Month: April 2022

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“Because of the Thoroughness With Which the Accuser Was Discredited”

Paul Takakjian, a criminal defense lawyer who is not involved in Bauer’s case but previously served as a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said he saw Thursday’s ruling as “a harbinger of maybe good news” for [Trevor] Bauer in his criminal investigation “because of the thoroughness with which the accuser was discredited in the judge’s eyes.”  NY Times [2022-04-30]

I post this link with no pleasure, but because we are all continually confronted with advocates for women insisting that women never lie about sexual assault.

It appears that the woman let slip that she hoped to extract a large sum of money from Bauer as a result of her allegations, and in spite of lavish evidence that she consented to his actions in the bedroom.  In fact, the woman initiated contact with Bauer and requested “rough sex” and, apparently, even specifically asked for actions by Bauer that she later alleged were abusive.

I am disappointed– but not surprised– that Major League Baseball suspended Bauer for 2 years regardless of the facts.  It is not logical.  Either the woman has been discredited or she has not.  If she was discredited– and she certainly was after a “thorough” investigation– then Bauer’s behavior may have been distasteful and offensive to the more mainstream (public) preferences of Commissioner Rob Manfred and his colleagues, but it should not be grounds for a suspension, and I would not be surprised if Bauer wins his appeal.

I repeat that– it was a thorough investigation.  No judge would be eager to dismiss charges in an explosive case like this but the judge,  Dianna Gould-Saltman — yes, a woman– had no choice.  The evidence was clear and convincing.

This reminds me of the Jian Ghomeshi case in which several women also lied about the incident– to the police and in court– and then coordinated their stories.  Ghomeshi’s lawyer provided the court with convincing proof that the women had lied and the case was dismissed.  Yet the feminist establishment continued to behave as if he had been found guilty.

They will behave the same way in the case of Trevor Bauer and that is why MLB suspended him in spite of the court case collapse.  If they had let him resume his career, they would have been relentlessly savaged in the media and nobody wants to have defend someone whose taste runs to rough sex, and nobody wants to even mention the fact that the woman requested it because feminist orthodoxy is that the woman never asks for it.

Another case of a woman lying about sexual assault.

 

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The Father of Violence

The logic of the militarist is this. The only way to stop the enemy from committing violence against us is to threaten to retaliate as swiftly and surely as possible. The proof for the militarist is this: immediately after we have retaliated, the enemy, applying the same logic, will commit more violence, justifying further decisive and immediate retaliation.

Inevitably, there will be peace talks in the Middle East because even mule-headed politicians like Ariel Sharon eventually get it through their thick skulls that this is not a war he can win.

Arafat is a different problem. Arafat had led a war against Israel for thirty years. Confronted with the real prospect of peace at Camp David in 2000, he demurred. Why? Possibly because he was afraid that the entire structure and culture of his power, the on-going struggle against the imperialist west, would be washed away into a complex labyrinth of regulation and policy. Without administrative skills, his power would be diminished and hemmed in by the demands of constructive engagement.

Is Sharon all that different? His reputation is built upon his military successes. Without Arafat to bash around, he would have to develop real economic and social policies that would benefit the voters. Anger and threats don’t settle strikes, reduce inflation, or generate jobs or tourism.  But the country rallies, usually, around a war-time leader.

 

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The 2021-2022 Maple Leafs

It seems incredible that a Canadian NHL team has not won the Stanley Cup since Montreal did it in 1993.

Yes, 1993.  29 years ago.

I said last year that the 2020-21 Montreal Canadiens were probably the least talented team to ever make the Stanley Cup Finals.  I seem to have been vindicated in my opinion by their performance this year: they are nowhere near the level they seemed to reach in the 2021 playoffs.   Really good teams rarely fail to perform well in the years just before and after a championship appearance.   Even after the loss of a star player, most great teams will have a core of solid talents that carry them through the early rounds.  My theory was that their progress then was largely due to Carey Price and sheer determination and hustle and a bit of luck (the Leafs were very close to eliminating them in the first round).  This year, the Canadiens lost Price to personal issues and collapsed as a team.  It will be a while before they return to a competitive level, though perhaps not as long as we used to think.  NHL teams lately have shown a remarkable ability to rebuild quickly.

