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n Victoria, Australia, last week, a few dozen cows escaped their pasture. The farmers rounded them all up except one. A neighbor, Kay Laing, found it trapped on her trampoline. The cow was fine. It just couldn't stand up on the springy surface. So with the help of a tractor, the farmers were able to get the cow onto solid ground, and she walked the mile back home. Maybe we should call her Bouncing Bessie.

In April 2017 Trump told an audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was about to take bold action on foreign guest workers. He promised to end the "theft of American prosperity." Foreign worker visas "should never, ever be used to replace American workers." he said.

But the executive order he signed was not bold, as Trump said, but tepid. It simply directed four cabinet agencies to "suggest reforms" with no deadline for submitting their ideas.

There are also work visas for low-skilled workers like the staff at Mar-a-Lago, which had for years relied on the very workers Trump wanted kept out - foreigners. Trump said during one of the Republican primary debates that Mar-a-Lago, like other local seasonal resort properties, had no choice but to import workers. "People don't want a short-term job," he said. "So, we will bring people in, and we will send the people out. All done legally."

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida broke in. "That's not accurate," he said, because at least three hundred Americans who sought work at Mar-a-Lago were not hired. That, Rubio said, helped Trump push down wages, the very issue Trump complained was caused by too many foreign workers in America.

"When you bring someone in on one of these visas they can't go work for anybody else," Rubio noted. "They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don't have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that's why you bring workers from abroad."

Trump kept interrupting Rubio, making it difficult for those watching to understand the debate unless they read the transcript later.

The public record showed that hundreds of local residents did want jobs but were not hired.

In July 2017 the Trump administration decided to let in more foreign workers, not exactly what Trump promised on inauguration day when he said every decision would be made to promote American jobs and buy American.

American "businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm due to a lack of available temporary nonagricultural workers" would be able to hire an additional 15,000 foreigners in temporary low-skill, low-paid jobs.

That would increase supply by more than 40 percent for the second half of the year.

This was a prime example of Trump not walking his campaign talk in office, but also of driving down wages, just as Rubio had said was Trump's goal.

In Palm Beach, for example, hundreds of people were willing to work at the wages offered by Mar-a-Lago, roughly $10 to $13 an hour, for the 2016-17 season.

Locally four people wanted work for every low-skill resort job offered.

That means there was no shortage of local labor for the seasonal positions. With so many workers available, hiring locals might not even put upward pressure on wages. When there is so much more demand for work than employers could supply, employers can offer less pay and still recruit people.

But workers who come from overseas on visas are subject to more control. Their employer can arrange pay that depends on their staying until the last day of the season and hold back part of their pay through "bemusing" arrangements. That means anyone who gets out of line, anyone who gets fired, gets shorted on his or her pay and sent home early.

President Trump declared July 24 the start of Made in America Week.

Trump said he would be "recognizing the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity."

The same week a tiny classified ad ran twice in the back pages of The Palm Beach Post. It offered work for "3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club." The jobs paid wages only - "No tips:'

The ads did not identify the employer, but the fax was a Mar-a-Lago number.

A week earlier, Mar-a-Lago had applied to the Labor Department - run by a Trump appointee - for visas to import thirty-five people to wait on tables, twenty cooks, and fifteen chambermaids. All it needed to do was show that it offered work and not enough people showed up to take the jobs. That was easily accomplished. Run a tiny ad with few details. Tell locals to apply via fax, a technology few people seeking such low-paid seasonal work were likely to own. People could mail a letter but letters can get lost or take time being delivered.

Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.

There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump's paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn't be violating American law.

Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of "Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers."

To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill's purpose is to "establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States."

That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.

The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.

The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.

The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

They were controlling the press in the television age both by limiting access to the president and by planning no event without imagining the headline, photo. and story that would follow it. This system tried to ensure that every story was advantageous to the White House, no matter what the facts. This practice simply reached its apogee in Reagan's time, when in contrast to the Nixon era, the system served a consummate performer.

The result, as political essayist Leon Wieseltier described it, was that for the Reagan administration. "the truth was a problem to be solved." The solution was an art form known as "spin control," which referred to the "spin" the White House public relations experts put on news to make sure it bounced the desired way. Enterprising reporters tried to detect the spin and dig out the real story. Occasionally they were successful, but not without risking revenge. Press secretary Larry Speakes gave what he called "death sentences" to those reporters he deemed too critical or otherwise uncooperative. He would threaten to "put them out of business" by making sure their phone calls went unreturned and questions unanswered. putting them routinely at a competitive disadvantage. Speakes explained proudly. "The idea was to be subtle. They thought they were being screwed. but they were never quite sure." He froze out some reporters for years, but it is debatable how much they missed. Speakes later confessed to having fabricated several presidential quotes; even before his confession stirred a controversy. he admitted that he misled the public about how disengaged the president was. "As a rule," he said. "I did not think it was lying to suggest that the president might be aware of something when he wasn't."

These strategies shaped not only the written record but the photographic one as well. The official White House staff photographers shot an estimated eight to ten thousand pictures of Reagan every month, the best of which were released to the press. Mrs. Reagan usually determined which images the public saw, particularly when they included her. She personally went through the thousands of pictures. signing "O.K. per N.R." when they could be released and tearing off the comer of each of those she deemed unflattering.

