Rand Paul is an idiot

Today or yesterday Randall Paul gave a talk to a group of Latino business people to whom he read a poem by the great Pablo Neruda. My guess is that Paul was the only business person in the room ignorant of the fact that Neruda had died a Communist--murdered by Fascists.  That raises a question: what does Rand Paul know?  Not much--the little squit is an idiot.

Gays Are Us

Why do we give a damn if two gay people marry?  On the face of it, marriages should be the least of the problems between gays and others, including closeted gays. There is no passage on gay marriage in the Bible; the religious aspects of the dispute are a smoke screen. The historical one-man, one-woman argument in the land of divorces and single parents is absurd, especially when it comes from a Mormon who tells us that humans have always married that way. How many wives did Solomon and Joseph Smith have? The claim that people marry in order to procreate is upside down. Most people marry for love and companionship, and in some cases kids come later.

Yesterday it occurred to me why certain confused people among us oppose same-sex marriages. I recognized something in myself. There is a considerable difference between tolerance and full acceptance. Let's start with ignorance. My father, a machinist, was a racist, but for some reason he was fine with gays and Jews. My mother once told me that he did not grasp what gays did for sex. Thanks to my parents I grew up tolerating gays. I believed they had rights. I didn't care if they married, but here is the change. I started to think about it. If gays can marry and raise children, then they aren't different. They are us. They really are us. That whips the bigots into a frenzy: gays are us.  




i? On the

What Is Marriage?

My mother died in her early seventies. About eight years later my father married again to a woman his own age. They had no children together. When manipulators on  TV  claim that the purpose of marriage is to have children, they insult older couples and all couples who choose not to have kids or cannot have them. I find that level of deep stupidity irritating.

Let's Cut Social Security So We Look Good

I read a newspaper every morning, so you would think I like newspapers. I do like them for the sports pages, the comics and the puzzles. I do not buy papers for political news. There are no good papers in that respect. I read the NY Times for 30 years, and it was, on a political level, a load of road apples.  What you get is a circle jerk of reporters and lame commentators repeating tips from one another that often have no relationship with reality. 

If I want political commentary, I go to magazines, which publish writers who have their own brains.

Recently the Washington beltwayers have decided that cutting back Social Security--in the richest nation in history--is the responsible thing to do.  Next, as J. Swift might say, we will be cooking and eating plump babies.

Below is a comment by TRUTHOUT.

"There are few areas where the corruption of the national media is more apparent than in its treatment of Social Security. Most of the elite media have made it clear in both their opinion and news pages that they want to see benefits cut. In keeping with this position they highlight the views of political figures who push cuts to the program, treating them as responsible, while those who oppose cuts are ignored or mocked.

"This pattern of coverage was clearly on display last weekend. Both the New York Times and Washington Post decided to ignore the Senate's passage by voice vote of the Sanders Amendment. This was an amendment to the budget put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that puts the Senate on record as opposing the switch to the chained CPI as the basis for the annual Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA)."

Brisket

My wife, who is Jewish, has cooked a brisket to take to a Seder in San Francisco (or, as my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents called it, "Frisco"--that was before the joint got prissy). Anyway, I am not Jewish like my wife and daughters and granddaughter, but they did invite me to join them. They did not encourage me to come, just invited me. Fortunately my granddaughter, who is six, was there to help me decide what to do. She complained that, among boring meals, Seders rank in the top six. That tempted me. In the end I have decided to stay home and contemplate the fate of the greatest Jew of all time.

Chinese Anchor Babies

I have no good insights into why the Republicans lost the Asian vote in the Presidential election.  Asians used to vote Republican. Maybe American Asians grew disgusted with the racism the Republicans boasted about so proudly. My brother did suggest an interesting factor in all this. Apparently wealthy Chinese and other Asians have started up a large regular system of anchor babies. That is, wealthy men fly their pregnant wives in from China. The wives are met at the airports by a helpful service that will house and feed them for the remaining month or two of pregnancy. And also take them shopping and so forth. It adds up to a nice holiday. In the end the mom and child return home and the child has dual citizenship. (I admit to admiring the Chinese.)  Now if I were Asian, I might notice that Latinos catch hell for anchor babies (largely a Republican myth). I might, just for pragmatic reasons, vote for a less dangerous group of foolish candidates.

Personhood

The current personhood movement is an attempt to grant full citizenship to a fetus at the moment of conception, which would ban abortions. What enrages me about personhood movement is that it--with its Orwellian name--actually removes personhood from women, half of our population. Personhood re-enslaves women, turning them into the mechanical baby factories preferred by old white men.

Most Americans understand that slavery is the original curse our ancestors put on this country, a curse that has warped everything since. The greatest crimes in our history were committed against people with black or brown skin. But next comes the denial of personhood to women, gays, Asians, and minorities in general. Today the typical American rejects the surface manifestations of slavery, yet fanatical Republican office holders are deeply committed to the enslavement of young women of all colors. The personhood laws they are passing are currently unconstitutional, but three or four of these women-hating nutters sit on the Supreme Court, where anything can happen.  We can thank the Reagan Revolution.

