Archive for the ‘ambition’ Category
Brat Cavernaugh, or the Ruling Class at play: part two
In a speech to his old high school in 2015, Kavanaugh remarked smirkily that ‘what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep, that’s been a good thing for all of us..’ It’s fascinating how such a seemingly harmless piece of banter can take on much darker tones as information comes to light. For example, considering that Georgetown Prep has always been an all-boys’ school, ‘all of us’ clearly refers to only one gender, and considering that the cloud gathering over Kavanaugh now is all about his and his preppy mates’ treatment of the opposite sex, which may have at times bordered on criminality, this hiding of the truth about goings-on at the school becomes very disturbing.
The intense focus on Kavanaugh in recent weeks has revealed someone who knows how to be evasive in a lawyerly way. The end result, before the scandalous claims began mounting up, was that Democrats and moderate Republicans, in Congress and out, had no clear idea of his views on Roe v Wade, presidential power and immunity, or any other key issue that concerned them. It can be argued that this evasiveness was a product of ‘due judiciousness’, the view that a judge can’t answer these general questions, but has to pass judgment on the facts before him in particular instances, but with so much at stake, it’s understandable that those with at least some progressive cells in their body would want a clearer picture. This has in fact been given by examinations of his record of judgements and legal opinions, which don’t provide much hope for progressives.
More importantly, Kavanaugh’s evasiveness has been very much to the fore as allegations have come to light re his high school and university years. In the case of his most recent appearance before the judiciary committee, this evasiveness has been mixed with, and sometimes masked by, a belligerent and, in my view, self-servingly mawkish tone which I didn’t find conducive to truthfulness. Most importantly, and, I feel, decisively, he managed to avoid answering the question as to whether he would be prepared to submit to an FBI investigation. Not once but on five separate occasions when questioned on the matter. In spite of my squeamishness, I did witness him doing this on one of the cable networks, and to me it was clear what he was doing. As a person who has himself been falsely accused – of a crime even more serious than anything alleged against Kavanaugh – I know how I feel about police investigations – that they should be done as promptly and as thoroughly as humanly possible, and I would certainly have been prepared to testify to the highest authorities under oath many times over to clear my name, and was in fact desperate to do so. And since there were no witnesses to the allegation made against me, I would certainly have been happy to have any and all witnesses to testify to my character in respect of violence, or my accuser’s character in respect of truth-telling. But, being a ‘nobody’, accused by a nobody, I had to sit and by and watch the police do virtually nothing, until forced to do so, after which the case was thrown out. So Kavanaugh’s refusal to answer that question, and his obvious whitewashing of the period in question, can only be explained one way. Innocent people just don’t behave like that, unless there’s something very wrong with them.
The fact is, Kavanaugh’s obfuscation is incredibly telling, and the majority Republicans, who have now ‘permitted’ an FBI inquiry, ‘limited in scope and time’, are still doing their best to ram through the confirmation ‘no matter what’, according to the dictum of the egregious Mitch McConnell. This is not an investigation which will probe all the facts in the case, because it is limited by a partisan party. Moreover, the recent appearance by Kavanaugh was conducted under oath, and a number of classmates have since come forward to point out that he told lies under that oath, about his drinking habits, which he massively downplayed while also talking, strangely, at length, about the pleasures of beer. He presented himself as a church-going, highly studious, sporty type whose love of beer wasn’t excessive. Classmates have come forward to say that he was very often drunk, that he was a mean drunk, a sloppy drunk and so forth, and that he therefore lied under oath, which should be immediately disqualifying.
However, having said that, it’s likely that the FBI will not be investigating his drinking habits, they will only concern themselves, as directed, with the alleged assault or assaults. Though it isn’t entirely clear, it seems, what the FBI’s brief is. In fact, as I write, the goalposts keep shifting. The White House and Trump seemed to broaden the investigation, then the media were told, no, it would remain limited, etc, and the FBI itself seemed confused about all the mixed signals. The bureau is supposed to take its orders from the White House in this instance, which is itself a worry. Not surprisingly, Trump is now heaping praise on the FBI – at least until their findings are presented.