The Leafs have what is probably the best team they have ever put on the ice, with the exception of goal-tending.  Austin Matthews may well be the best over-all player in the NHL this year; Mitch Marner is not far behind– if he is behind.  Marner’s incredible vision on the ice is remarkable.  In a game tonight against the Islanders, he made a back-handed pass right onto the tape of Nylander’s stick that seemed jarringly unlikely given his position, headed into the corner.  He has an uncanny awareness of where the spaces are, where his team-mates are, and who is a position to shoot.  He does this a lot.  How many goals would Matthews have if he were playing with someone else?  But then, how many assists would Marner have?  Last night, in the absence of Matthews,  Marner set up Nylander several other times but Nylander missed all except one, and that one squiggled through the goalie.

One commentator tonight (April 23) mentioned, in an off-hand manner, that Marner might be “underrated”.  I think he’s right.  They showed a list of the top five candidates for the Hart trophy:  the leading scorer of the past 3 months was not on the list.  Yes, that’s Mitch Marner.

Michael Bunting is supposed to be the gritty line-mate to compliment Marner and Matthew’s finesse but it would be useful if he receive passes with a bit more dexterity and cash in on some of the golden opportunities his line-mates give him.   Why do other teams hate him?  Sure, he draws a lot of penalties, but he’s not really a “dirty” player.   But other teams tend to go after him for some unknown reason.

In addition to Marner and Matthews, the Leafs have several pretty good secondary offensive threats, particularly in Nylander, a mysterious player who often seems to be punching the clock, until you notice that he has 6 goals in the last 8 games.  Where did they come from?  He often misses the net, because he always tries for the corners, usually the upper corners, but his shots are crisp and quick, he’s a great puck handler, and he is very fast.  He may score 50 some day.  John Tavares should be providing more of a threat from the 2nd line than he currently does.  He’s just not as sharp as Marner or Matthews but I give him credit for grit and determination for a good player past his prime.

Ilya Mikheyev is also impressive.  The Leafs have had speedy forwards before but often without a deft touch at the net (Russ Courtnall, Kasperi Kapanen): Mikheyev shows signs of figuring out how to actually get it past the goaltender once he has broken free of the defense, which he does a lot.  Alex Kerfoot is a threat– like Tavares, gritty and persistent, and he’s also pretty fast.  Pierre Engvall has good nights and may end up being a key part of the team if it advances.  He is big but also quick and a threat on the penalty kill.

Jason Spezza should really sit down.  He’s just not that quick anymore.  When is the last time he got a goal?  Filler.  He seems like a likeable guy but, sheesh, the Leafs are gunning for playoff success here and I really believe a younger talented player like Blackwell would be more helpful than Spezza at this point.

On defense, I believe Reilly may be over-rated.  Yes, he’s a good skater and gets a lot of assists, but he also occasionally rushes to the net and shoots right at the goalie’s midsection, or he rushes down the ice, blowing past players to the left and the right, then he dumps the puck in.  Tonight, he broke in alone on goal and couldn’t manage to do anything except fall down in front of the goalie as the puck slid away.  Still, it’s very hard to measure the defensive impact of a player who, through good skating and puck handling, minimizes the time the other team spends in possession of the puck.   It’s one thing for a defenseman to block a shot; it’s even better if the other team never got the shot in the first place.

Mark Giordano is not bad.  He seems reliable.  Ilya Lyubushkin is a question mark: he often just fumbles around with the puck, unsure of where to go or what to do.  Jake Muzzin is okay and a balance to the more offensive-minded partners on defense.   Brodie makes a lot of mistakes lately.  Justin Holl made a lot of mistakes earlier in the season but has improved though he still makes bad decisions in his own zone– turning around and going back and getting trapped in the corner, or passing to someone who is about to be checked.   Actually, he does that a lot.  Timothy Liljegren has been playing well lately, going to the net when the opportunity presents itself.  Rasmus Sandin makes mistakes but also looks promising.

