Everyone is a hero in their own story

by

by liberal japonicus

An open thread-y post to talk about this NYT daily

An explosive whistleblower report claims that the Justice Department is asking government lawyers to lie to the courts and that that has forced career officials to choose between upholding the Constitution or pledging loyalty to the president. Today, I speak to that whistleblower.
 
I have thoughts, but I'm working on something about the recent election in Japan, so I thought I would toss this up. 

23 thoughts on “Everyone is a hero in their own story”

  1. I wish I could say I’m surprised.
    I think a more accurate opening line might refer to “the Attorney General” or “senior political appointees in the Justice Department”. Something that would make clear that this is not (hoping that it is not, at least yet) something that everybody in the Department of Justice is on board with, and rolling out to attorneys in the rest of the government.

  4. Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
    1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
    2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he’d try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him — see “hero in his own mind”. To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
    I’m already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
    Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.

  5. I’ve never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
    If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
    Of all the things I value most of all
    I look upon my Earth
    And feel the warmth
    And know that it is good
    The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it’s built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early ’70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement – wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
    Ozzy’s voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
    Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath’s musicianship and range a bit more. It’s the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy’s passing.
    I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath’s influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.

  6. The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it’s built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early ’70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement – wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
    It’s funny you used the word “moody,” nous. I get a “Ride my See-Saw” (by The Moody Blues) vibe from that song.
    Another song that’s not quite as far as from Sabbath’s familiar style, but still a bit different, is “Never Say Die.” It’s not exactly a happy song lyrically, but listening to it fills my heart with joy about as much as any song I can think of. (Needless to say, I might be a bit of a weirdo in that regard.)

  7. …legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
    I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE’s by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.

  8. My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM

  9. Then there’s prog metal, so, yeah…
    I get annoyed with the metal technocrats. I can listen to clinical demonstrations of technical proficiency for a bit, but I can listen to 70s/Bon Scott AC/DC for who-knows-how-long. It’s not a contest. Make me feel something. (There’s also a happy medium, but the extremes are good for illustration.)

  10. One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s management style is getting other people to break laws to fulfill his demands, leaving them liable for their actions but not him. Mike Pence is the poster boy for this. It is unsurprising this attitude filtered down.
    And a fair bit of early Sabbath is almost prog, mellotrons and pianos shifting through various grooves, much like the more metal songs made up of a collection of power riffs strung together. They never attempted the psuedoclassical styles used by pure prog bands.

  11. Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
    Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.

  12. The inimitable Tom Lehrer died at 97 a couple of days ago. It’s some small comfort to learn that the good don’t always die young.
    People surely exist who enjoy both Tom Lehrer and Ozzy Osbourne in equal measure; alas, I am not among them.
    Which is too bad, because my 21yo nephew is a dedicated heavy metal rocker. He is the lead guitarist and main songwriter of DefCon:Dead, a widely-unknown college band. I have gone so far as to attend a couple of their gigs, and survived. I can even say I genuinely like a couple of their songs, in the privacy of my house where I get to operate the volume control. But I still can’t quite “get into” heavy metal.
    It was my nephew who texted me the news of Tom Lehrer’s death yesterday, because he has been a fan from a young age (my doing, of course). His reaction to Ozzy’s death was: “He was a hero to my heroes.” The kid knows his heavy metal genealogy, it seems.
    Anyway, I mention all this to say that my nephew is one of those who are so made as to enjoy both Tom Lehrer and heavy metal, and I kind of envy him for that.
    –TP

  13. Tom Lehrer was wonderful. And even fans can find some new songs (see below) – for various reasons I recently mentioned “Wernher von Braun” to a friend who I knew liked him, and she had never heard it.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&list=RDQEJ9HrZq7Ro&start_radio=1
    And of course, his reply to the question of why he was no longer doing satire is a classic: that satire was obsolete after Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
    Also, his relinquishing of all his rights to his compositions was a rather heroic act. And the website publicising this reveals an amazing number of songs, many of which I had never heard of, and although presumably not all of them are classics I still intend to browse around them…
    https://tomlehrersongs.com/

  14. Here’s one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
    Tool – Lateralus
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs
    Tool was playing with the Fibonacci Sequence all through the song. The opening riff after the acoustic intro is measures of 9, 8, and 7 for the 16th step in the sequence (987). The lyrics also play with steps in the sequence:
    Black [1]
    Then [1]
    White are [2]
    All I See [3]
    In My Infancy [5]
    Red and yellow then came to be [8]
    Reaching out to me [5]
    Lets me see [3]
    As below so above and beyond, I imagine [13]
    Drawn beyond the lines of reason [8]
    Push the envelope, [5]
    Watch it bend [3]
    Etc.
    Not everything is done in sequence in the song, but there’s enough to geek out over, and the rest is thematically related to the search for patterns and exploration.
    And the outro lyrics: “Spiral out, keep going.”

  15. A friend suggested Ozzy and Tom from a duet, the first song would be “I Am Irony Man.” I’ll just see myself out…

  18. I’m currently reading “Harmonic Experience” by W.A. Mathieu, in which he explores the mathematical nature and structure of musical harmony. Very briefly, he looks at explaining the human experience and phenomenon of tonal music (very broadly construed) in terms of the mathematical relationships between pitches, as manifested in the overtone series.
    The exploration is not just theoretical or cerebral, there is a singing and listening practice that goes along with it all, the goal of that being to learn to feel the relationships in your body as physical phenomena. But it’s an interesting read even without that.
    Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms. Mostly ratios between different elements in the work, I think.
    Humans are pattern-seeking critters.

  19. Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
    In my freshman year music tutorial at St. John’s College (Santa Fé) we did a lab where we tuned two strings in unison and then changed the speaking length of one of them, listening for the places where they sounded consonant or dissonant and calculating the ratios where those things occurred. Then change the speaking lengths of both and tuned to unison again and repeat the process. Fun lab.
    We ended up getting into a discussion about what, exactly, consonance and dissonance sound like, because a few people were taking consonance as meaning “pleasing to my aesthetic taste” and they had a taste for clashing waveforms. Once we all agreed with the literal sense of the words – together-sounding and apart-sounding – the conversation moved on smoothly.

  20. Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
    When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of “townies”.
    The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice’s Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
    I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.

  21. I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
    So…a professional MIDIator?

  22. So…a professional MIDIator?
    I asked for that, didn’t I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
    My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a “Themes From the Nutcracker Suite” piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.

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