But to return to Kavanaugh’s final ‘testimony’. It was belligerent and evasive, but also partisan and Trumpian – blaming the Clintons for a set-up and an ambush. It’s noteworthy that Trump was critical of Kavanaugh’s performance in his first hearing, and it’s well-known that Kavanaugh had been ‘rehearsing’ his performance at the White House, so this time he did his master’s bidding and played the witch-hunt card, thus managing to be offensively belligerent and obsequious at the same time – though why he chose to play to an audience of one, when the confirmation was largely out of Trump’s hands, is anyone’s guess.
The most recent development, which seems to be Trump’s own doing, is that the FBI is being given as wide a scope as it needs. From this, I’m getting the impression that Trump is preparing to wash his hands of Kavanaugh – to throw him under that very destructive bus the Yanks keep talking about – but the GOP is definitely not. Which leaves the FBI as the piggy in the middle, with the White House giving carte blanche, and the Republican Senators, under the whip of the disgusting McConnell, saying it all has to be wrapped up by Friday (October 5). It’s an impossibly ludicrous situation. Apparently the FBI is currently busy turning away an increasing number of people who want to speak to the agency about Kavanaugh’s drunken loutishness during his college days. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Brett was then something of a lout, and is now something of a liar. All in all it’s the behaviour of that class of people I recall from my own university days – students of the moneyed professions, behaving boorishly in the bar, mixing only with their own kind, man-spreading smugly, making a moat of waste and filth around their table as they disgorged food, drink, fag-ends and assorted packaging over the course of a fun evening. The sort of people worth avoiding, for a lifetime. Everything I’ve observed about Kavanaugh recently fits that picture to a t. Having said that, having been a loutish youth over thirty years ago isn’t a crime. Pretending that you never really behaved badly isn’t either. But, on the one hand, we’re not talking about criminality, we’re talking about suitability for a particular job, a job that clearly requires great integrity (as does the job of US President, but that’s another story…). On the other hand, the possibility of a serious crime is in question, and that won’t be properly investigated, because of the determination of McConnell and the GOP. So, if the GOP manage to get him confirmed, it will destroy the credibility of their party for a long time into the future – and I believe Kavanaugh can be impeached. Though he may have to wait in line.
towards the ousting of Trump and his confederacy of dunces
Before all this shite came up I was writing something completely different. In order to alleviate myself of my own existence for a while, I should get back to it, and update it.
We’re living in interesting times, and I can’t help but put my weird and less than minuscule shoulder to the wheel in trying to bring down Trump and his cowboy cronies. I’ve been trying to ignore this stuff but it’s just getting too exciting. There’s been the Paradise Papers, the Facebook revelations, sex scandals and of course the Mueller inquiry. The pundits of the cable news network MSNBC are almost peeing their pants on camera as they gleefully rake through the revelations of Russian links to the Trump administration. It’s a great time for the media, with an obvious charlatan in the White House, whose buffoonery provides endless talking points, while ordinary folks and elephants get shafted big-time.