Despite these many protective layers, someone close to the Oval Office would occasionally break ranks, providing a glimpse of a place that sounded quite strange. Terry Arthur, a staff photographer who spent countless hours quietly observing and documenting the president alone and with others, said he took the job partly "to find out who was running the show." After two solid years of traveling with the president, following him through meetings and on his weekend retreats, he concluded, "I never found out." Reagan, he said. "was like a Buddha. People would say, 'He wants this' or 'He wants that,' but you'd never really see him say so. He'd be shown the decisions others had made. and would say. ·Uh-huh.' "

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Stanley's usual two-volume thousand-page best-seller turned out to be only one of many books subsequently written about the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. (In recruiting his officers, Stanley made each one sign a contract promising that no book he wrote would appear until six months after Stanley's "official" account.) But other than benefiting the press and the publishing industry, the expedition proved a disaster for almost everyone involved, except, perhaps, for the New York Yacht Club, which at least had its banner borne across a continent.

Stanley threw his usual temper tantrums. Four times he fired his personal manservant and four times took him back. He had screaming matches with his white officers - several of whom later painted a highly unglamorous picture of Stanley. "The slightest little thing;' one wrote, "is sufficient to work him into a frenzy of rage." He compounded the problems of Henry Sanford's collapsing Congo business venture by commandeering its partly built steamboat as a barge for his troops and returning it several months later badly damaged. Most important, he made the strategic mistake of dividing his eight hundred soldiers, porters, and camp followers into two columns so that he, with a smaller, faster-moving force, would reach Emin Pasha and accomplish the dramatic, headline-catching rescue more quickly.

As always, Stanley bungled his choice of subordinates. The officer he left in charge of the rear column, Major Edmund Barttelot, promptly lost his mind. He sent Stanley's personal baggage down the river. He dispatched another officer on a bizarre three-thousand-mile three-month round trip to the nearest telegraph station to send a senseless telegram to England. He next decided that he was being poisoned, and saw traitors on all sides. He had one of them given three hundred lashes (which proved fatal). He jabbed at Africans with a steel-tipped cane, ordered several dozen people put in chains, and bit a village woman. An African shot and killed Barttelot before he could do more.

Stanley, meanwhile, slogged through the rain forest at the head of the vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering numerous floggings, some of which he administered himself. Supply snafus meant that much of the time his porters and soldiers were near starvation. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley's officers wrote in his diary, "We finished our last plantain to-day the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women." When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, "Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round." Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

"It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day's work. Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone. Immediately a volley was poured into the village."

One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.

Of the 389 men in Stanley's vanguard, more than half died as they hacked their way with machetes through the Ituri rain forest, sometimes making only four hundred yards' progress a day. When they ran out of food, they roasted ants. They climbed over giant tree roots and had to pitch camp on swampy ground in the midst of tropical downpours, one of which lasted seventeen hours without interruption. Men deserted, got lost in the jungle, drowned, or succumbed to tetanus, dysentery, and gangrenous ulcers. Others were killed by the arrows and poisoned-stake traps of forest-dwellers terrified by these armed, starving strangers rampaging through their territory.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Don't Need a Hurricane to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.

In the White House Rose Garden press conference that triggered a surge of bird flu media coverage, President Bush addressed the pandemic. "The people of the country ought to rest assured," Bush said, "that we're doing everything we can." Iowa senator Tom Harkin was not assured. " 'Trust us' is not something the administration can say after Katrina," he said in an interview. "I don't think Congress is in a mood to trust. We want plans. We want specific goals and procedures we're going to take to prepare for this."

Hurricane Katrina hit just days after Bush reportedly finished reading the classic historical text on the 1918 pandemic during his August vacation on his ranch. John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History details how the U.S. government, in the words of a 2005 Institute of Medicine report, "badly handled" the situatlon. This combination may have spurred the administration's sudden interest. Redlener calls it the "post-Katrina effect." He said, "I don't think politically or perceptually the government feels that it could tolerate another tragically inadequate response to a major disaster."

As Secretary Leavitt toured hurricane emergency shelters after Katrina and Rita, it hit him how catastrophic the pandemic would be. "What if it weren't just New Orleans?" he recalls thinking. "What if it were Seattle, San Diego, Corpus Christi, Denver, Chicago, New York? Make your own list." "We have learned in the past weeks," Secretary Leavitt told reporters, "that bad things can happen very fast."

He also should have learned the folly of ignoring the warnings of experts. Whether it was the Challenger disaster, 9/11, or Katrina, there were experts who cautioned that these particular tragedies might happen. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been warning about the levees for years. New Orleans' major newspaper ran a five-part series in 2002 accurately predicting not only the inevitable blow from a major storm, but the nightmarish aftermath. "The danger of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was ignored until it was too late," said Senator Kennedy. "We can't make the same mistake with pandemic flu." Though senior public health scientists describe an H5Nl pandemic with soundbites like "Hurricane Katrina a thousand times over," a former FEMA director in October 2005 described the level of federal preparation for the pandemic as "zero."

In the pandemic, there will be no cavalry. During Katrina, the nation's resources were mobilized to aid three states. Imagine every city as New Orleans. Secretary Leavitt told state public health officials, "We could be battling 5,000 different fronts at the same moment. Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue will be tragically wrong." In Chicago, public health officials have run through a mock influenza pandemic scenario. The simulation showed the public health system breaking down almost immediately. The chief medical officer of the Department of Homeland Security warned, "The federal government will not be there to pick you off your roof in a pandemic." "If the avian flu were to hit here, it would be like having a Category 5 viral hurricane hit every single state Simultaneously," said the director of Trust for America's Health. "We're not prepared. It's the ugly truth."

