Category: Society

Is Greg Schiano a Pedophile Enabler Because He Worked With a Pedophile?

The Daily Escape:

Red- Palouse Falls State Park, photo by EarthPorn

Wrongo isn’t sure how many of you know who Greg Schiano is. He’s currently the defensive coordinator for the Ohio State football team. He was head coach at Rutgers, and a head coach in the NFL at Tampa Bay. Early in his career, Schiano was an assistant coach at Penn State.

We are talking about Schiano because he applied for the head coach position at the University of Tennessee. The two parties decided they liked each other, and reached a written memorandum of understanding, followed by a contract which apparently, Schiano signed.

Then, a few hours later, Tennessee reneged on hiring Schiano.

Shortly after the intended hiring became public, anyone with a stake in Tennessee football was slinging poo at Schiano. Why? A group raised the issue that Schiano’s time at Penn State overlapped with a Penn State coach, the convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky. The sum of the Schiano character assassination was this: Greg Schiano worked at Penn State. Someone told someone else that Schiano may, or did know what was going on with Sandusky.

It’s true that Schiano coached at Penn State. He has not been named in any lawsuit. No charges have been filed against him. No witnesses have come forward with any evidence direct or circumstantial, that he knew anything about Sandusky’s acts. The “evidence” of Schiano’s wrongdoing is a third-hand, ten-year old hearsay (one sentence) in a deposition. That’s what triggered the outrage by Tennessee fans.

There were protests on campus. There were statements criticizing Schiano’s hiring from a boatload of Tennessee politicians, including four of the five candidates for governor. It appears that the University and its Athletic Director, John Currie, capitulated to public demand by implying his new hire enabled child rape.

If that wasn’t enough, the White House press secretary weighed in:

Guess who’s the new head football coach at the University of Tennessee. Yup. The guy who covered for Jerry Sandusky. #GregSchiano

The Trump administration takes a position on a football coaching job based on unsubstantiated hearsay, while it openly supports Roy Moore for the US Senate despite reams of potentially credible allegations. Roy Moore says he didn’t do it, and that’s plenty for Trump. But Schiano is guilty as charged based on uninvestigated third hand hallway comments.

Let’s remember that Greg Schiano is not guilty of anything. Rumors are not facts unless proven. If somebody has something that proves that Schiano knew about Sandusky, let’s see it, and then let’s run him out of town.

Wrongo doesn’t believe that the people of Tennessee are outraged about what Schiano might have witnessed a quarter-century ago as a young assistant coach. They were furious because they didn’t think he was “worthy” of a Tennessee football job that used to be prestigious a decade ago. With Schiano’s middling 68-67 record as a head coach at Rutgers, and his failed two-year tenure as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they wanted someone better. And they found a way to torpedo Schiano’s deal.

If Schiano had been a hot-shot coach headed into the upcoming college football playoffs, would the Tennessee fans be up in arms? Highly doubtful.

The real story here is the power of the internet. Baseless charges make their way around the world, the White House has a hot take, fans protest, and outraged state pols demand answers. And then the guy falls like a sack of rocks.

What school is going to hire Schiano after seeing the reaction in Knoxville?

Whoever Tennessee hires next won’t be significantly more or less talented at coaching than Schiano. It’s important that the country sees how loud and ugly it can be when the fan base runs with a false narrative.

This is a teachable moment for our politics as well as for our universities. We need to do a much better job teaching critical thinking, or the mob will always find an audience for guilt by association.

Let’s hope this is something the next school, the next coach, and the next fan base (or voter base) remembers.

 

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – November 27, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Coyote, Housatonic River – Litchfield County, CT – photo by JH Clery

At the risk of sounding like the discredited Democrat John Edwards, we do live in two Americas. The top rungs of the ladder are living a good life, benefiting from the nine-year rebound from the Great Recession. The other 90% haven’t done well at all. Check out this chart of median household income:

Source

The chart shows median (not average) household income for the US, adjusted for inflation. Unlike average income, median income is not distorted by the enormous gains made by the one-percenters during the past decade.

The chart shows that for a household in the center of the US income distribution, 1999 was the best year ever. The housing bubble brought median household income almost back to its 1999 level in 2007, but not quite. Today, median household income (adjusted for inflation) is slightly lower than it was in 1989, in the first year of the George H.W. Bush administration.