I’m not always a huge US watcher, and I’m of course pretty ignorant on the details, but it’s been a circus that’s been difficult to ignore lately, and the pickings are getting richer and richer. I’m garbling up metaphors here, so let me calm down and look at the now distinct possibility of removing Trump from office. First, the Mueller inquiry. NBC news is reporting, with apparently impeccable sources, that Trump’s former, albeit brief, national security adviser Michael Flynn is close to being charged with money laundering and perjury by the Mueller team. Of course, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates have already been indicted and it looks like a junior but big-talking foreign policy adviser to the administration, George Papadopoulos, is assisting the team with their inquiries after pleading guilty to perjury about Russian connections. I’ve been listening to a number of legal and political experts being interviewed, mostly on NBC, and it looks as though the case against Manafort, the biggest fish, is extremely strong, and it seems like a matter of days before Flynn is indicted, but what would I know? On top of that, there’s Jefferson Sessions, the US Attorney-General and apparently an arch-racist, who has perjured himself under oath, and others who are key figures in the Trump admission, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
It does seem as if Trump’s hold on power is crumbling, unless I’m falling prey to the manic glee of American liberal pundits. Certainly there are polls and election results that suggest maybe I’m not getting ahead of myself. There has just been an election victory for the Democrats in Virginia, and the (extremely unpopular) Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has been swept out of office. The Virginia result in particular is being treated by some as a watershed event (where does that odd term come from?) but maybe not. Certainly though it’s bad for Trump, who heavily supported the Republican candidate (then threw him to the dogs when he lost). The apparently reliable Reuters/Ipsos poll measuring Trump’s approval/disapproval rating has him currently at about 36%, with 59% disapproval, figures which have remained more or less steady for the last two months. I don’t see a huge dip in the polls – his numbers have always been quite low, it seems, but unless they pick up he’s going to be very vulnerable, and may become more extreme under pressure. His lack of success in pushing his agenda, his gaffes, his tweets, the Russian mess and the inquiry, they’re all converging to ensure that he won’t be elected again, but what are the chances for those who want him out before the next election. Surely almost all hopes lie with the Mueller inquiry.
Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, its longest serving director since the thuggish J Edgar Hoover. Appointed by George W Bush, he was given a two-year extension to his term by Barack Obama, and was eventually replaced by James Comey, who was controversially sacked by Trump earlier this year, a decision which may prove disastrous for the man with One of the Great Memories of All Time (a memory which may well be tested under oath soon, according to former US solicitor-general Ken Starr). It was Comey’s slightly controversial dismissal that led directly to the 2017 Special Counsel Inquiry headed by Mueller, since Comey alleged that Trump had essentially tried to obstruct justice by asking him to drop an FBI inquiry into Flynn and his connection with Russia. Mueller and his team’s brief is to investigate “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”, to quote from assistant Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the position. That’s a pretty wide brief, it seems to me. Mueller has a fearsome reputation and he’s gathered together a team of 16 lawyers, some of them highly reputed, and if Flynn is indicted, which appears a near-certainty, things may well reach crisis-point for the administration.
So it all appears to be going along nicely, if painfully slowly for those who want Trump and his confederacy of dunces removed. The thing is, Mueller and his team will be thorough. They won’t go charging in and arresting people unless the evidence is clear, and even then they may try to use the guilty as hell to gain more information about other parties, in exchange for a degree of immunity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to be a fly on the wall of Mueller’s Justice Department offices over the coming weeks.
Flynn seems to be a particularly revolting reptile. Apparently he tried to arrange a deal, which would have earned him oodles of money, to smuggle the moderate Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen out of the USA to Turkey, where he would’ve faced certain death under the thuggish macho dictator Erdogan, who constantly accused Gulen of organising the failed coup against him. If this is true, and provable, hopefully Flynn will live inside a cell for a long time. But there’s also a possibility that Flynn discussed this plan with the morally cretinous Trump, who would undoubtedly have approved. If there’s evidence of such discussions, that would be fantastic for us all.
Flynn’s a weak link for many other reasons, it seems. According to the Washington Post, he lied to the FBI – a felony offence – about discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration due to its meddling in the US election. It was because of this dishonesty that he was sacked by Trump – with great reluctance. Flynn also seems to have been involved in a strange plan to build US-Russian nuclear power plants in the Middle East, about which, again, he has been less than honest. The Russians who were part of the deal are under US sanctions. Flynn has an obvious penchant for the anti-democratic Russian kleptocracy, something of a liability for a National Security Advisor.
