"Notes" for THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE, Motivation for Don Jr. E-Mail Leak

Memo

THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE

A SiliconCorp/MouseFilm Co-Production

From: Script Analyst Division

To: Suit #435

Date: 17 July 2017  3 August 2017

Subject: Your memo on our Notes on script draft 12

      re: Motivating Leaking of Trump Jr.'s e-mails on meeting with Russian agents OR
           "Payback is a Mother*cker"

Solly, Sweetheart!

We've suggested conflating several Intelligence big-wigs into a composite character we're calling Alan Foster and picturing, say, Willem Dafoe for the role. For the small-scale version of the film, he could be in one location: a spartan, windowless office through whose door we get glimpses of a 21st-c., high-tech version of a bureaucracy out of Kafka. 

We've recommended cutting much of the dialog on Foster's motivation and replacing it with visuals in the office and with a repeated — repeated within reason — intercut with historical footage. 

Visuals: On Foster's desk is a photo of him in combat gear as a young man in Vietnam; depending on what rank we want him at that time we have either on his helmet or the helmet of someone else visible the slogan "Payback is a motherfucker." Posted on his office walls, increasing as the film goes on, are printouts of news stories of Donald Trump Sr. dissing the Intelligence services. 

Intercut in LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE we'd like historical footage of Trump at the CIA, before their commemorative wall with the words clearly visible, "In Honor of Those Members of the Central Intelligence Agency Who Gave Their Lives in the Service of Their Country." Audio here would make it clear that Trump is winging the speech and digressing to gripe about media coverage of his inauguration. No big chunks, but sound-bite by sound-bite selections from such as this:

And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media.  They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.  (Laughter and applause.)  And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.  And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number-one stop is exactly the opposite -- exactly.  And they understand that, too. 

We did a thing yesterday at the speech.  Did everybody like the speech?  (Applause.)  I’ve been given good reviews.  But we had a massive field of people.  You saw them.  Packed.  I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field.  I say, wait a minute, I made a speech.  I looked out, the field was -- it looked like a million, million and a half people.  They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.  And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well.  I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. 

In fact, when I first started, I said, oh, no.  The first line, I got hit by a couple of drops.  And I said, oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it.  But the truth is that it stopped immediately.  It was amazing.  And then it became really sunny.  And then I walked off and it poured right after I left.  It poured.  But, you know, we have something that’s amazing because we had -- it looked -- honestly, it looked like a million and a half people.  Whatever it was, it was.  But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.  And I turn on -- and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.  And it said we drew 250,000 people.  Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie.  We had 250,000 people literally around -- you know, in the little bowl that we constructed.  That was 250,000 people.  The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed.  So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty.  And I think they’re going to pay a big price. 

Some of the sound-bites could be coming through a speaker in Foster's office, with him listening very carefully while doing other work. He shows very little emotion, but is getting increasingly pissed off. 

So: When Foster finally passes along the e-mail intercepts to be leaked to the press (New York Times as it turned out historically), there's no problem whatever with his motivation and no need for extended dialog. This guy is of the school, "Don't get mad, get even," and he's going to be infuriated by Trump's being oblivious not only to his immediate audience but to their dead, commemorated behind him.

It's "Show, don't tell," and we stand by our recommendation to cut the invented dialog here to a minimum and let the visuals and Trump's own words do the work.

I hope this will answer the concerns of The Powers That Be. We in my Division are all very excited about THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE and thrilled to be working with so fine an operation (and if you can get Dafoe for a small but crucial role, we'll be ecstatic).

==================================

Addendum: We're working in Trump's Tweet on Trans-sexuals in the military — leading from the rear by Twitter! — and the release of the transcripts of conversations with Mexican and Australian leaders. I'm thinking a darkly comic montage of action/reaction, with the Trump character totally oblivious of how much he's pissing off the intelligence services and military brass with his casual contempt.

        

North Korea, Nukes ... Existential Threats

I responded to a "What's on your mind, Richard" — though if they knew me well enough to call me by my first name, they'd know I go by "Rich" — I responded to one of those "What's on your mind prompts on Facebook with this. Caution: It's depressing.

