“The first method for
estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around
him.” Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”
In the
first season of “The Tudors,” a Showtime
series that ran between 2007 and 2010, a young King Henry VIII becomes intimate
with several of Queen Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, including (with
their father’s encouragement) Mary and Anne Boleyn, who ultimately charms him
into divorcing Catherine and thereby breaking with the Roman Catholic Church. There are frequent references to such
contemporary events as Martin Luther’s so-called Protestant heresies, Spanish
conquests in the New World, and mention of the Niccolò Machiavelli quote from
“The Prince” (1532), that “It is better
to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” Sam Neil is excellent as the worldly,
ambitious Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, brought down by unworthy schemers led by Anne
Boleyn’s father and uncle.
Jacksons in 2015
“King
of Pop” Michael Jackson named his first son Michael, Jr., but nicknamed his
Prince. Then came daughter Paris-Michael
and finally Prince Michael, nicknamed Blanket, who was 7 when his dad died
almost 8 years ago and now called Bigi by family and friends. It remains to be seen whether he inherited
any of his dad’s talents.
In his history of
Rock and Roll, Ed Ward’s chapter covering the year 1963 mentions how folk
singer Bob Dylan’s appearance on Ed Sullivan got cancelled when he announced he’d
sing “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” and Pete Seeger was forbidden to appear
on “Hootenanny” after he refused to sign a loyalty oath. Surf music and girl groups dominated the
charts, but Trini Lopez’s cover of “If I Had a Hammer” was a hit, as was Peter,
Paul, and Mary’s recording of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Johnny Cash put out “Ring of Fire” while
Stevie Wonder launched his career with “Fingertips.”
Chet Baker
In
“Born to Be Blue” (2015) Ethan Hawke, superb as always, plays jazz trumpeter
Chet Baker, whose heroin habit caused him to get beaten so badly in 1966 that
he lost his teeth and seemingly his career until he made a successful comeback
several years later. In the climactic
scene, Jane (Carmen Ejogo), who had nursed him back to health and weaned him
from heroin, realizes that Chet had shot up prior to the crucial performance
and leaves him. Chet Baker died at age 59 after falling from a hotel window in
Amsterdam while high on cocaine and heroin.
East
Chicago Central lost a double-overtime Regional contest on questionable calls,
par for the course in basketball tournament history. The refs called almost twice as many fouls on
East Chicago, including 3 on star player Jermaine Couisnard in the first 5
minutes, forcing him to spend much of the contest on the bench. With seconds remaining, the referees ignored
a double dribble by a Warsaw player and then claimed Kyle Mangas got fouled
with 2.1 seconds left after he caught a length-of-the-court pass and, according
to Coach Pete Trgovich, flopped. Trgovich
told Times reporter Steve Hanlon, “It’s hard to beat eight guys.” Deontay Bonaparte, whistled for the
infraction, said: “I never touched
him. They gave them the game. We couldn’t do anything the whole game. Those refs crushed our heart.” Mangas, who scored 49 points, shot a
total of 23 free throws while the entire Cardinal team only attempted 9.
Trgovich questioned why there were no African-American referees assigned to the
game, then resigned as E.C. coach when the IHSAA threatened repercussions
against him.
At
bridge, hosted by Tom Eaton, Toni came in first thanks in part to making a
small slam as Dick Hagelberg’s partner and two four-Heart contracts as my
partner for a 700 rubber. A gourmet
cook, Eaton served a delicious cake with walnuts and apricot filling for
dessert. Brian Barnes has been reading
Michel J. Klarman’s “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States
Constitution” (2016), which claims that the Founding Fathers pulled off a
conservative counterrevolution in order to curb the excesses of democracy and block
state legislatures from passing laws for debt and tax relief. During the
Philadelphia Convention Edmund Randolph of Virginia argued that if events continued on their
present course, “The union will be
dissolved, the dogs of war will break loose, and anarchy and discord will
complete the ruin of this country.”