And there are other members of the confederacy – Trump junior, Kushner and Sessions stand out, but there are so many others in the worst political administration the western world has ever seen – who are being targeted by the Mueller inquiry. The question really is – when will the circus be closed down? Every day’s delay, after all, brings damage. Morans are running the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA and just about every other US department…
All of this calls into question the whole of the US political system, surely. It has often been called the least democratic system in the western world, though that tends to avoid the problem with democracy itself, the problem that uninformed people have the same voting rights as informed people. If you’re going to have a democracy of that kind, you really need to maximise the number of informed people. But another problem, and it’s as clear a problem in Australia as anywhere, is that ignorant, loud-mouthed people can run for political office, with far less vetting than is carried out in protecting our borders. In this respect I’m an unashamed elitist. But America’s presidential system is way too presidential. Australia’s political system, like Britain’s, is much more party-based, with responsibilities, and culpability, more equally shared among government leaders. And this, I think, is a much better, much less dangerous system. In the USA, people generally vote every four years for a person rather than a party and its policy set, and this has so many problems associated with it, it just isn’t funny. Trump, for example, isn’t a Republican, he’s ‘his own man’, a blundering, bullying, bullshitting, bragging, belly-aching buffoon, a man born into and gifted enormous wealth, a laughing-stock as a businessman, a patsy for Russian mafioso oligarchs, who has installed an assorted pile of know-nothings to important political, scientific and cultural posts in the most economically powerful in the world – though by no means a model country for fairness, security or opportunity. I can’t think of any other western country in which this could’ve happened. The checks and balances, but above all the political culture of those countries would never have allowed it.
any day now, any way now, they shall be released….
The New York Times describes the current US Prez as a billionaire, but is he? How can such a bumbling oaf be so super-rich? In the same NYT article, by Alan Rappeport, the Prez was quoted as bragging, when still a candidate, that he understood his country’s tax laws ‘better than anyone who has ever run for President’ – clearly as truthful a remark as everything else he’s ever said. His subsequent remarks on the tax system he promised to fix have been typically vague when not entirely ridiculous. A one-page tax plan of sorts was released in late April, which promised massive tax cuts to businesses and individuals, but it was massively short on details on how such cuts would be targeted and absorbed without a massive blow-out of the deficit. Anyway, it’ll be massive cause the US Prez likes massive. The administration has promised a thoroughly detailed plan by the end of August, but fellow-travellers who’ve been involved in meetings – mostly Republicans – remain thoroughly sceptical.
Meanwhile the Prez hasn’t released his own tax returns in spite of promising to do so. In mid-April some 100,000 citizens demonstrated against this interesting behaviour while high-profile critics such as Sam Harris have wondered why the release hasn’t been forced upon him. Could it be that the Prez is above the law? This is of particular concern because investigative journalists and historians such as Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder, people with solid Russian connections, have cast doubt on the Prez’s fortune and raised questions about his indebtedness to Russian money-makers, and possibly Putin’s mafioso government. And of course tax cuts to the rich might just ease the economic burden on the Prez himself, supposing he has one.
Apparently there’s a 40 year tradition of Prezes releasing their tax returns. When I read this in Rappeport’s NYT article I was immediately disheartened, as it became clear that it was only a tradition, which is far from being a law. And the Prez, as we know, is no traditionalist, with respect to such fakeries as the rule of law, a free press, human rights and the like. But I hatched an idea this morning as I heard about the Prez’s tweets on the London knife attacks, taking the opportunity to shore up his base with dog whistles on crazy immigrants, and attempts to mock the London Mayor by deliberately misconstruing his remarks. My idea is for certain high profile critics to take to Twitter (which I never use myself) or other social media platforms, and to address him directly, on a daily basis, with remarks like ‘have you released your tax returns yet, Herr Prez?’, and to get everyone else to do the same – a sort of global crowd-sourcing project. After all, though the Prez isn’t a traditionalist, he is a populist, and imagine how he would respond to hundreds of thousands, growing to millions, of people tweeting the same request every day, flooding social media platforms around the world… You may say I’m a dreamer, but really, imagine….
the strange world of the self-described ‘open-minded’ – part three, Apollo
In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom’s Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. Another poll gives that 25% of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened. There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax, claiming that, since the Sun is 93,000,000 miles away, and “according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles farther away than that”, the Moon would be nearly 94,000,000 miles away; to travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, “a patently impossible feat even by the scientists’ calculations.”
From ‘Moon landing conspiracy theories’ , Wikipedia
Time magazine cover, December 1968
Haha just for the record the Sun is nearly 400 times further from us than the Moon, but who’s counting? So now to the Apollo moon missions, and because I don’t want this exploration to extend to a fourth part, I’ll be necessarily but reluctantly brief. They began in 1961 and ended in 1975, and they included manned and unmanned space flights (none of them were womanned).
