Obsidian Wings

Feinstein

by liberal japonicus

I tend to think that the transactional nature of politics, particularly in the US House and Senate, makes it a certainty that the people who end up there never seem like the person they were when they started. Reading the Guardian's obit of Feinstein underlines that. Whether it reveals their true nature or changes them is the question.

In the decades after, her steady centrism left allies at times soothed, and sometimes seething. Feminist groups celebrated her political rise, and lamented that she refused to ally herself with women’s rights groups. She supported programs to fight the Aids epidemic, but as mayor vetoed domestic partnership legislation, confusing and frustrating LGBTQ+ rights activists. She was an ardent gun control advocate; she was booed at a state Democratic party convention for supporting the death penalty.

 A thread for anything related to this.

 

A slow motion train wreck

by liberal japonicus

With Janie faithfully putting up open threads (greatly appreciated), I'll try to alternate with some more focussed posts and for this one, I'll let all of you give your predictions about the Supreme Court, using this vox article to prime the pump. Predictions and links appreciated!

Gone Fishin'

by JanieM

This little guy has been contemplating the universe, and sometimes fishing, at the Mount Vernon town beach for as long as I’ve been going there to take pictures. He moves around a bit now and then, perhaps wanting a slightly different view of the water in different seasons or weathers, or to stay in the shade on hot days. But amazingly enough, though it would be easy to carry him off, he remains as a sort of guardian spirit of the north end of tiny Minnehonk Lake.

This may be an obscure place in the grand scheme of things, but the beach is next to a busy road (relatively speaking), right on the edge of the little cluster of buildings that constitutes Mount Vernon village, next to the community center and across the road from the fire station and the post office.

Pre-covid, I sometimes went to to the community center for the regular Saturday public breakfast, and usually to the annual poetry reading in August. Mount Vernon is not my town, but I have good friends there, and all are welcome at community events.

Bigger version of the picture here.

Open thread.

 

Modern Life

by JanieM

The picture is of a section Water Street, the main street of Hallowell, Maine, on the Kennebec River just south of Augusta. (Bigger version here.)

Signs of modern life: a brew pub next to a cannabis store.

My topic is a different feature of modern life, perhaps the most characteristic of all: the mobile phone.

The first person I knew with a cell phone had one in their car, probably in the late 1990s. The first person I knew who carried a cell phone around with her used it to coordinate with her husband when their two kids had basketball games in widely separated towns. That would have been in the early oughts.

Despite earning my living as a techie of sorts, and being quite comfortable with technology, I was a relatively late adopter of the cell phone, the last of my social circle to give in and get one. That would have been in about 2004 or 2005, when my kids were off to college and I was on the road a lot.

Almost twenty years later, it’s hard to imagine life without cell phones. Sometimes, especially when reading mystery novels set in earlier times, I find myself wondering why one character or another didn’t just make a phone call…

But I still use my phone mostly as just a phone. Well, also as an alarm clock, a timer, and a camera. Okay, and sometimes to write notes to myself. But almost never as a means to get access to the internet when I’m away from home. I’m on the internet for hours every day when I’m at home, and I’d just as soon pretend it doesn’t exist when I’m out in the wider world.

So I’m out of synch with how most people use their phones these days, and in particular I’m apparently way out of date as to how secure phones are. I’ve spent a few weeks during each of the past two years in a place where there’s no phone signal, and I was surprised to find that one of the financial institutions I deal with will not send a security code via email. Digging deep into their help pages, I find that they consider email to be so much less secure than phones that they will only send a code via text or voice.

I get that email is insecure, but I didn’t realize that phones were significantly better.

Can anyone (I’m looking at you, Michael, if you have time….) offer an up to the minute assessment of the safety of phones for, especially, banking, or for that matter any other kind of financial transaction?

Or: what’s an app?

The subterranean streams of se acabó

by liberal japonicus

I think that since most of us here are not fanatical followers of sports in general or football/soccer in particular, an interesting discussion might be had about everything related to the unsolicited kiss from Rubiales, head of the Spanish Soccer Federation. If you aren't aware of any of this, basically, the Spanish women's World Cup team won the most recent World Cup, defeating England. At the award ceremony, Luis Rubiales kissed Spanish forward Jenni Hermoso. This link gives a breakdown of the timeline:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/08/29/jenni-hermoso-luis-rubiales-kiss-row-womens-world-cup-spain/

That link gives an apparent quote by Hermoso, but some have suggested that the quote was not from Hermoso, but from the Spanish Football Federation

According to the sports media Relevo.com, the statements released by the Spanish Football Federation after the 'unacceptable' kiss were not made by Jenni Hermoso as they had led people to believe.

The Spanish Football Federation has been accused of "faking" comments by World Cup star Jenni Hermoso, where it appeared that she downplayed a controversial kiss from the federation's president.

This Slate article has an interesting discussion basically saying that Rubiales and the rest of the men running Spanish soccer were run over by a truck they didn't even notice was barrelling down on them

Because Rubiales and RFEF were too blinded by their own egos and machismo to treat the players right, support their historic win in an appropriate fashion, and, barring that, admit wrongdoing and accept proper consequences, they ended up proving exactly what they were so eager to deny. Their entire response was a catastrophic miscalculation of the power balance between Spain’s soccer governing body and the players—a balance that has been shifting in athletic organizations all over the world in recent years.

