Something/Someone Old

I woke up today with this song on my mind:

This is the Monotones singing "Book of Love." That is an Old Thing. But I didn't realize I'd find not one, but two Old Things. This is, according to the poster, the "Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show" from 1958. I have no idea what a "beech-nut" is (are they punning on beach nut? even if they were I don't really get it.)

But look how young Dick Clark looks!

Another Something Old: a spinning wheel I might buy for my partner:

Something New

There was a new break in the "Russia helped get Trump elected" story. This is from the NY Times:

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

So, like anybody campaigning against anybody for high office since 1980, they were interested in receiving damaging information about their opponent.

You know what? When I worked on campaigns, I absolutely would have wanted any damaging information on my candidate's opponent, and if someone offered such, I would absolutely have met with them and given them a hearing. And I'm just a naive little progressive who doesn't understand how Washington works.

That's called politics, people. If you had a problem with it, you should have said so roughly at this point:

And definitely before this point:

HACKED EMAILS SHOW that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton and a major fundraiser for her 2016 campaign, urged her campaign team to silence rival Bernie Sanders’s message against police shootings of African-Americans. He suggested countering it with “the Sandy Hook issue” — a reference to Sanders’s opposition to lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/harvey-weinstein-urged-clinton-campa...

And obviously before this point:

The story began making the rounds at Washington dinner parties late last summer: Donald Trump had been caught in a compromising sexual position by Russian intelligence agents during a business trip to Moscow. According to one version, told by a high-ranking Obama administration diplomat, Russian intelligence services, acting on Trump’s well-known obsession with sex, had arranged an evening for him with a bevy of hookers, with hidden cameras and microphones recording all the action. The jaw-dropping detail that topped the story? Trump had somehow engaged in “golden showers,” sex acts involving urine.

The veracity of the report and its sourcing have not been verified.

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russian-spies-infamous-golden-shower-memos...

If you wanted a politics that was not scurrilous, you could have spoken up at any time over the past 45 years. Those of us who have been fighting against this pernicious scandal-mongering for years, unsuccessfully, would have appreciated the help. But you didn't, for some reason.

So, how did the nefarious Russian sabotage of Hillary Clinton go down?

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

So a former British tabloid reporter set up a meeting for you with a lawyer who said she had damaging information about Hillary Clinton?

If I were the campaign manager, I'd have met the guy, and listened to him, but with roughly a whole shaker of salt. Mainly because I don't control a media cartel which specializes in making absurd, baseless claims into received wisdom, and therefore I would need to make sure that neither my candidate nor I could later be attacked on the lack of veracity of any claims we made.

But apparently now engaging in ordinary campaign behavior--and this is ordinary behavior, albeit from the less pleasant side of campaign politics--is evidence of some kind of largely unspecified guilt which has something to do with the Russkies making sure we didn't get Hillary in office.

You can campaign in America, but not against her.

Before I get into whether there's any New evidence here that Russia was trying to tilt the electoral field against Hillary, perhaps we could take a minute to consider America's position, or at least the position of its politicians and press, on foreign influence in our electoral process. For instance, if the New York Times was upset about foreign influence in our elections, they might have wanted to say something about this:

THE INTERCEPT HAS discovered that American Pacific International Capital, a company incorporated in California but owned and controlled by Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen, a married couple who are Chinese nationals, made donations totaling $1.3 million to the Jeb Bush Super PAC Right to Rise USA.

or this:

...the 2016 election has seen a surge of contributions to Super PACs by so-called ghost corporations, which appear to exist solely to make those donations and whose ownership is unknown. Whether any of these corporations are ultimately owned by foreign nationals is likewise unknown.

or the fact that non-profits are an even better way to pour foreign money into American elections:

The 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) organizations are, in fact, much more attractive than Super PACs to anyone hoping to influence elections anonymously, because, unlike Super PACs, they are not required to publicly disclose their donors. This is why contributions to politically active nonprofits are often referred to as “dark money.”

