GRRM Answers NYT Staff Questions

It would be wonderful if GRRM would finish the books. But I've made my peace with the fact that one ending of the story will be revealed sometime in 2019. And that will be that. Maybe GRRM finishes. Maybe he doesn't. Either way there are just oodles of other books to read and things to do. Anyway I thought this short little Q&A with GRRM was interesting. I also would like seeing Fevre Dream made into a movie.

Megyn Kelly Out At NBC?

If you pick up a cobra and caress it there's a good chance that you will be bitten repeatedly. You'll probably die if you can't get anti-venom quickly enough. Either way, regardless of whether you live or die, most people would tell you (or your survivors) that what you did was remarkably stupid. Cobras are venomous. They can kill. It's what they do. Megyn Kelly is a human cobra. She's a skinny venomous racist. It's who she is. It's what she does. You can't hire Megyn Kelly and expect that she's not going to say or do something racist any more than you would lie down with a cobra and expect not to get bit. Although I do not like Megyn Kelly I have to put most of the blame on this controversy on the people at NBC who hired her in the first place. I understand that they were chasing profits hoping to get some of the Trump voting viewers who had made Kelly successful at Fox. But not all money is good money.

And NBC didn't even get the ratings they were expecting to get because a toned down Kelly isn't able or willing to build or keep an audience looking for softer, less aggressive, less confrontational topics and tone. That's not her. Even a sanitized Kelly is far too abrasive for the morning NBC audience. The stench of her inauthenticity radiated for miles. The real Kelly is the woman who thinks that blackface is just fun and f*** you if you can't take a joke. She let the mask drop because she either got tired of wearing it or thought she was back on Fox. Make no mistake, if Kelly made the exact same comments at Fox she would still have a show and job. Heck she might get another pay raise. I haven't bothered to look yet but I have no doubt that even now conservatives racists are forming up like Voltron to argue that Kelly is the real victim and Black people are just too sensitive, yada, yada, yada.

Megyn Kelly Today has been canceled, according to multiple reports. The 47-year-old journalist's NBC talk show is reportedly over after she was widely criticized on Tuesday for defending using blackface in Halloween costumes.

South Africa ANC Political Murders

It is a damn shame that people who struggled against the violent apartheid regime now have no problem murdering each other for money and power. I suppose that's the way it goes sometimes. Can you imagine living in a country in which power depends not on the vote but on who has more button men? That would be a pretty crappy place to live.

One could argue that political violence in South Africa is the inevitable blowback from apartheid-that people who have grown up impoverished and hating themselves with no strong social, economic, or political systems to safely channel dissent and disagreement will find it easy to use violence against each other. Even so, political murder is not normal. It is symptomatic of a sick society. The US has tons of problems but we're not yet at the point where it's normal for political party leaders to dispatch hit squads against dissenting members. Nancy Pelosi does not, whatever you might see on Fox News, threaten to murder Representatives who don't vote for her as party leader. Mitch McConnell is not sending goon squads to visit the families of Republican senators/congressmen who didn't vote to repeal ObamaCare. And no matter how much Clinton voters despise third party voters, so far neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein has been found in car trunks.

UMZIMKHULU, South Africa — Their fear faded as they raced back home, the bottle of Johnnie Walker getting lighter with each turn of the road. Soon, Sindiso Magaqa was clapping and bouncing behind the wheel of his beloved V8 Mercedes-Benz, pulling into familiar territory just before dark. Minutes later, men closed in with assault rifles. Mr. Magaqa reached for the gun under his seat — too late. One of his passengers saw flashes of light, dozens of them, from the spray of bullets pockmarking the doors. The ambush was exactly what Mr. Magaqa had feared. A few months before, a friend had been killed by gunmen in his front yard. Then, as another friend tried to open his front gate at night, a hit man crept out of the dark, shooting him dead.

Next came Mr. Magaqa, 34. Struck half a dozen times, he hung on for weeks in a hospital before dying last year. All of the assassination targets had one thing in common: They were members of the African National Congress who had spoken out against corruption in the party that defined their lives.

Movie Reviews: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Mandy

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
directed by Robert Aldrich

Legendary superstar actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis famously hated each other. Some say both women made romantic moves on the same actor. I've read other claims that the infamously libertine Crawford once made a play for Davis, who declined in insulting terms. 

Other reports say that the fiercely competitive women disliked each other for the usual reasons of money, roles, and prestige. Perhaps Davis saw herself as an actress first and was put off by the more glamorous Crawford. And maybe Crawford and Davis detested one another just because they were so similar. It's not important now. 

