Month: July 2018

Three Guesses as to why President Trump Softened on Iran

When coincidences point to causation

(Actually, I lied about three guesses. It’s only one guess—mine—but I put its likelihood as better than 75%. Bear with me.)

On Sunday President Trump was, via Twitter, threatening IN ALL CAPS to rain down death and destruction on Iran because of . . . Iranian government rhetoric.  The rhetoric was Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warning that war with his country would be “the mother of all wars.” (Rouhani has to talk tough because the clergy who really rule the country require it. I’m not sure they were entirely happy with the echo of Saddam Hussein saying that war between the U.S. and his country would be “the mother of all battles”—we all know how that turned out—but I wonder if Rouhani was chuckling inside.) Rouhani went on to fulminate, “Don’t play with fire, or you will regret [it]. Iranian people are master and they will never bow to anyone.”

WORDS.  Words which are, in belligerence of tone, pretty much standard fare in Iranian bluster since the clergy toppled the U.S.-friendly Shah of Iran in 1979. And for those words, Rouhani got back the now notorious all-caps tweet from Trump: ‘NEVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER [blah blah blah to the effect that we’d squash Iran like a bug—mirroring the kind of rhetoric Rouhani used, only in the case of Trump, unlike Rouhani, it sounded as if the President was off on one of his temper tantrums, personally aggrieved by someone seeming to stand up to him].

On Tuesday, we hear a suddenly agreeable Trump saying his administration stands ready to come to the negotiating table. With Iran, that is. Followed by “shraararrasshreeshshshseesh” which was the sound of John Bolton tearing his hair out.

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Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife

U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife

Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.

A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail.  Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall

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Trump Strong-Arms Ecuador – then Defers to Guess Who?

It’s not just asylum seekers’ children suffering from Trump policy; it’s kids in other hemispheres

Given everything we hear and see from the Trump administration, it’s evident that children’s well-being is low on their list of priorities.

Still, two headline-grabbing episodes have given extra dimensions to  Trump anti-child bias.  

The first, the separation of children from parents seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border, made still more vile by failing to track which children belonged to which parents, vileness compounded yet again by the prospect of toddlers being ordered to appear in court alone for their own deportation proceedings.

Ugly— yet, there is still the flimsy rationale of “border security” used to justify such inhumane treatment.  The border security narrative goes, who knows what Hispanic children, allowed to stay  in the U.S., will go on to join an MS-13 gang and hack to death hapless white U.S. citizens on the street?  Better to send them back to an early death in El Salvador, ensuring we need never fear them again.  So it might be cruel, but at least it is not arbitrary.

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Gambling with Other People’s Money: Trump Trade Wars

How easy to win are trade wars?

Vainglorious boaster President Trump, having declared trade war against much of the developed world,  assured us that trade wars are easy to win.

??  Maybe, and maybe not. I’m no economist, but I have noticed that the majority of mainstream economists and many business leaders have opined that trade wars are bad for everyone.  They are particularly bad when they slow down the global economy as a whole, in an age where the global economy is increasingly THE economy that really matters in the long run.

On the other hand, seasoned economist Irwin Stelzer proposed that Trump’s trade war “really might be easy to win.” Stelzer on trade war

The basis of Stelzer’s conjecture is that the U.S. economy dwarfs that of any one of its economic adversaries (euphemistically called “trading partners”), excepting China, and they need the U.S. market more than the U.S. needs theirs. Secondly, if foreign tariffs really were as relatively disadvantageous to us as Trump claims (and Stelzer seems to agree), greater parity could put those foreigners on the ropes.  As Stelzer points out, a German auto industry’s proposal to eliminate tariffs is a sign that some foreign businesses are seeing trouble ahead with the status quo.  The status quo is that EU tariffs on U.S. automobiles have been five times that of the America’s on theirs.

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Musical Balm 2: Jazzy Flavors from Bossenbroek

Here’s another post where some music may soothe a fractious state of mind.

These two Elijah Bossenbroek pieces are different enough in mood and style from his more typical”modern classical” compositions that they may surprise you (unless you have been investigating his work following my earlier post, Pianistic Thunder [etc].*)

Both are short (3:18 and 4:28). Enjoy!

“Spinning Nowhere” has a distinctly jazzy feel; definitely not “modern classical.”

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