Misled by Sanders, Some of his Supporters Still Demanding Revolution

Chris Cillizza:

Bernie Sanders spoke to a large group of his supporters on Monday in Philadelphia. The crowd cheered as Sanders ran through all of the successes he and his self-professed "political revolution" had run up this year: the millions of votes he won, the reduction in superdelegates, the takeover of state parties by Sanders supporters.

Then came time for the pivot. Sanders tried to tell the crowd that now was the time to line up behind Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Timothy M. Kaine. Boos cascaded down. Shouts of "no!" And then a Sanders chant started up.

Sanders was at a loss. Here he was telling his most loyal supporters what needed to happen next in order to unify the party and beat Donald Trump. And they weren't listening. They wanted revolution. Now, not later.

What was clear for anyone watching Sanders's unsuccessful attempts to calm the churning among his supporters is that the revolution he started is no longer one he can totally control. Or maybe even control at all.

See, when you go around the country riling people up with talk that the system is so rotten that only a revolution can solve our problems, some of them will believe you. I think this scene is the best evidence yet that Bernie didn't really mean it. He doesn't want a revolution; his hero is FDR, who was very proud of having prevented a revolution. He wants a much more liberal government, but he wants to achieve that through elections; he has no notion at all of any other way to proceed, and would probably be shocked at the notion of attaining power any other way. Some of his supporters have decided that the elections are rigged, and they aren't interested in abiding by the results.

A Reformist Confronts Trump

These days Noah Millman writes for the American Conservative, even though he no longer considers himself a conservative. He says that the old left/right divide, and the two parties that equate to it, is simply not providing the answers we need. In other words, he likes to see himself as a critic of the American system in a very deep sense. But then along comes Trump:

And the other point is that Trump’s blustery, impetuous approach to these matters is prompting people like me, who should be arguing against the Washington consensus, instead to argue that it’s too risky to break with that consensus, at least in the Trumpian manner.

Little League Embezzlement

Fascinating series of stories in the Times about embezzlement from youth sports teams, which has become a big national problem. One prosecutor told the Times that she has been involved in so many such cases that she couldn't count them all.

A husband and wife were implicated in Michigan after a neighbor, an accountant whose sons played for the baseball league, joined the board and scrutinized the books, leading investigators to a case that uncovered $300,000 in missing money.

In Winslow, Me. (population 7,794), there were three theft charges against members of volunteer sports clubs in a four-year span, including one person who was charged with stealing from two clubs.

In Wisconsin, a self-described soccer mom confessed to another soccer mom about taking money from the local club, only to discover she was taking even more money.

A woman in Vermont was convicted of stealing from a fund established to honor a dead child who had been a club member.

The exposure of embezzlement leaves communities thunderstruck and wounded at the revelation of neighbors stealing from neighbors, friends cheating friends. The children of the accused are often best friends with the children of the accusers.

Times reporter Bill Penington got interested in these cases because someone embezzled money from his own kids' soccer team.

Two observations: First, as you can see from the Trump campaign and a thousand other such campaigns, we like to believe that we can trust our neighbors, at least the ones who look like us. Threats, we like to think, come from outsiders. But this is not so; unless you are involved in gangs or drug dealing, the person who murders you is overwhelmingly likely to be someone you know very well. If your house is burgled, the burglar probably lives within walking distance. And if there is embezzlement in your community, it will probably be committed by a neighbor trusted completely by everyone.

Second, the world is not divided into good people and bad people. All people are mixes of good and bad, and almost everyone will commit awful acts in the wrong circumstances. The reason youth sports teams have become such frequent targets of theft is that their simple organizations rely on trusting one or two people to do things right. Thefts like that $300,000 embezzlement in Michigan could almost all be prevented by simple annual audits, because people who know they are likely to be caught are much less likely to steal. But if you put $50,000 in the hands of people who have no oversight, many of them will start stealing.

Meanwhile in Pokemon Land

My youngest son talked me into taking him on a Pokemon safari to Ellicott City, Maryland, a nice little historic downtown now full of restaurants, bars, and antique shops. Which has become the center of the Pokemon universe in this part of the world. The town has about ten Pokestops and on this summer Sunday lures had been planted around most of them, so the whole town was full of Pokemon. On a 97-degree afternoon, there were at least a hundred people walking back and forth along Main Street, their phones held out in front of them. Except for the toddler on that guy's hip, all of these people are playing Pokemon Go.

