Saved you a click

Here's the Al Arabiya story from last month which contains significant details that seem to be confirmed by Saturday's New York Times revelation of a carefully timed hit on senior Al Qaeda leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah ("Abu Muhammad al-Masri") in Tehran in August. It's a reminder of the deep Egyptian roots of old-guard Al Qaeda. 

How the Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco happened

1. The Hatch Act is suddenly being enforced: White House staff couldn't work on the campaign post-election legal strategy.

2. The Trump campaign is flat broke and most campaign staff and contractors are wondering if they'll get paid -- no one there available to help (example). So ..

3. Rudy was on his own. He asked an intern to find a venue. Rudy hasn't seen Philadelphia other than through a limousine window in 25 years, so he remembered that there was a Four Seasons on the Parkway at 18th Street, with a parking area and overhang facing the Parkway. And he wasn't going to spend the money on a hotel function room. So he decided to gamble on showing up at the hotel and having the news conference either right outside, or if asked to move, he would go to Logan Square across the street, either of which would convey the needed degree of "classiness."

4. So he told the intern, give everyone the address for the news conference as the Four Seasons Philadelphia, the one in the city near I-95. Make sure it's the address rather than the name of the hotel, since we haven't arranged anything directly with the hotel.

5. The intern had never been to Philadelphia, Googled the description, and found what looked like a Four Seasons fitting the description. Especially as, since the Four Seasons is no longer in the original location, the intern would have been stumped by how Rudy described it (it's now called The Logan Hotel). Rudy wouldn't know it, but the Four Seasons has moved to the new Comcast tower (the Technology Center) a few blocks away. A short distance, but no longer fitting the description on the Parkway, across from Logan Square.

6. At some point, they realized the mistake, but before they could reverse course, Trump had mistakenly tweeted the hotel as the venue, and they knew it would be be obvious they were trying to get access to a hotel grounds without paying. So they toughed it out.

UPDATE: Whatever about the facts of what happened, you won't read a better cultural analysis of the event than in the Financial Times by Joy Lo Dico. 

Philadelphia

 How it started

pic.twitter.com/lFzaoFcXZD

— Matthew A. Cherry (@MatthewACherry) May 31, 2020

How it's going

We found him: #Philly Elmo. The drumline has arrived to the #Pennsylvannia Convention Center #Jawn #Election2020 #BattlegroundState @6abc pic.twitter.com/HA6cO7aMqP

— George Solis (@GeorgeSolis) November 6, 2020

Donald Trump at the Inauguration of Joe Biden

Election 2020

Everyone probably has their own version of how an unexpected election outcome merely confirms their existing opinions. So with that pinch of salt, our existing opinion: Pundits and pollsters have failed to grapple with the role of polarization in elections, and especially the role of elections in driving polarization. 

Would Americans have been as polarized by Coronavirus if it was not an election year? 

The fact that pollsters have now major misses two USA presidential elections in a row is a warning sign that should be familiar to social scientists -- you think you are undertaking a statistically scientific estimate of some fixed underlying parameter, but the very circumstance that makes you want to estimate that number is also causing that number to be fluid! 

Another way to say this. Pollsters and polling analysts (one in particular) tend to think about "news" as something that causes a measurable shift in opinion. But there is no plausible "news" that explains what is emerging in the election outcome. It is more that the election result is itself news about the level of polarization.

To be slightly more technical, polarization is endogenous. It can't be measured by polling, because the polling is correlated with a cause of polarization.  

Election 2020

It looks like all those Trump Country articles and books should have been reported not from diners, but from Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. 

Quote of the Day

Spurs boss Jose Mourinho on Sky Sports (after win over Brighton) via BBC sport: 

First of all it's three points. When teams with more power and history, one of the top six let's say, has a difficult match against the others it is always analysed as the top team not playing well. It is time to give credit to these guys. Not just to Brighton, the majority of the teams. They are getting better, they are very well coached, the difference in quality of players between the teams is not huge. The game is very difficult for us, we beat a good team and it was very difficult.

If he's correct -- and we think he is -- then much of what dominates analysis of the Premier League is a total waste of time. The tendency to view the "Top 6" versus any other team  in terms of "dropped points," "slip-up," calls for the head of the manager, etc is a relic. The teams are close in quality. The edge is a bit of skill and a bit of luck, not some business as usual from the Alex Ferguson days. 

Song of the Day

 

It's allegedly a Donald Trump favourite, specifically on account of the video.

The distortion of politcs

This morning on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper, interviewee is White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows --

MEADOWS: ... your Web site is talking about, well, now we think the spread is coming from small social groups and family groups. First, it was large groups. Now it's small groups. Now... (CROSSTALK) TAPPER: It's coming from all sorts of places. It's coming from all sorts of places, because the pandemic is out of control. 

MEADOWS: That's exactly the point. So, here's what we have to do. We're not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas... (CROSSTALK) 

 TAPPER: Why aren't we going to get control of the pandemic? 

 MEADOWS: Because it is a contagious virus. Just like the flu, it's contagious.