What's on my mind is the 4th of July fireworks offered by North Korea, leading to thinking about Tom Lehrer's song, "Who's Next," on nuclear proliferation, leading to a line by Sergeant Yanek, the teacher of the course I took in the early 1960s in CBR: Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare.

Another student in the course tried to waste some time and/or was really interested and asked Sergeant Yanek about concerns publicized on the upcoming test by the USSR of some 50 megaton or 100 megaton or whatever really big "device" and Yanek said that there was some worry that an explosion that large might crack the crust of the Earth or get the planet wobbling a bit on its axis, which in turn could crack the crust .... And the student said, "You don't sound too concerned," and Yanek paused a beat and said, "Well, I probably shouldn't say this since the motto of the course is 'Survive, Struggle, and Prevail,' but the way I figure it, by the time the Russians set off their bombs and we set off ours, and the English and French and Chinese and maybe Israelis and God-knows-who-else set off theirs, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!! So, no, I'm not worried about no 50- or 100-megaton Russian superbomb."

A North Korean bomb that can go on an ICBM is an issue, but I live next to a US West Coast deep-water port with container-ship traffic, and if the DPRK or anyone else can make a bomb small enough to fit into a shipping container and not be too obvious, well, "they" can take out a lot of Americans, including, even in California, a lot of Republicans.

In terms of existential threats, the North Koreans aren't an issue. The Americans and Russians are: between us we have enough warheads to risk nuclear winter or at least put big parts of human culture back to the late Medieval. And our leaders really need to keep working on that (things were worse during the Cold War).

It would make me very unhappy — more exactly, very dead — if Port Hueneme, CA, and a big part of Ventura County got reduced to a rapidly expanding ball of white-hot plasma; but H. sapiens and the USA could take the loss. A serious thermonuclear exchange, and "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!" or at least risk species death. And we came close to that in my lifetime: not just the Cuban Missile crisis, but on the quiet day of 28 September 1983, when the balloon almost went up, and a whole lot else, because of a computer glitch.

Whoops. Messrs. Trump and Putin et al. need to stop messing around.

Blood Libel: Donald Trump, Mika Brezinski, Genesis 9.5 (and Leviticus et al. passim)

I'm not going to write a formal post on the subject — with a draft on MS-Word and revision and proofreading and all that — but this much I'll add to the commentary on Donald Trump's tweet of 29 June 2017 on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, as reported on Business Insider: "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"

To tweak for the tweet an old snarky comment: we knew Trump was a bully and sexist when the Electoral College hired him, so we have only a limited right to complain. Even allowing that limitation, however — and as an American I claim complaining as a God-given right, Constitutionally protected — even allowing that limitation, there are three serious problems with the tweet, in addition to its being a tweet (and sorry folks, but the President of the United States shouldn't be tweeting, period, except maybe an occasional "Happy Thanksgiving" or such).

First, blood comes with taboos in our culture and others: Biblically, it's the life of an organism and forbidden as human food in God's covenant with Noah. (So religious folk all upset over homosexuality shouldn't speak on the subject while eating blood sausage.) On the positive side, as the life of the organism it's a crucial point of Christian communion: "Take; drink." / "for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins." And there are concerns with menstrual blood in the cultures of the Israelites and Jews and others.

Trump's mentions of blood, though, are unusual nowadays, and creepy.

They move from creepy into dangerous with at least two other considerations.

That Mika Brezinski and Joe Scarborough would track down Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago three nights running would indicate a great need to get to Mr. Trump; that they'd do it while Brezinski was undergoing complications from surgery would make them nearly desperate to contact him.

Whatever else was going on, such insistent attempts would indicate either pathetic stalking or a pathetic attempt to get to the Mr. Trump for one reason or another. As an absolute certainty, it would indicate a power relationship in which Mr. Trump is the superior.

Trump is the President of the United States; it's weird he'd brag about power in such a relatively trivial relationship.

It's weirder that he'd brag in such a way that he can be easily and quickly be shown to be lying.

Mike Brezinski is a TV personality only, so she's without significant power; she does have significant exposure and people could see whether or not "She was bleeding badly from a face-lift" on or about New Year's 2016/17. News outlets simply need to publish a photo, such as this one.