How can this be? The economy is growing, and the US should have a squeaky-tight job market, since unemployment is at a 17-year low at 4.1%, a jobless figure that is near the definition of full employment. We’ve had seven straight years of job growth; job searches lasting 15 weeks or longer are now only 1.5% of the work force, down from 2% a year ago.

But wage growth is anemic. According to the law of supply and demand, employers should be sharply bidding up wages in order to capture increasingly scarce workers. But they aren’t. In October, they raised wages just a bit more than inflation, at an annual rate of 2.4%, down from September’s rate of 2.8%.

This is what imperial decay looks like to the middle class. Keep spending your seed corn tilting at windmills in the Middle East, and pretty soon some in the middle class are dumpster diving.

And consider this: Only a little more than half of America has a retirement account, such as a 401(k) or Individual Retirement Account, according to the Federal Reserve. And the typical household with a retirement account had a balance of $60,000 last year, but there are big variations. Among the top 10% of households by income, the typical amount of savings was $403,000. Middle-income households had a median of $25,000.

Everyone who isn’t in the top 10% knows just how bad things are, and those below the top 20% feel it every day.

But what can they do about it? They work, many working multiple jobs. They get home exhausted. They’re too poor to run for office in a rigged plutocracy. So they go to bed and get up and go to work again in the morning, either depressed and angry, or simply depressed.

That’s about all they can do, except to vote for politicians who have no intention of working to change their economic situation.

Each resulting government is worse than the last. Not to mention at this point in terms of power over people’s lives, even the government is dwarfed by the power of multinational corporations.

It’s long past time to wake up America! We’ve got to stop the hostile takeover of the middle class by plutocrats and corporations, but how to do it? We all have to get off the couch and work for local candidates who will be the bench strength of progressive politics down the road. We also must work to insure that our voting rights are not further eroded by polls that close early, or by efforts to prune the rolls of people who haven’t voted in a few years. This is particularly heinous when less than 55% of eligible people vote even in our presidential elections.

To help us wake up, here is the 1970’s British group XTC with their tune “Wake Up”:

Takeaway Lyric:

You put your cleanest dirty shirt on
Then you stagger down to meet the dawn
You take a ride upon a bus, it’s just a fuss
You know it keeps you born
You get to know a morning face
You get to join the human race
You get to know the world has passed you by

Facebooklinkedinrss

A Year Later…

The Daily Escape:

Chalk Pyramids, Oakley Kansas – photo by Marlon Flores

(Wrongo is writing this on Election Day, and will not know any national or local results before you read the column on Wednesday. Two years ago, Wrongo’s hometown turned out 20+ years of Republican control in a deeply Republican county. The subsequent efforts by local Republicans to block change mirrors exactly what we have seen on a national level. Despite that, much was accomplished. We’ll know on Wednesday if vision or blockage controls the town’s next two years.)

We are one year into the Trump administration. Many of us are still dealing with the reality that the country elected someone who is incapable of empathy, who has very little understanding of how the world works. Someone who treats women, minorities, and people who disagree with him so appallingly.

The worst thing is how bad behavior (by Trump and many in his administration) has become normalized in the eyes of the press and the people. It started immediately with the administration lying about the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd. Martin Longman took a look back and sums it up perfectly:

Looking back a year later, it’s a struggle not to succumb to a well-earned cynicism. We don’t like to repeat our mistakes, which makes it tempting to over-correct for them.

There were…times when President Obama stood up and told the American people that we’re better than this, that we can do better and be better. It’s not a good feeling to know that the response [by voters in 2016] was, “No, we’re not, and no we can’t.”

…But one giant mistake doesn’t condemn us in perpetuity. I actually find comfort and a cause for optimism that so many people were unable to imagine a Trump victory. It means that I wasn’t alone in having some standards or in believing that we can be better than this. It’s just going to be harder and take longer than I was willing to imagine.

Wrongo thinks Martin is too optimistic, and we shouldn’t expect any real change in his lifetime. Why? One reason is that the Democrats can’t stop playing inside baseball long enough to have a winning vision for the country. The Donna Brazile kerfuffle tells all we need to know: There is no leadership in the Democratic Party.

So, no leadership and no vision. The Dems are like your kids fighting in the back seat of the SUV. While the GOP is a well-oiled machine, staying on message, even when they don’t agree with whatever it is that the Donald just did.