This additional layer of obfuscation makes it even less likely that money originating with foreign nationals would be noticed. For instance, if APIC had donated to Right to Rise Policy Solutions, a 501(c)(4) that was affiliated with the Right to Rise USA Super PAC, it’s unlikely The Intercept would have ever discovered its involvement in the election or ultimate ownership.

In fact, you'd think that the New York Times would be quite interested to know that the Saudis, who share a nationality with all but two of the 9/11 hijackers, do quite a bit of meddling in American politics themselves:

Want an example? Consider, for instance, that the American Petroleum Institute is partially financed by the U.S. subsidiary of Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company. In the 2010 midterm elections, API was one of the funders behind attack ads that helped the Republican Party take back the House of Representatives from the Democrats and stop most of Obama’s plans in their tracks.

https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-money-us-ele...

So, now that we've established what this country's position really is on foreign influence over our electoral process, namely, if it doesn't bother someone whose name is Bush or Clinton we don't give a shit, let's get to whether or not there's any evidence of Russian involvement in the election in this latest breaking news. Here's what they base their story on:

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people [the sources for the NY Times story], indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information.

Let's take this apart carefully.

The first point: The NY Times never saw that email. It was "described to the New York Times." They are relying on the word of their sources. While it would obviously be better if NY Times reporters saw the information on which they base their article, it's not unheard of to rely on a source in this way. Except--

The second point: Why didn't the sources show the NY Times the email? The simplest explanation is that they didn't have access to it. Did they have it, then delete it? That would be strange behavior for someone who was worried that the sovereignty of their country and the integrity of their elections was at stake. Did they never have it at all? In that case, how did they know about it? Did they ever see it themselves? Did they just hear about it? This is a fairly important question that the New York Times doesn't go into. In a court, it would be the difference between evidence and hearsay. But it's not of interest to the New York Times.

This brings up the question: how does the NY Times know there ever was such an email? Luckily, the former tabloid reporter/publicist, Mr. Goldstone, gave an interview this Monday, so at least we know there was an actual meeting. At least this isn't all about nothing:

Mr. Goldstone represents Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

A fact. Thank God.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Don Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

Third point: So the Times...interviewed Mr. Goldstone BEFORE the email was described to them? Why is this starting to sound like they interviewed Goldstone, didn't get the answer they liked, and then suddenly found--between Monday and today--three sources who described Goldstone's email to them?

Now let's get into what the sources purportedly described to the New York Times.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people [the sources for the NY Times story], indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information.

The verbal description of Mr. Goldstone's message, a message the New York Times hasn't seen, and which the New York Times hasn't said its sources have seen, indicates that the Russian government was the source of information that was potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Indicates it? How, exactly? You see, this is where having the actual words in front of you would help, so that you weren't relying merely on three people telling you that they knew, somehow, that the email involved said, no, wait, indicated, that the Russian government was trying to peddle damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Fourth point: What was the information? Was it true? Was it false? Did it ever even exist, or was the claim a cheap stunt to get the ear of someone close to Donald Trump and talk about something else entirely?

[Donald Trump, Jr.] said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya only offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”

The New York Times seems utterly uninterested in what information Veselnitskaya had about Clinton, or if she ever had any.

Conclusion: Once again, there is no proof of Russian government involvement in Trump's election, and, in fact, there is actually no proof that any damaging information about Hillary Clinton ever existed, whether factual or contrived.

Yet here's the lead-off sentence in their article:

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

Let me fix that for you, NYT.

"Before arranging a meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. received an email which three sources claim contained an assertion that the compromising information came from the Russian government. The Times has not been able to view the email, nor verify the claim that the author, a former British tabloid reporter and publicist named Goldstone, actually said the purported information came from the Russian government. Mr. Goldstone, in an interview given Monday, claims he never thought any such information came from the Russian government. Mr. Goldstone further states that at the meeting, lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya proved to have no compromising information at all, but apparently had used the claim of possessing some to get the ear of someone close to Trump because she wanted to reverse a 2012 U.S. law regarding the blacklisting of Russians accused of human rights abuses."