People lie for many reasons. For a person in power to tell a blatant lie is a power move. As George Orwell and Eric Hoffer pointed out primarily about "the old monster," Stalin — descriptive phrase from a Marxist opponent of Stalinism — Stalin's twists and turns functioned among other things to make intellectuals go into contortions to follow the Party Line. And more normal folk would have to show their faith in the great leader by showing it as unquestioning faith, ignoring logic and reason and sometimes their senses.

If "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," then Power is the power to get people to say, and ultimately believe, otherwise. If Trump says Brezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift," that is that, whatever photos and other witnesses might say. For authoritarians and totalitarians and bullies and power-freaks from Shakespeare's farcical sexist Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (4.5) to tragedy-producing tyrants: for their inferiors "To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason" (The True Believer, §56).

And that means heresy against the word of the leader and treason as disloyalty, e.g.,  to assert that Mika Brezinski wasn't bleeding.

National Security Issues Generally and Terrorism Specifically Are Political Issues (Back to a Very Basic "Basic")

I'm going to disagree with an assertion I heard on a very respectable NPR program this morning that national security issues — with protection from terrorism most immediately in question — aren't, or shouldn't be, political. They are political, and should be. 

Let's go back to one really basic point among the Basics.

Among the ways we humans divide up, there is the Soft-Hearted School that says at an extreme that human life, or at least the lives of Americans, is/are of infinite value, and "If it saves just one American life, it's worth it." Opposed to that is the Hard-Headed school that asks just what "it" we are talking about and how much "it" costs, including costs in terms of other values, such as freedom.

That gets us into questions that are difficult and dangerous — involving philosophy, theology, religion, and really basic values — and political.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, so if safety is an absolute good, let's move toward a police state. But "most Americans" isn't all Americans, and some people would be a whole lot less safe in a police state. Which gets us into politics: Who pays for that safety, in several senses of the word "pays," and who profits?

            If you don't get the point of the question, ask around among Black Americans, or families with memories of escaping the secret police and/or death squads of the Czar, KGB, Shah, Stasi, Pinochet government, and so on for a substantial list.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, but necessarily less free. Which gets us into safety vs. liberty — and again into politics.

One can and should believe each individual life of infinite value, but when practical matters come up, people must be willing to suspend that belief. For a prime example where it is necessary to do so, it is a moral imperative to perform triage, which can mean selecting whom to treat and possibly save, whom to let die. If every life is of infinite value, and we're talking the same sort of infinities here, it becomes impossible to do the bloody arithmetic of choosing to let even one person die that others might live. If you're going to perform the ethical imperative of minimizing casualties and suffering when you can, you find yourself deciding — as a practical matter then and there —the STAR TREKian question of the needs of the few or the one vs. those of the many.

Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school and hold that the sanctity of human life is a fundamental and absolutely necessary myth, but necessarily mythic: the belief requires either the Leap into the Absurd of believing in a caring God who chose human beings to be special; or the belief requires the outright absurdity of thinking that human beings on our own have some sort of special value.

            As the Bible saith, or Koheleth the Preacher, anyway, saith, in a stretch of Scripture rarely quoted by the pious,

I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts.  For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity [=emptiness].  All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3.10-21)

It is very dangerous to deny the sanctity of even a single human life and sacrifice one for the survival of the group. It is also sometimes necessary. It is dangerous to assert the rights of privacy and movement and to put at risk the lives of Americans, including American children: lives that could be saved by government surveillance and freewheeling policing. If we wish to retain some privacy and freedom of movement, if we wish freedom from government control, we wish upon ourselves risk.

We don't have to resolve these issues, and we can't. We can try to balance various good things and risks and argue about the balance. That is, we can, and do, engage in politics.

Sy Hersh on Syrian Gas/Trump's Missiles, Rich Erlich on Where Rich Erlich Is Coming From on the Issue

Link to Coverage of Hersh Article (see below for link to the article itself).

