Mohammed Bin Salman: We are shocked—shocked! that a rogue band of operatives misunderstood my idle reflection (“will no one rid me of this turbulent journalist?”) and committed this terrible crime. We are not surprised that the group included Qataris and Persians. All will be beheaded publicly tomorrow afternoon at 3 and their bodies put through a brush chipper and into my shark pond.
[Twelve schlimazel expat laborers are rounded up off the street and executed]
Trump: As I expected, the vengeful Democrat fake news press mob—the greatest, most mendacious, most treasonous mob any president has ever faced-was wrong again, and if some patriots should exercise my rally advice on them it’s really their own fault. I talked to my good friend Mohammed Bin Salman this morning; he bought three condos right there on the phone, and he firmly denies he had anything to do with this unfortunate event, just like Putin, Brett, and, um me, and that should be enough once and for all.
I might add that the people who expect some of my strongest supporters (and funders) to give up $10 billion in arms business, while there are still working hospitals in Yemen patching up Houthi children to grow up into radical Islamic terrorists, over one foreign brown fake news scribbler for the failing Washington Post, are the kind of people who don’t want America to be great, and that’s why we need to save the Republican congress next month.
Author: Michael O'Hare
Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training.
He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs.
At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.
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I learned a new word for my 72nd birthday! The stress is apparently on the second syllable: /ʃlɪˈmɒz(ə)l/ (Oxford online).
Henri Plantagenêt paid for his crime by public atonement and flogging by monks in front of Canterbury Cathedral in July 1174 (3 blows each from 80 monks). We can not expect any such poetic justice for Bin Salman or Trump.
Happy birthday!
It’s part of a set:
A schlimazel and a schmendrick are sitting at a restaurant table. A schlimiel brings the soup, trips over the schmendrick’s foot, which is out in the aisle, and spills the soup on himself and the schlimazel.
And the fourth member of the trio, the schmegegge, laughs.
BTW, the latest Saudi excuse that they didn’t mean to kill Khashoggi rings true. If you (Prince Salman) are planning to murder a subject, one of your embassies is about the worst possible location: you can’t deny responsibility afterwards, as Putin is doing for the novichok attack in Britain. There will be very strong pressure from the host country on you to waive diplomatic immunity for the perps and allow a proper criminal investigation. The diplomatic damage won’t stop there.
On the other hand, the cellars of an embassy are a good place to carry out a brutal interrogation of the said subject. Your team of thugs are as safe from surveillance as they can be. The mistake was not taking along a sleazy doctor to ensure the victim’s heart did not give out.
Uh, everything you say makes sense. Except. I read [I sure as hell didn’t dig deeper, b/c already too much too much] that he was dismembered while alive. That seems to go against the idea of an interrogation.
OK. I’ll stop there. The entire idea makes me ill, but just had to note that it isn’t at ALL clear that they were actually interrogating him.
I’m not sure that an embassy that’s under surveillance by a somewhat unfriendly (and frequently hostile) host government is a particularly good place to carry out the prolonged torture and brutal interrogation of a political dissident with powerful friends in that host government. It must have been obvious even to the morons who run the Saudi intelligence and security services that it was only a matter of an hour or two before the Turks would start to go nuts and demand to search the consulate and the residence—and that there’d be no realistic way for the Saudis to stop the Turkish military and/or police from searching the place or even forcing their way in at gunpoint.
Also, it turns out that they did have a sleazy doctor accompanying them and he had apparently participated in other torture sessions, too. It was apparently his job to cut off Khashoggi’s fingers with the bone saw as part of the interrogation. And then to aid in the disposal of the body.
Also, the idea that you could land one or more private planes (registered to the Saudis) with 15 or so hard looking men and one asshole doctor, without setting off fireworks in the Turkish security services is just insane. As was the idea that you could humiliate the Turkish government by carrying out such a blatant attack on their severity. The fact that the Saudis have lived their entire lives with complete impunity seems to make it impossible for them to plan anything intelligently.
This whole operation was a giant clusterfuck. But it’s also more proof, if any was needed, that the Saudis are our enemy, just as they are the enemy of everything good and decent in the world. At this point, I think the West would be better off with unmaking a rapprochement with Iran and dumping the Saudis (either way, though, we’d be better off without them).
http://www.hhhhh.com
Mango Mussolini would NOT use the word mendayshuss.