And these. To this must be added dozens more people in restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; the ice cream shop Ben and I went into was half full of Pokemon players.  One of the two gyms in town – a gym is a place where players can play something like king of the mountain, knocking each other off the perch – is within range of a popular bar, and it changed hands every two or three minutes, I suppose because the bar was full of players. It was downright weird to be in such a throng of people all doing the same thing, their phones putting them in touch with a virtual world that is quite similar for everyone in town.

Etruscan Antiquities at the Villa Giulia, Rome

The Villa Giulia in Rome was built in 1551-1553 for Pope Julius III; the first architect was Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, who was responsible for the facade.

However, the many porticoes and courtyards and so on were designed by others, including Giorgio Vasari.

These days the villa is the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, that is, the National Etruscan Museum. It houses an amazing array of Etruscan artifacts and Greek artifacts recovered from Etruscan tombs. This is the Apollo of Veii, a painted terracotta Etruscan statue of Apollo discovered in the Portonaccio sanctuary of ancient Veii. It dates from c. 510 - 500 BC. It was probably made by Vulca, the only Etruscan artist whose name is known.

The golden tablets of Pyrgi, which contain a bilingual inscription in Etruscan and Phoenician, one of the most important clues in the still incomplete decipherment of the Etruscan language.

The famous Sarcophagus of the Spouses.

The Chigi Vase, a Greek vessel with one of the best surviving depictions of early classical hoplites in battle.

The Euphronios Krater. This signed masterwork of the painter Euphronios was purchased by the Met in 1972, despite doubts as to whether the provenance produced for it was genuine. Then in 2006, during the trial of Italian antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, evidence was introduced showing that the vessel was looted from an Etruscan tomb in 1971. So the Met sent it back to Italy in 2008, as part of a deal that included long-term loans to the Met of other objects. This scene shows the death of the hero Sarpedon; Hermes directs Death and Sleep in carrying away the body.

Out behind the villa is this remarkable little gem, the reconstruction of a small Etruscan temple. It was built in 1891 by Count Adolfo Cozza, who based the design on excavations made in the 19th century and on a description by the Roman writer Vitruvius.

Details.

View inside, showing that it is used as a sort of storage space for second-line artifacts. I encountered this many times in Greece; step around a corner at the back of the museum and you find a yard full of columns and other pieces of architectural sculpture, just sort of sitting there.

A Note to Young Journalists

If you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not.

– Corey Robin

The Westbury Quilt

One of the most beloved pieces of Anglo-Australian folk art, the Westbury Quilt was embroidered by the Misses Hampson, two sisters living on a farm near Westbury, Tasmania between 1900 and 1903. It is now in the National Gallery of Art in Canberra.The file above is pretty big. Below, some details.

Villa Louis Vitton

Built in 1880 adjacent to the family leather goods shop, with which it eventually merged. It recently opened to the public as a museum.

The Weird World of Fox News

The accusations of sexual harassment swirling around Fox News are at the same time unsurprising and, to me at least, puzzling. They are unsurprising on a surface level, given the contempt for feminism and political correctness that pours from the mouths of so many Fox personalities, and the weird way prominent Fox women all seem to look like characters in a repeating sexual fantasy. I was particularly struck by the way Ailes designed the news sets to show off his anchors' legs; he once told a woman who wore a pants suit on the set "I didn't spent all that money on glass tables for you to wear pants."

But on the other hand Fox News has made quite a few women rich and famous and given them platforms that make them players in American politics.

What is one to make of a world where intelligent, capable women who happen to be leggy blondes with a certain hardness to their looks are made into media stars, provided they can put up with their boss and colleagues propositioning them and talking about how hot they look all the time?

I have to say that I find this utterly bizarre.

For one thing these allegations confirm what I always suspected, that the women of Fox News really are a sexual fantasy. Ailes picked them personally for just that reason. The fantasy is widely enough shared that if you do an image search for Fox News female anchors, as I just did, you end up in a strange world of very soft core pornography displaying the hottest on-air personalities in what pass for suggestive poses.

Come to think of it I have an acquaintance who has a fetish for sexy weather girls.

Anyway.

I wonder, is there also an element of political fantasy, the old "feminists are ugly and all the really hot women want to be treated like women" thing? Are the hot blondes as much a part of the Fox News message as constantly calling Obama "divisive" and the lies about "apology tours"?

I have always found Fox News weird. An old-style news operation like the CBS and NBC I grew up with sold an aloof, god's eye view of a chaotic world, with the best sort of people telling us how we ought to feel about it all. Fox News seems to sell sham outrage. What should conservatives be angry about today? How can we twist a story about the normal sort of bureaucratic bungling (e.g., Benghazi) into a spasm of partisan outrage? I suppose I understand why people enjoy that, but don't they see how they are being manipulated? Sometimes the manipulation is so stupidly transparent that I would feel insulted. I know people who follow both the conservative and liberal/mainstream versions of the news, so they have multiple perspectives, but that doesn't seem to apply to the average Fox listener. What does that average listener want? To be manipulated into outrage? Why?