The Cheetah's Best Friend

Yesterday I read in our paper that cheetahs are becoming rare in the wild. Maybe 12,000 left.  Zoos and related cheetah breeding programs have found it hard to get the animals to mate. Apparently cheetahs are skittish, nervous, not quick to befriend one another. They have trouble relaxing and making love. This surprised  me--I remember reading about the domestication of cheetahs. African kings used them the way we use hunting dogs. I assumed that cheetahs were calm animals.

Fortunately some smart fellow has come up with an answer. You don't put a bunch of cheetahs together to reassure them. They don't like one another. Instead you assign to each cheetah a large loyal companion dog. This gives the cheetah a friend to comfort it. And if something bad comes along, the dog will roar and fight. Of course the relationship is somewhat one-sided. While the dog is loyally defending it, the cheetah will depart at speeds unknown to other land mammals. The cheetah is a cat.

A cheetah with a companion dog is a cheetah at ease, ready to date. At meal times, though, the two have to be separated. Otherwise the dog will eat two meals.

A LIVING WAGE

In the United States one per-cent of the people own 50% of the stocks, bonds, etc. They sit on 40% of the nation's wealth. But they are hard workers. They must be. The average person (a lazy taker) has to work for a month to earn what a 1% guy earns in one hour. But the pay balances out in the end, to some degree, because the 1% guy lives, on average, four or five years longer than the ordinary person, while continuing all of that really hard work. You know how difficult it is to get up in the morning and walk outside to the limo and so on.

Bottle Shock (changing the world)

Our local paper today announced the death of Jim Barrett, who owned the Chateau Montelena winery in Calistoga. Jim Barrett is the dude who changed the world of wine. In 1975 if you wanted a bottle of fine wine, you bought from the expensive French, maybe from the Italians or Germans. That was what we did back then. I will not forget going into a liquor store with Dennis Renault and him asking the astonished owner what sort of wine went best with tamale pie. Then, in 1976, Jim Barrett sent some of his wine, made from Napa and Sonoma county grapes, to a blind tasting contest in France. To the shock of anyone interested, the California wines won. (This feat was duplicated about 20 years later by Robert Mondavi.) Now here is what matters. It's not that Napa and Sonoma became a world center of fine wine and overpriced cuisine, suddenly drawing tourists, billionaires and wine zombies from all over the world, although that has had its pleasant side effects. For example, superb bakeries. What matters is that it became clear that excellent wines could be made cheaply in places like Paso Robles and Oregon and Brazil and Australia. Wine drinkers were no longer confined to the wines of France. 

(You can revisit the taste test with the movie BOTTLE SHOCK.)

HIV Cured

Close to 20 years ago, my brother-in-law died. He'd insured himself to the hilt to protect his wife and daughter. He was smart and he was brave, and he died from AIDS like a man. Today I read that maybe 5% of HIV patients can be cured. The rest can usually live long and healthy lives. We can thank science for that, unless we are teabaggers and don't believe in biology or Darwin or climate change.

Pope Francis Speaks

Now that the College of Cardinals has elected a new leader, Pope Francis, whose parents were both Italian, we have the first Pope from outside of Europe in many centuries. Among Americans, including my many Catholic relatives, questions have been raised about the Pope's name. We should insist on one thing: he was not named for a talking horse. The talking horse was Mr. Ed. He was only on TV. There is no Pope Ed. Francis was a talking mule, voiced by Chill Wills, in a series of movies in the 1950s.

Dennis Rodman

Top story in THE BOHEMIAN: Hugo Chavez dies just before his turn to meet Dennis Rodman.

The ECONOMIST on Hugo Chavez

I have friends who swear by a magazine called THE ECONOMIST. This British publication has a circulation of about 750,000 proud readers in the USA. I have tried to keep away from economists, myself, after one of them told me to pull my pension funds out of the stock market when the S&P had reached about 3,000. Shortly after that, when the S&P went to 14,000,  I became convinced that economists don't know jack. Today I've found a few economists I listen to, but that's another matter.

This morning our local paper republished a story from THE ECONOMIST on the legacy of Hugo Chavez, and I will attempt to translate two sentences of it from the British for you right here. For example, in discussing Venezuela's booming oil income, ECON wrote: "Chavez used this windfall to buy himself popular support, with social programs and handouts." In  American English that would read "Chavez used the nation's oil money to lower the percentage of his citizens living below the poverty line from 22% to 8%, the third lowest in South America."

I realize that my translation omits something vital from the ECON article, as translations often do. Perhaps I should try again. "Chavez used the nation's oil money to lower the percentage of his citizens living below the poverty line from 22% to 8%, the third lowest in South America, the dirty bastard."  That seems to capture the ECON tone a little better. 

The last sentence of the ECON article reads: "Now that the man has gone, however, Latin America's democrats have an easier task." Here the translation is much simpler. Where the ECONOMIST used the term "democrats," the rest of us would use the term "capitalists." In THE ECONOMIST, confusedly, the two words are employed as synonyms.     

