The Language of Slavery

 The New York Times today has a story about a new study that claims Alexander Hamilton owned slaves right up to the end of his life.  There doesn’t seem to be new evidence but a new, more assertive interpretation of it.  I know little about the period or Hamilton in particular, so my opinion doesn’t mean much, but the argument struck me as persuasive.  I would be surprised to find out that Hamilton wasn’t a slave owner.

But here’s the thing: the article’s writing endorses the new language around slavery.  We no longer have slaves but enslaved people, not slave owners but enslavers.  It is an attempt to personalize the issue.  The word “slave” is said to carry a connotation that the individual in question was somehow different by virtue of their status; instead we want to convey the idea that they were just like anyone else except that, at some point (or repeatedly), other people enslaved them.  Myself, I never thought that slaves were anything other than ordinary folks who had been delivered into slavery, so for me it’s a distinction without a difference, but if other people need the change in terminology to respect the full humanity of slaves I’m OK with that.

The enslaver bit is a different story.  An enslaver is someone who alters the status of another human being from non-slave to slave.  Those who captured previously unenslaved people, whether from a village in Africa or a native community in the New World, were enslavers.  Those who participated in the institution of slavery by buying or selling those already enslaved or by directing their work were slave traders or slave owners but not enslavers.  If we care about precision in language, we should be careful about the words we use.

But the problem goes much deeper than this.  The campaign to replace slave owner with enslaver is part of the larger movement to make politics a matter of individual responsibility.  Slavery was a horror, and this horror, we are to believe, was the product of the individual consciousness and behavior—personal racism—on the part of each person who participated in it.  According to this view, we need to use the word “enslaver” to not let these evildoers off the hook.  If Alexander Hamilton was an enslaver he was personally responsible for the enslavement of the individuals forced to work in his household.

Now personal responsibility is real, but not mainly in this way.  We are all called upon to consider our position in an unjust social order, not because each of us individually creates some small piece of it, but because it rests on our acceptance of it.  It was not Hamilton who authored the enslavement of his servants; it was the slave system itself that placed them in that position and ensured that, with few exceptions, if he didn’t own the slave in question someone else would.  At the margin, an enlightened rich person like George Washington could free a few slaves (in his case upon his death), but slavery as an institution grew and prospered.

At stake is the understanding of politics itself.  Is slavery just an accretion of individual choices by enslavers or an institution with legal, economic and social underpinnings?  Is racism today also institutionalized and reproduced legally, economically and politically, or is it mainly the outcome of racist thoughts and actions one individual at a time?  How does social change happen?

In the case of slavery, it didn’t really matter that Hamilton was active in the Manumission Society, which encouraged slave owners to release individual slaves, nor would it have mattered much for the course of slavery in America if he had refused to purchase slaves from their prior owners.  At the margin again, it was better to promote manumission than not, and it would have been even better if Hamilton weren’t such a hypocrite about it by owning some of his own.  But manumission did not end slavery nor could it: that was accomplished only by a civil war and the subsequent constitutional amendments outlawing it.  It took collective action, and a lot of bloodshed, to bring about this social change.

Obviously the battle for social justice is far from over.  Our society is riven by deep inequalities and change is still on the agenda.  But just as in Hamilton’s day, more enlightened personal behavior is nice but also something of a distraction.  The real personal morality is about participation in movements to dismantle the institutions of inhumanity.

Visiting Charlottesville On The Day Biden-Harris Declared Victors Over Trump-Pence

 Really, it was not planned with politics in mind.  In Harrisonburg, VA we are an hour drive from Charlottesville, VA, and we have in the past maybe about 2 times every 3 months or so gone over there to shop, eat, hang out, etc.  I used to go to UVa to the library or to see people I know, but all that has faded away to nothing over time.  In the pandemic we have cut it way back, and it had been several months since we had been there.  But today the weather was nice, clear and in the 70s, with the leaves just past max over there, so time to go, not to mention picking up some holiday stuff.  We had been planning it for several days, again, nothing to do with politics at all.

