Why did Trump cancel the Afghanistan talks?

It has been an open secret that Donald Trump’s envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalizad has been having ‘secret’ talks with the Taliban about the withdrawal of some of the 13,000 US troops from that country as part of a larger peace deal. Ending US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were Trump’s key promises in his election campaign and the lack of achieving any of those may have been heavy on his mind so the fact of there being negotiations over troop withdrawals were not a surprise.
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The fact that ‘both sides’ criticize you does not mean you are neutral

Mainstream media journalists and editors like to pride themselves on their ‘political neutrality’, that they do not take sides. Some even claim they do not vote in elections because of their commitment to this neutrality. Thoughtful media analyses have long since debunked that idea, pointing out that though some journalists might not consciously bias their reporting (though others of course do), the institutional filters that exist in media institutions ensure that only people who have a certain limited range of views can survive in the media institutions. These people are then given the freedom to say and write what they want without explicit orders from the top because the media entity is confident that they will stay within the boundaries. If on occasion a journalist goes rogue and challenges the consensus, they are taken to task or dismissed, thus warning any other journalists of the dangers of straying from their assigned path
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Making films in the days before post-production sound

I recently watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) that can be seen in its entirety online (see below). I have long been a fan of Hitchcock’s films but had not seen this one and was curious as to what his early efforts looked like.

It is not a great film but I learned something about how limited filmmakers were in their options in those days. As I was watching it, it felt strangely different and I finally pinned it down to the lack of ambient sounds, especially a soundtrack. With modern films, one hears music that sets the mood, footsteps when people walk, doors shutting, and all the other sounds that accompany the action. But in this case, there was mostly silence apart from dialogue, and it was the absence of such sounds that seemed strange.

In reading about the film later, I learned that in 1930, there was no post-production possibility of adding sounds after filming was completed, like they do now with Foley artists and adding a musical score. Any sound in the film had to be picked up by the microphones that picked up the dialogue while filming the scene. So for example, in this film at the 34:00 mark, we hear a character’s thoughts as a voiceover while he is shaving while a radio played music. How this was done was by having the actor’s voice pre-recorded and played on a phonograph while an actual orchestra on the set played the music.

Here’s the full film.

Why you should never listen to the foreign policy establishment on war

It is a predictable pattern. As the US gears up for war, any war, the foreign policy establishment reacts like soldiers to a bugle call, quickly lining up to support it, irrespective of where they supposedly stand on other political issues, and whether they are self-identified as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

On the occasion of the death of Leslie Gelb, one of the many ‘liberal interventionists’ who cheered on the Iraq war, Philip Weiss reminds us of something that Gelb said when asked later to explain why he initially supported the invasion of Iraq, something that he said that he later regretted.

“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

That pretty much sums it up. ‘Credibility’ is not dependent on being right but on being supportive of wars. All these people in the establishment media know the unwritten rules of the game, that if you oppose, or just even seriously question, any of America’s wars, you are not considered ‘serious’ and will immediately become a pariah and lose your media and professional platforms. As the cliché goes, they know which side of their bread is buttered.

For these people, it is easier to quickly support the war and then when things turn sour, as they almost inevitably do, to express regret and say that ‘everyone’ agreed with them. In this way, blame is spread so thinly that no one gets expelled from the ranks of punditry and they can respond enthusiastically to the next bugle call. This is why we still see Andrew Sullivan, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and the rest still around pontificating in the media, while people like Phil Donahue who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning were sent into the wilderness and remain there.

In-depth look at Tulsi Gabbard

Presidential candidate and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is a bit of an enigma, hard to pin a label on. She has incurred the wrath and venom of the Democratic party establishment for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to involve the fact that she does not take an instinctively hostile attitude to the designated enemies of the political establishment, namely Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. Edward Isaac-Devore tried to understand the reasons for this antipathy. He says that the party establishment seems convinced that she has some ulterior motives for running for president even though they cannot articulate what it might be.
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Elizabeth Warren shuts down fossil fuel industry talking points

During the climate change town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo of CNN raised the issue of whether fighting climate change would require forcing people to give up their straws etc. Warren quickly shut down that line of questioning, saying that the fossil fuel industry wants to put the onus of cleaning up the environment on us and for us to be always talking about such things as violating our personal freedoms, in order to distract from their major role in destroying the environment.

42 as the sum of three cubes

In March, I wrote about the successful effort, after 64 years of computational striving, of finding integer solutions to the problem x3+y3+z3=33. This equation, along with x3+y3+z3=42, were the only two equations for which neither a solution nor a proof that no solution exists had been found for the right hand side being below 100. Finding that solution meant that only the 42 problem remained unsolved.

Now 42 problem too has been solved and in a nod to Douglas Adams, Andrew Sutherland (MIT) and Andrew Booker (Bristol), the finders of the solution, announced it on webpages titled Life, the Universe and Everything.

Every cube of a whole number is within one of a multiple of nine, which means that a sum of three cubes must be within three of a multiple of nine. So numbers of the form 9𝑘+49k+4 or 9𝑘+59k+5 cannot be written as the sum of three cubes.

In 1992, Roger Heath-Brown conjectured that every other whole number can be written as the sum of three cubes, in infinitely many different ways. Mathematicians on the whole seem to have been convinced by Heath-Brown’s argument that this ought to be true – but actually finding ways to write any particular number as a sum of three cubes remains a difficult problem.

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Farcical US attempt at bribery

You may recall the Iranian oil tanker that was seized by the British in the Mediterranean and taken to Gibraltar because of suspicions that it was taking its cargo to Syria. It was released later over the protests of the US government that wanted to seize the ship. It has now been revealed that the US government tried to bribe the ship’s captain to take the ship somewhere where the US could seize it but he ignored them.

The US state department has confirmed it offered millions of dollars to the captain of an Iranian oil tanker which is at the centre of a diplomatic row.

Brian Hook, head of the department’s Iran Action Group, emailed the captain of the Adrian Darya 1 about sailing it somewhere the US could seize it.
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According to the Financial Times, Mr Hook sent an email to the Indian captain of the Adrian Darya 1, Akhilesh Kumar, before it imposed sanctions on the ship.

“I am writing with good news,” the email read. The Trump administration was willing to pay the captain several million dollars to take the ship somewhere it could be seized by US authorities.

The emails reportedly carried a state department phone number to make sure the captain – who took over the ship after it was impounded – did not think they were fake.

Mr Hook told the newspaper that the state department was “working very closely with the maritime community to disrupt and deter illicit oil exports”.

Mr Kumar ignored the emails. The US then imposed sanctions on him personally when they blacklisted the Adrian Darya 1.
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A brief history of slavery in the US

In The 1619 Project of the New York Times that I wrote about earlier, the opening piece that frames the rest of the magazine is by Nikole Hannah-Jones. She looks at the history of how slavery became embedded in the very legal fabric of the nation from the very beginning in August 1619 and she argues that it has been the struggle by slaves and their descendants to achieve basic decency that has resulted in so many of us having rights that the original slaves and their descendants were denied.
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Getting bears out of dumpsters

Via Carla Sinclair, I came across this video of police using a ladder to get out a bear cub that had fallen into a dumpster. But I was impressed at the earlier efforts of two other bears to try and rescue the cub themselves, even though they failed.

But this idea of using ladders to rescue cubs is not original. Back in 2012, I linked to a video of a New Mexico couple who used the same ladder idea to get three bear cubs out of a dumpster.