With full credit to Jake Tapper for getting and pursuing the key quote "We're not going to control the pandemic" -- there's nothing about the federal government Coronavirus strategy in that quote that we did not already know. Trump has said as much on multiple occasions, and it could discerned from actions, or the lack thereof. 

But, if the same statement had come from Meadows in a "leak," "tape," or similar format that would have lent itself to the screaming headline "REVEALED" treatment, it would be massive "news." While a factual statement to this effect is simply another hour in the news cycle. 

The divergence of meaning of plain English statements depending on whether or not the statements are seen as political is bizarre, and has itself been part of syndrome that made Coronavirus worse than it had to be. 

They never learn

Steve Bannon has managed to get himself back into the US politics legacy and social media slipstream, while on bail for fraud charges, through an interview that he gave to that widely watched American news outfit ... Sky News Australia. In other words, a platform that has no distribution in the USA, and an interview that took place during the sleeping hours of most of the USA. But of course, it's that Bannon guy who's doing what looks a TV interview somewhere with an outfit that has "news" in its name, and the polarization-industrial complex has been stuck for material this weekend -- so it's News!

Quote of the Day

Janan Ganesh in the Saturday Financial Times, with an innovative redeployment of the famous Yeats poem --

The falcon can hear the falconer, it seems.

His underlying argument: the media exaggerate the degree of dissent about more restrictive Covid-19 public health measures. 

Creative destruction

As if millions of hipsters suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced:

Wall Street Journal on the restaurant industry restructuring -- Yet many other chains say now is a time to get more aggressive. Olive Garden’s parent, Darden Restaurants Inc., is looking into expanding in urban areas including Manhattan where rents were previously too expensive to justify growth.

In touch with the people

Palestine News Agency (WAFA) --

President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, today, Saturday, congratulated the Chairman of the Labor Party, Chairman of the State Affairs Committee of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Marshal Kim Jong Un, on the anniversary of the founding of the Korean Labor Party. In his telegram, [Abbas] valued the long-standing historical supportive role that the Korean Labor Party plays for the peoples who struggle for freedom and independence, and on top of that is its support for our people's legitimate struggle for freedom, independence and sovereignty over our Palestinian land, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The president expressed his confidence in President Jong Un's supportive stances towards the achievement of this noble goal, wishing the existing historical friendship between the two countries and two peoples and his party further development and advancement.

Quote of the Day

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times on Eddie Van Halen:

The guitarist announced himself to the world on an instrumental track called "Eruption", an aptly titled masterclass in baroque fretwork pitched somewhere between Bach and Jimi Hendrix.  

Eddie Van Halen

 

There's of lot of brilliant Van Halen but this song -- Chicago Blues fused with Van Halen's blistering raucous California hard rock -- is right up there among the best.

The White House is Heathers

 Reuters

Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who oversees the National Security Council, was among the earliest and most consistent mask wearers in the White House. He was previously mocked behind his back by some staffers for wearing a mask at work, one person familiar with the matter said.

New photo of White House Amy Coney Barrett reception

 

Actually it's the 1751 print Gin Lane by William Hogarth. But the print and its context is a good representation of the incredulity of the behaviour at the White House this day last week, and indeed for the months since the pandemic started. 

Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:NotFromUtrecht using CommonsHelper.

Link

Incoming

 

A military Special Air Mission flight landed in South Bend this morning from Joint Base Andrews.https://t.co/p9SIf6L84H

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) September 26, 2020

This was the warning sign. This day last week, the White House sent a special flight to South Bend to pick up the Barrett family and take them to the White House for a day of events related to the Supreme Court nomination. The ceremony and the optics were being prioritized -- during a pandemic. Touchdown Jesus became Touchdown Coronavirus. 

Weapon of Wealth Destruction

Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump have a key area in common. Saddam didn't want to cooperate with the UN weapons inspectors, because he feared a public finding that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction: his ability to intimidate enemies would be gone. Donald Trump didn't want to cooperate with the wealth inspectors -- the Internal Revenue Service -- because he feared a public finding that he didn't have any wealth (as the New York Times tax returns revelations show). His ability to impress signifier-susceptible voters would be gone (James Poniewozik wrote a book about this). 

It's too late for a fence

Back in March and April, when there was a lot of bewilderment about the coronavirus, Tomás Pueyo introduced the vivid terminology of The Hammer and the Dance for the sequence that would be needed to get the pandemic under control. Even if the prescription was never exactly followed, it's a useful way to describe a cluster of severe measures early on, and then a more protracted phase of adjustments after that. Pueyo has now written a New York Times sequel calling for a "fence" -- based on the apparent movement of the virus from country to country and around cities and counties within a country. So if we restrict these kinds of movements, we restrict the virus. 

Maybe. But consider the following. We're now almost 10 months into the pandemic. The virus is everywhere. When we see new infection surges, these aren't infection surges from travel. They're local surges from social activity, aggravated by non-compliance with social distancing. The "fence" would have to be within a city to be effective, and there have to be at least a minimal consensus about what behaviour needs to be restricted on the infected side of the fence, and how this would be enforced (Madrid clearly lacks both at the moment).  