The word of the Biden-Harris victory came just before we left to go there, but we still did not think about political implications. Indeed we initially did some upscale grocery shopping elsewhere before we went down to the Mall, where 4th Street crosses, where Heather Heyer was killed by a white nationalist, and where the statues of both Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan Jackson (that is what is no the base of it) still stand, probably to go in the not too distant future finally.  

I had thought nothing of all that as got there, although we did see the statues as we drove up and discussed their status.  We parked several blocks away, but it was only as we got within a block of the Mall, oh about 3 PM, that it finally dawned on me.  People were randomly breaking out into cheers. Music was playing, and people were clearly celebrating vigorously and with great pleasure.  We would eat at a funky restaurant sitting on the Mall, and regularly people coming by would start shouting and cheering, and everybody would join in (or most of them anyway), and the place was packed on this gorgeous afternoon.  It was a massive and total spontaneous celebration.

Of course as we first encountered the celebrations I remembered the significance of this particular location in all this, and how it was totally appropriate that it would be erupting in ongoing outbursts of loud celebration, people jumping up and down and dancing, with many musicians playing all kinds of music.  Heck it was just plain great.  I loved it.

We did go to Fourth Street to the site that has since Heather Heyer died there has been festooned with many signs and objects commemorating her and what happened there.  I am also extremely aware of the fact that when Joseph R. Biden, Jr. announced his candidacy for the presidency, the main point of his talk, what he claimed motivated him more than anything else to run, was his disgust with Donald Trump's characterization of the violent demonstrations by overt racists and neo-Nazis on August 17, 2017 that "there were good people on both sides" or words to that effect.  Biden said that this comment of Trump on the death of Heather Heyer on August 17, 2017 on Fourth Street in Charlottesville, Virginia motivated him to run for President of the United States of America, and given that, I am glad he has defeated the man who made those odious remarks, and I hope for the best not only for the USA, but for the whole world, as I know that most people outside of the US have been hoping for the outcome that has arrived today.

My deepest regards and peace to all who read this.

Barkley Rosser

Dubya

 Crickets.

UPDATE: George W. Bush: “I just talked to the President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden. I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night.”

Whining Pundits

 As I write this the outcome of the presidential election remains uncertain, although the trends seem to be heading steadily in Biden's favor and it seems very unlikely he will lose, but the hanging on of this is beginning to get to many of us.  Most other races have been decided, although some of those are still up in the air.  In any case, although it is near certain Biden will win, it will be by a substantially lower margin that forecast by the main polls, with him not taking several states he was forecast to take.  This is also mirrored in Congressional (and some state legislative) races, with it unlikely, although not completely out of the realm of possibility, that Dems will control the Senate as had been forecast as a 2 to 1 likely outcome by 538, and instead of gaining seats, the Dems lost some in the House while retaining control, with the exact number of losses also still a bit uncertain.  In short, Trump and the Republicans did much better than generally forecast, and this has lots of people upset and lashing out at each other, including, reportedly, Dem members of the House.

No, I am not going to join the mob howling at the pollsters, nor am I going to join the mob howling at Schumer and Pelosi.  I shall look at how I think the pollsters got it wrong, although I think they have been doing their best and trying to avoid certain errors they made in 2016, when they also underpredicted how well Trump would do.  Nor am I going to join those dumping on Schumer and Pelosi. I think the Congressional outcomes have a big fat zero to do with anything either of them have done or said or not done or not said.  It was all about the down-ballot GOPs gaining from the underpredicted surge of Trump supporters coming out to vote for him, the phenomenon that needs to be understood.

Who I am going to pick on, although not too much really, are some reporters and commentators I shall simply label as pundits, "whining pundits" to be precise.  To name three who all appeared in the Style section of the Washington Post, not the editorial page, I note Monica Hesse, Hank Stuever, and Margaret Sullivan, roughly in order of how annoying and hypocritical I find their whining.  

