Schwarzenegger Pulls No Punches in a Rare Rebuke of Trump

On March 21, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.  

He told me Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”

In a jab at the president’s 243-pound physique, the former world-champion bodybuilder said that Trump should turn his attention to infrastructure and immigration reform when he wakes up and starts his morning workout.

“I know he must be working out every day because he’s so unbelievably in shape,” Schwarzenegger said.

Trump’s tirade began with a pair of weekend tweets laced with falsehoods. The first, on Saturday afternoon, scorned McCain for forwarding the now famous Russia dossier to the FBI and casting the deciding vote that blocked Trump’s promised repeal of Obamacare:

Spreading the fake and totally discredited Dossier “is unfortunately a very dark stain against John McCain.” Ken Starr, Former Independent Counsel. He had far worse “stains” than this, including thumbs down on repeal and replace after years of campaigning to repeal and replace!

His second tweet came early on Sunday morning:

So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) “last in his class” (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election. He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual). Even the Fake News refused this garbage!

It was not entirely clear why Trump had become so agitated  seven months after McCain’s death. One White House aide said that excoriating McCain isn’t a “winning issue,” and that officials would like to see Trump drop the subject. People close to the White House say that he might be feeling pressure from the Russia investigation, or was set off by something he saw on cable TV news.

[Read: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s War on Gerrymandering Is Just Beginning]

Whatever it was, the president hadn’t exorcised those demons on Wednesday, when he spoke at a manufacturing plant in Ohio and again invoked the dossier. “What did he do? He didn’t call me,” Trump said. “He turned it over to the FBI hoping to put me in jeopardy. That’s not the nicest thing to do.”

Trump went on to say that he had “never liked him (McCain) much. Hasn’t been for me. I really probably never will.” He wasn’t finished. Trump noted that he’d approved state funeral arrangements for McCain. And he said, “I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted … but I didn’t get a thank you.”

Trump wasn’t invited to the McCain funeral service, which some of his allies describe as a hurtful snub. “McCain’s funeral was calibrated to insult Trump–from not inviting him to the way the media played it up,”  former senior White House aide Steve Bannon told me before the president spoke in Ohio.

[Read: Arnold Schwarzenegger Contemplates His Legacy]

A former aide to McCain, Mark Salter, told me that McCain did the responsible thing and gave the dossier to law enforcement. “What would you have him do?” Salter said. “He didn’t have his own intelligence agency. He had to give it to people who can do something with it.” As for Trump not having been invited to the funeral, Salter said, “I don’t think it’s a surprise that his (McCain’s) family wouldn’t want him there.”

Only a few Republican senators have, like Schwarzenegger, condemned Trump’s attacks. Tepidly. Most have stayed silent, possibly mindful of his hold over the party rank-and-file. Defying the president invites scornful tweets, if not a primary opponent.

McCain’s closest friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, sent out tweets Sunday that defended McCain while not mentioning Trump.

He offered a more pointed statement on Wednesday, telling reporters in South Carolina: “I think the president’s comments about Senator McCain hurt him more than they hurt the legacy of Senator McCain.”

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who’s had an on again-off-again relationship with Trump, tweeted on Tuesday: “I can’t understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky wrote a tweet Wednesday that hailed McCain as a “rare patriot and genuine American hero”—but also omitted mention of Trump.

In his recent attacks, Trump has avoided mention of McCain’s record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. During the presidential race, Trump said he preferred people “who weren’t captured,” referring to the years McCain, shot down as a Navy pilot, spent captive at the so-called Hanoi Hilton.

Schwarzenegger described McCain as “a hero.”

“He was a great public servant, no two ways about that,” Schwarzenegger said. “He was known for his honesty, for his courage, and his patriotism and his service.”

The war hero-turned-politician and the movie star-turned-politician joined forces in 2005 when McCain helped Schwarzenegger push for a package of education and spending initiatives in California. Voters defeated the measures, but Schwarzenegger didn’t forget the favor; he endorsed McCain in the 2008 Republican presidential nomination fight.

Schwarzenegger is busy these days. An aide said a new Terminator film is coming out in the fall. He is working to draw fairer electoral districts, ending the gerrymandering that protects incumbents. He doesn’t want to be a pundit, and the last thing he needed was a fight with Trump. But staying quiet wasn’t an option.