The Leaf’s biggest 5 on 5 weakness is their inability to break up the play when trapped in their own zone: the puck seems to ricochet around the boards from one attacking defenseman to another until they can force a scramble in front of the net or a one-timer from the side.  Buffalo, for some reason, seemed adept at breaking up that kind of zone trap against the Leafs,  but the Leafs seem flummoxed by that kind of action in their own end.  They chase and  scramble along the boards and then give up the puck.

The real problem– and Leafs’ management knows it — is that, aside from a spell earlier in the season, Jack Campbell has not been reliable in goal, and Petr Mrazek has been awful.  Erik Kallgren showed some promise but has also had disastrous nights.  At one point, it appears that Kyle Dubas was involved in secret negotiations for Fleury from Chicago but they fell through, and it’s Campbell, probably, for the playoffs, and I shudder to think the Leafs might be involved in some close games.

In the last few years, Frederick Anderson fooled fans by making a brilliant save or two and then losing sight of a shot from the point, or losing track of the puck in a scramble in front of the net and giving up a cheap goal.  Fans tend to judge goalies generously if they make a spectacular save or two, but the really great playoff goalies are consistent.  Nothing is more depressing than to see a team make a gritty, determined effort to tie the game only to see a fluke shot go in at the other end, something that happened regularly with Frederick Anderson, memorably against Boston two years ago.   And nothing gives a team more confidence to make daring attacks than a spectacular save by their goalie after one of those daring attacks goes wrong, as Price did last year for Montreal.

Any of about a half-dozen teams or more could win the Stanley Cup this year:

  • Toronto Maple Leafs
  • Colorado Avalanche
  • Florida Panthers
  • Tampa Bay Lightening
  • St. Louis Blues
  • New York Rangers
  • Minnesota Wild
  • Carolina Hurricanes

Another half-dozen, including Boston and Pittsburgh, have an outside chance of pulling a few upsets in the  first or second rounds of the playoffs.

There is no magic formula to determining who is most likely to win.  There are always surprises and disappointments.  On paper, the Panthers and Avalanche would be favorites, but both are beatable– any team is– on a good night for the other team  (the Panthers, at home tonight, just barely escaped with an overtime victory against the Leafs who had the better chances in the 3rd period).  Over a best of seven series, good luck, great goal-tending, and that intangible, random, thing we sometimes call “focus” or “inspiration” or “grit” can play a huge role in determining the outcome.  We’ve all seen teams with amazing scoring prowess suddenly totally smothered by disciplined defensive team with great goal-tending.   It happened to Toronto, Vegas,  Pittsburgh, and Colorado in 2021.   It could happen to any of the great offensive teams this year, Florida, Toronto, and Colorado.

The Leafs have gone 17 seasons without winning a single playoff series, and are 0-8 in potential series winning games over that stretch.  That may sound really, really awful, but keep in mind that it’s a big league and those numbers are not all that unusual.  There are teams that have done even worse.

What the Leafs have going for them is, firstly, that they have the best winning percentage in the NHL against playoff opponents (and the worst against teams that are not going to make the playoffs), and, secondly, Matthews and Marner both have a year of additional experience and a painful awareness of how awful they were last year in seven games against Montreal (Matthews: 1 goal, 4 assists; Marner:  0 goals, 4 assists).   Matthews in particular seems determined to add more grit and aggression to his performance and seems, at times, more capable of willing himself into a more dominant role against even formidable opposition.

We’ll see.

Tonight (April 24, 2022) the Leafs beat Washington in a shoot-out despite being badly outplayed through most of the game.  The Leafs’ performance was not reassuring in reference to their playoff prospects.  My impression is that teams that are capable of tight defense tend to prevail over teams that emphasize offense.  The Leaf defense tonight was often terrible, leaving players uncovered, allowing breakaways, giving the puck away, and endless chasing in their own zone.  Quite often, Washington simply pushed Leaf players aside and took the puck.