I note of these I have long respected Margaret Sullivan a lot, and she was mostly fairly factual, covering in fact the difficult problem of the pollsters messing up ("Who who won, but it wasn't the pollsters"). In fact while accurately noting details of how off the pollsters were, she, who regularly covers the media, extended the critique to the broader media beyond the pollsters. She accurately noted the sparcity of coverage of the degree to which Trump was appealing to Latino males, especially those in South Florida.  But she may have overdone it when she appeared to blame the media for relentlessly covering Trump's mishandling of the pandemic, which she suggested allowed Trump to appeal to his followers by pointing to a hostile mainstream media.  What she did not do when she came up with that was to note that she herself has much of the time in recent years dumped on the media for not being relentless enough in exposing the various flaws of Trump.

From his byline of "Critics Notebook," Hank Stuever ("Difficult to tune out, but even harder to watch") focused on the election night TV coverage.  Much of this is reasonable, but he too turned to whining, not about the polls or even the coverage, but the naive optimism of sucker liberals among the public.  He did this by quoting TV reporters who made sneery such remarks as the results began to turn unexpectedly so much for Trump.  So we get "Long before the post-midnight madness, CNN anchor Jake Tapper reminded viewers that there has been a lot of magical thinking lately on the part of Democrats and liberal pundits, who spent too much time entertaining pie-in-the-sky dreams of tipping Texas and Georgia [which now appears likely to in fact end up gong for Biden] to blue states, imagining a landslide victory for Biden. "As they say, 'You can't get high on your own supply,'" Tapper zinged."  OK, but I am unaware of either Tapper or Stuever expressing such views prior to the election.  Ooops!

Somehow Monica Hesse ("Crushed by a landslide that never heppened") makes these other two look completely reasonable with her sneering whining, also lacking any previous reporting on how wildly over-optimistic all these people were.  She accurately notes that election officials had warned of "an election week," but then we had "in some liberal circles there was a jacked-up fantasy that nobody would have to wait for Pennsylvania's tortured ballot count because by 10 p.m. Joe Biden would turn Florida and North Carolina blue [this latter remains a possibility, although not too likely] - and maybe Texas, why not?"  As an added dig she adds that "for the past years, the demographics in my inbox who most fervently believed in a 2020 blue landslide were White liberal men and occasionally White liberal women. Surely, they insisted, what had happened in 2016 was a blip." This may be right, and she does then argue that Black women and others did not have such illusions. 

OK, for all the hypocritical whining and sneering by these folks who did not issue these warnings previously, the problem seems to boil down to observers taking polls seriously.  538 had a national gap of 8% nationally for Biden while Real Clear Politics had it at 7%.  A likely outcome will have Biden at 4-5% ahead.  This is a larger gap than in 2016, when the final 538 predicted national advantage for Clinton was 3%, with her getting a 2.1% lead. How then did things go so wrong in 2016?  Ah, the errors varied across states, with some having the polls on the money, but they messed up badly in the crucial three states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, especially the first, and they were what provided the surprising outcome of a Trump electoral college victory.

The national gap this time looks to be somewhat larger, but the variation across states also seems to have reappeared. Some have been on the money, such as the respected Selzer poll in Iowa that nailed the Trump lead almost on the head.  But then we have Wisconsin again, where one poll in the last few weeks actually had Biden ahead by 17%, with the overall averages having Biden ahead by 5-6%, but in the end having less than 1 percent lead (again, thank you Prairie du Chien!). 

For myself on Facebook in comments I speculated that due to a likely higher turnout with such intensity on both sides, there was a larger variance to the likely outcome, with the 538 projections of the expected for Biden too optimistic, but with indeed there being also a non-trivial chance of him getting a landslide. And we should note that if 538's main forecast had happened, 8% lead, this would have been viewed as a landslide, with indeed both Florida and North Carolina for Biden by 2% and with Texas a tossup, despite the whiny sneering by Monica Hesse.  It was not just obviously pie-in-the-sky fantasy to take such an outcome seriously, although arguing it as an inevitability clearly was so.

