CapitalistImperialistPig

The International Juggler's Association had it's 69th Festival in El Paso Texas this year, just down the road from here. My wife and I drove down I 10 to spectate at some of the goings on. I used to juggle a little, never with much proficiency - I could do some elementary tricks with three balls or three clubs, but it's been quite a few years. I couldn't help picking up and hefting a few snazzy clubs, a torch or two, and even a battle-axe and a chain saw. Chain saws are heavy. Friday night featured a fire show, with people juggling, spinning, etc all sorts of flaming objects, and Saturday night culminated in big professional show. If one does juggling in Las Vegas, or a circus, most of the audience has no clue what's going on and no appreciation of the technical difficulty or artistry needed to carry out the performance, but at the IJA one is performing for the elect, and they can really appreciate the cool stuff. So I picked up three bean bags this morning ...

From ABC News One of the most powerful lines in one of the DNC’s most emotional speeches came when Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, told Donald Trump, “You have sacrificed nothing!” Now, in his first response to Khan’s address, during an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos set to air Sunday morning, Trump responded to that line by saying,“I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.” Apparently Trump has some difficulty coming up with any actual sacrifices he had made. Pressed by Stephanopoulos to name the sacrifices he’d made for his country, Trump said: “I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. Some have suggested that putting your name on Casinos is not quite as big a sacrifice as losing one's son in battle. In case the question comes up again, I have made up my own list of some ...

I thought Hillary gave a good speech. Then she stopped, and I waited for the balloons to fall. They did not. Next she gave another speech, not so good as the first. Then she read her laundry list. She interspersed a few slaps at Trump. Finally, I wondered if she was ever going to stop. Whatever happened to brevity as the soul of wit?

Josh Marshall: For me you start with a series of highly disturbing and dangerous comments by Trump about Russia and NATO. As I noted a couple weeks ago, our relative peaceful and prosperous world is far from the natural or only possible order of things. Things can get bleak very quickly, especially when you're stupid. Trump's comments are far more than highly questionable foreign policy ideas. He seems unable to understand high level geopolitics as anything more than a protection racket with him running for American mob boss. Even if Trump is no more than ignorant, impulsive and stupid, these are highly disturbing intimations of a Trump presidency that should have everyone across the political spectrum taking note and re-evaluating what sort of situation we're dealing with. But that's not all there is. On top of that you have very high level advisors to Trump who have been deeply immersed in the Putin world of dirty politics and energy concessions that characterizes P...

Even before the leaked DNC emails were traced to hacks by Russian intelligence, Paul Krugman and others were assembling the evidence that Trump was Putin's candidate. Beyond the extravagant mutual admiration society, there are the money ties. Trump's campaign manager, for example, Paul Manafort, was previously in the employ of Victor Yanukovich, Putin's deposed man in Ukraine. another excerpt or two. Then came Mr. Trump’s interview with The New York Times, in which, among other things, he declared that even if Russia attacked members of NATO he would come to their aid only if those allies — which we are bound by treaty to defend — have “fulfilled their obligations to us.” ...there are reasons to wonder about Mr. Trump’s own financial interests. Remember, we know nothing about the true state of his business empire, and he has refused to release his taxes, which might tell us more. We do know that he has substantial if murky involvement with wealthy Russians and Russian...

Art students are often found in museums, copying the work of the masters. In this way, I expect, they learn a lot about technique. If they are fairly good, the work they produce will look a lot like the masterpiece from which it is copied. It won't be a masterpiece though, even if it is a very faithful copy, because the students are not themselves masters, but ultimately because it is only a copy. The new Ghostbusters copies the old, but it's not even a really good copy. The student lacks technique. The delicate brushstrokes of the original are here reduced to clumsy splotches and blotches. They say that a great masterwork reveals more and more of itself with closer study, and the original Ghostbusters had a little bit of that as various subplots were woven together. The new GB is as subtle as a pie in the face, and just about as funny. In the original, the principal protagonist, Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) was a cynical fraud and a scoundrel, using his psychic exp...

The idea behind drone war was to make war somewhat less inhumane. Instead of responding to acts of war with mass murder, just find and murder the perpetrators. A decade or so of assassinations of "ringleaders" and "masterminds" doesn't seem to have worked though. I suspect that the failure can be ascribed to our fundamental tribal nature. For most of human history, our security against murder by members of other families or tribes depended on our the members of our tribe, clan, or family being ready to extract revenge. That revenge impulse may well be maximally excited by anonymous assassination from the sky. There is every indication that routine drone assassinations don't discourage future jihadists but recruit them. The alternative may be a return to the far more brutal methods of the past. If we had had drones during the American Civil War, Lee's army would probably still be in Vicksburg. That war ended only with Sherman's brutal march t...