"[T]his relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence..."

"... cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror. The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, [Natalie] Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor.... ... Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. 'She’ll never leave me,' he would tell other staffers.... It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Natalie’s Magnificent Obsession" (NYT gift link).

"Obsession" is the title of a current movie that is, as Dowd tells us, "about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it." 

I haven't seen it. And I haven't seen "Magnificent Obsession," but I know it's a 1954 movie starring Ronald Reagan's first wife:

ADDED: After reading Dowd's column, I scribbled this at Grok, writing quickly, without the intention of sharing it, but I'm sharing it:

I'm interested in they way many women in the workplace are competitive with other women in a way that's actually sexist — judging that other women are getting more than they deserve because of their looks and/or imagining that sexual things are going on. They're actually impeding the progress of women... or are they trying to help some subset of women by pulling particular women down? (I'm thinking about the reaction to Natalie Harp.)

And then I connected the Natalie Harp foofaraw to this passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned) that my son Chris — reader of presidential biographies — had just texted to me last night. We join the Cuban Missile Crisis in progress.

This morning's random song encounters.

1. I woke up and looked at the phone to see that it was 4 in the morning, and it made me think of that Paul Simon song with the soaring line "4 in the morning/Crapped out/Yawning/Longing my life away." I found it on Spotify and played it through headphones, then found this version by Karen Carpenter (singing "crashed out" for "crapped out"):

2. On the way to the sunrise, the car played Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," which has the line "Even children get older/Now I'm getting older too." Meade said aborted children don't get older, and it made me think of that Byrds recording of a Pete Seeger song with the line "I'm only 7 although I died/In Hiroshima, long ago/I'm 7 now as I was then/When children die, they do not grow":

3. I was reading the news about the dismantling of the "autonomous zone" here in Madison, including a letter said to be from the family of the man who, it seems, drew a knife on the police and was shot to death. It said: "We are entrusting The Pressure Movement" and "We are working directly with The Pressure Movement." What's the Pressure Movement? This song played in my head:

"So, there you have it, the meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not."

"Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz."

Writes Trump at Truth Social.

"At some point, we will reach an 'ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT' basis, but Iran has not allowed that to happen by merely saying, 'There may be a mine out there somewhere,' that nobody knows about but them. THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION....

"The euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible."

"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."

Writes Philip Kennicott, in "Trump’s dark rhetoric eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age" (WaPo).

I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Five years before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"

"I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not?"

"And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means?... ... I start from the proposition that Iran cannot afford to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver those weapons to American cities...."

Said David Boies, interviewed in "Why David Boies Thinks We Should Support Trump’s Iran War/The prominent lawyer says that Democrats should get behind the President, and make sure that he finishes the job" (The New Yorker).

"One of the things about democracies is that the person that you support doesn’t always get elected, but the person who gets elected is nevertheless your President. And, while I think that part of democracy is opposing things that you disapprove of, part of democracy is supporting our elected officials, regardless of whether they are the same party, regardless of whether you agree with them generally, when they are making decisions that you support. I think that we’ve got to find common ground. We have got to get back to the point where we can support people that we oppose.... I didn’t pick Donald Trump as my President, but he is my President."

That interview followed Boies's column in the WSJ, "Partisanship on Iran Is Dangerous for America/Trump is doing the right thing for the U.S., and we Democrats should judge the war on the merits."

"Critics deride the most ambitious part of the program — flooding low Earth orbit with thousands of satellites to detect and take out adversaries’ missiles — as a fantasy..."

"... that will only destabilize the fragile international order that has prevented nuclear war for more than 70 years. 'Golden Dome could be the single most dangerous idea Trump has ever proposed, and that’s saying something,' Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview...."

I'm reading "Trump wants to build a trillion-dollar Golden Dome shield in space. Can it work?" (WaPo)(free-access link, because there are some good explanations and graphics)(That's the teaser headline from the front page because the headline on the main page is all caps).

Is Moulton saying we need to keep ourselves vulnerable so other countries will feel better about the balance of power? To install a highly effective defense "will only destabilize the fragile international order." Only?! Come on, Moulton, you can't mean what you are saying!

"Israel launched a stunning series of strikes Friday morning on Iranian nuclear sites and killed several of the nation’s security chiefs, in a remarkable coup of intelligence and military force..."

"... that decapitated Tehran’s chain of command. President Trump warned that further attacks would be 'even more brutal' and redoubled pressure on Iran to reach a new deal to curb its nuclear program.... The attacks also killed top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists and hit Tehran’s long-range missile facilities and aerial defenses."