The Democratic Party leadership has to go, we can’t stand by them, not even for another election cycle. Mike Allen at Axios suggests we look to mayors for the next Democratic leaders:

Here’s something unusual and refreshing: There are two highly ambitious Democrats who don’t even bother hiding their strong desire to run [for president] in 2020 — and to reshape the party: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, president of the US Conference of Mayors.

Allen thinks that Democrats could be led back from the wilderness by a mayor:

  • Garcetti: “We’re too busy talking to ourselves, and about ourselves…People don’t care about our inner workings, or even our inner leadership battles…We’ve got to get back to speaking plain English. We are so inside baseball right now…Are you a Bernie person? Are you a Hillary person?”
  • Landrieu, speaking about the bipartisanship of the Conference of Mayors: “The one thing we never do in any of our meetings is think about what the Democratic caucus or the Republican caucus in Washington, DC, is doing. It never enters our mind…People in America are feeling unbalanced right now.”

Allen asked top Dem donors and operatives about possible candidates like Garcetti and Landrieu, and heard that they think DC experience is a vulnerability not an asset for a presidential candidate.

Wrongo agrees. America’s mayors actually do things, and getting things done energizes them. Wrongo has seen this from up close in his hometown. Mayors don’t talk like DC pols, they seem to love their jobs.

And it’s a level of government where Democrats have a deep bench.

The GOP’s goal is to destroy the New Deal, the environmental legislation passed during the Nixon administration and all of Johnson’s domestic achievements.

We won’t defeat their goals without a new message and a new messenger.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Notre Dame Cancels Birth Control for Students and Staff

The Daily Escape:

Grand Tetons – 2011 photo by Wrongo

Notre Dame’s (ND) students and employees no longer have birth control covered by their health plan. This from Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times:

Notre Dame thus becomes the first and most important employer publicly to take advantage of the Trump administration’s Oct. 6 rollback of contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The act requires insurance plans to provide contraceptive services without charging a deduction or co-pay. Trump expanded an exemption aimed at religious institutions…to almost any employers claiming religious or “moral” objections to birth control.

ND notified students and employees of the change on Friday, according to The South Bend Tribune, that birth control coverage for students will end August 14, 2018. Faculty and staff, however, will lose their coverage on December 31. The school will still cover birth control if it’s used as treatment for a medical condition and not as pregnancy prevention.

Notre Dame has 5,825 employees and 12,393 students. Almost all (90%) of employees are covered by the university insurance plan and are likely to be affected by the policy change (although not all use birth control). Among students, 3,020 — 705 undergraduates and 2,315 graduate and professional students — are covered by the university plan. This means students that have only really had adult material from a site like https://www.fulltube.xxx/ as their sexual education are no longer getting the benefits of free contraception, this could lead to a lot more unprotected sex, the spread of disease and unwanted pregnancies.

ND had been fighting to drop birth control coverage since the ACA was enacted. The rules issued by the Trump administration allowed any employer to request an exemption from the birth control coverage requirement for moral or religious reasons, and ND took that opportunity.

ND used to be a liberal Catholic university. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Rev. Theodore Hesburgh was ND’s president, he helped make ND a university that was among the top Catholic academic institutions. Father Ted served on the board of the top-three bank that Wrongo worked at during that period, and Wrongo got to meet him a few times. Father Ted seemed to be a terrific guy. He was identified with progressive thought, and ND, along with Wrongo’s alma mater Georgetown, moved to establish that American Catholic universities should operate with:

True autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.

Hiltzik reminds us that the quote comes from the 1967 Land O’Lakes statement, which was signed by ND, Georgetown and Boston College. Its purpose was to balance the university’s responsibility to modern society with devotion to religious ideals:

The Catholic university of the future will be a true modern university but specifically Catholic in profound and creative ways…

Hesburgh was a prominent supporter during the civil rights era and was known for his work opposing nuclear proliferation and fighting poverty. The current president of ND, Rev. John I. Jenkins, said after the rule change that Trump struck a blow for religious freedom:

Critical issues of religious freedom were at stake…For that reason, we welcome this reversal.

Making the point that life begins at erection.