At an informal high school group reunion after the end of US warfare in Vietnam, and later when I was talking to someone who'd been in the CBR biz during the 'Nam years (that's "Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare") — I was told that despite my training in microbiology I would not have gone to Fort Detrick to make new and better bubonic plague had I been drafted but would've been infantry in 'Nam itself, probably with a promising (brief?) career as a tunnel rat. Still, I considered submitting to conscription and trying to get to Detrick as opposed to other options, in part on the ethical grounds that if white phosphorous and napalm were okay, the threat of "germ warfare" wasn't all that out of line. (Bigger part was my not being keen on the outdoor life, plus some idea from ROTC about what infantry grunts do and can suffer.)

And from there I came to the question raised by a student in the CBR course I took of why the international conventions prohibiting CBR have mostly held, whereas there was no similar success with long-dead conventions against submarines' blowing ships out of the water without warning, or fleets of aircraft bombing cities and starting fire-storms that would incinerate civilians by the thousands. 

HINT: Check out probable casualties by kilogram of various lethal stuff. (I found the figures in the 1970 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, and yes, Virginia, there are people who work out tables of such things, even as human beings before and during World War I worked out gunnery tables for rolling barrages that maximized enemy casualties while minimizing one's own, including casualties from "friendly fire.")

And from there I came to the conviction that we should support the international prohibitions against CBR on the grounds that any rules limiting weapons were better than none — but come off it! Biological warfare is inherently dangerous to the human species and therefore should be out of bounds, but gas warfare is ethically no worse than various ways of burning people with other kinds of chemicals, or using mines or cluster munitions to maim them. (And Virginia: There were people who worked out that maiming enemies is more effective than killing them. Do the math on how many people are taken out of military action by a death as opposed to severe bodily harm, and the psychology of what people — young men and older boys most specifically — most fear.)

And so I can't get too excited over "Red Lines" crossed in Syria with gas warfare and tend to believe that Assad et al. wouldn't use gas so long as they can deliver more effective agents to kill, wound, maim, and/or traumatized enemies and/or perceived enemies and/or people in the general vicinity thereof. (See "collateral damage" as the euphemism of choice for blowing the shit out of said people in the general vicinity. Or burning them. Well, etc.: There are lots of different munitions.)

And so I think we should definitely consider the argument by the usually reliable Seymour Hersh that the Syrians did not use Sarin gas and, therefore, weren't in line for the missile attack ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Please do see the article, and please try to help it go viral. Whether he's right or wrong in this case, the article and where it was and was not published raises important issues. 

Hersh article in Die Welt: Here

Note: The war wonks went from "CBR" to "NBC": Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical" warfare, which helped allow the G. W. Bush administration to conflate poison gas with hydrogen bombs as "WMD" (which has its own labelling issues) and now. for homeland security purposes, "CBRNE": Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives.

Teaching Controversies: Global Warming

            An energetically polemical editorial in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel on "Global warming in the classroom" asserts that "Indiana" — presumably the Indiana General Assembly — erred in passing "an 'academic freedom resolution giving teachers great latitude in how they help students 'analyze and critique scientific theories,'" finding that resolution "almost an invitation to teach flat-Earth-theory mumbo jumbo and Earth-is-the center-of–the-universe nonsense" (22 June 2017).

            I taught a course in rhetoric and composition on "The Literature of the Life Sciences" where students analyzed and wrote about scientific controversies, including the "nonsense" of the theory of spontaneous generation: that under the proper conditions, life nowadays can arise and develop: e.g."if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog," as Hamlet puts it, or later when what we'd call bacteria arise in a suitable medium exposed to air.

            Spontaneous generation theory went against the Book of Genesis and its assertion that creatures were, well, created and since then reproduce "each after its kind" — but it was widely accepted until effectively exploded by elegant experiments, notably by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

            Studying that debate teaches science as a method — not a body of facts that dispel nonsense — but a method and as a human activity with social, political, philosophical, theological, and historical contexts. (Why wasn't there religious opposition to spontaneous generation theory the way there was to evolution?)

            Similarly, why did educated Europeans and others from ancient Greece on deny the evidence of their senses and come to believe the Earth wasn't flat, if lumpy, but a sphere? And how can we know that they knew? (Hint: Check the "ball and scepter" motif with kings: they don't hold a plate to signal power on our planet.)