But… just one more general point. While we may treat it as inevitable that many people prefer to believe in hoaxes and gazillion-dollar deceptions, rather than accept facts that are as soundly evidence-based as their own odd existences, it seems to me a horrible offence in this case (as in many others), both to human ingenuity and to the enormous cost in terms, not only of labour spent but of lives lost. So we need to fight this offensive behaviour, and point people to the evidence, and not let them get away with their ignorance.
The Apollo program was conceived in 1960 during Eisenhower’s Presidency, well before Kennedy’s famous mission statement. It was given impetus by Soviet successes in space. It involved the largest commitment of financial and other resources in peacetime history. The first years of research, development and testing involved a number of launch vehicles, command modules and lunar modules, as well as four possible ‘mission modes’. The first of these modes was ‘direct ascent’, in which the spacecraft would be launched and operated as a single unit. Finally, after much analysis, debate and lobbying, the mode known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) was adopted. The early phases of the program were dogged by technical problems, developmental delays, personal clashes and political issues, including the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy’s principal science advisor, Jerome Weisner, was solidly opposed to manned missions.
I can’t give a simple one-by-one account of the missions, as the early unmanned missions weren’t simply named Apollo 1, 2 etc. They were associated strongly with the Saturn launch vehicles, and the Apollo numbering system we now recognise was only established in April 1967. The Apollo 4 mission, for example, is also known as AS-501, and was the first unmanned test flight of the Saturn 5 launcher (later used for the Apollo 11 launch). Three Apollo/Saturn unmanned missions took place in 1966 using the Saturn 1B launch vehicle.
The manned missions had the most tragic of beginnings, as is well known. On January 27 1967 the three designated astronauts for the AS-204 spaceflight, which they themselves had renamed Apollo 1 to commemorate the first manned flight of the program, were asphyxiated when a fire broke out during a rehearsal test. No further attempt at a manned mission was made until October of 1968. In fact, the whole program was grounded after the accident for ‘review and redesign’ with an overall tightening of hazardous procedures. In early 1968, the Lunar Module was given its first unmanned flight (Apollo 5). The flight was delayed a number of times due to problems and inexperience in constructing such a module. The test run wasn’t entirely successful, but successful enough to clear the module for future manned flights. The following, final unmanned mission, Apollo 6, suffered numerous failures, but went largely unnoticed due to the assassination of Martin Luther King on the day of the launch. However, its problems helped NASA to apply fixes which improved the safety of all subsequent missions.
And so we get to the first successful manned mission, Apollo 7. Its aim was to test the Apollo CSM (Command & Service Module) in low Earth orbit, and it put American astronauts in space for the first time in almost two years. It was also the first of the three-man missions and the first to be broadcasted from within the spaceship. Things went very well in technical terms, a relief to the crew, who were only given this opportunity due to the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts. There were some minor tensions between the astronauts and ground staff, due to illness and some of the onboard conditions. They spent 11 days in orbit and space food, though on the improve, was far from ideal.
Apollo 8, launched only two months later in December, was a real breakthrough, a truly bold venture, as described in Earthrise, an excellent documentary of the mission made in 2005 (the astronauts were the first to witness Earthrise from the Moon). The aim, clearly, was to create a high-profile event designed to capture the world’s attention, and to eclipse the Soviets. As the documentary points out, the Soviets had stolen the limelight in the space race – ‘the first satellite, the first man in orbit, the first long duration flight, the first dual capsule flights, the first woman in space, the first space walk’. Not to mention the first landing of a human-built craft on the Moon itself.
One of the world’s most famous photos, Earthrise, taken by astronaut William Anders on Christmas Eve, 1968
The original aim of the mission was to test the complete spacecraft, including the lunar module, in Earth orbit, but when the lunar module was declared unready, a radical change of plan was devised, involving an orbit of the Moon without the lunar module. Apollo 8 orbited the Moon ten times at close quarters (110 kms above the surface) over a period of 20 hours. During the orbit they made a Christmas Eve telecast, the most watched program ever, up to that time. Do yourself a favour and watch the doco. The commentary of the astronaut’s wives are memorable, and put the moon hoaxers’ offensiveness in sharp relief.