George Mason University's Mercatus Center has concluded that we must "[r]ealize that the federal government will be largely powerless in the worst stages of a pandemic and make appropriate local plans." Each individual community is responsible for preparing its own pandemic plan; preparation begins with each family, each circle of friends, each neighborhood, each business, each township. To this end, a fledgling "experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health" was launched called The Flu Wiki, available free for anyone to use at www.fluwikie.com, whose explicit purpose is to help local communities prepare for and cope with a pandemic outbreak. It is based on the "wikipedia" model of nonprofit, internet-based collaboration to share knowledge and ideas from around the world. Its success depends on the level and quality of public participation.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

The game is up
(Shakespeare - Cymbeline, Act III, Sc. 3)

That is the perfect title for my book. I'm so grateful to you, Jack, for saying it. It's ABSOLUTELY perfect.

You see I was thinking about writing a best-seller. It's cast historically. They all have to be historical really.

And they've all got to be vaguely connected with aristocracy. So my heroine is a love child. It's always terribly sympathetic, you see. And her mother is Lady Caroline Mutton, who's a rather sort of older Caroline Lamb. And the father is a sort of itinerant Grub Street writer. And he had a love affair with Lady Caroline Mutton and his name is Thomas Tupper. That's a joke which will only be appreciated by farmers.

But they have the child, as is usual, she's put out to wet-nurse and eventually they persuade an inn-keeper and his wife to adopt this child. And this inn-keeper was Jabez Harp, who kept a little inn just around the back of Maiden Lane in the City of London. And she grew up a very gay and vivacious child. Extremely gay and extremely vivacious. And like all heroines of light love, she had an oval face. I can't really think of the alternative to an oval face. We'd have a rectangular face. Parallelpipidean face. She has an oval face and hazel eyes. Her eyes look like a nut. And ringlets. And all the time she's laughing and terribly jolly and fun.

So the Harps decide to call her. . . Jabez says one day, "Every time the wind blows and we're sad, she just sings", so they call her Aeolian Harp. It's a beautiful name.

And then she goes on the stage in my story. And she joined a company of a marveous actor called George Frederick Cooke. And she played Sheridan's comedies with George Frederick Cooke. Went on tour in the provinces. It was the first Cooke's Tours. And she had this kind of unremitted gaiety.

And he'd say, "We've only taken four and six."

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What matters, all the world's a stage."

And he took to drink. He was actually one of the stage's most celebrated drunks, was George Frederick Cooke.

But at the same time there was a man in the company, who was a nobleman, who always wanted to be an actor, called Lord Charles Grenville. And he was very much in love with her but he couldn't STAND this unremitted jollity. For twenty-two hours a day she was happy and laughing and making little jokes. And eventually, although he loved her, and couldn't declare his passion, he went to join the navy.

So they flung her out in the street and she languishes there, this beautiful girl, and nobody will bother with her any more and she really is about to fling herself over what would be the embankment of the embankment which would be built, which it hadn't been, when suddenly there is a man in front of her that she recognizes.

It is Lord Charles. This ending is a bit like Fanny Hill, but I'm cribbing it. It is Lord Charles. And he's come back from the navy stone deaf. He was on the Victory about to go to Trafalgar. And Lord Nelson said to him, "Will you get Lieutenant Farr." (who was the gunnery officer) And he thought he was working with the guns so Lord Charles put his head down the front of a barrel and shouted "FARR!!" And he went stone deaf.

So there he was on half pay and there she is. So they get together and she is the one he's always loved. And with her bright unremitting chatter and this awful glass-shattering laugh, he's the only man who can stand it because he's stone deaf.

That's my story which is absolutely super. And I've got my nom d'plume, which is Barbara Horseland. I want to be ahead of Barbara Cartland.

And up to now I've been stuck for a title for this thing. I was going to call it Aeolian Harp, the Study of a Regency Girl. And Jack gave me the title. I'm just going to call it simply The Gay Miss Harp.

--Frank Muir, "Take My Word For It" (1978)

574a

Being a decent human being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behavior becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are "really" like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behavior sets the tone for everyone around you.

Stay grounded

Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists' club of Hollywood - a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times - and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes' drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. "I'm twenty minutes," he would call out. "It's too far. We're going home." Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.

I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, "Frank's in a great mood today."

I said, at normal volume, "What about me? What about my mood?"

And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. "Who cares? No one cares how you feel."

I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.

I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded.

There's nothing like your mum saying she's had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favorite soap, or your wife saying, "You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle's over there," to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you're getting in your professional world, at home you're just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.

The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, "My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films." There was a little pause. "He's dead now."

"Oh" I said "Have you seen any?"

"I don't think so."

On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. "Hey, I know you," he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I'd been in Batman. Instead. "Didn't you used to be Michael Caine?"

Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, "I know you." Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, "No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Before you get out, I'll get your name." As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, "I've got it. Telly Savalas."

So Alec says, "No, that's not it."

"I bet you wish you was, though," says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Anyone can get on the ballot in the U.K. if they pay 500 pounds. So while Boris Johnson led his party to a massive election victory in the U.K. against Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, he had other competition.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRIME MINISTER BORIS JOHNSON: I thank my fellow candidates in all their glory - Lord Buckethead, Elmo and others.

MARTIN: Yep. One candidate dressed as "Sesame Street's" Elmo. Also mentioned - Lord Buckethead, who ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party. I mean, hey - these are serious Brexit times. And, clearly, voters are desperate for some comic relief.

In April 2017 Trump told an audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was about to take bold action on foreign guest workers. He promised to end the "theft of American prosperity." Foreign worker visas "should never, ever be used to replace American workers." he said.