Trump, he suggested, should shift focus from tweeting to governing.“The president should lift people up, should lift the nation up rather than always tearing people down,” he said.

Trump, he said, should consult the first lady, who has made online bullying a cause. “Why don’t you go and sit down with your wife for just a few minutes, Mr. President, and listen to the first lady when she’s talking about stopping online bullying. That is a really great message. Which way do we go? Your way, or her way. That’s really the question here.”

The Inconsistency of Atheism, Psychiatry’s Hubris, and the Pirate’s Life

On March 21, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method, says the winner of this year’s Templeton Prize, Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth.

Lifeway, the nation’s biggest Christian retail chain, to close all 170 stores.

Psychiatry’s incurable hubris: “The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.”

A pirate’s life: “The pirate’s life has long intrigued people of all ages. The tales of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Amaro Parso and William Kidd have earned their rightful place in the history books. Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814), Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821-22) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) captured the imagination of curious readers. Film versions, including Long John Silver, Captain Blood, the comedic Yellowbeard and Peter Pan’s great adversary, Captain Hook, continue to amaze us. It’s also impossible to forget the occasional young pirate who comes waltzing to your door at Halloween looking for sugary treasures. Which brings us to Eric Jay Dolin’s new book, Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. The historian and author acknowledges that ‘many people view pirates in a romantic light,’ but he emphatically states ‘there was absolutely nothing romantic about them.’”

How Polynesia came to be inhabited was, for many years, a mystery: “The centuries have thrown up a number of theories. Heyerdahl, for example, was convinced that the early settlers were Incas from South America (a belief built almost exclusively on the presence in Polynesia of the sweet potato, a vegetable indigenous to the Americas). Others theorised that Polynesia was settled by the ancient Greeks or seafaring Egyptians or even a lost tribe of wandering Jews…Where Sea People really breaks new ground is in Thompson’s ability to unpick not just the evolving (and sometimes revolving) research findings, but the personalities and prejudices of the researchers themselves. Time and again, she shows how insights were missed and opportunities lost because of the questioners’ inability to look outside their own cultural prism. Generously, Thompson puts this down less to intellectual arrogance or pig-headedness (true though both are) and more to the inherent difficulty of seeing the world from another’s point of view.”

Pelagius the progressive: “The year 2018 marked the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the excommunication of one of Christianity’s most famous heretics: the fifth-century monk Pelagius, who gave his name to “Pelagianism,” the set of beliefs that denies the doctrine of original sin and the need for grace in order to live a virtuous life and attain salvation. A Council of Carthage in then-Christian North Africa condemned Pelagius and Pelagianism in 418. The Council of Ephesus in 431 confirmed the condemnation. Anti-Pelagianism thrived during the Reformation and its aftermath. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England specifically rejected Pelagianism. Early Lutheran and Calvinist tracts, affirmed in a series of Protestant synods, featured denunciations of Pelagius, whose teachings were taken to be implied in the “works righteousness” (indulgences and other ­practices) of the Catholic Church in the Late Middle Ages. On the Counter-­Reformation side, in 1546, the Council of Trent denounced ­Pelagianism as well. That was then. Recent years have seen a campaign to turn the tables on traditional orthodoxy and make Pelagius into a saint, or at least a respectable Christian.”

Essay of the Day:

Perhaps you remember the poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas from last year? He was accused of being a fascist by the critic Dave Coates because he used the metaphor of a black sun (a supposed Nazi symbol) in one of his poems and because Rivas complained at some point that Marxism had ruined poetry. In The Dark Horse, Rob Mackenzie writes about how crazy the accusation was:

“Ideological criticism demands close attention, careful listening and well-researched contextual awareness. It ought not to wilfully twist a text until it says what a critic wants it to say. Critical reinterpretation entails drawing out, not adding in. I find one authority for this approach in Dave Coates himself: ‘there’s a world of difference between a critic imposing their needs and wishes on a text, and a critic listening to the text’s needs and wishes. Which seems obvious, but the former is still very popular, and basically useless.’ (Dave Coates, Twitter, 22 June 2018.)

