Special Assistant To The President Will Make Steve Bannon Look Moderate -- The Political Page, Part 2, T+32 -- February 21, 2017

I think folks forget that presidential appointees come with a rolodex and a staff.

Taken Steve Bannon for example.

From the Februry 13 & 20 issue of The New Yorker, the headline: becoming Steve Bannon's Bannon -- how Julia Hahn got from the University of Chicago to Breitbart to the White House.

There’s an old saw about Washington, D.C., that staffers in their twenties know more about the minutiae of government than their bosses do. Whether they wield real power is a different question. Julia Hahn, the twenty-five-year-old Breitbart News reporter who has just been named a special assistant to the President, could be a test case. Hahn is a protégée of Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist and former Breitbart chairman, who has been referred to as “Trump’s Rasputin.” (On Twitter, he is often called #PresidentBannon.)

When Hahn wrote for Breitbart, her primary beats were immigration (she wanted less of it, especially from Muslim countries) and the perfidy of Republicans who, in her view, sold out American interests—especially the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. In dozens of vituperative articles, Hahn called Ryan a “third-world migration enthusiast” and a “double agent” who was secretly campaigning for Hillary Clinton.

Some have suggested that hiring Hahn is Bannon’s way of putting Paul Ryan “on notice,” to use a Trumpian locution.

William Kristol recently told the Washington Post that Hahn will “be Bannon’s Bannon and will make Bannon look moderate.” This would be a feat, given that Bannon has declared that his “goal” is “to destroy the state.” When he was running Trump’s campaign, he called Trump “a blunt instrument for us,” adding, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”

Hahn was raised in Beverly Hills and attended Harvard-Westlake, an exclusive private high school in Los Angeles. (She did not respond to requests for comment.) She excelled at mock trial, and organized a fund-raiser to bring orphan children from other countries to live with American host families. She majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago and studied in Paris. “We had dinner together a few times, and she was always kind and approachable,” a Chicago classmate said. “The only unusual thing I remember is that she once worked at a shooting range. She described herself as ‘a very talented markswoman.’ ”

Hahn’s senior thesis, about “issues at the intersection of psychoanalysis and post-Foucauldian philosophical inquiry,” drew on the work of Leo Bersani, whose ideas she called “hugely transformational.” Bersani, a left-wing cultural theorist who taught at Berkeley, is known for his provocative writings on Freud and sexuality; his books include “Homos” and “Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.”

Anyone that can make Steve Bannon look like a moderate makes my day. And at 25 years of age, she is going to have lots of energy, a lot of ambition, and a force with whom to reckon.

Much, much more at the link.

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Salt: A World History

Mark Kurlandsky

c. 2002

DDS: 553.63 KUR

See this post, also.

• Some quick notes:
• salt, sodium chloride
• chloride is essential for digestion and respiration
• sodium is essential for nerve impulses, muscles including the heart, transmitting nutrients, transmitting oxygen
• ... people who eat red meat appear to derive from it all the salt they need. But vegetable diets, rich in potassium, offer little sodium chloride. On every continent, once human beings began cultivating crops, they began looking for salt to add to their diet. How they learned of this need is a mystery

Part One: A Discourse on Salt, Cadavers, and Pungent Sauces 

Chapter One: A Mandate of Salt

• Chinese history of salt
• soy
• pickling

Chapter Two: Fish, Fowl, and Pharaohs (note spelling)

• the Nile River
• the Phoenicians

Chapter Three: Saltmen Hard as Codfish

• Austrian town of Hallein (we've visited the salt mines at Hallein)
• the colorfully dressed salt miners of Hallein were Celts

Chapter Four: Salt's Salad Days

• Romans
• most Italian cities were founded proximate to saltworks
• the Phoenicians (again); Sicilians; olives, tuna
• purple dye
• garum: possibly a generic term for fermented fish sauce; Romans used it much like Chinese used soy sauce
• after the fall of Rome, garum vanished from the Mediterranean

Chapter Five: Salting It Away in the Adriatic

• I can never remember where on which side of Italy or Greece is the Adriatric; the way to remember it is to remember that the Aegean is between Greece and Turkey (easy: think of the Trojan War); that means the Adriatic has to be between Greece and Italy
• Venice and Marco Polo

Chapter Six: Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between

• the valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula; that was my exact thought when driving through the Po Valley many decades ago

Part Two: The Glow of Herring and the Scent of Conquest

Chapter Seven: Friday's Salt

• by the seventh century AD, all of western Europe spoke Indo-European languages; languages that stemmed from the Bronze Age invasion of Europe
• Late Bronze Age: Helen of Troy, the Trojan War (13th century BC)
• Iron Age: Homer (8th century BC)
• the Basques
• the Catholic Church
• the Vikings
• planks of cod
• Icelanders
• Celtic places that escaped Romanization

Chapter Eight: A Nordic Dream

• Sweden, 13th and 14th centuries
• herring, harengeres, herring sellers
• Zeeland, southern Holland

Chapter Nine: A Well-Salted Hexagon

• history of France
• French cuisine as it relates to salt

Chapter Ten: The Hapsburg Pickle

• German cuisine as it relates to salt
• Poland

Chapter Eleven: The Leaving of Liverpool

• the Mersey River
• English cuisine as it relates to salt

Chapter Twelve: American Salt Wars (I was unaware of America's salt wars)

• the history of the Americas is one of constant warfare over salt; whoever controlled salt was in power

Chapter Thirteen: Salt and Independence

• the English, the Dutch, and the French searched for salt
• the American revolution

Chapter Fourteen: Liberte, Egalite, Tax Breaks

• the French revolution
• Napoleon Bonaparte

Chapter Fifteen: Preserving Independence

• Cape Cod saltworks
• Erie Canal
• Robert Fulton and steamships

Chapter Sixteen: The War Between the Salts

• the US Civil War

Chapter Seventeen: Red Salt

• Edmund McIlhenny, Texas (I always thought the family originated in Louisiana)
• San Francisco

Part Three: Sodium's Perfect Marriage

Chapter Eighteen: The Odium of Sodium

• clerihew: a pseudo-biographic verse of two rhymed couplets in which the subject's name makes on of the rhymes
• Sir Humphry Davy: abominated gravy; discovered sodium
• chemistry and salt

Chapter Nineteen: The Mythology of Geology

• Clarence Birdseye; Gloucester, MA (we visited numerous times)

Chapter Twenty: The Soil Never Sets On ...

• Cheshire, England (again); we first "met" Cheshire in chapter eleven

Chapter Twenty-One: Salt and The Great Soul

• India; Gujarat

Chapter Twenty-Two: Not Looking Back

• Israel; the Dead Sea

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Last Salt Days of Zigong

• China again, modern
• Japan again, modern

Chapter Twenty-Four: Ma, La, and Mao

• Chinese again, modern

Chapter Twenty-Five: More Salt than Fish

• Scandinavia (again), modern
• herring
• anchovies
• Israel
• France
• Finland

Chapter Twenty-Six: Big Salt, Little Salt

• modern commercial salt

Bibliography: 13 pages
Index: 18