v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Enough!

From The Atlantic again! It's alarming that no one is calling this out in a forceful way:

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.

That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.

And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country.

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.

Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable.

Trump is Responsible

 

From Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

If you cannot get an abortion, if you fear leaving your state to get an abortion, if you are afraid to text your loved ones or type abortion into a search bar, if you are scared to ask a friend or loved one to help you get an abortion, if you know someone coerced into remaining in an abusive relationship because they fear prosecution, if you cannot find an obstetrician in your state, if you have a relative who was left at the edge of death by doctors afraid to risk prosecution by violating an abortion ban—you have Donald Trump to thank.

And yet, if you skim the headlines, you might come away with the impression that Trump is a moderate on abortion. In an interview Sunday, Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he thought a Republican-primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had made a “terrible mistake” by signing a law that bans abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant. His rambling remarks also suggested support for a federal ban on abortion: “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months. You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy … I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

A federal ban, of course, would make the current encroachments of the abortion surveillance state even worse, by committing the resources of the federal government to controlling women’s reproductive choices. Federalism currently limits the power of Republican-run states to impose themselves on people’s private lives. The federal government has fewer such limitations.

Trump’s remarks provoked headlines that suggested—with caveats and debunkings coming only lower down—that he was somehow moderating on the issue of abortion. Some articles left out the crucial fact that DeSantis’s six-week ban was only possible because of Trump himself. The justices he chose reversed decades of legal precedents that had established standards—few restrictions before the third trimester, few exceptions after—that were roughly consistent with public opinion, more so than those that followed Roe’s demise.

During the 2022 midterms, Trump urged Republicans to “talk differently” about abortion. Not govern differently, but talk differently. That is all he is doing here: If Trump now wants to give the impression that he opposes abortion bans, it is because he senses that in a world where such bans are no longer hypothetical but a threat to fundamental civil liberties, this is a way to earn positive headlines. But he has an actual record to be judged on. This is not 2016, when a Trump administration was an abstraction and no one had any idea what he would do in office.

Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe. He appointed the right-wing apparatchiks to the federal bench who are rewriting the law out of whole cloth to conform to right-wing preferences. He made it possible for red-state governors like DeSantis to ban abortion and then use that as an excuse to thrust the power of the state into the private lives of Americans and control what they say and do, and even where they move. This is Donald Trump’s legacy.

Weird Times!

Copyright-Vallejo Nocturno 2023

From The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes:

Americans have become accustomed to so much in public life that they would have once found shocking. But many of these events are not only shameful; they are a warning, a kind of static energy filling the air just before a lightning strike. America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it.

For example, a single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage. (Welcome news, no doubt, in Beijing.) Few people outside of America’s senior military leadership seem particularly concerned.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fringe figures who in better times might never have been elected, and in a sensible House would have been relegated to the backbenches so far away from the rostrum that their seats would be in a different time zone. (And let us not even speak of Lauren Boebert.)

Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump, and so he is resorting to a deeply cynical ploy that could cost lives.

And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy.

Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a request for a gag order on Trump to stop him from making more public attacks on prosecutors, witnesses, and potential jurors. As they say on social media, let that sink in:

A federal prosecutor has asked a judge to stop the former president of the United States from threatening lawyers and witnesses in his case, and intimidating potential jurors.

On Today's House of Reps

 

Here is what a reader posted on NYT editorial discussing the state of the Republican led House of Reps:

No budget, no hearings, no regular order, no international leadership, no fiscal responsibility, no respect for law enforcement, no respect for military leadership, no military promotions, no stability for military families, no climate change action, no clean energy jobs, no clean air or water, no infrastructure jobs, no immigration reform, no trade legislation, no help for farmers, no help for criminal justice, no affordable health insurance, no affordable higher education, no help with childcare, no respect for women's personal decisions, no increase to the federal minimum wage, no help for Medicare or Social Security but brave demands to extend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Amazing.

Lock Him Up

From The Atlantic:

For a free society wishing to preserve its governmental system, the prosecutions of Donald Trump for trying to overturn our democracy and willfully mishandling national secrets is not optional. They are the essential step that must be taken if America’s rule of law is going to survive, and be worthy of the trust that is essential to that survival. More hopefully, they offer the nation its single best chance of escaping from the appalling thrall of Trump’s lies and insults since he came down that escalator eight years ago.

One cannot imagine a more serious set of offenses by a sitting president against the nation than working deliberately to overturn the result of a democratic election—one that he clearly knew from his closest advisers he had lost—or illegally squirreling away and refusing to return some of the country’s most sensitive secrets. The seriousness is greatly magnified in the first instance by the extent and persistence of the conduct at issue, spanning many months and transcending multiple states and means used to change the electoral outcome. In the documents case, again, the amount of classified material and the persistence of evasive efforts to avoid returning the materials is breathtaking.