As it was, even though I thought the pollsters had made some appropriate changes since 2016, with one for a bias about educational levels widely reported, I worried about "silent Trump supporters," and I think those in the end were out there, especially among the better educated, despite the awfully loud and proud shouting by many Trump supporters. So I generally lopped 2% off the forecasted projections, but that was still not enough by a percent or two, although it does actually lead to pretty close to accurate the outcomes of which states would go which way.  

I shall note that besides election officials one group that was also cautious about this and preparing for a high turnout by Trump's supporters has been those in the Biden campaign.  Many criticized him for not going to Texas and some other out-there possible states (although he made a few such trips).  Of course, he laid low a lot in his basement, possibly too much.  But when he was out he very heavily concentrated on the core three states that unexpectedly flipped in 2016, and it looks like this was a good decision, with Wisconsin and Michigan flipped back, and hopefully and likely Pennsylvania as well.

Barkley Rosser

Two Questions about the Election

 I am about to turn in and let the vote counting continue without me.  It will be a troubled sleep, since the election was mostly a disaster.  (Universal preschool won in Oregon, and if everywhere were like here I would be happier.)

Meanwhile two questions:

1. What went wrong with the polls?  They didn’t do too badly in 2016; the popular vote was close to the consensus prediction, and the electoral college was a squeeker within the margin of error.  This time though the polls were apparently way off.  Yes, the votes are not all in, but it doesn’t look like we’ll see the massive popular victory for Biden they foretold.  In fact, as I fade away tonight, it’s still possible that Trump could pull out a legitimate electoral college victory, something that seemed almost impossible a day or two ago.  Take Wisconsin (my home state) for instance.  We saw numbers ranging from 5-13% for Democrats, and now it’s nip and tuck.  Meanwhile, analysts were giving the Dems a better than even chance of taking the senate, but that looks out of reach now.  So what gives?  Supposedly the weights were adjusted to better reflect the role of education, and the “shy Trumpster” effect was taken into consideration.  But here we are.

2. And how do we understand the politics?  We’re dealing with a president whose failures were about as massive as could be, especially in the context of a pandemic.  He made a fool of himself in the first debate.  He is mired in corruption.  And the Republican senate has repeatedly blocked measures to support workers, small business and local governments devastated by the economic effects of the virus.  If this isn’t enough to expunge them from office, what is?

I hope the news is better when I wake up.

Biden Narrowly Leads In Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin

 Several months ago I forecast that "He who wins Prairie du Chien wins the White House."  I also argued more generally that SW Wisconsin would determine Wisconsin.

As of right now Trump is leading by about 2% in Wisconsin, and he seems to be ahead in most of the counties of SW Wisconsin, although Milwaukee has not yet come in.  And the county Prairie du Chien is in, Crawford Trump is leading 4620 to 3953.

But, for what it is worth, in the City of Prairie du Chien itself Biden is ahead 1303 to 1223.  So we shall see.

BTW, I think this is all the votes for that area, but I am about to go to bed, waiting to see Trump make a statement, but I am not going to wait up for the Milwaukee or other long counts.

Barkley Rosser

Signs and Portents

 My favorite ; A hand-made sign a few blocks away from my house:

ONE DAY, LIKE A MIRACLE, HE'LL BE GONE

Amen to that!

The Queen’s Gambit Declined

 I made it through episode 5 of The Queen’s Gambit last night, but I doubt I will finish it.  A noticeable deterioration takes place on all fronts as the story proceeds: weak dialog, dull cinematography, clumsy editing.  It’s as if the creative folks behind the project had done what they set out to do and were now just playing out the endgame.

But here I want to focus on the chess, the way the game is portrayed in the Netflix series.  I have some experience at this, since I was a “promising young player” during the mid-sixties, the period during which The QG is set.  I traipsed around to open tournaments, staying in downtown hotels in mostly midwestern cities (few as glamorous as the ones Beth Harmon visits), and developing a bit of a reputation on the circuit.  No, I never made the leap to professional stardom, not having either the talent or dedication it requires, but I saw the real life version of what the TV series portrays.