And yet, the Leafs scored two goals in the later stages of the 3rd period, by Mikeyev and Spezza(!), including one with the net empty, to overcome a 3-1 Washington lead and take it to overtime– where they took a penalty.  In the shootout, almost everybody missed until Kerfoot managed to tuck one in to win the game.

Erik Kallgren, it must be said, did marvelously well in the shoot-out, stopping every attempt except the very first one.

I don’t get why it isn’t obvious to the Leafs that they need a different strategy for breaking up plays along the boards in their own zone.

I also can’t comprehend why anyone in the Leafs’ brain trust actually believes the back-pass on the powerplay is even remotely useful.  I’ve been watching them do this forever and it mostly fails.  Why does anyone think it is working?

 

 

 

 

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Ketanji Brown Jackson

I really wish Biden had not announced, during his campaign for the presidency, that he would appoint the first black woman justice to the Supreme Court.

There was no need.  He should have said nothing and then gone ahead and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson out of the blue, as his choice as the most qualified candidate.

Not because he was wrong.  But because it fed into the false far-right narrative that deliberately choosing a black woman and excluding all white men or women is a form of racial discrimination.

So if a black person is charged with a crime and appeals his verdict all the way to the Supreme Court and is a confronted with 9 old white men who will arbitrate his fate, there is no problem.  They are the best.  They are the most qualified.  And there could not possibly be the slightest racial bias embedded in their judgements.

That’s what the far-right would have you believe because, to be blunt, they are too stupid to see a problem.

What they ignore, of course, is, first of all, that there very likely is a racist element to the selection of those judges.  Every single Senator who voted to confirm those justices could openly, sincerely declare that race did not play a role in their choice to confirm.  But that would imply the belief that racism played no role in the establishment that created the network of personal connections, criteria, cultural institutions, inflections, language, and so on that provided them with the nominees from which they chose the members of the Supreme Court.  They might even sincerely believe that these old white male justices would have enough amazing insights into all of the issues and conditions that black people experience to render an objective and fair verdict on each case.  They might believe that black people experience the same law and the same enforcement strategies as white people and that, therefore, there could not possibly be any discriminations or injustice in the way the police and prosecutors conduct their prosecutions.  The police are just as likely to stop or pull over a white citizen for a “random” check as a black citizen.  They are just as like to respect his rights and assume innocence as a they would for a white suspect.  They are just as likely to use physical force.

That is a fantasy.

I don’t think they really believe it themselves.  They know they cannot openly declare that only white people (or black conservatives) should be on the Supreme Court because they are white.  They can’t openly declare that black people are trying to steal the material benefits created by hard-working white people.

They can’t admit that Clarence Thomas was chosen because he was a black conservative and they relished the idea of liberals having to consider rejecting a black nominee just because he was a lousy ideologically driven judge.

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The Saint

Is there anything that speaks as directly and conclusively to the credibility of the church as the fact that the wife of Nicholas II, Alexandra, has been made a “saint” by the Russian Orthodox Church?

In 1981 Alexandra and her family were acknowledged by The Russian Orthodox Church as martyrs, and in 2000, Empress Alexandra was made a saint by the church. She was canonized as both a saint and as a passion bearer.  From Here.  Don’t click on it: it’s one of those awful click-bait Facebook links.

Seriously?

Can we, in the future, expect to see “Saint” Diana?  Why not? Let’s see: she was famous.  She was rich.  She was vain and self-serving.  She was  a consummate narcissist.   Do we even have to wait for a miracle?

