the ground.  (And I'd forgotten about the glory which seemed worth a post all by itself.)

Note:  I tweaked the exposure, saturation, and contrast in some of these images.

Unexpectedly In Cordova Airport

When we checked in for our 8am flight home from Seattle, they asked for volunteers because the flight was full.  I had been looking forward to a quick return to Anchorage, but we had nothing urgent, so we figured we'd see what they had to offer if we took a later flight.

It turns out they had an earlier flight (7:30am), but with stops in Juneau, Yakutat, and Cordova.  But for $400 vouchers for future flights it seemed like we could go sightseeing.  Not sure how much time I have left with this wifi - I'm on the plane getting it from the Cordova airport - so I'll put up the pictures, in the order of the trip, but the best ones are at near the end.

From the plane at the Juneau airport.

It was snowing in Yakutat and the visibility was below the standards for landing, so after circling a while, we continued on to Cordova.  The image above was while we were waiting for Yakutat to clear.  

Flying into Cordova was pretty spectacular.  

Almost there as we fly past the glacier.


And this last photo is for my friend Jeremy who likes towers that do radio and other electronic things.

This is at the Cordova airport.














For non-Alaskans who have no idea where these places are, here's a map.  (I'm going to post this now  and I'll add the map. UPDATE 3:30pm:  There's the map.)

Cable Car Museum

We took the cousins - our grandkids - to the cable car museum yesterday.  It's a free museum housed in the Washington/Mason cable car barn.

Most impressive are the active winding wheels that pull the cables.

There's a brief explanation of how cable cars work here on the museum site.

And here's a cable car on a very level portion of the ride.

There's more, but have been walking around San Francisco with grandkids in tow.  Sometimes on my shoulders.  There was an interesting set of posters in the museum about how the mayor in 1947 was planning to do away with the cable cars until some women got together and got a ballot initiative to prevent that.  I'll give more detail on that because it has important lessons for people today.  We even had some playtime at the Joe DiMaggio recreation center playground.

Oscar Screwup Response Was Class Act

It was any event organizer's worst nightmare.   The last award.  The most important.  And the wrong film was announced.  The La La Land crowd - there were a lot of people who took the stage - began their jubilant thank you's when La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz (I didn't know who it was at the time) told the audience that it was a mistake, that Moonlight had actually won.

There were no tears (at least visible on tv), no refusal to give back the awards, no yelling, no blaming.  Just the opposite.  It was one of the wrong winners who announced the mistake and who said very positive things about the actual winner, and the La La Land crowd gracefully ceded the limelight to the crew from Moonlight.

The mistake was acknowledged immediately and openly and the response was all so adult, so gracious, so harmonious.  This was not some minor issue, but rather the most prestigious award in the film industry, an industry filled with ambitious people.

Our news has been so dominated by three-year old tantrums lately, that this is a wonderful relief, and we should all be glad for the error, just to see how decent people behave.

Deadline says that PricewaterhouseCoopers has claimed the blame:

"We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture. The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, ABC, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation."

Another, adult statement.  No weaseling.  Just standing up and admitting the fault, and apologizing to those who were affected.

Can An Alternative Fact Sell Jeans?

The first time I was aware of alternative facts in advertising, I was about ten or eleven.  I'd ordered the 'fresh' strawberries from the menu.  When they came, they were obviously frozen strawberries.  I told the waitress that they weren't fresh.  "Sure they are," she said, "their fresh frozen."

So lying in advertising is probably as old as advertising.

But announcing that what your are saying is a lie, I don't recall any ads like that before.

Here's a San Francisco billboard I saw today.

Maybe this is just a local joke, since Levis, the Gap, and Betabrand are headquartered in San Francisco.


*For the visually impaired, the billboard in the image says:

"Alternative Fact:

We're now bigger than

Levi's and Gap

Combined"

Betabrand

NOW YOU CAN SAY ANYTHING."

Structural Difference Between US and 1930's Germany That Makes It Harder For Trump

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, I began to understand the differences between a centralized national government and one that split powers between the national government and the states.

In Thailand, everything was centralized in Bangkok.  There were provincial and local governments but they were controlled by Bangkok.  All government professional positions - in schools, hospitals, police departments, courts, etc. - were controlled by Bangkok.

This means if you run afoul of your employer in one province, you're screwed in every province.

If someone had issues  - i.e. disagreed with the actions of the headmaster of the school she was teaching at - they couldn't just go to another school district and apply for a job.  There was, essentially, just one school district, administered in Bangkok.  If you vocalized your disagreement and irritated your boss enough, you might find yourself transferred to a distant part of Thailand while your spouse, say a doctor in the hospital, was not transferred there (and couldn't get a job there without official sanction.)  An indirect, but very effective way of keeping employees in line.

My mother was 17 when she escaped Nazi Germany.   On more than one occasion told me that "the same thing could happen in the US," I have always wondered about that.

In Thailand I began to understand that the US structure, with powers divided between the states and federal government, would make it harder for an autocrat to seize control of the US.

Yes, local schools and police departments get federal funding, and Washington can threaten to withhold that funding.  But, a local police department is independent of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.  They can tell them to go to hell if they find an order distasteful or out of sync with local values.

So the other day when I heard the police chief of Santa Cruz declare their department would 
take a long hard look on whether to cooperate with Homeland Security in the future, I thought about this structural benefit of our government.

In Hitler's Germany, Berlin was similar to Bangkok.  All power was centralized there.  But here, the Santa Cruz police chief can tell Homeland Security to go to hell without losing his job.

As we figure out how to deal with the reality of most divisive and abusive president in American history, I can take some solace in this division of power between the feds and the states.