The NYT reports.

Trump at Truth Social: "I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to 'just do it,' but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come - And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse! There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!"

"The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"The survivors 'help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,' Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said during his announcement on Friday. Mr. Frydnes added that 'extraordinary efforts' by survivors of the U.S. nuclear attack in Japan, including those who are part of Nihon Hidankyo, 'have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo.' That, he said, had led to a world in which no weapons of that type had been used in war in 80 years."

The NYT reports.

"When people wonder how things might go wrong if AI controlled the world, this example clearly illustrates the point."

The sheer insanity of that actual response from Google’s AI is staggering! They will fix it to be less obvious in the future, but the bias will still be in there.

AI mirrors the mistakes of its creators.

When people wonder how things might go wrong if AI controlled the world,… https://t.co/Dr4BrxUPCm

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024

Coincidentally, the NYT has this on its front page right now:

The article is full of graphics, apparently designed to boost our inadequate imagination. Here's one of the many vivid images that fly by as you scroll:

Around town.

 At the UPS store:

In the Wisconsin State Capitol:

At the café:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual..."

"... has to dial it up to 11. 'Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,' he declares, 'civilization will never become multiplanetary.' There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean? Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger 'demon mode' — a mind-set that 'causes a lot of chaos.' She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done...."

Writes Jennifer Szalai, in "Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial 'man-child' with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match" (NYT).

"During that phone call from the White House, my father told us that if there was a nuclear war, none of us would want to be alive anyhow."

Writes RFK Jr. in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

While I idolized my dad, I just couldn’t go along with him on that one. What about all that planning and practicing for the apocalypse at Our Lady of Victory? What was the point of all those drills?...

I, for one, intended to be among the survivors.

"If you are worried about rapid, catastrophic changes to the planet’s climate, then you must be worried about nuclear war...."

"[E]ven a relatively 'minor' exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.... A detonation of a [one-megaton nuke], within about a four-mile radius, produce winds equal to those in a Category 5 hurricane, immediately flattening buildings, knocking down power lines, and triggering gas leaks.... The hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would act like a supercharged version of California’s Santa Ana winds, which have triggered some of the state’s worst wildfires.... Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere."

Writes Robinson Meyer in "On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem/Even a 'minor' skirmish would wreck the planet" (March 9, 2022, The Atlantic).

Is Putin "rational actor"? — Jake Tapper asks Biden. Biden answers "he is a rational actor... I just think it’s irrational."

You have to separate the "he" and the "it" to make sense of it.

Here's the video. I'll quote from the transcript:

"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.”

You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

"President Putin has ordered Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces to be on high alert as he condemned NATO’s 'aggressive statements' regarding his invasion of Ukraine...."

"The significant escalation of tensions came as Germany, Britain and other NATO countries said they were sending military aid to Ukraine and imposed hard-hitting financial sanctions against Russia, including the president himself. 'Western countries are taking not only unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, I mean here illegitimate sanctions that everyone knows about. But the top officials of leading NATO countries are also allowing aggressive statements against our country,' he said, in a statement reported by the Russian news agency, Tass. 'Therefore, I order the minister of defence and the chief of the general staff to transfer the deterrent forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty.' According to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which was updated in 2020, it can carry out first-strike attacks if it has 'reliable information' about the launch of ballistic missiles targeting its territory.... Speaking on Wednesday night, before the first dawn assaults by Russian airborne troops, tanks and cruise missiles, he warned that 'whoever tries to hinder us' would see consequences 'you have never seen in your history.'"

From "Putin puts nuclear deterrent forces on high alert" (London Times).

"I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world."

Did Biden inadvertently — obliquely — advise Putin to use nuclear weapons? 

From the transcript: 

I’m very concerned that this could end up being — look, the only war that’s worse than one that’s intended is one that’s unintended. And what I’m concerned about is this could get out of hand — very easily get out of hand because of what you said: the borders of the — of Ukraine and what Russia may or may not do. I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world. And so, I don’t think he thinks that, but it is a concern. And that’s why we have to be very careful about how we move forward and make it clear to him that there are prices to pay that could, in fact, cost his country an awful lot. But I — of course, you have to be concerned when you have, you know, a nuclear power invade — this has — if he invades — it hasn’t happened since World War Two. This will be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world, in terms of war and peace, since World War Two.

What hasn't happened since World War II? That a nuclear power has invaded? (Is that true, and, if it's true, how did you have to interpret "invade" to get it to be true?) Or was he saying the thing that hasn't happened since WWII is the use of nuclear weapons? 