Some gripes:

1. The pace and ambience are all wrong.  No, players don’t routinely blitz out their moves, nor do they slam the pieces down and stare into their opponents’ faces, much less talk with them during the game.  Tournament rooms are eerily quiet, with the loudest sound at the board being the nerve-wracking ticking of the chess clocks.  I realize that drama has to be poured on for mass entertainment purposes, but surely a few sequences could have been taken slowly and silently to convey a different, truer type of tension.

2. No post-mortems!  In real chess tournaments, as soon as the game is over the players head to the analysis room, where they try to figure out what just happened.  The winner, of course, takes the lead in explaining where the loser went wrong, unless the stronger player was the one who lost.  (More on that in a moment.)  There are a lot of “what were you thinking when....?” questions, or “what about this other move?”, when alternatives rejected during the game are given a new look.  If the players are highly rated, their board is quickly surrounded by a crowd of observers eager to see how the best chess minds think.  The jockeying and camaraderie of the analysis room is where the social side of chess tournaments gets played out.

3. The role of luck in chess is completely eliminated in the show.  No, the stronger player doesn’t always win, nor does a single win demonstrate who is stronger.  And lots of games are draws, especially as you move up to the higher ranks of the sport.  Chess players talk about the “draw zone”, the window between a small advantage and a small disadvantage in which neither side, with reasonably accurate play, can bring home the full point.  A better player can blunder, get caught in an opening they hadn’t prepared for, or just randomly miss something crucial beyond their calculation horizon.  And often the advantage that results from better play just isn’t enough to move the game beyond the draw zone.  A brilliant player regularly loses and draws against their inferiors, although of course they win often enough to maintain their position.  How one deals with regular, unavoidable disappointment is the central emotional issue in competitive chess.

4. Soviet chess is misrepresented to feed Cold War stereotypes.  Yes, Soviet players playing abroad were often accompanied by KGB agents, more to keep them in line than to strategize with them.  But, the greatest chess sin committed by the QG is to present Soviet chess as stolid, boring and “bureaucratic”.  (This word actually appears in the dialog.)  But the opposite was true.  It’s not a defense of the ugliness of the Soviet regime to acknowledge the innovative, creative accomplishments of the players churned out by its chess machine.  The art of positional sacrifice, for example, advanced by leaps and bounds among the Soviets, along with paradoxical opening ideas—consider the Taimanov variation in the Sicilian Defense, to take one example.  Yes, Soviet chess was the best, but not at the expense of inspiration.  (I began subscribing to Shachmatny Bulletin, the leading Russian chess magazine, when I was 14 to get that inspiration from the source.)

I could add a lot more, but these were the jarring miscues that undermined the chessic part of the story.  The believability of the emotional side I’ll leave for others.

Did The Hunter Biden Laptop Come From China?

 The election season is nearly over, thank heavens, but I guess I shall throw one more story for it out there, one I really did not expect and find plenty weird, but with two different sources pushing it, well.  As it is, I must say that given how totally lacking in any credible support this whole Hunter Biden story was from the get go, I found it hard to believe that the Russian GRU was behind it. I think they are more competent that that. The Chinese I think are maybe less practiced at this sort of thing, although the versions of this going around are plenty weird.

So one version I saw this morning in in the editorial page section in the Washington Post by Josh Rogin, who, it must be noted, seems to have somewhat of an anti-China bias, so I note that and would not have posted this if that were the only source.  According to him the story was promulgated by a supposedly dissident Chinese figure who many now think has switched and is now working for the CCP, attacking various dissidents abroad.  This story is a serious mess, frankly, and Rogin at the end of it admits that he really cannot figure it out and is not sure what is going on.

