What does it take?

So…a Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was brutally murdered by a Saudi pathologist in the Saudi embassy with the full knowledge of the Saudi consul, apparently at the request of the Saudi government, who didn’t like the reporter’s coverage of the repressive Saudi regime. Audio of his death was recorded.

It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist’s last moments told Middle East Eye.

Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said.

Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said.

“The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,” the source told MEE.

The screaming stopped when Khashoggi – who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October – was injected with an as yet unknown substance.

We even know who did it.

Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who has been identified as the head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, was one of the 15-member squad who arrived in Ankara earlier that day on a private jet.

Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said.

The killing took seven minutes, the source said.

As he started to dismember the body, Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music. He advised other members of the squad to do the same.

“When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,” Tubaigy was recorded as saying, the source told MEE.

When he does this job? This is something he’s done before?

This is a horrific and unforgivable act. So what does the “leader of the free world” have to say about it?

I’m not giving cover at all, Trump said. I just want to find out what’s happening.

With that being said, Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East, he added, pointing to a US-Saudi arms deal that he valued at $110 billion, even though just $14.5 billion of that figure has actually begun to materialize.

Speaking in Washingon, Trump said he was hopeful the crisis would resolve itself, while Pompeo told reporters in Brussels the US takes the journalist’s suspected killing and dismemberment seriously, even as both men stressed the importance of the US-Saudi relationship.

I guess $110 billion will buy you the right to torture-murder someone. Is it just the one? Or do the Saudis get to slaughter any journalist they want while they hold the promise of a fucking “deal”?

Also, the deal doesn’t exist. It’s a loose collection of non-binding promises, nothing more.

A real leader would have cut these barbaric killers off at the knees, immediately announced a suspension of all these arms deals to a backward, vicious kingdom, and made it clear that that murder was intolerable. All Trump sees is dollar signs, even illusory dollar signs are enough to keep him in line.

It’s also not just Trump. These “deals” were made during the Obama years, and once again we see that a much-admired president had a thoroughly reprehensible foreign policy. Fuck these monsters. Why are we even selling arms to Saudi Arabia in the first place, even before they’d started openly torturing journalists?

I agree with this review of the Ark Park

This article on the Ark Park is exactly right, and hits on all the same impressions I had when I visited it.

  • It’s grossly overpriced.
  • “It’s just a large building in a shape you don’t typically see large buildings in.”

  • The “extremely optimistic queueing area” — you wend your way through a maze of fences intended to restrain a mob…and you’re one of the few people there.

  • “The first proper exhibit on the Ark is a room containing lots of wooden cages with model animals in them.” It’s another pointless waiting area. A lot of the cages don’t bother to have fake animals in them — they just play animal noises.

  • “But, unfortunately, with the exception of three dioramas, all of that is depicted using a bunch of pictures and text on boards stuck to the wall.” There are virtually no real exhibits inside.

  • “Once you’re done reading the signs on the wall of the pre-flood world section, you head on to the next attraction: a bunch of signs on walls.”

  • “The Ark has two screening areas that, during my visit, played two movies on loop.” I skipped the movies. From the description, I didn’t miss anything.

  • Did I mention the signs on the walls? “Room after room after room of signs. More signs than have ever been gathered in one place before.”

  • They have a new addition! “One of the newer additions to the Ark is an exhibit made to look like a graphic novel that tells the story of some college kids questioning their faith (spoiler alert: God turns out to be cool, actually).” Unfortunately, it’s just another variation on a theme. “Ken Ham described the exhibit as “like walking through the pages of a book.” An alternative description would be “like reading a bunch of signs stuck to a wall.””

Aside from the incompetent, boring collection of didactic exhibits, they note another feature of the content: it’s all written by regressive, homophobic Christian fundamentalists.

Anti-LGBTQ bigotry is a big attraction at the theme park, and is smattered generously throughout.

All people who volunteer or work at the park are required to sign a “statement of faith” which explicitly prohibits them from employment if they’re gay, bi, or a person who has “attempt[ed] to alter [their] gender by surgery or appearance.”

During my visit, I saw multiple ads for something the Ark is hosting called “Sacred: Embracing God’s Design for Sexuality” which appears to be some sort of transphobic gay conversion event.

It’s no wonder that attendance has been declining, but there’s an interesting tension here: they are catering to narrow audience that doesn’t want information or entertainment, they want nothing but affirmation that their rotten beliefs are valid, and the Ark Park is a massive, expensive false signal that they’re right. It hasn’t collapsed as fast as it should if it were judged on its merits as a museum and a park, but that’s not what it is or ever has been. It’s a costly signal for a dying, contemptible culture. It will continue to draw in revenue from the fading tatters of that group.

He sure dines out a lot on his uncle

Donald Trump only listens to one scientist, apparently — his oft-mentioned Uncle John Trump of MIT.