But the executive order he signed was not bold, as Trump said, but tepid. It simply directed four cabinet agencies to "suggest reforms" with no deadline for submitting their ideas.

There are also work visas for low-skilled workers like the staff at Mar-a-Lago, which had for years relied on the very workers Trump wanted kept out - foreigners. Trump said during one of the Republican primary debates that Mar-a-Lago, like other local seasonal resort properties, had no choice but to import workers. "People don't want a short-term job," he said. "So, we will bring people in, and we will send the people out. All done legally."

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida broke in. "That's not accurate," he said, because at least three hundred Americans who sought work at Mar-a-Lago were not hired. That, Rubio said, helped Trump push down wages, the very issue Trump complained was caused by too many foreign workers in America.

"When you bring someone in on one of these visas they can't go work for anybody else," Rubio noted. "They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don't have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that's why you bring workers from abroad."

Trump kept interrupting Rubio, making it difficult for those watching to understand the debate unless they read the transcript later.

The public record showed that hundreds of local residents did want jobs but were not hired.

In July 2017 the Trump administration decided to let in more foreign workers, not exactly what Trump promised on inauguration day when he said every decision would be made to promote American jobs and buy American.

American "businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm due to a lack of available temporary nonagricultural workers" would be able to hire an additional 15,000 foreigners in temporary low-skill, low-paid jobs.

That would increase supply by more than 40 percent for the second half of the year.

This was a prime example of Trump not walking his campaign talk in office, but also of driving down wages, just as Rubio had said was Trump's goal.

In Palm Beach, for example, hundreds of people were willing to work at the wages offered by Mar-a-Lago, roughly $10 to $13 an hour, for the 2016-17 season.

Locally four people wanted work for every low-skill resort job offered.

That means there was no shortage of local labor for the seasonal positions. With so many workers available, hiring locals might not even put upward pressure on wages. When there is so much more demand for work than employers could supply, employers can offer less pay and still recruit people.

But workers who come from overseas on visas are subject to more control. Their employer can arrange pay that depends on their staying until the last day of the season and hold back part of their pay through "bemusing" arrangements. That means anyone who gets out of line, anyone who gets fired, gets shorted on his or her pay and sent home early.

President Trump declared July 24 the start of Made in America Week.

Trump said he would be "recognizing the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity."

The same week a tiny classified ad ran twice in the back pages of The Palm Beach Post. It offered work for "3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club." The jobs paid wages only - "No tips:'

The ads did not identify the employer, but the fax was a Mar-a-Lago number.

A week earlier, Mar-a-Lago had applied to the Labor Department - run by a Trump appointee - for visas to import thirty-five people to wait on tables, twenty cooks, and fifteen chambermaids. All it needed to do was show that it offered work and not enough people showed up to take the jobs. That was easily accomplished. Run a tiny ad with few details. Tell locals to apply via fax, a technology few people seeking such low-paid seasonal work were likely to own. People could mail a letter but letters can get lost or take time being delivered.

Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.

There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump's paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn't be violating American law.

Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of "Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers."

To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill's purpose is to "establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States."

That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.

The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.

The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.

The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

As Ed Rollins, who worked with Reagan for five years. concluded, "The job was whatever was on his desk."

Reagan's former campaign manager, John Sears, attributed this trait to Reagan's first career, as a movie actor in an age when the studios discouraged independent thinking. As such, Sears noted, Reagan had become professionally accustomed to learning his part and "following the prescribed rules - doing what they told you to do." If something went wrong on the set, Sears said, Reagan would most likely think. Hey, I'm just the star. I'm the performer. Others were supposed to worry about the rest of the show.

This complacency was evident in cabinet and staff meetings, where Reagan was a wonderful raconteur - frequently speaking as if he were still governor of California - as well as a good listener But he rarely made substantive points. A staff member who had also served in the Ford White House said, "Ford led the discussion; Reagan followed it." When the public began to learn of Reagan's lack of involvement in meetings, aides explained it by saying the president wanted to hide his thought process in order to avoid leaks or that he was trying to spare the feelings of those with whom he disagreed. But, as Don Regan later admitted, Reagan "sent out no strong signals. It was a rare meeting in which he made a decision or issued an order."

If the president rarely played the leading role in meetings, his aides found he was even less likely to question the paperwork they sent him. Reagan obligingly read whatever he was given - all of it - at least in the early years. One aide early on was surprised to find that the president was staying up until the early hours of the morning trying to read all the materials his staff had sent him. "He read indiscriminately," the aide marveled. "If you gave him eight hundred pages, he read every word. He used no judgment." Nancy Reagan finally stepped in and explained that her husband's workload needed to be reduced. Similarly, the staff had to monitor the amount of information they sent him to prepare for press conferences. As former communications director David Gergen recalled, "If you gave him too many pages, as good as his photographic memory is, he tries so hard to remember what he read that he sometimes gets mixed up." He was particularly susceptible to whatever arguments he had heard most recently White House spokesman Larry Speakes used to joke that "the last thing you put in is the first thing that comes out."

Unlike other presidents, Reagan seldom requested information beyond the briefings and talking points his aides gave him. He enjoyed occasional luncheons with outside experts when they were brought in, but he rarely initiated invitations. He watched what Regan later called "a lot" of television and read a number of newspapers, although he claimed, possibly for effect, that he turned first to the comics.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

No territory-wide census was taken in the Congo until long after the rubber terror was over. But Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persuasive demographic evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids - and he discovered the evidence in the regime's own statistics. No other explanation accounts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census. These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men.