But Theocracy isn’t an asset in an academic marketplace where kids have a bewildering number of choices for college. The Church’s theology around marriage, sex and birth control is incoherent to sexually active people who must disavow much of its teachings in order to live in the real world.

But the larger question is, what is Trump and his Republican fellow-travelers’ issue with birth control? Most Christian churches have no problem with it. As George Carlin said: “not every ejaculation deserves a name”.

Let’s close with Monty Python doing “Every Sperm is Sacred” from “The Meaning of Life”

Key lyric:

Let the heathen spill theirs

On the dusty ground.

God shall make them pay for

Each sperm that can’t be found.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – October 30, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Fall at the Statehouse in Augusta, Maine – photo by Robert F. Bukaty

Welcome to what we may start to call Robert Mueller Monday. Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund has serious concerns about the uneven recovery of the US economy.

In a LinkedIn post, Dalio said that if politicians and business people look only at the economy’s average statistics about how Americans are doing, they could easily make “dangerous miscalculations” because the averages mask deep differences in how people in various income segments are doing.

Dalio divides the economy into two sections: the top 40%, and the bottom 60%. He then shows how the economy for the bottom 60% of the population, (that’s three in five Americans for you English majors), has been much less successful than for those in the top bracket.

For example, Dalio notes that since 1980, real incomes have been flat or down for the average household in the bottom 60%. Those in the top 40% now have 10 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 60%, up from six times as much in 1980.

Dalio says that only about one-third of people in the bottom 60% (20% overall) save any of their income. Only a similar number have any retirement savings. These three in five Americans are experiencing increasing rates of premature death. They spend about four times less on education than those in the top 40%. Those in the 60% without a college education have lower income levels, and higher divorce rates.

Dalio believes these problems will intensify in the next five to ten years. The inequality problem is caused by our politics and our fiscal policies, not by the Fed’s monetary policies.

OTOH, Dalio’s concerns aren’t a surprise to anyone who follows the political economy. In fact, it isn’t a surprise to anyone who has walked through any mid-sized American city, or driven through any small town in the heartland.

The problem is not low wage growth.

The problem is not long-term unemployment, as degrading and humiliating as that is.

The problem is that the US economy has been restructured over the past 30 years as an underemployment, low-wage economy in which most new jobs created are temporary jobs (whether you are a laborer, a technician, a service worker or a professional) with no job security, low wages and few benefits.

The real question is can we solve the problem? Many old lefties argue for a Universal Basic Income, (UBI), but Wrongo thinks that’s, er, wrong. If the UBI were high enough to provide even a subsistence living for every American, it would be massively inflationary. And it would merely allow businesses to pay lower wages, which is why some wealthy business people, like Peter Thiel, support a UBI.

Wrongo thinks we should support guaranteed work, not guaranteed income. Most people need and want to work in order to keep their place in our society. Getting a check just isn’t sufficient. If people matter at all, and if 95% of them lack the means to live without working, society must strive to employ all of those who have been deemed redundant by the private sector.

And there is plenty to do around America. Start with the 5,000+ bridges and dams that need replacing, or the 104 nuclear power plants that are falling apart.

We need real tax reform that can’t be loopholed. Corporations must pay more, not less. Stop the move to give corporations incentives to repatriate offshore earnings by lowering their effective tax rates. That only compromises our future tax stream. Corporations have to pay more in taxes, and agree to increase the wages of average workers.

Economically, we are in a pretty scary place. People across party lines and socio-economic levels are frightened for their financial security. We need a jobs guarantee, not a UBI.

So, wake up America! Letting corporations and the rich dictate our investment in human capital or infrastructure has us on the road to eclipse as a country. To help you wake up, here is Todd Snider performing “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Male“, live at Farm Aid 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina in September, 2014:

Why aren’t the Dixie Chicks singing harmony on this?

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – October 27, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Fall at Crested Butte – photo by mellowrapp

The economists at Indeed’s Hiring Lab say that the areas of the country that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 face the smallest job growth in the decade ahead.

Indeed uses new projections by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to project the winners and losers in the American job market for the period 2016-2026:

The occupational projections suggest faster growth in urban areas than in suburbs, and slowest in rural areas. The two sectors projected to have no or negative growth — production and agriculture — are more concentrated in small towns and rural areas. Many technical, scientific, legal, financial, and healthcare jobs are clustered in big, dense cities.