I saw the second one on daily kos in a post by Mark Sumner.  In that one he reports that various right wing social media sites have been claiming that the laptop and its emails are for real based on an analysis by a "Marten Aspen," supposedly a cybersecurity expert in Switzerland.  But, according to Sumner (he does not report his sources), there is no such person, certainly not one in Switzerland, and that the photo supposedly of him seems to have been artificially created.  

According to Sumner, the story was initially reported by Christopher Balding, an economist and blogger based in Beijing, although with him not reporting the ultimate source.  Also supposedly there were three laptops taken from California to the blind, pro-Trump, repairman in Delaware, who not only sat on in for several months but then broke the law by recording what was on it.  Where all these laptops are is unclear, although supposedly the FBI has one, with them saying zero about it, and maybe Rudy Giuliani has one?  Where is the other?

I note that these two accounts do not seem to agree with each other, so I really do not know what to make of this.  I am also not going to comment on the resignation of Glenn Greenwald, who apparently has been taking the story seriously, but I have not seen his piece the Intercept reportedly would  not publish as is. 

Again, bottom line: I do not know where this wild laptop story originated, but it looks pretty phoney, with the proof on that pudding being in the New York Post story that initially reported on it, which repeated the repeatedly discredited claim that Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin was fired at Joe Biden's request because Shokin was investigating Burisma.  This is simply a lie, but I have no doubt that if Biden wins, Fox News will continue to spout this lie as they have been doing for a long time now, with it being the leading candidate to become the first Fox Benghazi story of the Biden administration they can keep their faithful hooked on watching them to see repeated over and over yet again.

Barkley Rosser

Open Thread

My friends, 

If you post endless copies of off-topic news articles and list of corona virus statistics to my substantive posts, I will simply hide all comments on that post. DO NOT DO IT! Effectively, all you do with those "comments" is to prevent conversation. If that is your intention, you are trolls. One way or the other it is SPAM. You are welcome to post whatever you want on an "Open Thread." 

No Bumper Crop in 2020

We took a trip this weekend, driving 180 miles each way on I-5 through Oregon and Washington State.  We kept our eyes peeled for bumper stickers relating to the upcoming election but counted only three for Trump and an amazing zero for Biden.

I’ve never seen anything like this before in the US.  (In Europe bumper stickers don’t seem to exist at all.)  Just four years ago you could see Clinton and Trump plastered on cars everywhere.

Is this your experience too?

And what does it mean?  This election is supposed to be attracting more interest than any in decades; why is it practically stickerless?  Is it because there are fewer non-virtual events and less door-to-door canvassing where bumper stickers can be handed out?

An Irony About Interest Rates And Income Distribution

 It has long been a truism of economics that high interest rates were favored by wealthy capitalist lenders against poor borrowers, with such a view lying behind the populist demands of the late 19th century.  We are used to applauding Keynes's forecast of the "euthanasia of the rentiers." But now that such a situation is upon us of increasingly likely very low interest rates for a long time ahead, this euthanasia does not seem so much like something poorer people should be all that happy about.

Increasingly it looks like the largest effect of prolonged very low interest rates is a booming stock and real estate market.  The latter may help the middle class, but those gaining from the former are much more heavily concentrated among the wealthy, even though somehow Donald Trump thinks that nearly every American is totally focused on their 401ks and that really is what matters in the economy.  After all, we all know that it was the potentially negative impact on the stock market that had Trump worrying about public "panic" back in early February when he told Woodward that he was not going to publicize how serious the coronavirus is.  Ironically he would probably be in much better electoral shape now if he had done so back then, with the economy probably doing better than it is, although I have no idea what the stock market would be doing. But Trump still has not figured all that out.

Anyway, it is not just that the poor do not seem to get much of the obvious gains from asset price appreciation that seems to be the main effect of lower interest rates.  It is also that the future viability of pensions, both public and private may become endangered, although this is not an immediate worry.  But in today's WaPo Allan Sloan reiterated a case he has made previously, citing several new studies on this, warning that low interest rates on bonds will make it harder for pension funds to pay out what they have promised to pay out, with this affecting Social Security as well, although the greater damage and danger seems to be for state and local pension funds, as well as private pension funds, with insurance companies and others facing problems down the road some years if interest rates really do stay so low.