At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children 402 adult women, but only 275 adult men. (This was the very town for which, some ten years earlier, the district commissioner had ordered "absolute submission or complete extermination:') At nearby Iboko in 1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men. Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. Sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium. They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.

During Leopold's rule, by how much, from all four causes, did the Congo population shrink? Just as when historians chart population loss from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, they can be more confident of the percentage than they are of absolute numbers. They have, after all, no census data. Interestingly, some estimates of population loss in the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agree with some of those made by more scientific methods today.

An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had "been reduced by half." Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative judgment today comes from Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest living ethnographer of Congo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on "innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more." His estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut "by at least a half."

Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

Burned villages, starved hostages, terrified refugees dying in swamps, orders for "extermination" - even in crass, purely monetary terms, aren't these inefficient means of doing business? Massacring huge numbers of people may frighten the survivors into gathering rubber, but doesn't it destroy the labor force? Indeed it does. Belgian administrators ordered the census taken in 1924 because they were deeply concerned about a shortage of available workers. "We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear;' fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert."

Why, then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag. So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of Rene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clement Brasseur and Leon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?" When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases

Practicing social distancing techniques not only protects you from the crowds, it protects the crowds from you. If one actually falls ill, the best thing to do from a public health standpoint may be to self-quarantine at home to prevent the spread of the virus. Otherwise, you are visiting a potential death sentence on everyone you meet. The extreme lethality of the current strain of HSN1 may actually work in humanity's favor - people may be so ill and succumb so quickly that they are unlikely to get out of bed and spread it to others outside their households. Experts expect the virus may ratchet down its lethality in the interest of being more effectively spread. Of course, if we do become infected, it may be a day or two before we know it, so all but essential personnel should consider preparing for a prolonged "snow emergency"-type isolation at home in the event of a pandemic." Instead of a snow "day," though, Osterholm compares it to preparing for a worldwide "12- to 15-month blizzard." although each wave may only last a matter of weeks in any particular locale. Everyone should also begin getting into the habit of practicing what infectious control experts refer to as proper "respiratory etiquette."

Most people know to cover their nose and mouth when they cough or sneeze, but most people are not doing it right. One should not cough or sneeze into one's hand. The current thinking is one should only cough into the crook of the arm. Covering our nose and mouth can somewhat limit the dispersal of contaminated respiratory droplets, but when we cough into our hand, it becomes coated with virus that can then be transferred to everything from elevator buttons and light switches to gas pump and toilet handles. A recent study found that the virus could be recovered from more than 50% of common household and day care center surfaces during flu season. This is not surprising, given that up to five infectious viral doses have been measured in every drop of nasal secretions. Coughing into the inner elbow area of one's arm or sleeve prevents the contamination of one's hands. This takes practice, so we should all start rehearsing now. The Mayo Clinic has a slogan: "The 10 worst sources of contagion are our fingers."

Fomite is the technical term for a contaminated physical object, like the archetypal doorknob, that can transmit disease among people. It comes from the Latin fomes, meaning "tlnder." This sparking of an infectious blaze can be prevented through disinfection. At room temperature and humidity, influenza virus can survive intact for up to 48 hours on nonporous surfaces like metal or plastic and up to 12 hours on cloth, paper, or tissues. but can be killed easily with a simple solution of household bleach. One tablespoon of chlorine bleach mixed in a gallon of water is a potent disinfectant. This diluted bleach solution can be sprayed on potentially contaminated common surfaces and left to sit for at least five minutes. Frequently used but infrequently disinfected objects, such as refrigerator handles and phone receivers, should not be missed. The bleach solution can also be used to wash contaminated clothes and bedding, as research has shown that a shaken contaminated blanket can release infectious viral particles into the environment. It must be chlorine bleach, meaning it should contain a chlorine-based compound like sodium hypochlorite. So-called "color-safe" bleaches should not be used as disinfectants.

Wrapped in a stolen fatty coat from our cells, influenza viruses like H5N1 can lie in wait for days under the right conditions, patiently twiddling their thumbs until someone grasps the same doorknob. The virus still needs to bypass the skin barrier and find a way into the body, though. This is why we should get into the habit of avoiding touching our eyes, noses, and mouths whenever possible in public until we can wash or sanitize our hands. The power of this simple intervention is illustrated by a study that showed that children aged four to eight taught to not touch their noses and eyes essentially halved their risk of contracting cold infections. Although viruses like influenza can go airborne, studies of outbreaks at nursing homes suggest that this direct physical contact may play a significant role in its spread.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

ndrea Diamond of Toronto is used to having squirrels in her backyard, but she did a double take recently when she saw one holding something blue. She looked closer. The squirrel was twirling a paring knife in its front paws. Eventually, it ran away unhurt, and she noticed it had also gotten into some hand sanitizer she'd left out. They're trying to be COVID conscientious, I guess, she said

Police in Ballwin, Mo., investigated two missing pies. Someone apparently decided a Honey Baked Ham store should not have been closed for Thanksgiving. They entered the shop, which was unlocked. And they left a note - "no one was here, and we were in desperate need of pies," end quote. No word on whether they were pumpkin or pecan. Police told KPLR-TV the shop did not press charges because there was money left behind for the pies, plus tax.

Casinos were supposed to be the catalyst to rebuild Atlantic City. Instead they have transformed it into the place where the South Bronx meets Las Vegas-by-the-Sea, where heroin and hookers are readily available and armed robbery is a constant danger, especially for old folks.