“Nothing I read in Black Sun gave me an impression of ‘nakedly fascist ideology’ (Coates). No one else had detected it either until Coates published his article, when a small chorus of Twitterati wanted to get in on the act. Someone linked to a Wikipedia page that depicted a black sun as a fascist symbol. It was astonishing how easily and quickly people were convinced that Martinez now had no leg to stand on. They didn’t appear to notice that the jagged Nazi symbol, carved into the floor of Himmler’s castle in 1936, looked entirely different to the eclipsed sun that appears regularly in both of Martinez’s books. But, more seriously, they didn’t appear to know that the black sun image goes back far further than the twentieth century. Nerval used it as a symbol of depression and melancholia. A. B. Jackson, reviewing Terror in the Poetry Review, links the image to ‘the alchemical Sol Niger or black sun, a spiritual dark hour before the dawn’ (Volume 104, No 3, Autumn 2014). But it goes back further than that. It is found in Judeo-Christian apocalyptic writing, such as Revelation 6: 12— ‘The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair’. Just before the death of Jesus on the cross, we read, ‘there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst’ (Luke 23: 44–45). It’s also in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament e.g. Joel 2: 31—‘The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.’ Should Christians and Jews give up their own imagery just because fringe Nazi groups have appropriated the words ‘black sun’? Should we let them take whatever they want? That seems ludicrous to me. Images of apocalypse and judgement, and of the crucifixion, are ubiquitous in Martinez’s Black Sun collection. It could be that biblical illiteracy is a major reason for a collective inability to locate the most likely origin of an eclipse symbol used by a poet whose obsession with apocalyptic Christian imagery is apparent on page after page. I asked Martinez if he was aware of the Nazi appropriation of the black sun. He told me he had not been until after his first book had been published and he’d written several poems for his second. He decided to ignore it, presuming no one would ever think for a second that he was referencing it.

“Martinez’s attack on the metropolis, the black sun hanging in judgement over London, is partly an attack on what he perceives as a liberal orthodoxy in universities and other cultural institutions, and also an attack on privileged, well-educated poets who have never known real hardship or worked with people living on the edge, who write on political issues but couch everything in irony, sarcasm and an apparent determination for obfuscation to avoid saying anything serious. I am not really guessing. I know this because that’s pretty much what he said at the reading event in the Lighthouse.”

Read the rest. (HT: H. Dietzman)

Photo: Khazineh Canyon

Poem: David Kirby, “Negative Reviews of Famous Italian Cultural Sites”

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ProPublica Wins Overseas Press Club Award

On March 21, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by ProPublica

The Overseas Press Club announced ProPublica’s “Fuel to the Fire” as the winner of the Whitman Bassow Award, which recognizes the best reporting on international environmental issues.

“Fuel to the Fire,” by ProPublica senior reporter Abrahm Lustgarten and co-published with The New York Times Magazine, exposed how U.S. laws intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels unleashed an environmental disaster in Indonesia. The laws encouraged the use of vegetable oil in gasoline and other fuels, in an ambitious effort to reduce carbon emissions and curb global warming. Lustgarten’s reporting showed, however, that the policies were based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs of biofuel, and the result has been a calamity with global consequences.

Traveling from Washington to Indonesia, including the remote oil palm plantations of Borneo, Lustgarten traced the disastrous consequences of an ill-considered scheme. He showed that the forests of Indonesia have huge amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning them to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that in one year released more carbon than the annual emissions of the entire continent of Europe. The palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which are using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce more oil. Lustgarten also revealed the inner workings of the “shadow companies” that palm-oil producers use to distance themselves from slash-and-burn production even as they market their product as environmentally friendly.

In addition, ProPublica’s “Unprotected” won the citation (runner-up) for OPC’s Madeline Dane Ross Award, which recognizes the best international reporting showing a concern for the human condition. Co-published with Time magazine, the story by reporter Finlay Young, with photography by Kathleen Flynn, looked into an acclaimed charity called More Than Me. Led by American Katie Meyler, the Liberian school promised to rescue some of the world’s most vulnerable girls from life on the streets; but from the very beginning, children placed under its care were being raped by one of the nonprofit’s leaders. Following publication, More Than Me apologized to the victims, and for the first time, it conceded it had failed them. The board chair resigned, along with two other board members, while Meyler took a leave of absence pending two internal inquiries.

See a list of all the Overseas Press Club award winners here.