The fastest growing occupations are projected to be in clean energy: solar photo-voltaic installers and wind turbine service technician jobs are expected to double. Four of the 10 fastest growing occupations pay at least $100,000 a year, according to the BLS: physician assistants, nurse practitioners, software developers, and mathematicians.

Indeed combined the BLS projections with 2016 US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data to show where the faster-growing occupations will be located. That suggests faster growth will be in coastal urban areas, and slowest growth will be in rural areas:

Indeed then overlaid voting patterns on the BLS job growth projections. It is clear that Blue America has a more favorable forecast for future jobs growth than Red America:

So what does this chart tell us? In places that voted for Trump by a 20-point margin, 16% of workers are in occupations projected to shrink, versus 13.2% of workers in places that voted for Hillary Clinton by a similar 20-point margin.

The next decade’s jobs growth could also increase inequality. The fastest growing jobs include several with the highest average wages, including healthcare, computer, and mathematics occupations. Occupations with the lowest average wages are also projected to grow fast, such as home health aides and personal care aides. Middle-wage job growth is projected to lag, at about half the rate of the highest- and lowest-wage jobs.

It seems that a big slice of Trump’s supporters will be losers when it comes to jobs and income growth over the next 10 years. Will they stick with the Republican Party when the job situation gets even worse for them? Of course!

Now, here comes the weekend!

This week we watched Jeff (I’m not a) Flake give a valedictory speech that excoriated the leader of his party. Catalonia succeeded from Spain, and the GOP pushed their tax cut agenda forward. The Trump administration tried to deny a young illegal immigrant woman an abortion, and Hillary Clinton was implicated in paying for the Steele Dossier.

But the worst was that Paul Newman’s Rolex wristwatch sold for $17.75 million. File this under: Idiots with too much money.

Plenty of hits to the system for a single week, so it’s time to take a break from the reality known as Trumpmerica.

Time to brew a very large mug of Celestial Seasons Bengal Spice tea, put your feet up, and put on the Bluetooth headphones. Now listen to Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City” from the 1989 album “Works by Husa, Copland, Vaughan Williams, and Hindemith”, performed by Wynton Marsalis with Phillip Koch on English Horn along with the Eastern Wind Ensemble.

Copland said the piece was an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of an Irwin Shaw play, who had abandoned his religion and his poetry in order to pursue material success. He Anglicized his name, married a rich socialite, and became president of a department store. But he continually returns to his guilty conscience whenever he hears the haunting sound of his brother’s trumpet.

See if Marsalis can take you inside your conscience:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Letter From London – Saturday Soother Edition

On Thursday night, we saw “An American in Paris”. It played on Broadway, winning four Tony awards before moving on to Paris and now, London. It is based on the 1951 film with George and Ira Gershwin’s music that won six Oscars. Since it was just six years after the end of WWII, the movie is played as a lighthearted romp, filled with tap dancing.

On the stage, the focus is on the romantic story of a young American soldier and a beautiful French girl in Paris, each yearning for a new beginning in the aftermath of war. The American GI, Jerry, a painter in Montmartre meets Lise, a young saleswoman. Lise however, is loved by Henri, a rich kid singer of middle-of-the-road popular songs.

The stage version is balletic, even to the point of including a 15+-minute classical ballet when Jerry and Lise reunite, after it seemed their love would be unfulfilled. The sets are magical. A swastika flag turns into the French Tricolor before our eyes. Backlit screens showing Paris are conjured in line drawings that are slowly sketched in, like our hero Jerry, the GI artist might do on the streets of the city. All of the sets are animated by 59 Productions. As the images float in, computers project these scenes exactly on time with the set as it moves into place. (Sorry no photos are allowed in the theater!)

This was a wonderful experience, and Wrongo and Ms. Right, who missed in on Broadway, were delighted to see it here. “Who could ask for anything more?”

After the show, we were fortunate to meet with Leanne Cope, the Tony nominee who played Lise in NYC, Paris and now in London. She was joined by Zoe Rainey and Julia Nagle, featured members of the cast. Cope is a member of the Royal Ballet and brings those skills to the role of Lise, plus she also has a beautiful singing voice.

It is incredibly difficult to perform the dancing sections for eight days each week, and Leanne said that the fear of injury is always present. She only performs seven of the weekly shows, and thus gets a long weekend each week for rest and recovery.