Publicists like to put on airs about a grand and glorious old Atlantic City. In truth the town was conceived as an excuse to sell train tickets. Civil engineer Richard Osborne, who witnessed but did not share in the profits created when a little lake port became mighty Chicago, shepherded thirty-four rich Philadelphians onto barren, windswept Absecon Island in 1852 and asked them to envision a workingman's resort that would make them richer still. The well-to-do already had their beach resort at Cape May Point thirty miles south at the Garden State's southern tip. Osborne picked this shifting sand not because of any natural beauty, but simply because it was the closest straight line between the sea and the crowded workshops of what had been, until a few years before, the dominant city of the Western Hemisphere. This was the easiest way for Osborne and his partner, Shore physician John Pitney, to profit from train fares and real estate.

The first train filled with beach goers arrived in Atlantic City on July 1,1854. The first Boardwalk went up in 1870, a cultural oddity eight feet wide and made in sections so it could be hauled back for storage in winter. The Boardwalk was an industrial-era sensation, for it allowed visitors to experience nature vicariously, looking out at the beach, the crowds and waves while escaping the messy reality of wet sand. The world's playground was born. Soon bigger, permanent planking was in place and grand hotels like Haddon Hall, the Marlborough-Blenheim and the Traymore rose beside the boards.

Despite these few elegant hostelries Atlantic City was always honkytonk, with saloons during Prohibition, back-room gambling run by the likes of Skinny D' Amato, and lots of hype. Mob guys played there, too, because it was an open city where nobody was supposed to get rubbed out. The Miss America Pageant began there as a publicity stunt in 1921, held after Labor Day to coax from tourists one more weekend of hotel revenues.

But Atlantic City did not share in the prosperity of the Pax Americana that followed World War II. No interstate highway was built to Atlantic City. Instead, the new superhighways, along with jet travel, opened up new vacation possibilities for Atlantic City's traditional market as people from Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore hit the road, filling Kemmons Wilson's Holiday Inns. Television hurt Atlantic City, too. The giant Boardwalk showrooms - where tourists could type a letter on a two-ton typewriter, sample Heinz's 57 varieties, and watch the famous diving horse in between - closed down as network television offered a cheaper way to hawk wares to the masses.

New Jersey was a Northern state in the Civil War, but Atlantic City lies south of the Mason-Dixon Line both geographically and in spirit. When changing vacation patterns meant that the big Boardwalk hotels could not sustain themselves, the absentee owners took their profits elsewhere and let upkeep slide, a process known as disinvesting. Whites who could find better jobs moved out either to the surrounding suburbs or far away. But the blacks, who made the beds, entertained in the black nightclubs in the summer, and got by on relief in the winter were not welcome in the suburbs and lacked the resources to move anyway, so they stayed on. By 1976, when city fathers, merchants and the local newspaper were organizing the second statewide vote for casinos, the most popular bumper sticker in town said, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE ATLANTIC CITY PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.

Authorizing casinos did not change the old ways of Atlantic City. By 1991 the casinos employed nearly fifty thousand people, yet unemployment in Atlantic City remained higher than in the rest of New Jersey as well as the nation because the casinos prefer to hire their workers from the suburbs, which are overwhelmingly white. The state government encourages this policy in myriad ways, including studied indifference to the casinos' flouting of the fair employment laws and by subsidizing bus fares from white communities an hour away, while only rudimentary and costly transit is available in Atlantic City's poorest areas.

While Atlantic City nurtures its romantic image as the Queen of Resorts, the harsh truth years after legal casinos started is that a greater portion of its people live in public housing than in any other city in America.

But not all of Atlantic City's dozen temples of chance stand by the city's slums. Harrah's Casino Hotel is on the northwestern edge of Atlantic City just off another road across the marsh to Absecon Island, the White Horse Pike. Just before reaching the public housing projects that stretch for block after block, players can tum north and head through the stands of phragmites and sedges to Harrah's or its sole marina neighbor, Trump Castle Hotel & Casino Resort by-the-Bay.

In its advertising Harrah's appeals to those who do not want to be reminded of the underclass by so little as a passing glance at a poor person through a car window. Harrah's calls itself "The Other Atlantic City" This slogan worked so well that Harrah's added a second: "The Better People Place." Its billboards, newspaper ads and posters feature smiling middle-aged and elderly white couples, often in expensive attire, endorsing Harrah's as a fun place for people like themselves. When leading Atlantic City blacks like Pierre Hollingsworth, the retired deputy fire chief and former city commissioner, complained that the slogans exuded a subtle racism, Harrah's responded by adding a very few black faces to its posters, particularly the faces of blacks who serve casino patrons.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

"He really hated the light-skinned leaders like Benjamin Hooks and [former HEW secretary] Patricia Harris," recalled Michael Middleton, Thomas's trusted, liberal colleague in Washington. "He thought they were 'bourgeois Negroes' who thought they were white."

At the same time, a number of EEOC colleagues believed that once in power, Thomas treated light-skinned women in particular with more deference than those with darker skin, showing a kind of contempt toward those more like himself. "He had more respect for light women, and he was definitely different around white people," asserted a former employee at the EEOC whom he eventually fired, Angela Wright. Wright, who was willing to testify that Thomas had made crude and unwanted sexual comments to her in the office, thought it unlikely that he would have behaved so disrespectfully had she had lighter skin.

When Anita Hill surfaced with her allegations, Thomas offhandedly confirmed this prejudice by telling his mother that there was no way he could have been seriously interested in Hill, because she was too dark for his taste. As his mother recalled the conversation, Thomas asked her, "Mamma, what kind of women do I like?"