I finally had to look him up. He was an electrical engineer, with no qualifications at all to speak on climate science, and as the President* even admits, they did not discuss climatology. But even worse, he’s been dead for 33 years.

I’m going to guess that they never discussed science while he was alive at all — he was just the one member of the family they could point to and say, “See? Not all Trumps are venal morons.” He was the family token, and now he’s nothing but a useful prop from the grave.

Don’t ever play the racist game

A simple question: did Elizabeth Warren have an Indian ancestor? Yes. Definitely. As Carl Zimmer explains, the science is good and robust on this one. Anyone who is arguing that this is fake science ought to be immediately fired from any job that involves setting science policy. Bye, Donald!

More complex question: does Elizabeth Warren have any legitimate claim to any kind of Indian affiliation? Nope, not that she claimed she did. And she played right into Trump’s racist hand.

Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation. The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category. Warren’s video will hardly convince a Trump voter, who will see only a woman who feels that she has to prove something. Trump himself has already walked back his promise of a million-dollar charity donation. Warren, meanwhile, has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her.

See? You can understand that it is good science while also recognizing that she’s promoting odious ideological implications that are contrary to her political position.

A Republican, pro-Trump pimp has died

Are we expected to mourn?

I saw a few episodes of that godawful HBO reality show, Cathouse, which featured smug thug Dennis Hof as a brothel owner. It is no surprise that he ran for political office as a Republican, and actually won the primary — Republican voters may be moralizers, but they’re also the biggest hypocrites on the planet. He has now died, ending his political aspirations.

I will say he’s one of the reasons I don’t subscribe to HBO. When I’d travel and stay in a hotel somewhere, I’d flip on HBO in the evenings to see what was on, and would routinely see only a few things. One was those dreadful sports documentaries where some lugubrious narrator would drone on about the Cosmic Significance of a boxing match or some sportsball event; the other thing that was always on was that terrible Cathouse show with the women simpering over that bald pompous bouncer guy. Hated ’em both.

I guess his show has been off the air for a while now, and recently every time I’m in a hotel room in the evening it’s nothing but Bill Maher, who always seems like another Dennis Hof, only with hair.

Jeeezus. The details are trickling out, and he died after a wild birthday party with Grover Norquist, Joe Arpaio, and Ron Jeremy. If only he could have taken them all with him.

Fortunately, there were no women at this party. Have you noticed how these kinds of events always feature great gross corpulent men of greed and villainy, and yet no women ever get mentioned? That sounds like a hellishly bad party to me.

We can be angry for all the right reasons

An interesting take on the psychology of Trump:

Donald Trump is an anger troll. Rage is the one thing he capably nurtures and grows. He stoked anger in people horrified by Kavanaugh’s confirmation and is now turning it against them. This is an old tactic: drive people crazy, then call them so. As projects of government go, this one is as familiar as it is contemptible. He wants to make his followers feel threatened. To achieve this, he needs his opponents to seem irrational. So he sets about making them angry.

He insults them, railroads them, calls people protesting for justice liars and profit-seekers even as he openly enriches his friends. He gives them offensive nicknames and mocks their pain for fun, and to get them to lose control. He’s doing this in plain sight—it’s pretty obvious why people are angry—but his goal is to make their reaction look inexplicable, beyond the pale. After leading angry crowds to yell abuse at anyone he points to, he turns around and marvels at how irrational and dangerous his targets are.

As tactics go, this one is dumb and transparent, but it’s worth describing it because it works. It works a lot. Trump is not a genius. But he instinctively understands the dynamic of provoking and then delegitimizing someone else’s pain. As Adam Serwer wrote, he’s energized by the suffering he causes others and—secondarily—by the bond that ritualized cruelty forges with his base, which has been connected by fear of others. From Trump’s perspective, it’s kind of fun that people feel compassion for the families he separated. It’s delightful that women are worried about rights he has expressly said he wanted to take from them. And, after insulting and belittling people he’s supposed to be governing, he enjoys acting surprised that they mind.

It’s a silly and ugly game, but it’s the only true rule of Trumpism: be the sorest winner imaginable. Aspire to nothing but power and status. Hold no principle sacred. Withhold justice and insult those who object. Yes, the effects of this are predictable. It doesn’t take a genius of social engineering to be the “why are you hitting yourself?” guy. All it takes is a willingness to be him.

Yeah, that’s the man. But it’s only half the problem: the other half is an electorate that falls for it every time, that fails to recognize that a lack of principle and a narcissistic need for power are bad things, and not a sufficient reason to give the narcissist the power he craves. Slightly more than half the population sees right through him and is really pissed that the orange troll has gotten what he was after — they are righteously angry — and the remainder have completely fallen for the lies and are in a mad race to hurt themselves even more.

We need to own our anger, because that’s the alternative. Our rage is aimed at a deserving target, their rage seems to be self-inflicted.