A particular point on this that Sloan notes is that there is a huge difference in the share of wealth that pensions constitute for different parts of the income distribution.  For the 20-80 percentiles it is the largest portion, even exceeding homes.  For the top 1% it is less than 2% of their wealth, essentially nothing.  So damage to the value and viability is potentially a serious hit for the middle and poorer classes, whereas it is a big nothing for the super wealthy.  

Thus we have this new irony of interest rates: lower ones hurt the poorer parts of the population while helping the wealthier parts of it.  The rentiers that may end up getting euthanized may well be the middle and poorer classes in the longer run.

Barkley Rosser

Abolish The Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence (ODNI)

 A sign that this entity should be abolished, and I mean really gone, done in, not with its parts redistributed to other entities, is that it is an an entity defined by its director, not itself.  In preparing to write this post I checked on it, and I thought it was the ONI, the Office of National Intelligence. But, no, it is the ODNI, spelled out as above, really. And it should go.

Why was it ever created in the first place, this unnecessary entity?  It was created in 2005 as a reaction to the failures of the US intel establishment to "connect the dots" in the runup to the 9/11/01 disastrous attack that killed about 3,000 people in a terrorist attack, about 1.5% of the number of people who have died this year in the coronavirus pandemic in the US. Indeed, there were failures of communication between the FBI and the CIA then that helped lead to that attack.  But the creation of a supposedly overseeing entity has not remotely overcome the tendency of these agencies not to share information with each other, even though various politicians at the time thought that it would achieve such a result.

Indeed, this ODNI simply became yet another entity among others, at least 17 others in fact, over which it theoretically has power, but which in fact it does not.  I cannot even name all 17 of those entities, although I know that some of the more important ones are barely known to the US public, such as the NRO and the NGIA (and no, kids, not going to tell you all what they are what they do.  If you do not know, tough). There was never any way it was going to be on top of or direct or do anything useful at all with respect to any of these 17 entities, some of which also should probably go. But none of them as much as what has now become not only a useless entity, but an odious one.

That it is not only useless but potentially dangerous has now become clear as Donald Trump has installed as the Director who justifies the existence of this entity, which is his "Office" after all, John Ratcliffe, five year far right Congressman from Texas with zero intelligence experience, but a record of supporting the most ridiculous conspiracy theories advocated by Donald Trump.  He promised not to be partisan in his new position, but almost everything he has done since his appointment suggests that he was lying when he made that promise.

Two items suggesting this include his affirmation that the New York Post story about a laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter Biden with various scandalous emails on it was not a product of Russian intelligence activity, even as over 40 former US intel officers publicly declared that it seriously looked like that was exactly the case, with this being pretty likely given that the person who provided the emails to the NY Post, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, was reported many months ago to have been seriously involved with at least one known Russian intel agent.

One might think that given his supposedly high position overseeing all those 17 agencies, Ratcliffe, who arrived in his position very recently, would know more than any of them.  But according to a column in the Washington Post, Oct. 23, by David Ignatius, mot of the 17 agencies are not giving important intel info to Ratcliffe, the DNI overseer, because they do not trust him.  He is isolated and knows nothing, and his agency is being "hollowed out," as anybody with any remote competence is fleeing it as fast as they can.