On Friday, we traveled out of London to Highclere Castle for dinner:

2017 photo by Wrongo

This is the big highlight of a highlight-filled week in London. Obviously, we did not dress for dinner like Lord and Lady Crawley did in the 1900’s, but the Castle insisted there should be no stilettos or sneakers. Turns out they have been doing private dinners for a couple of years. They have the occasional marriage on site as well.

We had a brief tour of the bedrooms shown on the series, but what was the most interesting was our tour of the Egyptian antiquities that were discovered by the fifth Lord Carnarvon. He and Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. Much of the Lord’s collection was sold in the 1920’s to NYC’s Metropolitan Museum. Howard Carter catalogued what remained and said he had stored a few unimportant items at Highclere.

Those items were hidden within the Castle, until re-discovered by the family in 1987. An incredible story.

We had dinner in the dining room that is featured on the show, and it was outstanding. But a big thrill for those who watched “Downton Abbey” on PBS was that after the meal, someone said, “Shall we go through?” And we retired to the magnificent library for coffee, and single malt or cognac.

We can marvel at the manner in which some at the very top of the wealth pyramid lived back then, but remember, the castle still doesn’t have central heating. Highclere was part of a lifestyle on a grand scale that, for both social and financial reasons, can no longer exist, probably not even for the most obscenely wealthy hedge fund guys of today.

Here is the theme music from the show for our Saturday Soother. Our driver had the CD playing as we drove up to the main entrance of the castle:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Letter From London – October 12, 2017

A day off, with “American in Paris” on tap for tonight. But today was throwback Thursday, so Wrongo and Ms. Right visited old haunts from Wrongo’s time in London with the global bank. A visit to Harrods was our first stop, where we saw this outrageous jacket:

2017 photo by Wrongo

Wrongo asked a young Harrods employee if this was the most garish jacket in the Men’s department, and he replied “Sorry, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” And apparently so. There was even one that seemed to be a faux royal military outfit that might have been worn by Michael Jackson back in the day.

We then went to the Food Halls for some sweets:

Hard to believe, logo chocolates! 2017 photo by Wrongo

We moved on to visit the public school Wrongo’s sons attended, which is co-ed now, these many years later. Then to the flat that Wrongo lived in on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge. It sold recently for about ÂŁ7.5million, a tribute to how out-of-reach real estate has gotten in central London in the intervening years.

We went to Ottolenghi Belgravia to purchase spices; sumac, and black garlic specifically. By now we were hungry, and moved on to Dishoom, one of the best Indian restaurants in London. For Connecticut residents, quality Indian food is very difficult to find, without driving at least an hour. So when one of the best is a ten-minute walk from your hotel, you have to visit. Maybe twice.

We loved Dishoom’s Mahi Tikka, the Lamb Boti Kebab, and the House Black Daal, among others that were simply terrific.

Last evening we saw “Apologia” at the Trafalgar Studios. The play is about a disastrous family reunion between a Boomer career mother, her two grown male children, and the women in their lives. Stockard Channing is the mom (Kristen) who became an eminent and successful art historian, but was unable to keep custody of, or stay connected to, her two sons when they were young. Joseph Millson plays both sons very effectively. Some in our group didn’t realize the same actor performed both roles. Simon says:

I have to tell you now that the thing I remember most about you is your absence.

Things do not go well at Mom’s birthday dinner. The triggering point is Kristen’s recently published book about her life, in which she fails to mention either son, Peter or Simon. When the sons and their partners Trudi (Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael) and Claire (Freema Agyeman) show up for Kristen’s birthday, they want only to confront her about her decisions, both about her career and the book that represents it. Over the course of the evening, Kristen is forced to confront her sons’ antipathy for her, because of her commitment to career over family.

There is plenty of humor to cut the tension of the many confrontations, but ultimately, Kristen is left alone and unloved, a prisoner of the choices she made.

Stockard Channing is the lead, and turns in an excellent performance as Kristen, but it was Laura Carmichael as Trudi, the “Wisconsin nice” fiancĂ©e of Peter who knocks it out of the park. Trudi is a born-again Christian who seems naĂŻve, possibly insipid, and a less-than-worthy opponent for Kristen. But it is Trudi who delivers the coup de grace to Kristen in the final moments of the play.

