Mark J. Heinicke – Page 8 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

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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Musical Balm 1: Where Light Still Shines

Best escape from the furor: music to lighten the soul

The last two news weeks have been saddening, maddening, frightening, sobering, and frustrating for those of a politically liberal or civil rights bent, or those simply with an inclination toward common decency.

After hearing of the Anthony Kennedy resignation from the Supreme Court, and hearing the reliably hypocritical Mitch McConnell promise to get Kennedy’s replacement installed before the November elections, I found myself bristling—all the more so to hear Democrats speaking at odds with each other.

I really needed an escape. You too?

It then occurred to me how to calm the bristling mid-brain: music of a light, sunny, or soothing sort. But I wanted to add a twist to my customary Pandora stations, and found two in particular, the first thanks to NPR and the second thanks to my recollection of the most sunny of Beethoven’s sonatas. . . .

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Supreme Court Delivers Big for the Ruling Class

What do you get when you add 5 to 4 to 5 to 4 to 5 to 4?

(a) 27

(b) 5/9 + 5/9 + 5/9 = 15/9 = 1.6666666 . . .

The answer is all of the above, but (c) is the most important, if . . .

You take a look at three Supreme Court decisions made in May and June by the notorious 5 to 4 margin, it all adds up.

Foremost, in Janus v. AFSCME, decided in June, the Court eviscerated public sector unions by gifting nonmembers within a unionized workplace an exemption from paying “fair share” fees. Those are the fees charged to nonmembers who refuse to pay dues while still getting the workplace benefits obtained by the union. That is, a means by which to make free-riding by nonmembers a little less free. Now the Supreme Court says free-riding is A-OK in the disingenuous name of “right to work.”

That’s the short version. For the long version, see this excellent piece in Slate.com: Crushing effect of Janus vs AFSCME decision

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Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error

[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children. Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics. But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept. The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]

Fear here, there, and everywhere

Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled

The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April. He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.

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Silent Spring Nights: Amphibian Decline Hits Home

PREFACE: Since I began this post in April, there have been some signs indicating the situation with local amphibians is not quite as bad as I originally portrayed – see the Addendum at the bottom. (But it’s still bad.)

It can happen here – is happening

A typical reader of this blog will know that, worldwide, amphibians—principally frogs and toads—are being ravaged by lethal fungal diseases and diminished habitat. Some species have already gone extinct, and many are sure to follow. The foremost villain in these fungal epidemics is world trade in animals. When one thinks of trade in exotics, one usually thinks of highly visible animals—colorful birds (or uniquely gifted birds such as the African Gray parrot), big cats, rare dog breeds, snakes, lizards, and such. But amphibians, despite small size, are valued by collectors for their calls and colors. And any one of them, usually from the tropics, may carry a disease that will lay waste to the toads and frogs in your neighborhood, should it escape. Even in an absence of local release, local populations are vulnerable to the plague creeping across all populations at a rate comparable to the spread of Dutch Elm Disease 50 years ago.

Something like that may have happened in or near our neighborhood in semi-rural Virginia. For whatever reason, this year our spring nights have gone silent in the absence of calls by amphibians—primarily the Gray Treefrog and the Cope’s Gray Treefrog, whose calls you may be familiar with. You can listen to their overlapping calls in the last 15 seconds of this sweet little clip:

Of course, on YouTube you can listen to a host of frog and toad calls as varied as their physical sizes and colors. Probably more varied—the diversity is astonishing!

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