The ultra environmentalist mantra -- "we are the virus" -- is true. There is no possible fence, except the one that magically moves around with us, the zone corresponding to social distancing. But social distancing became uncool in June. And there seems to be little willingness to adopt it again, across all age groups. It's going to be a long winter. 

It's for Thomas Friedman's next column

 
A promotion for Saudi Arabia National Day in Dubai. 

Via UAE news agency. 

Virtue of Parliament

There are many odd aspects to the "Kent Access Permit" revelation in the House of Commons today, although whether it's actually surprising depends on how much attention you were paying to "experts" about Brexit. But among the odd things: Michael Gove didn't even mention the permit in his opening statement. It was only revealed as part as a response to a follow-up question from Damian Green:

Damian Green (Ashford) (Con) I can assure my right hon. Friend that the so-called Saxon wall on the Ashford site is in fact a myth: it is not Saxon and it is not holding up work. The prospect of 7,000 trucks queuing to cross the channel will send a chill through my constituents, because we know the disastrous effect that has on all the roads in Kent. I very much support my right hon. Friend in his work to prepare the road haulage industry for the end of the transition period, but may I ask about the Government’s own preparations and specifically the smart freight system that he mentioned, which is essential for the smooth running of traffic across the channel? Can he give a guarantee that that system will be fully up and running and operational from January?

Michael Gove My right hon. Friend makes a number of very important points, and I am grateful to him for clearing up the point about archaeology, which I failed to address in my response to the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), but his expertise in this area is greater. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we want to avoid the level of congestion that this reasonable worst-case scenario sets out, and he is also absolutely right that that requires people to work together. It requires not just the haulage industry, but in particular those goods exporters who commit goods to haulage to be ready in time. Part of that is the smart freight system, which has been developed and is being shared with business. We want to make sure that people use a relatively simple process to get what will become known as a Kent access permit, which means that they can then proceed smoothly through Kent because they have the material required. If they do not have the material required, through policing, ANPR cameras and other means, we will do our very best to ensure that his constituents are not inconvenienced.

Could not happen today

From Studies in World Christianity / Volume 25, Issue 3 / The Origins of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the United States: Early Developments in Indiana and Michigan and the Reactions of the Ecclesiastical Authorities by Valentina Ciciliot --

In the spring of 1973, Fr Michel Dubois, a priest from Belgium, was introduced to The Word of God charismatic community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as someone who had come from Europe to experience the Catholic charismatic renewal in person. He stayed with community members in their homes, attended prayer meetings, met with a variety of small groups and participated in seminars. Only at the end of his approximately five-day visit did he reveal to everyone his true identity: Cardinal Léon Joseph Suenens, archbishop of Malines–Brussels and primate of Belgium, and one of the four moderators of Vatican II. Few in the community knew who he was, and his plan for anonymity worked well enough that he was able to have a personal encounter with this new movement in the US, known at that time as Catholic Pentecostalism (later it was widely known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, hereafter CCR).

Why, you ask, is the proprietor of this blog looking up this kind of stuff? Because while Republicans seem to be trying to bait Democrats into making Amy Coney Barrett's Catholicism an issue, it's the charismatic part that's going to be interesting if that ends up as a line of questioning. 

Written long before Coronavirus, fits very well with Coronavirus

 

Worried about the status of his ski-season European gabfest invitations

 

On the occasion of the New Year, I wish Iranian—and indeed all—Jews happiness, and most of all, good health.

The children of Adam, Abraham and Moses are siblings who deserve to live in a real democratic peace—not business deal. Our proposal has been #Referendum.

L'Shana Tova! pic.twitter.com/aHA8FCKiFs

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) September 17, 2020

Coronavirus observation

We are where the WHO feared back in February that we would be if widespread mask-wearing became a major plank of pandemic strategy: masks have a become a substitute, not a complement, for other pandemic precautions formerly known as social distancing. Public health measures have targeted the more obvious non-distancing arenas (e.g. restaurants) but all sorts of social consumption and social leisure activities have popped up in their place -- not to mention the Veblen intersection of those two activities: conspicuous consumption. 

"But we're wearing masks!"

Hope you're all geared up for a winter of home-schooling.

Al Qaeda agrees that 9/11 was about Israel

Mike Pence at the White House Israel / Bahrain recognition announcement: 

THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Mr. President, I can think of no more fitting tribute to the heroes that were forged on this day 19 years ago, and all the heroes that were forged on battlefields ever since, than to see this peace agreement announced today. 

Outside avocado toast land

Excellent Wall Street Journal article on successful corporate adaptations to Coronavirus concludes:

Christy Johnson, who left her job as a consultant at McKinsey when her daughter was born, said many talented professionals are overlooked because they can't work 60 to 100 hours a week out of offices in New York or San Francisco. She started Artemis Connection, which provides business strategy advice to midsize companies, to tap this underutilized pool. All 40 of her employees work from home, from California to Wisconsin to Turkey. 

"If you go to nonurban areas, there's amazing talent hanging out," she said.

 

Song of the day

  

The world may be going to hell, but we still have 1970s rock at which to marvel. 

The Luck of the Irish

Raptors / Celtics background from the land of the Maple Leaf. 

Boston Globe version.