Excellent. See it if it comes to the US.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 8, 2017

(There will be limited blogging until 10/17, as Wrongo and Ms. Right are visiting London to see five plays in seven days. We are also having dinner at Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey). Please keep your tray tables in the locked position while we are away.)

Another week of shocks to the system. Cartoons may help. The GOP reaction to Las Vegas is almost automatic, just like bump stocks:

Some are reluctant to give up their Congress:

The Senate is always on sale:

Tillerson tries to explain Trump’s undermining:

Trump tosses different kinds of paper depending on the audience:

RIP Tom Petty:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Our Military Needs to Take Charge in Puerto Rico

The Daily Escape:

Floating lanterns in Motoyasugawa River, Hiroshima Japan. The lanterns mark the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. There is one lantern for each person who died in the bombing – photo by the Asahi Shimbun

Why hasn’t Trump mobilized America’s military to help rescue Puerto Rico from the disaster that grows worse every day? Why the Band-Aid of repealing the Jones Act?

After eight days of delay, the Trump Administration has issued a Jones Act waiver. The Jones Act prohibits the transportation of cargo between points in the US, on any vessel owned or operated by a foreigner. The Trump administration issued a Jones Act wavier earlier this month, for petroleum products to be delivered for relief assistance in anticipation of the effects of Hurricane Irma.

Similar to many things that happen in Washington, the Puerto Rican Jones Act waiver is a sham. Why? Because it is a 10-day waiver. This, from the DHS announcement: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

This waiver will ensure that over the next ten days, all options are available to move and distribute goods to the people of Puerto Rico. It is intended to ensure we have enough fuel and commodities to support lifesaving efforts, respond to the storm, and restore critical services and critical infrastructure operations in the wake of these devastating storms…

And the clock has already started. Wrongo used to handle shipping finance in Europe for a top-three bank. It will take a few days to get foreign ships loaded with the appropriate goods. Then it will take many days, possibly a week or more, for them to travel to Puerto Rico.

As an example the US Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort, leaving from Norfolk Virginia will take at least five days to reach Puerto Rico. And the Comfort travels at about the average speed of a container vessel, or a tanker, 17 knots. Even if a foreign tanker or container ship was already loaded and ready to go this morning, it is clear that few, if any, could arrive and unload in less than 5-7 days.

So, Trump’s “waiver” is a sham. OTOH, the situation in Puerto Rico is already far beyond needing a waiver of the Jones Act. Bloomberg reports that:

Thousands of cargo containers bearing millions of emergency meals and other relief supplies have been piling up on San Juan’s docks since Saturday. The mountains of materiel may not reach storm survivors for days.

Distributors for big-box companies and smaller retailers are unloading 4,000 20-foot containers full of necessities like food, water and soap this week at a dock in San Juan operated by Crowley Maritime Corp. In the past few days, Tote Maritime’s terminal has also taken the equivalent of almost 3,000 containers. The two facilities have become choke points in the effort to aid survivors of Hurricane Maria.

Mark Miller, a spokesman for Crowley, said:

…that’s where the supply chain breaks down — getting the goods from the port to the people on the island who need them…Trucks are ready to be loaded with the goods and precious diesel for backup generators, but workers aren’t around to drive. Instead, they’re caring for families and cleaning up flood damage — and contending with the curfew.

The buildings that would hold the supplies are either destroyed, or have no power. The over-the-road transport companies that have staff available and diesel on hand encounter downed poles and power lines while attempting to navigate on washed-out roads.

Planning for something of this scale should have started once we knew that Maria was a CAT 5 storm making a direct hit on Puerto Rico. But that didn’t happen, and now, the number of people who are out of money, food, water, fuel and critical medical supplies grows every day.

We should be sending vast amounts of equipment and manpower to help clear roads, and get things in a condition to where people can begin to rebuild. We should be sending mobile medical teams that can move in and out of remote areas and evacuate those who may die without medical intervention.

Our military has divisions of logistics experts that can supply an army even under very difficult conditions. They have units that can build bridges in a day, or rapidly repair roads for supply convoys.

Our military has the mobile medical teams that can handle wartime injuries. They need to be on the ground. We need a military-style operation to stem the tide of this disaster.

Why hasn’t General Little Hands ordered them into action?

Facebooklinkedinrss