I will concede that she appears to have been faithful to her husband, and she volunteered for nursing duty during the war, along with her daughters.  She didn’t commit any mass slaughters like Olga of Kiev.  But she also may have been at least partly responsible for bringing on the Russian Revolution with her irrational attachment to Rasputin and her belief that he could heal Alexey’s hemophilia– at least, temporarily.  When it was apparent to all of the Czar’s advisers and ministers that Rasputin was widely hated among the populace, she and Nicholas refused to disassociate themselves from him.  When Prime-Minister Stolypin reported in more detail on Rasputin’s lecherous behaviour, he had him exiled but Alexandra persuaded him to allow back.  With the survival of the entire government at stake, it was left to the husband of one of Nicholas’ nephews,  Prince Feliks Yusopov, to try to save the Czar from himself by assassinating him.  As it turns out, it was too late.

Can you imagine some sequence of thought or imagination in which a genuinely spiritual person in a Church based on the gospel of Jesus Christ has an authentic experience of encountering qualities in  the story of Alexandra that would inspire you to exclaim, “what a saint!  What a model and paragon of Christian virtue and humility!  What an inspiration to all of mankind!  Think of all the suffering she alleviated!  Think of her purity and modesty!  Think of how constantly she placed others ahead of herself!”

But then, we are talking about a movement–I do mean broadly, Christianity itself– that bloviated constantly about purity and humility and spirituality and service to mankind and truth and dignity… and then voted– overwhelmingly– for Donald Trump in a real election.

How can anything said by its adherents be taken seriously anymore?

And to those who rejected Donald Trump but insist they are Christians, I cannot imagine how you rationalize a faith that itself proclaims that you can and should judge people by their fruits.

 

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Kansas vs Manhattan

One of the most fascinating aspects of the whole story of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” is the culture clash between the sophisticated, gay, cultured New Yorker and the “just plain folk” in Holcomb, Kansas, particularly when, as we discover, Capote invited some of his friends from Holcomb and its’ neighbor, Garden City, to New York, to one of his parties.   Reportedly, they were not impressed by the sophisticated culture, but were more than happy to be able to return home with stories about meeting famous actors and princesses.

When Capote arrived in 1959 to write about the Clutter family murders, most people in Holcomb had no idea of who he was, though he was, by then, a very well-known writer.  They didn’t much care for him at first, either, but he quickly began to ingratiate himself with the local police, including Alvin Dewey,  an investigator with the Kansas Bureau of Investigations.  His wife, whom Capote met in a supermarket, was the key: she did value literature and was dazzled by Capote’s connections.

Holcomb, Kansas might as well have been a different planet.  Everyone went to church, everyone knew each other, everyone pitched in in a crisis, and everyone was white and heterosexual.    Don’t sneer at Holcomb: for all the close-minded parochialism, small towns like Holcomb do have their upside.  People took care of each other.  They were actually reasonably tolerant of weirdness and non-conformity as long as it didn’t threaten the status quo too much (“It’s okay to be different; but not too different” as Woody Allen put it in “Bananas”).  And who knows?  Some day, a thousand years from now, people may look back at life in small towns in America and say to themselves, “you know, that was as good as it got for the human race.  Comfort.  Predictability.  Prosperity.”  And then someone may point out that that is only a superficial view of what life was really like in those small towns.  There was bullying, and abuse, and alcoholism, and a steaming, suppressed, virulent hatred of outsiders.  [See Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town” for a fascinating encapsulation of small town American life, in all of it’s facets.]

Some relatives of the Clutter family continue to resent the book, the movie, and Truman Capote.  They have a familiar complaint: the book doesn’t accurately represent the wonderful Clutter family.  The Clutter family was, by all accounts, wonderful indeed, but what they really mean is that the book doesn’t make them feel wonderful about the Clutters and awful about the killers.  They resent the depiction of the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, as humans.  They resent the sophisticated attitude towards crime, that the perpetrators have a story, that there might be things that happen in a person’s life that affect his character and behaviour, when we all know it is Satan alone who causes evil.  The resent the implication that the Clutters had flaws and foibles.

They detailed what they called 45 mistakes in the book.  If you analyze their list, like I did, you actually may come away with an even higher regard for the over-all accuracy of Capote’s book.  (For example, he didn’t give enough credit to Mrs. Clutter’s love of cooking.  And he noted that she was often “unwell”, based on comments from some people who knew her well, which the Clutter family contradict but don’t really undermine.  And he mis-stated the exact size of the Clutter’s acerage.)  Given what we know about Capote’s work habits at this time, I tend to believe Capote.  He didn’t really care what you thought about the Clutters and had no reason to ignore what he heard.  Nelle Harper Lee was with him and verified most of his information.

The story is fresh and relevant because that divide is probably bigger than ever.  Many of the citizens of Holcomb did eventually at least come to respect the fact that Capote was a well-regarded writer.

Today, they would just call him “fake news”.

 

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The Uncanny Absurdity of the Uncanny Valley

The problem with programming a machine to feel for others is, of course, that the machine might start to develop other feelings, ones unproductive to her work.  But Klara’s evolving emotions are crucial to our understanding of the novel as a technology of interiority.  The reader experiences Klara’s care for Josie through Klara’s empathetic narration, in which her desire to see Josie flourish and grow fails to completely suppress Klara’s desires.   [From a review by Jane Hu in the New York Review of Books.  2021-11-04]

I am completely baffled that a Nobel Prize winning author, Kazuo Ishiguro, would be responsible for such rubbish, or that a reviewer in the New York Review of Books would countenance such an observation.

I thought, perhaps Klara is a biological creation, as the replicants in “Blade Runner” may be (it’s not completely clear that they are).   When Roy Batty demands “more life”, he is expressing a desire, a want, an aspiration, which no machine can ever have.  That might be intriguing, but, of course, that essentially makes an argument for slavery.

But no: Klara is a robot.  She is at times relegated to a closet.  In the end, when Josie goes off to college, she is sent to a dump.

It appears that Ishiguro wants it both ways, in which case, he has failed as a novelist (I haven’t read the book– so I’ll come back to that when I do).  If, inevitably, humans become aware (as they are in the book) of the fact that robots have feelings, they won’t, presumably, leave them in the closet.  I leave open one possibility: Ishiguro has imagined a new  kind of relationship that the humans experience with their robots that blurs the distinction between mechanical and emotional.  But that does not seem likely given that the characters in “Klara and the Sun” sincerely believe that Klara does have feelings and treat her accordingly.  (It is perceived as an act of kindness when one of Josie’s friends prevents another of her friends from tossing Klara into the air to see if she can land on her feet.)  On the other hand, they put her in the closet.  Which is it?

Yes, many smart people really believe that it is possible for a robot to have feelings.  The theoretical framework for this concept rests on the perverse idea that human consciousness is formed by a quasi-mechanical process that takes place in dense particles.  If you have enough dense particles, eventually a “consciousness” can develop.  This fundamental to the belief in AI.

AI, my friends, is a myth.  Come back to me in 20 or 50 years and you will see I am right.

I have argued that this process cannot possibly produce a being with an aspiration or desire or emotion or any other biological characteristic.  Where does it come from?  How can you add 1 plus 1 and get 5?  There is no component of feeling or consciousness in any of the raw elements of a machine.  No matter how many 1’s and 0’s are in a computer brain, they cannot produce a 2: only a sequence of 1’s and 0’s.   Biological cells are not mechanical: they aspire to eat, to consume, to fuck, to absorb, to kill.   A robot only ever does what it is programmed to do“.  Klara can never be sad about losing her relationship to Josie because she could never have been glad to have it in the first place, and Ishiguro’s concept is absurd and Jane Hu’s review is a hollow, empty shell of misconceived rubble.

In “Never Let Me Go” the Klara’s are biological creations who exist only to give up their organs to other humans.  It’s a strange, alien concept (to us at the moment, in the civilized part of the “civilized” part of the world) which he made believable and sad.  I have no problem believing that such a circumstance could, at least theoretically, exist.

There is no way, theoretical or otherwise, a robot with feelings will ever exist.  Whatever we get– and I’m sure we’ll get it, given our surrender to every commercialization of every device ever– will be something mimics feelings which many stupid people will believe are just as real as their own.