Just look at the U.S. Women’s National Team, which prevailed last year in a protracted battle for equal pay that reached a fever pitch after the team won the 2019 World Cup. The team made its push for better pay a visible part of its World Cup celebrations, when it was at the height of its fame and enjoying outpourings of adulation from fans across the country. The ensuing surge of public support for the players’ campaign drove home that soccer fans come to games not because they’re fans of the U.S. Soccer Federation, which pays the players. They come to see Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and Crystal Dunn and Rose Lavelle. When the U.S. Women’s National Team players were forced to play in worse conditions for less pay—and made it known to their admirers—it became untenable for U.S. Soccer to stand by the two-tiered system that placed greater value on the men’s team.

Likewise, the Spanish women’s team correctly assessed that the moment after its World Cup win was the right time to take a stand against an organization that had systematically undervalued and degraded its players for years. And in response, people all over the world have signaled their support. Soccer players from other countries who lost in the World Cup just a couple of weeks ago have been posting and speaking and wearing wristbands for Hermoso. Every member of Spain’s women’s coaching staff resigned in protest, except for the detested manager, Vilda. At a professional women’s soccer game in D.C. this week, attendees held signs and chanted Hermoso’s name. Multiple officials from the United Nations chimed in against Rubiales too. The guy never stood a chance.

I'm not sure that it is as clear a parallel to the US women's efforts. In the former, it was very much like a labor negotiation, but in the case of Spain, it was more like a a penny dropping.A problem with a lot of these accounts is that it is framed as a very tidy 3 act drama where the villain does something in the first act, the people rise up in the second and it is happily ever after for the 3rd. A lot of these articles fail discuss the history of these problems, and I had to search a bit to find this one

The scandal has come after years of increasing disquiet in Spain over abuse of women, especially after the notorious 2016 “Wolf Pack” gang-rape of a teenager which prompted the socialist-led government to reform sexual consent laws.

In the case of football, the women’s team’s efforts to combat sexism and achieve parity with their male peers date back nearly a decade. That includes two dressing room rebellions that ended the international careers of several players.

Boquete led a mutiny seeking the resignation of coach Ignacio Quereda after a woeful performance at the 2015 World Cup, the only one his teams reached in nearly three decades.

The phrase se acabó means 'It's finished', and is supposed to relate not only to Rubiales, who, after holding out a lot longer than was wise, stepped down, but also to the issue of harassment of women in society. But it seems to me that the phrase will not age well and doesn't seem reusable.

This Guardian article, in addition to providing some depth to Rubiales, has this interesting tidbit

Rubiales told Morgan about the pressure on his family but his statement reveals the real reason: the risk to Spain’s World Cup bid. The fighter couldn’t keep fighting; the damage, bad enough already, would be even greater, and not just in Spain. Aware that he was never going to be able to go back, even he was forced to accept that in the end, to let go, losing a total salary of almost €900,000. “Insisting on staying won’t contribute anything positive,” he conceded. “My departure will contribute to Europe and Africa remaining united for the 2030 World Cup.” And so the circle closes.

I lived in Spain about a decade after Franco died, and the country was undergoing an efflorescence, where all of the creative energies that had been tamped down were bubbling up to the surface. But the country and the culture seemed hyper masculine and incredibly gendered. Perhaps Spain has changed from the time I was there, but I don't think that the deep implulse of machismo could be easily removed. That's why, though a lot of the reporting about Rubiales speech where he refused to resign seemed to have a horrified fascination (this link explains why it was horrific), for me, it was unsurprising.

Anyway, it's been on my mind and I'm wondering if any folks have thoughts about it.

 

selling the hangman the rope

by liberal japonicus

ProPublica has had a number of great deep dive exposes lately. They seem to do particularly well with problems in the Navy and their most recent piece about the Navy's failed Littoral Combat Ship program is the latest.

One point that caught my eye (and accounts for the title) was this

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that the GAO has identified throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price “due to proprietary reasons.”

Watson and others spent much of their time escorting contractors while on board because so many areas on the ship were considered classified, reducing their ability to do their own jobs, according to interviews with multiple officers who had served on the LCS.

Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. The delays were especially frustrating when trying to fix the computer network that connected everything from the radars, to the weapons systems, to the ship’s canteen. That system, another former lieutenant said, frequently shut down because of software glitches.

“You can’t ask for help from your superior commands” on shore, said the former lieutenant, who worked as a communications officer on Independence-class ships. “And you can’t even go buy yourself a soda.”

The ships needed constant repairs. But technical manuals were sometimes written only in the native language of the contractor that built the equipment. One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor from Norway to change two fuses.

Somehow, I don't think this is a problem for the Chinese. Anyway, talk about that or something else.

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

by JanieM

In my love of springtime, I tend to forget how lovely late summer and early fall can be. July is the only month that consistently brings us stretches of sweltering weather here in central Maine; August is almost always moderate and pleasant. September is similar, if a little cooler, but because the kids are back in school and autumn color hasn’t really gotten going yet, it too is a bit underappreciated.

At least by me.

This time around I’m enjoying it immensely. Fall color makes it easy to find beautiful pictures (see below), but really, there’s no hurry.

*****

Open thread.

*****

ETA: Link to a bigger version at Flickr.