Now I can add another layer to my puzzlement: what is life like for these women?

For the past few days I have been talking about this to whoever will listen, and two people have given me pretty much the same explanation: any woman who would work for Fox News obviously has no principles and would do anything for money and power, sex included. I don't see it that way. Obviously, yes, anyone who wants to be a news anchor has a hungry ambition. But that's not the same as trading sex for promotion, and anyway that is not what most of the recent news has been about. The allegations are mostly tales of clumsy come-ons and excessive hugging, which make Ailes look as much pathetic as predatory.

As far as I understand these things, women respond very differently to being treated as sexual objects in their professional lives. Some laugh it off or even use it to advantage, and some of the women promoted by Ailes seem to be fine with the arrangement. The Times found one female Fox News employee who said

many of the women she worked with “loved Roger Ailes” and were “very grateful to him.”

And then there are those who don't like it but treat it as just another obstacle to overcome on their climb to the top:

Several former Fox News employees said that people were afraid to speak up but that many women viewed the behavior there as par for the course in the broadcasting industry, where appearance is so highly valued.

“There is a culture where, not that you accept it, you just deal with it,” one former employee said.

And then there are those who really hate it and won't stand for it, and those who are wrecked by it.

But what really goes on at Fox News? The Times found lots of complaints about harassment but hardly any actual sex – to be precise just one blowjob, said to be performed by a junior staffer. Is that right? Can there really be such a sexually charged workplace as Fox News seems to be, full of rich, powerful men and rich, sexy women, in which there is no sex, consensual or otherwise? Is everyone covering up the affairs they know to be happening around them, because they see that as unrelated to these investigations? Have we been given a sanitized version designed to protect the women who did sleep their way to the top, or had affairs that might make it look like that's what they did? Or are there really no affairs? If so, what would that mean? Would it be just another sign that climbing to the top of the contemporary meritocracy requires a near abandonment of romance and the erotic? That even a mogul like Roger Ailes gets nothing but long hugs and bare legs under glass tables?

It is important to note that the real anger, and the lawsuits, come from women who say they were fired for refusing to go along, or for speaking out against the system. The average Fox spokesman would call that sour grapes. What this says to me is that women in the categories I just mentioned – who don't mind harassment or accept it as a fact of life to be gotten around – can put up with a lot as long as they have the right to say no. The limit for them comes when somebody tries to take that right away. When they feel like their careers have been sabotaged because they refused to do things they consider beneath them, they call their lawyers.

But I mainly wanted to says how weird I find everything about this story.

Urban Blackbirds

Menno Schilthuizen recounts that a friend in Amsterdam recently invited him over to see the blackbird nesting in a potted plant on her balcony:

Serenely incubating eggs in the inner city, this bird had little in common with its shy, reclusive ancestors that nested in Europe’s forests. Early in the 19th century, probably in Germany, blackbirds began settling in cities. By the mid-20th century, they were hopping around on stoops all over Europe.

Many “wild” bird species — like the peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks and laughing gulls of New York — have set up camp in cities. But the thing about Europe’s urban blackbirds (a relative of the American robin, not to be confused with North American blackbirds, which belong to a different family) is that they are very different from their forest-dwelling relatives. They have stockier bills, sing at a higher pitch (high enough to be heard over the din of traffic), are less likely to migrate (in cities there’s food and warmth year-round), and have less nervous personalities.

For many of these differences, genes are responsible. The birds’ DNA, after 200 years or less of adaptation, has diverged from that of their rural ancestors.

The rapid evolution of animals living in cities is a hot topic in biology these days. In North America, studies have shown that urban raccoons are measurably smarter than their wild cousins, since they live in an environment where food is plentiful but danger comes in hundreds of forms. (My sons are fascinated by this news and like to imagine raccoons evolving into clever goblins living around and among us, stealing our stuff.) There are moths that have evolved to avoid street lights and plants specialized to grow in cracks in the pavement. I wonder what is happening to North American robins, which now nest almost entirely in suburbs.

And, for that matter, to us.