Fears at the Fringe

I am a progressive in a progressive place. I hold that science is our most reliable discourse. I try to be brave. I live in North County. Our most progressive voters reside in West County, where some live lives of fear. 

Many are afraid of food. For starters, they fear wheat, the staff of life. Nationally 1.5% of the country is allergic to gluten, but in West County the perceived  figure is closer to 40%. Some of my friends fear the elected government every bit as much as the Tea Party does. They fear that the President is a Fascist. One town recently banned SmartMeters, so the utility company has stopped all work there. The ban exposes the city to lawsuits. 

Yes, some progressives in West County fear electricity. They remind me of my great-grandmother, Mary Berry, who came over on the boat. She feared telephones. As someone else pointed out, West County has banned  SmartMeters but has yet to ban routers, laptops,  TVs, iPads and Kindles, nor have they taken down the transmitting cell towers. Only a few have turned off the lights. 

Fluoridation, as you might expect, terrifies the fringe. The fact that most of the nation has been drinking fluoridated water for 70 years and nothing bad has happened is overruled by this: if you feed a rat nothing but fluoride and chicken fat, it will not prosper. And to hell with the poor kids who parents don't provide fluoridated toothpaste. Let their teeth rot. The fringe fear flu shots, of course, and all inoculations. The way they see it, if everyone else gets a flu shot, they won't need one.

CHAVEZ and BUSH

The death of Hugo Chavez yesterday saddens me. He was a colorful dude, and we won't see  his like again. To me (no expert) he seemed the sort of political leader who excelled at getting elected but lacked the wisdom to lead effectively. Clearly his heart was with the poor of the world. When he first took office, I supported him, drawn by his courage and charisma. When he changed the Venezuelan constitution so he could be elected in perpetuity, I dropped my meaningless support. He'd made a foolish decision, and he went on to make others. But unlike a worse corrupter of the democratic process, George W. Bush, Chavez never killed people by the thousands. He did not rejigger laws to profit the rich at the expense of everyone else.

The Darwin Award

Each year some Darwin Awards are given out to damned fools who can no longer reproduce, thereby improving our genetic stock.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Below is a story from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, an entry in the Darwin Awards contest.

    [Arkansas Democrat Gazette]:"Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early one Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock, were returning to Des Arc after a frog-gigging trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Poole's pickup truck headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. A replacement fuse was not available, but Wallis noticed that the 22 caliber bullet from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded eastbound toward the White River Bridge. After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged, and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exiting the pavement and striking a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident, but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended. Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. "Thank God we weren't on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off, or we might both be dead," stated Wallis.

______________________________________________________________________

In an unrelated matter, you should know that not all Catholic women secretly use contraception, a lesbian told me.

Cultural Theft

My favorite news commentators on TV are Melissa Harris Perry, Laurence O'Donnell, and Bill Moyers. I respect great intelligence. But this morning Perry, a young black woman, did a segment that left me somewhat bemused. In her final minutes on air, she talked about the Harlem Shake, not a new form of popular dance but one that has caught new attention in recent weeks. She had two basic problems with this. The name "Harlem Shake" was being applied to all sorts of hopping around that did not deserve it (which I found interesting),  and the groups doing this were guilty of cultural theft. They were stealing culture from the black people of Harlem. Melissa Harris Perry takes this seriously., Although she has a white mother, she identifies herself as a black woman.

What made the last complaint--about cultural theft--odd is that Melissa Harris Perry delivered it in an Indo-European language. She is a full professor at Tulane, a strikingly successful inheritor of non-African cultures going back to the Middle East, Greece, Rome and Great Britain. I am not, of course, accusing her of cultural theft. By definition you can't steal what is free for the taking. We learn from one another. The contributions made to American culture by black people are endless in number, and so are the contributions made by other groups, including the Scotch-Irish, who gave us Princeton, where Perry worked for a while, and songs like "I'll Fly Away." Also they gave us the surname "Harris."






l

On Not Making Water on Charles Krauthammer

I am writing today in protest against the movement sweeping the Internet for people to travel to the grave of Charles Krauthammer at some future date, after his passing, where they will make water on his grave. 

Why do I protest? Krauthammer may be as bitter as dirt in your mouth, but he's a clear thinker and a terrific asset to corporate America.  Yes, I know yesterday Krauthammer wrote that the sequester is a trifling matter and predicts that "nothing bad" will happen. Meanwhile, in the same issue of my newspaper, I read that our county's school districts will lose more than $4 million in funds that would have gone for free lunches, reading instruction and language work. But what's wrong with skipping breakfast and lunch for a few years? The children are young. They'll hardly notice, and don't we have too many overweight people already? 

During the sequester "nothing bad" will happen to Charles Krauthammer. That is what matters. He'll be eating the strawberries and heavy cream his contributions to our national dialogue deserve. Let's not even think about his urine-soaked future.