William
Doyle’s “PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F.
Kennedy” (2005) describes the future president as a voracious reader (Winston
Churchill being his favorite author) frequently ill and bullied by older
brother Joe, who once repeatedly banged his head against a wall. Of the mission in the Solomon Islands that resulted
in his PT boat being smashed in two by the destroyer Amagiri shortly after midnight on August 2, 1943, Kennedy himself
categorized it as a “fucked up” series of events exacerbated by its arsenal
consisting of defective torpedoes. PT 105 skipper Richard Keresey later
summarized what happened:
Fifteen PT boats ventured out into the Blackett
Strait to attack four Japanese destroyers, the best odds PT boats ever
had. We fired 32 torpedoes, including
four from my 105. We hit nothing! The destroyers kept right on going straight
down Blackett Strait and then straight back a couple of hours later. When the PT 109 got in the way, they ran over
it.
In treacherous water Kennedy rescued a badly burned crewman and, towing him by a
strap gripped in his teeth, swam three and a half miles to a small island while
nine others clung to two wooden planks and paddled their way to the same
destination. They survived on coconuts
for six days until finally rescued.
Jeff
Manes profiled IUN Biologist Spencer Cartwright (above) in his Sunday SALT column. Asked how he got into the field, Cortwright
explained:
One day, while working at a summer camp in Michigan, I was
walking on the dunes. It was bloody hot. My feet were burning. I saw flowers in
bloom. I thought, “How do those plants thrive with almost no water in this hot
sand?” I started thinking plants, animals and the environment. I went back to
college, talked to my professors, took some ecology classes and found out
there's another realm of biology besides medical biology, which I started out
in and hated. That was in 1978, and I've been doing it ever since.
For over a quarter of a century, I studied amphibians
like Alan does. If you study amphibians, you have to work a lot of rainy
nights. When do frogs breed? On cold, rainy nights. As you get older, that gets
tiring. I got burned out on it. But when
I got here, people started telling me about the problems with non-native
species and I started thinking that's pretty interesting. Now I get to work on
sunny days, not rainy nights.
Samuel A. Love combined his photo of the snow that fell at Eighth and Harrison with one taken at the same Gary intersection a hundred year ago.
Ray Smock commented on Trump’s latest outlandish claims about his predecessor and Obama holdovers:
Ray Smock commented on Trump’s latest outlandish claims about his predecessor and Obama holdovers:
When
you are as paranoid as Donald Trump, belief in conspiracy theories is par for
the course. The fraud that launched his presidency was the theory that
President Obama was an illegal alien without a birth certificate. He accused
Hillary Clinton of conspiring for decades to cover up major crimes that should
have placed her behind bars. He said Ted Cruz’s father was part of the JFK
assassination. He called for an investigation into the three to five million
people who voted illegally, presumably for Hillary. And most recently President
Trump accused Barack Obama of tapping his phones. Add all this up and we get
very close to a description of someone with extreme paranoia, like the ones who
believe the government has implanted tiny transmitters in their brains to
control their actions.
The
engine driving mass paranoia and hysteria in the White House is the idea of a Deep
State: that there is a secret cabal, composed of holdovers from the Obama
Administration, who are doing everything in their power to undermine Trump’s
presidency. It has all the ingredients necessary to explain every failure of
the Trump Administration. And it gives the Trump White House another excuse to
keep alive the president’s unhealthy hatred of Barack Obama.
This
nation could survive an inept novice and mentally troubled individual like
President Trump if such a president was surrounded by competent practitioners
of governance. But the Trump Administration has a cabinet of incompetents. He
selected as his top advisers a band of ideologues from the far reaches of the
far-right wing of the Republican Party. His cabinet is composed of billionaires
like himself because he thinks successful businesspeople are going to make
America a success. This is one of the
greatest American myths of all time. Government is not a business. To pretend
that government and the art of governance is no different than a for-profit
business is a formula for total failure.
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