Leola Williams, who is as dark as her son, said she hadn't thought much about it.

"Well, what color was Kathy?" he persisted, referring to his first wife, Kathy Ambush, who was three quarters black and one quarter Japanese.

"She was brown," Leola said she answered.

"And the others?" inquired Thomas.

"They've all been light-skinned too," his mother said.

"Right," she says Thomas answered. "So what would I want with a woman as black as Anita Hill?"

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

If it were printed as this book is, the Open Letter would run to only about a dozen pages. Yet in that short space Williams anticipated almost all the major charges that would be made by the international Congo protest movement of more than a decade later. Although by 1890 scattered criticism of Leopold's Congo state had been published in Europe, most of it focused on the king's discrimination against foreign traders. Williams's concern was human rights, and his was the first comprehensive, systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime written by anyone. Here are his main accusations:

? Stanley and his white assistants had used a variety of tricks, such as fooling Africans into thinking that whites had supernatural powers, to get Congo chiefs to sign their land over to Leopold. For example: "A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet. When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength." Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light a cigar, after which "the white man explained his intimate relation to the sun, and declared that if he were to request him to burn up his black brother's village it would be done." In another ruse, a white man would ostentatiously load a gun but covertly slip the bullet up his sleeve. He would then hand the gun to a black chief, step off a distance, and ask the chief to take aim and shoot; the white man, unharmed, would bend over and retrieve the bullet from his shoe. "By such means and a few boxes of gin, whole villages have been signed away to your Majesty." Land purchased in this way, Williams wrote, was "territory to which your Majesty has no more legal claim, than I have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian army."

? Far from being a great hero, Stanley had been a tyrant. His "name produces a shudder among this simple folk when mentioned; they remember his broken promises, his copious profanity, his hot temper, his heavy blows, his severe and rigorous measures, by which they were mulcted of their lands." (Note Williams's assumption, so unimaginable to his white contemporaries, that Africans had a right to African land.) Of the hundreds of Europeans and Americans who traveled to the Congo in the state's early years, Williams is the only one on record as questioning Africans about their personal experience of Stanley.

? Leopold's establishment of military bases along the river had caused a wave of death and destruction, because the African soldiers who manned them were expected to feed themselves. "These piratical, buccaneering posts compel the natives to furnish them with fish, goats, fowls, and vegetables at the mouths of their muskets; and whenever the natives refuse white officers come with an expeditionary force and burn away the homes of the natives."

? "Your Majesty's Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offenses, to the chain gang. Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound."

? Leopold's claim that his new state was providing wise government and public services was a fraud. There were no schools and no hospitals except for a few sheds "not fit to be occupied by a horse." Virtually none of the colony's officials knew any African language. "The Courts of your Majesty's Government are abortive, unjust, partial and delinquent." (Here, as elsewhere, Williams provided a vivid example: a white servant of the governor-general went unpunished for stealing wine while black servants were falsely accused and beaten.)

? White traders and state officials were kidnapping African women and using them as concubines.

? White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. "Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away... The officers made a wager of 5 pounds that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head."

? Instead of Leopold's being the noble antislavery crusader he portrayed himself as, "Your Majesty's Government is engaged in the slave-trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. Your Majesty's Government gives 3 pounds per head for able-bodied slaves for military service. The labour force at the stations of your Majesty's Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes."

***

Williams was not done. Three months after writing the Open Letter, he produced A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic if the United States if America. President Harrison probably had no more expected to hear from him than Leopold had. In writing to the president, Williams repeated his charges, adding that the United States had a special responsibility toward the Congo, because it had "introduced this African Government into the sisterhood of States." As in the Open Letter, he supported the charges with personal examples. "At Stanley-Falls slaves were offered to me in broad day-light; and at night I discovered canoe loads of slaves, bound strongly together:' Williams called for this "oppressive and cruel Government" to be replaced by a new regime that would be "local, not European; international, not narional; just, not cruel."

Whether Williams was calling for self-government or for international trusteeship, it would be many years before anyone else from Europe or the United States would do the same. In a letter Williams wrote to the American secretary of state, he used a phrase that seems plucked from the Nuremberg trials of more than half a century later. Leopold's Congo state, Williams wrote, was guilty of" crimes against humanity."

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

He who hesitates is lost
(16th century proverb)

I was watching one of those Kung Fu epics the other night and the leading character in it made a very profound remark to his closest friend.

He said, "The man whose experiences with the opposite sex are unhappy ones never finishes first in the obstacle race of life. Then he kicked his mate in the groin and rode off into the sunset.

I suddenly thought to myself that could very well account for my own failure to break life's tape ahead of the field. Because my experiences with girls, especially my early experiences, to call them gruesome would just be flattering.

And that's why when I was seventeen, all of romance was summed up for me in scene from a film called History is Made At Night. Nobody remembers that now.

In this scene Charles Boyer took Jean Arthur to dinner in a restaurant where a strolling violinist leaned over and played a melody into her left ear.

And as she listened her hand crept across the table and she linked her little finger into his, into Charle Boyer's, not the violinist's. Because that would have cropped up the violin playing.

I can't tell you what paroxysms of dewy-eyed soppiness that that sent me into.

If I could only arrange a setup like that for myself then life would have nothing further it could offer me.

Within a month a new family moved in next door containing a daughter called Bernice. And the other happy circumstance was that the haberdashers on the parade went bust. And it was re-opened, as, after some initial difficulties with the neon sign, The Hendon Brasserie.

What's more, and this is the strange thing, it was owned and run by an ex-member of the Debroy Summers Savoy Orpheums.