"When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet/The motif has long been associated with a certain brand of American cheeriness but, as its recent ubiquity attests, is most visible during times of turbulence."

A headline in T, the NYT Style Magazine, for an article by Nick Haramis.

The history of polka dots. This is the article I want to read. I feel some pressure to write about Biden's 2-hour news conference yesterday, which I watched, but I'm loath to blog it without a complete transcript. I have seen the "5 takeaways" pieces and the "utter disaster!!!" stuff, and it's propaganda on top of propaganda. Until I find a transcript, I'm holding off, I'm in the ellipsis... and therefore: polka dots!

Haramis writes delightfully:

"I was going to call my old, first phone number in the Bronx, and talk to whoever answered.... I would interview this person long enough to reveal our common humanity..."

"... and I would then tell his or her story with compassion; whatever differences we might have — cultural, political, whatever — would disappear with greater familiarity and understanding. Above all, we would, together, two ordinary people, prove that for all this country’s troubles, modernity does not have to be soulless. So I called. And got this recording: 'The next available service specialist will be with you momentarily. They will be happy to assist you with any inquiry.' Then I was put on hold, where I remained for 22 minutes, until I hung up." 

Story idea goes bad for Gene Weingarten, but he got a column out of it anyway: "Maybe the past is only a phone call away" (WaPo). They say you can never go home again, and, it seems, you can never phone home again. 

 

We were just talking about E.T. yesterday. Remember? "Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., [Biden] seems to instinctually believe in the healing power of physical connection—even if that intimacy can sometimes feel a bit too close."

Everybody's trying to make a connection... but maybe nobody's there anymore. Weingarten's column made me think of Bob Dylan's "Talking World War III Blues":

The NYT calls the pandemic "the greatest existential threat in our lifetimes" — presumably greater than nuclear annihilation and anthropogenic climate change.

Maybe whatever is going on right now seems bigger than everything else, but the pandemic, at its worst, was only set to wipe out 5% of us, and nuclear war was going to kill us all. As for climate change, if it's not worse than killing 5% of us — mostly the old — then it's not as bad as it's been portrayed in the press.

I'm reading "The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do Right Now/Our nation is rising, however imperfectly, to meet the challenge posed by the coronavirus pandemic. That needs to be said more often" by the NYT Editorial Board.

Ah, it seems that only a few weeks ago, there were mainstream media voices who would have called Donald Trump "the greatest existential threat in our lifetimes."

But the pandemic is the "existential threat" that we've done the most about — taken so seriously and changed so much of what we are doing. Maybe we need to call it the "the greatest existential threat in our lifetimes" to make sense out of how much we've done. We haven't been willing to sacrifice so much to deal with climate change — to radically shrink economic activity and to stay home or very near home. Much of what we've done for the pandemic is also what we could do for climate change if we took it deadly seriously.

Why did we do it? Deaths were happening before our eyes, and experts told us this is what we all need to do, and the whole world was doing it at once, and we understood that it needed to be done right away. That is what's greatest about the pandemic: The way We the People of the World acted in response to the thing — not the thing itself.

Now, to read the editorial. It begins with a "thank you," and it advises us not to look only at the failures but to look at all the good "the vast majority of Americans have done." Why limit it to Americans? Because it's Memorial Day?

This weekend, as we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the smaller but essential patriotic sacrifices we are all making today, for one another...

We've done a lot of "smaller" things. Whether they were and are "essential," we'll never know, and we'll analyze and politicize for as long as our lifetime lasts.

You’re doing great, my fellow Americans. What you have been asked to do is not easy...

But it is much easier than giving your life in battle.

... but you’re doing it. And you’ve already made a big difference. People are alive today who might otherwise not be, thanks to the sacrifices you have made and are continuing to make....

The editors call on us to continue. It's a thanks in advance:

Until there is a vaccine, which could be years from now, the simple acts of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing may be the most reliable ways to stem the spread of the disease and save more lives.

And if you don't believe in the cause, don't protest:

The most patriotic thing that Americans can do right now is not to carry military-style rifles to a protest that shuts down their state legislature, or to spread baseless conspiracy theories online, or to pick fights in a supermarket over reasonable public health measures....

Or at least, don't do the sorts of protests that are never a good idea, whether they're about a pandemic or anything else. The editors don't go so far as to tell Americans that it's not "patriotic" to have protests about our disagreement with what the government tries to force us to do.

As Hillary Clinton famously said: "I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration."