Monday, March 29, 2021

The Boat as Metaphor


So now the world is following the tale of the boat stuck in the Suez Canal, there's even a website Is The Ship Still Stuck?
And all the pundits are engaging in their favorite indoor activity - coming up with "takes" on how the situation illustrates the ridiculous and profound nature of life in these pandemic days, etc etc. 
At the Atlantic, Amanda Mull writes about how we're going to need a smaller boat:
For people who don’t work in shipping, these problems have reared their heads over the past year in an endless and seemingly random series of consumer-goods shortages, affecting products as varied as sofas and spandex bike shorts. Now, though, these problems—and the persistent frailty of the global system on which corporations have built our physical world—have a singular visual metaphor in the Ever Given. She is huge, and she is stuck, like I am when I wake up with a hangover. Right now, there’s not enough ibuprofen and red Gatorade in the world.
The most interesting takes, however, aren't the metaphysical ones, but the economic ones. 
Here's Matt Stoller talking about what the stuck boat is telling us about the constructed fragility of our economic supply chains:
What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives. 
It’s a dumb way to organize a global supply chain system, just as it was dumb to build ships that are too big to fit into canals. And that’s why the "big boat stuck in canal" is such a great illustration of the problem, it shows our policymakers and corporate leaders couldn’t even think through what would happen if Really Big Thing Got Stuck In Important Canal.
Yes, the stuck boat has definitely revealed some problems in world commerce, just as the pandemic revealed problems in public health.
Once again, in spite of all our society's attempts to anticipate and prepare, we just don't seem to be able to really get a grip on an issue until something actually goes wrong.  
But never fear, then its Canada to the rescue! UPDATE: Fascinating article today in The Guardian about how they got that boat free.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Sunday Night Sock Hop

Posted by at 1 comment:

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Funny stuff

 







And one more - its hilarious:
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, March 05, 2021

Patsy Cline: She holds you in her heart when she sings

On March 5, 1963, 30-year-old singer Patsy Cline was killed in a plane crash - one of the first musical losses I can remember, though far from the last. 
Here is a pretty good documentary about Patsy Cline and her music:
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

I love this!

And this happened here, in Saskatoon:
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

Tweet of the day

Posted by at 1 comment:

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sort of a lousy day, really -- stupid cold, and Trump is found GUILTY but he skates away without any penalties so far. Well, anyway, here's some funny tweets just to lighten the mood for Valentine's Day:
Posted by at 3 comments:

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Back to normal

What a relief it is to just have normal politics-as-usual going on everywhere these days - blaming Trudeau for stuff that isn't his fault, blaming O'Toole for stuff that IS his fault, watching Biden taking over the US government, its all good these days. 
I don't wake up and doom-scroll twitter anymore. 
Here's some of the recent funny stuff: 
I guess the Bernie meme is finally over: Too soon?
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Nah nah nah nah Goodbye

Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, January 14, 2021

What happened on 1/6, and what will happen next

Here's a map I found that illustrates the Jan 6 Trump Insurrection:
























The New York Times has an excellent interactive article which describes how the attack on the US Capital building went, and here's an article from the Washington Post describing what Washington police went through that day:
These police leaders talked of battles using metaphors typically reserved for wars, describing fighting on three fronts, including the West Terrace, one of the few places where police prevented rioters from breaking through. Had those rioters succeeded, authorities said, thousands more people could have poured into the Capitol, with possible catastrophic consequences. Nearly 60 D.C. police officers and an unknown number of Capitol officers were hurt in the siege, with injuries that included bruised and sprained limbs, concussions and irritated lungs. 

Here are Twitter threads which describe what happened at the Trump Insurrection on Jan 6, 2021, and why it happened, and who likely planned it.
First, how it was planned:

Second, the day itself;

 And third, what is next:

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, January 11, 2021

Some stuff to enjoy while we wait for the apocalypse

 Here's some stuff I collected from Twitter - enjoy!
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, January 09, 2021

How close was that?

What an awful week. 
I'm still processing the horror of what happened, and what almost happened, in Washington. 
 It seems pretty clear now that Trump and his grotesque family wanted the mob to invade Congress and lynch them if they wouldn't declare Trump as President. 
Trump himself is so frightened by bullies that he would think the members of Congress would just collapse if they were threatened. 
 There is no option now except to impeach Trump, even though he likely won't be removed from office. He needs to go down in history as the only American president impeached twice, for malfeasance and for sedition. 
Here's an excerpt from a GQ article interviewing political consultant Arieth Kovler who studies Trump message boards on Reddit, Twitter, etc. 

 a lot of them also just imagined they were going to be there for this historic time when Trump pulled away the curtain and revealed that all of Congress were traitors and then took his just and equal revenge. There were a variety of characters: people who were there to watch Trump gain control and people who thought Trump would win, but only by activating the military, [with] a proper military coup that they supported. They thought they were there to go and purge Congress. They were there to stop the certification. They were there to punish those who went against Trump. When you put them all together, you get this explosive mixture.

The only thing that surprised me was that it was not the army I expected it to be.

Why do you say that?

They didn't have as many guns. They had this fantasy that, There are going to be thousands of us carrying AR-15s and what are they going to do? But many of them may have had guns in their cars and just didn't take them out. And maybe Capitol police were surprised and then took less forceful action against the protesters. And that's how these guys were able to march in. I actually feel like, if they were armed, it would have triggered a more severe response.

It sounds like there were plans for something much more severe. You're talking about the execution of members of Congress. Why do you think that didn't come to fruition?

A lot of these people were there for the ride. I think that had things gotten more violent, there would have been a lot of people who would be very willing to go along with it. I think that ultimately the police successfully kept elected officials out of the hands of these people.