The extent and quality of the evidence of wrongdoing in both cases, including audio and video tapes, is also extraordinary, and reveals in countless ways that Trump was the primary driving force behind virtually all of the key misdeeds in both cases. In any situation where so much evidence exists, there will be complexities associated with prosecuting. And yes, a jury could nevertheless acquit or hang. But that risk is present in every criminal case, and is no reason to decline to prosecute.

To do so in these cases—featuring truly egregious wrongs personally committed by someone in a position of the highest trust—would be a failure of our vaunted system of equal justice at the most fundamental level. The planners and perpetrators of the January 6 events that Trump inspired and refused to stop are now receiving sentences of roughly 20 years; giving a pass to the person who unquestionably caused it all by violating his most sacred obligations to the nation would be unthinkable.But it is not just an abstract commitment to justice—and to the idea that no person should be above the law—that urgently necessitates prosecution here. It is also the need to deter the worst forms of conduct that Trump has persisted in as we look forward to future elections, including those happening next fall. Although he failed to achieve his goal by illegal means in the election of 2020, he and many of his Republican allies are working hard not only to delegitimize the last election, but to see that the next election will go his way regardless of the votes actually cast. If very strong evidence of such wrongdoing does not merit criminal enforcement, what is to deter Trump or anyone from trying to steal elections in the future?

Richard Davis, Bass Extraordinaire Gone at 93

Here is an excellent write-up about Richard Davis;

Richard Davis, the versatile bass player with over 3,000 recording credits, has died at the age of 93. Davis’ daughter Persia Davis confirmed her father’s death Thursday on a memorial page.

“We appreciate all the love and support the community has shown him over the years,” Persia shared in a statement.

Perhaps no artist besides Davis could claim to have worked with musical giants as different as Igor Stravinsky, Eric Dolphy, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen. A prolific and supremely versatile bass polymath, Davis spent his seven-decade career refusing to abide by musical barriers, playing everything from jazz (both the bebop and avant-garde varieties) to blues, pop, rock, folk, and classical music. He cited one artist in particular for this inspiration: Duke Ellington. Ellington “didn’t classify any genres,” Davis told Bob Jacobson in 2014. “To him, there were only two kinds of music: It’s either good or bad. I’m with Duke Ellington on that.”

Though popular audiences might not know Davis by name, they certainly know many of the records on which he played, particularly platinum-selling pop-rock masterpieces by Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run), Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin’ Simon), Van Morrison (Astral Weeks) and Janis Ian (Between The Lines). But though Davis’ pop and rock excursions certainly helped him financially and took his name into the wider public domain, his heart belonged to jazz, and he played with some of the genre’s biggest names, from trumpet pioneers Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and avant-garde magus Eric Dolphy.

Famed for his deep, rich tone and musical dexterity (he could pluck, strum, and bow the bass equally well), Davis was a master technician who could alternate between acoustic and electric bass and was in high demand as a sideman. He also found time to record over 20 albums under his own name and enjoyed notable LP collaborations with ex-Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, vibraphonist Walt Dickerson, and saxophonist Archie Shepp. The classical music world, too, benefited from Davis’ expertise; he worked with the Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky (who once purportedly described Davis’ virtuosity as “god-like”) and also played under the baton of several eminent conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Leopold Stokowski.

But Davis would probably contend that his greatest contribution to music was his role as a teacher, which began in 1977 when he took up the post of a music professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he stayed for 39 years. He firmly believed in passing on his knowledge and wisdom. “I love teaching,” he said in 1979. “I believe you should share what you have.”

Davis was a Chicagoan by birth, born on April 15, 1930. Music hooked him early thanks to his mother’s collection of 78-rpm jazz records, which he played incessantly. His first taste of active music-making was singing in a family vocal trio, coached by a cousin. But it wasn’t until he was 15 that Davis felt the urge to take up an instrument. Bashful as a child, Davis wasn’t drawn to a front-line instrument like the saxophone or trumpet but while attending DuSable High School, where his classmates included future saxophone star Clifford Jordan and blues man Bo Diddley (then known as Ellas McDaniel). He was fascinated by the upright bass. “The bass was always in the background, and I was a shy kid,” he told Steve Krakow in 2022. “So I thought maybe I’d like to be in the background.”

More

Some Experiments

Recently I've been reading up on intentional camera movement process to make different looking photographs. It is a rechnique that I've used for over 50 years but it was good to see how photographers are looking and analyzing the technique. As an example here is one of the more enjoyable YouTube photography sites around:

 

Korvolac is mostly B&W but the technique can be especially useful with color. I also used several other sites:

 

Here are some of the photos that have come out of this re-entry into this technique:

Copyrighted-Vallejo Nocturno 2023