So I had it all now. The time, the place, the girl, and the strolling violinist.

So I asked Bernice for a date. And when she met me at the Hendon Brasserie she looked a knockout. Admittedly she did appear to be about two feet taller than Jean Arthur. That was because Hendon girls of that time were very strong on what were then called beehive hair-dos.

Anyway, I pushed Bernice through that three-course a la carte in record time. And the moment that coffee was plunked down, I was all set for blast-off.

I said to her, "What's your favorite tune?" And I sort of smiled. "What's your favorite tune?" Did the Boyer nose wrinkle.

And she said, "What's the one that goes?" and then she hummed a few bars.

I said, "That's the national anthem."

She said, "Well, you pick one."

I said, "All right."

Beckoning the violinist over I said, "My good man. Do you know 'Time after Time I tell myself that I'm'. "

And he nodded, winked and then he leaned forward over Bernice's ear and he started playing on that low sexy violin string that they don't seem to use much any more.

Say what you like. There is something about those old Hollywood ploys, because he hadn't played more than about twelve bars when I saw Bernice's hand come creeping across the table towards mine.

I closed my eyes in sheer bliss. Such sheer bliss that I didn't even notice when the music stopped.

It was only when I heard this strange kind of sawing noise that I opened my eyes again.

That idiot was as inexpert at the game as I was. He'd got his bow stuck right through her beehive.

You know that peculiarly stiff kind of lacquer that girls put on their hair in those days? It had somehow bonded to the rosin on his bow. And it was awful. Her hair sort of swaying with this . . .

I can't even talk about it even now. It's a good example of that culled-through proverb, isn't it?

The man whose experiences with the opposite sex are unhappy ones never finishes first in the obstacle of life.

Or, if you prefer it in the western version, he who has sad dates is last.

Denis Norden
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The unexpected perks were things like this. When I first became a star I had never learnt to drive so I hired a chauffeur to drive me around. But later I moved with my family to Los Angeles, and everybody drives there so I had to take a test. Before I took it, a man behind a desk informed me, in a prepared speech he had probably given many times, "The person who will perform your test is sitting outside in the car. You will speak to him only to say, 'Good morning.' There will be no normal conversation. He will give you instructions, you will listen and respond. There will be no personal remarks whatsoever."

I said, "Yes, Officer, I understand." I went outside and got into the car.

The guy looked at me and he said, "I loved you in The Man Who Would Be King. You're going to have to be shit to not pass this test." So at the age of fifty that was how I got my first driver's licence.


Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Two weeks after [Joe] Arpaio was found guilty, Trump started focusing the thoughts of those who would attend his Phoenix rally the next week. It began with an off-air interview with a television pundit working for Fox News, the reliably Trump-supporting cable channel.

"Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?" Trump asked Fox's Gregg Jarrett. "He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn't deserve to be treated this way." Jarrett said Trump also told him, "I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio. He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He's a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him."

Not a skeptical word from Jarrett, a lawyer, who on Fox's Sean Hannity show told only part of the story. Jarrett called the case a "political prosecution that began in the Obama administration," speaking more like Arpaio's lawyer than a news analyst.

The case began during the George W. Bush administration and the decision to prosecute for criminal contempt came during the Obama era. It was during the Trump administration that Arpaio was tried for criminal contempt of court and convicted.

That Trump is thinking about using pardons to compromise the Mueller investigation was beyond doubt after the Phoenix rally. While the pardon power appears to have no limits, other than using it to prevent impeachment, Trump's willingness to use it is fraught with peril for himself and the Republic. Using pardons strategically could seriously hamper the Russia and other investigations.

Pardons are for "offenses against the United States." By accepting a pardon, a person admits guilt for committing the crime. Anyone is free to accept or reject a pardon, as a principled person might who believes that he or she was innocent and had been wrongly convicted. There are plenty of examples of people who refused to say they committed a murder, rape, or other crime just to get out of prison, even if it meant staying behind bars until they died.

Anyone who accepts a Trump pardon, including Arpaio, is admitting he committed offenses against the federal government. But there is a way around this. The Constitution also gives the president the power to grant reprieves, such as letting a prisoner get out of jail early, without settling the issue of guilt or innocence. Such clemency is not optional. If the president orders someone freed from prison or otherwise relieved of criminal punishment, that person cannot say no.

Pardons can be issued preemptively, before any criminal charges are brought, as President Gerald Ford did when he relieved Richard Nixon and the country of the prospect of Nixon being tried for a host of felonies, including conspiracy and income tax evasion (for which Nixon's lawyer did go to prison).

That explains why strategically issuing pardons and reprieves would likely occur late, not early, in the Mueller probe and those by House and Senate committees. The problem issuing pardons poses for Trump is that anyone who accepts a pardon loses his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. If you have been pardoned, you cannot be tried and therefore must testify in criminal proceedings and before Congress. Lying in such proceedings, including falsely claiming you cannot recall something, subjects you to prosecution for that criminal conduct.

Nothing in the Constitution would prevent Trump from issuing serial pardons, either. Thus, he could pardon someone who had evidence that Trump would not want used against him, and if the person was indicted for refusing to testify, he could, as with Arpaio, pardon them again even before they were found guilty of contempt of court.

Presidential pardons apply only to "offenses against the United States." This means that state prosecutors are free to bring charges for crimes within their jurisdiction, which helps explain why Mueller's team is working with Eric Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general. Should Trump pardon, for example, his sons or his son-in-law, or Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, or others, Schneiderman would be free to bring state-level charges.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017