There's also the question of what cues they're taking from Trump. While he was certainly quite contentious [in his video], it didn't quite rise to the level of, "Now is the time to act." He could have said something that was absolutely unequivocally understood by these people to be an order to attack. Instead, he told them to go home. It confused the hell out of them. On the one hand, there's a nudge and a wink, but they didn't understand. They thought, "Aren't we here to do a job? Did we do the job? Did we win?" It was a lot of confusion about what that was all about.

From what you've said, it sounds like a lot of this planning and organizing for this was really happening in plain sight if you were just willing to look and dig. Is that correct?

I think that's true, up to a point. In the last week or so, this stuff began to move more into private groups. I don't know what you would have gotten if you were in the private groups; the answer is possibly nothing. There was so much going on in public, I find it hard to believe that there was that much going on in private.

But my point is, if you knew this was going to happen weeks ago, it seems reasonable that we should expect that people in power should have known and prepped for this.

Yeah. I don't understand how things went as badly as they did. My only thought is that they were maybe expecting people to be more armed and when they didn't see a bunch of people carrying AR-15s they thought, “Aw, that's all right, it's just a normal protest,” and then failed to understand the gravity of the situation. But this was absolutely predictable....I'm also almost surprised to hear that they sort of were mapping out these pretty specific plans or fantasies, because it does seem that when a lot of them got into the Capitol Building, they didn't really know what to do. They went up on the dais, someone stole a podium, they trashed some offices. But it didn't appear that there was a coherent plan that had been worked out for weeks.

....When all these people were talking about their contingencies, it was always if and when Trump tells us to. The overriding message I was seeing was, "We're here to do a job, we don't know what that job is yet. When Trump said we're going to go to the Capitol, I guess our job is to go to the Capitol." But then they didn't get any further instructions, so there was a moment of, "Okay, now what? Surely this isn't why Trump called us to DC, we don't get it. This was where he was supposed to unveil the evidence, or arrest the plotters, or reveal that China is behind it." And then none of this happened.

I even saw people looking for post-Trump Trumpism. They're furious at Ted Cruz when he flipped back, and at Mike Pence, [in their minds] one of the biggest traitors. But now there's a little thinking that, "Trump kind of betrayed us, too. He told us he was the only one who could save the country and we believed it. And he's the only one who can stop Communist Joe Biden from selling organs to Chinese people. And he's not doing that and that means he's also a traitor." There's some very odd stuff popping up in Trump spaces right now. Obviously, that's not the majority of Trump fans, but there are all these people who just don't know, "Was there ever a plan? Was there a plan and it didn't work?" What we are going to see over the next few days is people trying to reassemble their worldviews.

....On these channels, are you seeing that people are excited at the prospect of him running again?

Honestly, no. I'm not detecting their enthusiasm yet, but that might change if he says he's going to do it. No one is saying, "Oh, well, we have 2024." Partly because they believe the elections are rigged. They don't think he can win in 2024.



I cannot get over how close the United States has come to facism. And they're not out of the woods yet.
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, January 04, 2021

I think Trump will try to declare Martial Law

When Trump doesn't succeed on Wednesday to get Pence to "do something" about winning the election, I believe he is going to try to declare Martial Law, thinking that will stop Biden from being sworn in. 
It's going to be a nightmare. 
We're already seeing such bizarre stuff -- Senators and Congressmen maneuvering to get Pence to delay confirming Biden's victory, Trump trying to muscle the Georgia secretary of state to change the vote count; Dick Cheney (yes, Dick Cheney!) organizing a letter from every single former Secretary of Defense to tell Trump to back off; Lindsay Graham, Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan sounding alarms about what Trump is planning; even Tom Cotton backing slowly away from the debacle - and that was only Sunday. 
I can't imagine what Trump's Georgia rally on Monday will be like. 
And then the Georgia vote on Tuesday, the Electoral College confirmation or whatever it will be in the Senate Wednesday. 
Leaving Trump two more weeks to declare Martial Law before the Biden inauguration. 
Until I read this article tonight at Balloon Juice, I hadn't realized that  the people Trump now has in charge at the Pentagon are very frightening:
There is no way this letter is put together and then pushed for publication unless someone senior, most likely either senior uniformed personnel (general officers/flag officers) and/or senior executive service personnel at the Department of Defense or one of the Services unless someone got a message out to one or more of their former bosses. Someone is very worried that the Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (who really works for Devin Nunes and was once thrown out of a Federal courtroom in Texas for being an ass and sanctioned by the judge in the case with an order of ineptitude), the Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Acting as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations & Low Intensity Conflict Ezra Cohen-Watnick (who is the protege of LTG Flynn, Michael Ledeen, and Safra Catz and who has been completely unqualified for every position he’s been appointed to in the Trump administration), the Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Anthony Tata (a noted racist, anti-Semite, Islamophone, homophobe, and all around bigot), and the Special Advisor to the Acting Secretary of Defense Douglas MacGregor (noted extremist kook) are up to something dangerous.
Not a reassuring bunch. The Constitution means nothing to these people, nor to Trump.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

My favorite Christmas videos

Here are some of my favorite "Christmas" videos, the ones I listen to every year around this time:
 

 This one is from one of the oddest Christmas specials ever:

 Here's my husband's favorite - it reminds him of his own trips home at Christmas time when he was a university student:  

And here's my own Christmas favorite - my mother always loved this song because she was in the Navy during World War 2 and she couldn't make the trip home to Saskatchewan from Halifax for Christmas. Its particularly apt this year, I think, for so many of us.
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Christmas commercials

Yeah, I know, but I just wasted an hour of my life watching a TV show that supposedly had the greatest Christmas commercials this year and they were all pretty awful. Here's some better ones.
  • My new favorite: This one is worth watching until the end: The hospital bracelet at the end tells the story:
    Posted by at No comments:
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)