The more recent example of Ratcliffe showing his utter inappropriateness for such a position was the press conference he held with is nominal underling, FBI Director Christopher Wray, two days ago. He studiously informed us of foreign interference in this US election.  While he mentioned that Russia was doing something, he never specified what it was and moved on from it to what he considered the important item, even though many intel agents are publicly saying that indeed it is the Russian activities that are the most dangerous.  But for Ratcliffe it is this alleged Iran interference that warranted the presser.  Supposedly some emails have been sent to individuals showing knowledge of their addresses and other personal info, supposedly from the Proud Boys, who deny doing so, demanding that the recipients vote for Trump, with these messages mostly in Florida, although a few in some other battleground states. This was supposedly done to create a conflict in the US and doubt about the election, something Trump and Russia would like. And Juan Cole points out that it is sort of bizarre to posit Iran wanting such an outcome or to call for people to vote for Trump. The whole thing stinks, frankly, although as of now we do not know what is really going on with this, even as it looks like the new DNI is playing a blatantly political game in contrast to his promise not to do so.

Given the already too many US intel agencies that are now retreating from dealing with the ODNI, if they can manage it, it is becoming clear that this office never had any chance of doing what it was supposed to do, and simply is getting in the way of those agencies doing what they are supposed to do when they are doing that. It does not connect the dots. This may not matter most of the time, but it does matter when an authoritarian president appoints a flunky hack to be ODNI to cherry pick intelligence to aid this president in his various political activities, which seems to be exactly what is going on now.

I close this by quoting Ignatius from his column:

"As the DNI office has become politicized, it's performing the opposite of what was intended - separating the agencies rather than integrating them. If Biden is elected next month, he should ask whether this bureaucratic behemoth, so susceptible to manipulation, should be scrapped."

Sure looks like it to me.

Barkley Rosser

“I don't know about the two gentlemen you mentioned."

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon join a long list of people Donald Trump doesn't know about.

Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas

"I don't know those gentleman. Now, it's possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don't know them, I don't know about them, I don't know what they do."

Jeffrey Epstein

"I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him, I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you."

Michael Flynn

"It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge, It would have been impossible for me to know this."

Roger Stone

"Now you know Roger didn't work for me in the campaign, Roger Stone didn't work on the campaign, except way, way at the beginning, long before we're talking about... Roger is somebody that I've always liked, but a lot of people like Roger. Some people probably don't like Roger, but Roger Stone's somebody I've always liked. … Roger wasn't on my campaign except way at the beginning."

Stormy Daniels

"I had nothing to do with her. So she can lie and she can do whatever she wants to do."

George Papadopoulos

"I don't know Papadopoulos. I don't know him, I saw him sitting, in one picture, at a table with me. That's the — that's the only thing I know about him. I don't know him. But they got him on — I guess, a couple of lies, is what they're saying."

"Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar."

Paul Manafort

"I didn't know Manafort well. He wasn't with the campaign long."

"I know Mr. Manafort — I haven't spoken to him in a long time, but I know him. He was with the campaign, as you know, for a very short period of time, relatively short period of time."

Michael Cohen

"He's been a lawyer for me. Didn't do big deals, did small deals. Not somebody that was with me that much, They make it sound like I didn't live without him. … He was somebody that was probably with me for about 10 years. And I would see him sometimes, but when I had deals and big deals I had outside lawyers, and I have a lot of inside lawyers, too, in addition to Michael."

Vladimir Putin

"I don't know him. I met him a couple of times. I met him at the G-20. I think we could probably get along very well."

No More Concerts From Keith Jarrett

 I have just read that jazz pianist Keith Jarrett will not be performing live any more, indeed has not done so for some time.  He had two strokes back in 2018, the last year he released an album, and apparently he is simply not able to use one hand.  He does not wish to perform with only one hand.

I saw him once live, in 1967 in the Memorial Union theater at UW-Madison, when he was playing in the Charles Lloyd Quartet.  He got attention then for reaching over and directly playing strings on the piano with his hands. That was before he began doing his famous live solo albums or performing with his own group. Apparently his best selling albums, which I read is one of the greatest selling jazz albums ever, is the 1975 Koln Concert, which I have always loved a lot.  He is 75 years old.

I note that my youngest daughter, Sasha, is a composer now out with 12 albums.  She has long acknowledged him as an influence on her work and admired him greatly.  In any case, this is sad news as far as I am concerned, viewing him as the finest living jazz pianist.

Barkley Rosser