By comparison to Apollo 8 the Apollo 9 mission (March ’69) was a modest affair, if that’s not too insulting. This time the complete spacecraft for a Moon landing was tested in low Earth orbit, and everything went off well, though space walking proved problematic, as it often had before for both American and Soviet astronauts, due to space sickness and other problems. With Apollo 10 (May ’69) the mission returned to the Moon in a full dress rehearsal of the Apollo 11 landing. The mission created some interesting records, including the fastest speed ever reached by a manned vehicle (39,900 kms/hour during the return flight from the Moon) and the greatest distance from home ever travelled by humans (due to the Moon’s elliptical orbit, and the fact that the USA was on the ‘far side of the Earth’ when the astronauts were on the far side of the Moon).
I’ll pass by the celebrated Apollo 11 mission, which I can hardly add anything to, and turn to the missions I know less – that’s to say almost nothing – about.
Apollo 12, launched in November 1969, was a highly successful mission, in spite of some hairy moments due to lightning strikes at launch. It was, inter alia, a successful exercise in precision targeting, as it landed a brief walk away from the Surveyor 3 probe, sent to the Moon two and a half years earlier. Parts of the probe were taken back to Earth.
The Apollo 13 mission has, for better or worse, come to be the second most famous of all the Apollo missions. It was the only aborted mission of those intended to land on the Moon. An oxygen tank exploded just over two days after launch in April 1970, and just before entry into the Moon’s gravitational sphere. This directly affected the Service Module, and it was decided to abort the landing. There were some well-documented hairy moments and heroics, but the crew managed to return safely. Mea culpa, I’ve not yet seen the movie!
Apollo 14, launched at the end of January 1971, also had its glitches but landed successfully. The astronauts collected quite a horde of moon rocks and did the longest moonwalk ever recorded. Alan Shepard, the mission commander, added his Moon visit to the accolade of being the first American in space ten years earlier. At 47, he’s the oldest man to have stepped on the Moon. The Apollo 15 mission was the first of the three ‘J missions’, involving a longer stay on the Moon. With each mission there were improvements in instrumentation and capability. The most well-known of these was the Lunar Roving Vehicle, first used on Apollo 15, but that mission also deployed a gamma-ray spectrometer, a mass spectrometer and a laser altimeter to study the Moon’s surface in detail from the command module. Apollo 16 was another successful mission, in which the geology of the Moon’s surface was the major focus. Almost 100kgs of rock were collected, and it was the first mission to visit the ‘lunar highlands’. The final mission, Apollo 17, was also the longest Moon stay, longest moonwalks in total, largest samples, and longest lunar orbit. And so the adventure ended, with high hopes for the future.
I’ve given an incredibly skimpy account, and I’ve mentioned very few names, but there’s a ton of material out there, particularly on the NASA site of course, and documentaries aplenty, many of them a powerful and stirring reminder of those heady days. Some 400,000 technicians, engineers, administrators and other service personnel worked on the Apollo missions, many of them working long hours, experiencing many frustrations, anxieties, and of course thrills. I have to say, as an internationalist by conviction, I’m happy to see that space exploration has become more of a collaborative affair in recent decades, and may that collaboration continue, defying the insularity and mindless nationalism we’ve been experiencing recently.
a beautiful image of the International Space Station, my favourite symbol of global cooperation
Finally, to the moon hoaxers and ‘skeptics’. What I noticed on researching this – I mean it really was obvious – was that in the comments to the various docos I watched on youtube, they had nothing to say about the science and seemed totally lacking in curiosity. It was all just parroted, and ‘arrogant’ denialism. The science buffs, on the other hand, were full of dizzy geekspeak on technical fixes, data analysis and potential for other missions, e.g. to Mars. In any case I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this little trip into the Apollo missions and the space race, in which I’ve learned a lot more than I’ve presented here.