            And, of course, it took a long time for the theory of a sun-centered universe to be accepted, and long time after that before the universe expanded to the universe or multiverse of today. (And I've got $100 for the favorite charity of the writers of "Classroom" if any one of them can write out from memory the main evidence for why common sense is wrong and the sun does not revolve around the Earth.)

            A tough job for teachers is getting kids interested, and those kids should at least be curious why their elders are so exercised over whether and how the Earth is warming and what, if anything we can and should do about it if it is.

            There's a great teaching opportunity there, not preaching some truth or other. It's just that teaching controversies requires broadly-educated teachers perhaps team teaching, and literate people reading essays of analysis, not giving multiple-choice tests.

Opioids, Me, and Numbers

            I'm sitting at my desk debating whether or not to take a Tramadol tablet (50 mg, generic for Ultram): an opioid. I usually take them near bedtime, when I do take them, but not too near since I take other medications then, and the combination can get my sleeping heart rate and blood pressure inconveniently low — or in some other way get me dizzy. I've had the Tramadol prescription for a number of months now, but have only taken a small number and wonder if I'm going to be counted by some activist or other as part of "THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC."

            I think about such things since I've fitfully followed the opioid story in the newspapers and just listened to "Opioid Overdoses: Mass Casualty Zones in America" on 1A, the NPR discussion feature from WAMU in Boston that's replace The Diane Rehm Show.

            Even in so respectable a venue, I heard few significant numbers. A literal epidemic is "the rapid spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time, usually two weeks or less. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic" (Wikipedia, "Epidemic").

            What are the rates of opioid overdoses per 100,000 in various areas? Of those, how many per 100,000 population are fatal? How many are intentional suicides? How many are accidental overdoses with prescription drugs produced under FDA supervision? How many are accidental overdoses with street drugs? How many are accidental overdoses from people using the drugs improperly through ignorance of proper dosage and/or a desire to get high?

            I'm an old man, and I've lived through a number of "epidemics" and "crises" hyped in part because people think, correctly, that the best way to get attention (and funding) is mongering fear. So there was an earlier crisis in painkillers — inevitably addicting for some portion of the population — and then a crisis in pain because many people in puritanical ("Suck it up; 'No pain, no gain'") American society couldn't get sufficient or sufficiently-strong pain-killing drugs. And now THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC!

            (Rule of thumb: Last generation's solutions can make for some of this generation's problems.)

            If there were generally knowledge of the relevant numbers, and their implications, we might have an informed discussion of what might be the most effective responses and determine what's politically possible. I'd like that: I spent the biggest part of my life in southwest Ohio, near Dayton, a center of the "epidemic"; and I'm taking, now and then, an opioid. I'd like lower-volume, logically-respectable discussion, starting with statistics using the phrase "per 100,000 population of ____."

            Accidental overdoses from street drugs might be most immediately dealt with by providing FDA-tested, properly labeled drugs. Suicides are a different matter. Both involve serious discussion of difficult political problems. For one thing, if despairing people in Rust Belt America don't kill themselves, what are we, as individuals, communities, and a country, willing to do for them to relieve understandable despair?

* * *

            One of the participants on the 1A panel had as her central talking point, "Addiction is a disease"; all right, but so is cholera — and central to preventing cholera epidemics were public-works sanitation projects. We have to look at drug use in its social context, and drug issues are social and political issues. So two-and-a-half closely-related things to end with: (1) Opioids are pain-killers, so we should expect some addicts. His second point was that we can't talk about "the drug" and "the user." There will probably be a number of drugs for one thing. More important is that social context. So (2) Remember that we did NOT have a heroin epidemic with former military heroin users returning from Vietnam. The great majority were able to leave their pain and heroin back in 'Nam. Those who returned to more pain in the US and available narcotics often went back on the needle. So there's that rule that with any pain-killer, a certain proportion of users will get addicted, to which we can add that opioids are psychoactive, and any drug that can get you buzzed will be abused. But the number of addicts and abusers can be reduced with social support, with reducing their pain, and with moving toward a society where we address compassionately and sensibly — using science and logic, figurative head as well as figurative heart — our problems and don't go immediately and exclusively for a pharmacological quick fix or criminalizing disease.