Fuck them.  This is a dangerous course of intellectual development which, if it happens, will have dire consequences.

 

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The Myth of Sybil

The story of “Sybil”, the woman with 16 different “personalities”,  is a myth, pure and simple.

(NPR on one of the books that has debunked it.)

One website, defending Sybil, refers to “Michelle Remembers”–without comment–as a reference to the influence of “Sybil”.  That is astonishing.  “Michelle Remembers” is one of the most discredited books of the 1980’s.

First of all, you do need to know what in no other developed country is the concept of a “multiple-personality” widely accepted.    Only in America, and only in a certain part of America.

As is well known, Sybil herself acknowledge the hoax in a letter to Schreiber:

She got the very, very strong impression when she went in and brought this letter of recantation to Dr. Wilbur that if she didn’t go with the program she was not going to have Dr. Wilbur anymore,” Nathan says. “Dr. Wilbur was giving her 14 to 18 hours of therapy a week. Dr. Wilbur was coming to her house and eating with her, giving her clothes, paying her rent … so, how could you give up Dr. Wilbur?

Sybil Exposed

Is this really difficult to see?  Look at the culture around MPD?  Look at who revels in it, thrives in the lurid stories attached to it?

Or look at hypnotism:

HS: Yes. She was very hypnotizable, what I call a “grade five.” On a zero to five scale we can classify most levels of hypnotizability. The top group—the hypnotic virtuosos—are about 5 percent of the population and they show extra phenomena that we don’t ordinarily see even in good hypnotic subjects. For example, they have the ability to regress in time and they will report past experiences in the present tense. It is as if they “ablate,” or remove from memory, the period of time from, say, their fourth birthday to the present time, and you have an expression of what was there up until the age of four. For most people, to get them to a fixed point in time, we use something that has an affect potential. You can’t just say, “I want you to go back to January 14, 1916″—that doesn’t mean anything. You will say to the subject: “You are getting younger and younger. You are now nineteen, eighteen, seventeen years old, twelve years old, seven years old,” and then: “This is your fourth birthday.”  NY Review of Books

If this impresses you, I have some bitcoin I want to sell.

Let’s put it this way: if you want to accept what Dr. Spiegel says about hypnotism at face value, it would be possible, for example, to go back in time to when you lost your keys and discover where you lost them.  In fairness, I believe Dr. Spiegel implies that this is not possible.

It is not possible, unfortunately, and neither is it possible to go back in memory to “a fixed point of time” (see Dr. Spiegel covering his tracks?).  You are always only going back to a memory you already have, or one that you have constructed, if you are suggestible, and I would suggest that the best patients for hypnosis– or any kind of psychiatry– are very suggestible.

That said, even Dr. Spiegel didn’t buy Sybil’s multiple personalities and he made clear why Dr. Wilbur and Schreiber did (and why they stopped speaking to him):

Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair there, and she said, “But if we don’t call it a multiple personality, we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!”

Exactly.  The publishers knew what gets you on Phil Donahue and 20/20 and maybe even 60 Minutes, and they knew that that is what sells books and makes movies.

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I Am a Tiffany Camera

The story is about a young writer, struggling to have his first literary breakthrough, moving into a rooming house in a big, sophisticated, complicated city, and meeting his kooky neighbor –a beautiful free-spirited young woman with multiple boyfriends and shady relationships with rich men whom she openly seeks to attach herself to (if she is unable to realize her delusional dream of becoming a famous actress or singer).

The crazy landlord provides comic relief.  It’s written by a gay man who occasionally seduces some of his friend’s handsome courtiers.

Yes, we are talking about the Sally Bowles stories in “I Am a Camera” by Christopher Isherwood.  Or wait– are we talking about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, the slim novella that made Truman Capote’s reputation?

The difference is this: Christopher Isherwood could not, of course, have had a copy of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in his suitcase when he arrived in Berlin; Truman Capote did have a copy of “I am a Camera” in his when he arrived in New York.