How's that?

Something Borrowed

Did we borrow some of the ideas in the Constitution from the Iroquois?

This is from an article by historian Ellen Holmes Pearson:

Those who support the theory that the First Peoples influenced the drafting of the founding documents point to the words of founders such as Benjamin Franklin, who in 1751 wrote to his printer colleague James Parker that “It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.” Native American Studies Professor Bruce Johansen and American Studies Professor Donald Grinde, among others, argue that American colonists, in Johansen’s words, “drew freely on the image of the American Indian as an exemplar of the spirit of liberty they so cherished.” These scholars argue that the framers of American governments understood and admired Native American government structures, and they borrowed certain indigenous concepts for their own governments.

Other scholars are not convinced. Anthropologist Elisabeth Tooker, for example, argued that European political theory and precedent furnished the models for American Founders, while evidence for Indian influence was very thin. Although the concept of the Iroquoian Confederation may have been similar to the United States’ first efforts to unite alliance, the Iroquois constructed their government under very different principles. The member nations of the Iroquois League all lived under matrilineal societies, in which they inherited status and possessions through the mother’s line. Headmen were not elected, but rather clan mothers chose them. Representation was not based on equality or on population. Instead, the number of Council members per nation was based on the traditional hierarchy of nations within the confederation. Moreover, the League of Six Nations did not have a centralized authority like that of the federal system the Euro-Americans eventually adopted.

http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24099

There's no doubt that our government and the government of the Iroquois Confederacy were quite different in many fundamental ways, but I don't think that precludes some Borrowing here. What do you think?

Something/Someone Blue

Why is Krishna blue?

There seem to be conflicting explanations.

Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu, who is associated with the waters, so some think that every avatar of Vishnu ought to be blue on that account. Other explanations have to do with Hindu color symbolism:

According to Hinduism, blue is the colour of the Infinite. The colour symbolises the all pervading and never ending reality or the formless Brahman. That is why many deities like Ram, Krishna and sometimes even Lord Shiva is depicted in blue colour.

Other myths ascribe Krishna's blue skin to failed attempts to poison him!

Putana Legend: According to the legends once a demoness called Putana came to kill Lord Krishna when He was a baby. She gave the Lord her poisoned milk to drink. Lord Krishna did not die but His colour changed to blue. He later killed the demoness but His skin colour remained blue.

Kaaliya Legend: Another legend is of the Kaaliya serpent who lived in the Yamuna river. The serpent had created a havoc for the residents of Gokul. So, when Lord Krishna went to fight the serpent, the poison of the deadly snake made Krishna's skin colour blue.

Read more at: https://www.boldsky.com/yoga-spirituality/faith-mysticism/2014/why-is-lo...

Still others say that his skin was not literally blue; that blue skin is the pictorial representation of Krishna's all-inclusive "blue" energy:

You will see in the existence, anything that is vast and beyond your perception generally tends to be blue, whether it is the ocean or the sky. Anything which is larger than your perception tends to be blue because blue is the basis of all-inclusiveness. It is based on this that so many gods in India are shown as blue-skinned. Shiva has a blue skin, Krishna has a blue skin, Rama has a blue skin. It is not that their skin was blue. They were referred to as blue gods because they had a blue aura.

This blueness, this sense of all-inclusiveness in him was such that even people who were sworn enemies of his sat with him and unwittingly gave in to him. He was able to effortlessly turn around even people who abused and plotted to kill him any number of times. There are various other aspects to him but this blue nature constantly assisted him in everything that he did. He was so irresistible that even Poothana, the assassin who came to kill him when he was just a baby, fell in love with him. She was with him for just a few minutes but she became completely entangled in his blue magic.

http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/yoga-meditation/history-of-yoga/why-is-kri...

When I was little, my mom had a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita lying around, and I loved the pictures.

Here are some other cool pictures of Krishna:

How are you all doing today?