It is interesting that in this movie Davis and Crawford found ways to feud and fight with one another, even as both women recognized that this film could be career rejuvenation for them during their struggle to remain commercially relevant in their (very) late middle age. 

Supposedly when Davis' character had to kick and stomp Crawford's character, Davis got some real licks in on her rival. Not to be outdone, when a scene called for Davis' character to lift and drag Crawford's character, Crawford put bricks and other material in her clothes to make herself as heavy as possible, knowing full well that Davis was suffering from lower back problems.
Nice.

Detroit Squatters Lose A Round

Because many of my older relatives, friends, and people I know in Detroit grew up in racially defined horrible poverty and segregation with plenty of experiences with evictions and racist insults they tend to be, well shall we say, less than sympathetic to incidents where someone is ripping off a landlord. Because Detroit is relatively impoverished with spotty enforcement of criminal and civil codes around housing, health, and waste management many landlords in Detroit have indeed taken the opportunity to screw over tenants and the taxing authorities as often as they can and as hard as they can. 

If you want people to internalize such values as respect for other people's property and paying their bills on time then you need to make sure that they have an opportunity to succeed by doing things the right way. If they are shut out of all opportunity they might not have much respect for your property. It's just human nature.

The answer is not to pick one side or another and blindly cheer them on but to create and follow law that is fair both in its execution and its definition. The landlord must be forced to maintain the property and submit to routine unbiased inspections to make sure the property is up to code. The tenant must pay their rent on time and in full. The tenant must have a financial incentive not to wreck or damage the property during the rental period. Pretty simple stuff right? The tenant and landlord have entered into a contract. The state needs to enforce that contract. Both sides should give each other incentives to treat each other well. Win-win for everyone. 

Black Uber Driver Threatened at Gunpoint

As discussed ad nauseam one of the bad things about being black in a society that runs on the idea of white supremacy is that not only the police but everyday whites feel entitled to question or to reject black presence in what the white person considers to be a "white" space or at least the "wrong" space for that black person to be occupying. This can be something minor such a secretary mistaking the new black manager for custodial help, something major like a self-appointed neighborhood watchman murdering a black teen and everything in between. 

There is evidence that the resulting continual lifetime "fight or flight" response is not good for black people. This response may be implicated in everything from higher rates of hypertension to higher infant and birth mother mortality rates to higher rates of strokes and cardiac arrest. In short it's not healthy to be stressed out and under attack all the time.

There was recently another reminder of how when information is processed through a racist mindset even the most innocuous behavior becomes life threatening. This incident also displayed how some whites do not view blacks as adults worthy of the respect granted to adults.

MILWAUKEE —An Uber driver says someone pointed a gun in his face in Milwaukee on Saturday, but it wasn't a robbery. He captured the encounter on video and said it's a symptom of Wisconsin's concealed carry law. In the video, a man is seen with a large, silver gun as Uber driver Darnell Smith records the confrontation near 40th Street and Mill Road early Saturday. "Just because you have a conceal and carry license doesn't mean pull your gun out if you think something is happening," Smith said.

Republican Tax Cut Doesn't Work: Republicans Threaten Social Security

The problem with voting is that there are a lot of stupid, gullible, or downright hateful people who vote. Their vote counts just as much as yours does or mine does. To be fair they may very well think of me or you in the same terms which I just used to describe them. That's politics. That's never going to change. If we accept that every citizen has a right to vote and pursue his or her own interests as he or she defines them then we also must accept that sometimes people will make objectively sub-optimal decisions.

This brings us to the impact of the Trump tax cuts. You may recall that the majority of economists across the political spectrum predicted that the tax cuts would not create enough growth to shrink the deficit. The tax cuts would increase the deficit. And just about every economist or political theorist on what's rather broadly defined as the left, argued that that once the increased deficit became obvious Republicans would smartly pivot and without missing a beat argue that programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security had to be cut in order to bring down the deficit. 

Republicans would weep copious crocodile tears as they congratulated themselves on their willingness to cut benefits to people who weren't invited to the tax cut party in the first place. It's classic bait and switch. It's one of the oldest cons in the book. With ever increasing frustration Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been warning about the tax-cut/deficit con and predicting the Republican response since before the tax cut became law. This isn't new. It's what Republicans do-or at least what the upper class/business class Republicans do. The middle-class/lower-class Republicans aren't necessarily supporting the party for its dedication to cutting taxes and slashing social programs (at least those used by whites) so much as they are supporting the party for racial and cultural resentments.