The Post Savages Trump

At the Washington Post, they're not even going to pretend to be evenhanded about the upcoming campaign. In an editorial titled Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy, they write:

The lack of experience might be overcome if Mr. Trump saw it as a handicap worth overcoming. But he displays no curiosity, reads no books and appears to believe he needs no advice. In fact, what makes Mr. Trump so unusual is his combination of extreme neediness and unbridled arrogance. He is desperate for affirmation but contemptuous of other views. He also is contemptuous of fact. Throughout the campaign, he has unspooled one lie after another — that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated after 9/11, that his tax-cut plan would not worsen the deficit, that he opposed the Iraq War before it started — and when confronted with contrary evidence, he simply repeats the lie. It is impossible to know whether he convinces himself of his own untruths or knows that he is wrong and does not care. It is also difficult to know which trait would be more frightening in a commander in chief.

Given his ignorance, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Trump offers no coherence when it comes to policy. In years past, he supported immigration reform, gun control and legal abortion; as candidate, he became a hard-line opponent of all three. Even in the course of the campaign, he has flip-flopped on issues such as whether Muslims should be banned from entering the United States and whether women who have abortions should be punished . Worse than the flip-flops is the absence of any substance in his agenda. Existing trade deals are “stupid,” but Mr. Trump does not say how they could be improved. The Islamic State must be destroyed, but the candidate offers no strategy for doing so. Eleven million undocumented immigrants must be deported, but Mr. Trump does not tell us how he would accomplish this legally or practically.

What the candidate does offer is a series of prejudices and gut feelings, most of them erroneous. . . .

Most alarming is Mr. Trump’s contempt for the Constitution and the unwritten democratic norms upon which our system depends. He doesn’t know what is in the nation’s founding document. . . .  Worse, he doesn’t seem to care about its limitations on executive power. He has threatened that those who criticize him will suffer when he is president. He has vowed to torture suspected terrorists and bomb their innocent relatives, no matter the illegality of either act. He has vowed to constrict the independent press. He went after a judge whose rulings angered him, exacerbating his contempt for the independence of the judiciary by insisting that the judge should be disqualified because of his Mexican heritage. . . .

Many Americans do not like either candidate this year . We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.

I suppose they decided to unleash their biggest guns now, rather than waiting for October, to keep Trump from getting any convention bounce or being accepted even more widely as an ordinary Republican candidate. Of course the Post has generally been a liberal paper, except for their fondness for Middle Eastern wars, so one would hardly expect them to support Trump. Even their most important in-house conservatives (George Will and Charles Krauthammer) are firmly in the anti-Trump camp. So I guess they decided to go all out on this one.

Philippi

Philippi is a spectacular ruined city in northern Greece, six miles (10 km) from the Aegean Sea. (Pictures are all from Wikipedia)

The site had been a Greek colony of no particular significance, but in 357 BCE it was seized by Philip II of Macedon and repopulated with Macedonians. The site interested Philip II for two reasons: because of a nearby gold mine, and because it occupied a strategic spot where an old route running north from the sea crossed the great east-west route that the Macedonians made a royal road. Above is the theater, one of the few surviving structures from Philip's time.

That road was later improved by the Romans, who called it the Via Egnatia. A surviving piece.

In 168 BCE the Romans conquered the Kingdom of Macedon and incorporated it into their empire. They divided Macedon into four provinces. Philippi was not the capital of any of them, and it languished. Then in 42 BCE Octavian and Marc Antony fought a battle just outside the walls against Brutus and Cassius, the assassins Caesar. According to our sources the battle involved about 200,000 men, one of the largest of Roman times, and 40,000 were killed. Octavian and Antony were victorious. After the battle they allowed some of their veterans to retire to the town, founding a new Roman colony there. (The Agora)

That colony became a "little Rome," government by Roman law, and Latin long remained the dominant language. (View of the Roman Forum from the Acropolis, with a Byzantine Basilica beyond)

Latin inscription near the Forum.

Relief carvings by the theater.

Small relief carving of Nike by the entrance to the arena, likely put up by gladiators.

In about 50 CE, Philippi was visited by the Apostle Paul, who encouraged the fledgling Christian community there. Around 62 he wrote a famous letter to the Philippians, preserved in the New Testament. (Yes, this is one of the genuine letters of Paul, held by almost all experts to be the apostle's work. It is the source of one of my favorite Christian texts: Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.) After the emperors converted to Christianity they showered largesse on what was by the fourth century a dying town, helping to build four significant churches of which ruins can still be seen. These pillars are parts of Basilica A, a sizable church dedicated to St. Paul.

Remains of Basilica B.

Mosaic floor in another church, an octagonal building of around 400 CE.

After the fifth century the town lasted in obscure poverty down to the Ottoman conquest, when it was finally abandoned. (Entrance to the Roman Library)