 

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For What it’s Worth

Though a large majority of Americans thought it was right and good and natural for the government to pay off the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, it was not. This was a completely original application of government resources that had never been done before, and it was at the behest of the airline industry which convinced the government– and the makers of this movie–“Worth”– that the nation would suffer immense economic harm if existing law was permitted to prevail and the airlines were sued, like they should have been in a capitalist free enterprise economy.

Have the airlines ever sued somebody?  Have any of the executives or large shareholders of the airlines ever sued somebody?  Did they think, before 9/11, that unlimited jury awards in tort cases might be a bad idea (actually, Republicans generally do)?  Why were gun manufacturers specifically exempted from tort law in 2005?   (As the link clarifies, gun makers could still be liable for “defects” in their product, if a product designed to kill and maim people can ever be said to have defects– does it not kill and maim?  Take it back to the store!)

Remember all that blather you heard about government hand-outs leading to toxic dependency? Yeah, that’s only for immigrants and black people.  In a capitalist system, as we claim to have, and as we say justifies letting poor people fend for themselves instead of helping them, the courts provide a system by which a good citizen can address compensation for deficiencies in a product or service that causes personal loss and suffering.

So the U.S. government broke all of it’s own rules and principles and decided that it would pay off the families of victims so the airlines could continue to pay off its shareholders and executives.

Next problem: how to decide who gets what?

We are the government: we have trillions. Line up and put your hands out everyone. And remember, repeat after me, “it’s not about the money”. Let’s work on the euphemisms for it: to bring closure; to ensure dignity; to make sure this never happens again; to bless the children and the kittens and the apple pie.

Meet Ken Feinberg, who, you should know, has been repeatedly hired (subsequent to 9/11) by large, powerful corporations like BP and Boeing to handle massive claims distributions after great big disasters. (Most recently, he has managed the 737 Max victim fund). Feinberg is asked by John Ashcroft to be the master of the compensation fund for victims of 9/11 and to the credit of “Worth” he is shown to be, at first, pretty clueless about managing the delicate feelings of the victim’s families.  (Except that he does refuse a salary– but then, we know how that works: somewhere down the road he will receive another appointment, maybe to a board or government post, that does pay, very, very well).  But the film does want it both ways: the families cannot be seen to be a mob of greedy materialists salivating at huge financial rewards. It’s not about the money, right? But it is always about the money and even the supposedly “pure” Donato family that sneers at the idea of taking compensation eventually joins the suit. Possibly the gravest hypocrisy in the U.S. right now is this absolute bullshit that people get away with when suing someone for a grievous loss. It is always about the money. “Worth” is far more honest than I expected about that, and presents some interesting dialogue about how the “worth” of a human life is determined. Should a janitor’s family get the same payout as a rich executive? (The initial plan, which rightly offended so many of the litigants, said: the CEO should get more since more potential earnings were lost.) And what about the children of a fireman by a woman with whom he was having a secret affair? Even more delicate: the gay partner of one man who lived in Virginia which did not allow for gay spouses. “Worth” is above average in it’s handling of these subjects, and relatively self-effacing– for a time– about Feinberg himself. Perhaps that is because it was critical to present him credibly while soft-pedalling the fact that this was all, all, really about sparing the airlines’ shareholders from shouldering the cost of their liability for 9/11, and for allowing juries to award scads and scads of millions of dollars for “pain and suffering” to family members who can cry on cue on the stand during a trial. We are also shielded from detailed discussion about the percentage of a settlement sucked up by the lawyers in cases like this.  The most depressing thing about this entire episode is how the government continues to resist any serious discussion about compensating the families of victims of slavery, or racial violence, in any form whatsoever. I’m not saying there is no argument against it– there is. I’m just noting how obvious the difference is between these two constituencies, and how quickly we can disregard and make exceptions to policy whenever we feel like it.

Astonishingly, Feinberg’s entry in Wikipedia contains no personal information about the man.  That is wondrous, for someone who was pivotal to some of the biggest and most controversial disasters in recent memory.