Tail Wags Dog

I'm sometimes tempted to think of the Republicans as the stupid party, but that is not the case. In general the Republican party of the past existed to help the 1%, where the money is. Getting rich by catering to the rich is not stupid (unless you are a male Christian, in which case you should keep in mind that Jesus said that sooner will a rope pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter Heaven).

Today's Republican Party, about to ignore Wall Street and shut down the government, is behaving stupidly but not from lack of intelligence. The GOP is paralyzed with fear.

I believe some analysts have traced how we got to this place.  (1) Nixon's "Southern strategy" stripped most of the racists out of the Democratic Party. They became Republicans and the party began its lurch to the Right and to Reagan. (2) Karl Rove helped to develop a strategy that emphasized stirring up the blood-lust of many separate groups, including the NRA, the nativists, the Confederate flag trash, the warriors against women, etc. In doing this, the Republicans mounted the back of a tiger, and now, if they dismount, they fear getting eaten. (3) About 35 Republican members of the House are so ignorant, angry and radical that they hope to shut down and crush the federal government, reducing it to almost nothing.  They come from super-safe Gerrymandered districts. They have the financial backing of balmy billionaires, so they do not need Wall Street. They do not like Wall Street. Most of the remaining Republican House members fear--with good reason--the wrath of the small nutter caucus, which will challenge in a primary election and defeat any Republican congress member who defies them. This might seem odd, but the rational thing for a centrist Republican member of the House today is to behave as stupidly as possible. (4) The House is now at a point where a shutdown seems almost inevitable. We may need a shutdown to shake up the voters and the House. Then the Republicans might feel safe enough to defy the minority teabaggers and do what is best for the nation. 

10,000 Years in the Desert

The other night I watched a TV program on a graveyard in the Sahara desert that is 10,000 years old. One of the graves held the bones of a ten-year-old girl and her bracelet.  This was not a tribe that had many bracelets. Think about that and 10,000 years melts away. Let another 10,000 years pass, and no one will remember us. They won't remember Shakespeare. But a family with a dead child will grieve as we do today.

The Conservative

America has seldom had any conservative political leaders. We've enjoyed numberless well-paid Big Business Stooges--they actively seek changes in the law that favor Big Business interests. There  is nothing conservative about that. It's just greed. More recently we have seen a lot of loony nativists called teabaggers. These brainless reactionaries seek ever more radical changes. Between them the two groups now struggle for control of the Republican Party, and they both claim to be conservatives, although genuine conservatives try to conserve things rather than fight to alter things in revolutionary ways.

I was reminded of this when I saw a genuine conservative speak on Bill Maher's TV show last week. David Frome explained that his disapproval of Obamacare was that it tried to do too much too fast. No one else on the panel even heard what he was saying. He took a conservative position. I disagree with it, but the position is reasonable and well motivated. I wonder what Sen. Ted Cruz thinks of David Frome.

Why, In One Sentence, We Should Fear Iran

We should fear Iran because Iran is catching up with us when it comes to allocating money to the military, having recently matched as much as 1% of what the USA spends. An even more terrifying reason is that while we have 8,000 nuclear weapons and Iran has none, they do generate electricity with nuclear power. Finally, in the last two centuries, Iran has failed to invade another nation, so think of the frustrated urge to invade they've stored up. You can see why the reporters on the Washington Post, CBS, PBS, and so forth tremble when urging us to do something about this startling menace.

The Hun

 About ten years ago someone asked me what I thought was our number one problem, and I replied that it was climate change. Among the issues that exist, climate change is the one most likely to harm, even kill, billions of people. That process has already begun in the United States. Getting a government to do something to mitigate the looming catastrophe has seemed nearly impossible, but today the Obama administration announced tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants--and power plants account for a third of all our greenhouse gas emissions. This move has, of course, made the President the enemy of the coal companies and the people who work for them or clean the workers' clothes or service their automobiles and so on. The problem is that if you can see consequences beyond the next paycheck, you are the enemy of our economic system and more villainous than Attila the Hun.

What Things Cost

The wife of a friend of mine has cancer, and this brought on an eating disorder, which had to be fixed before some of the cancer treatments could begin. Kaiser arranged for the wife to enter a locked facility here in Sonoma County that works with eating disorder patients. She stayed there for ten days and left in better shape. The treatment was paid for by Kaiser and Medicare, but my friend got a look at the bill, which came to more than $10,000 a day. Now of course we are talking here about maintaining a building, paying orderlies to guard the place, cooking up some bland food, short visits by doctors and nurses, some medications, maybe some use of an expensive machine that paid for itself in its first three months, etc. I figure that all that must be worth at least $2,000 a day. The other $8,000 a day was profit. We have a great system, eh?

Losing Badly

I am still digesting Sunday's football game.  I had no idea that the 49ers could play that badly or come out on the field so unready. The joy on the long visage of the opposing coach, the smile emerging in the lantern jaw, was a wonder to behold.

The Rubes of Jefferson

When you drive in the vicinity of the California and Oregon borders, you might turn on the radio and listen to NPR, which calls itself Jefferson Public Radio. That is because, for the last 70 years or so, there has been a movement in the empty rural parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon to secede from California and Oregon and form a new state called Jefferson. The state will represent the sorts of folk who are new to teeth brushing and resent it as a form of government interference by Michelle Obama. 

I believe that the NPR station took on the Jefferson cause with a smile, but in fact the Siskiyou  County Board of Supervisors recently voted 4-1 to secede from California and form a State of Jefferson. The new state will hold 44,000 of California's 38 million current residents. The main occupations will be mental health care and electing two teabaggers to the United States Senate. Luckily no one has given these rubes the permission slips needed to secede, so guess what?  We can forget about it. 

Ig Nobel and Diebenkorn

Once a year Harvard celebrates the Ig Nobel Prizes, a ceremony in which goofy research is rewarded. My favorite this year was the Probability Prize, which went to the Scottish Agricultural College in Edinburgh. After 11,000 observations, Scots determined that the longer a cow has been lying down, the sooner she will get up.

In an unrelated matter, an exhibition of the art of Richard Diebenkorn has been up at the de Young in San Francisco (aka Frisco to the unpretentious pioneers who built the place). Diebenkorn lived in Healdsburg the last five years of his life. He died 20 years ago.

25,000

According to the Press Democrat, by December 31, 2014, about 25,000 residents of Sonoma County with no medical help today will have health coverage thanks to Obamacare. On behalf of those 25,000 people, I have a question for the people who hate Obama or who claim that there is no difference between the two major political parties.  What's wrong with you?

Death Porn

Yesterday I watched parts of an hour program on MSNBC in which Karen Finney ran tape of dying Syrians on a split screen while talking-heads discussed whether we should join in on another nation's civil war. Death porn, designed to sway public opinion in favor of a useless attack on Syria. I finally turned off the government sponsored propaganda. Has President Obama lost his mind? The American people reject the proposed attack. The world has told us to stand down. If we attack we will not be acting as the world's police force. The world has told us to stay in our car. We will be acting like George Zimmerman.

Why Ayn Rand?

I recently read a thoroughly researched book on the "heavenly creatures," the two 15-year-old girls in New Zealand who murdered one of their mothers by slowly beating her to death with half a brick. That happened about 50 years ago. You might have seen the movie or read some mysteries later written by one of the young ladies, Ann Perry (a name one girl took after being released from prison). This sensational case proved second in commentary only to Leopold-Loeb in the 20th century. The matter of interest is why did the girls do it? They had stupid motives, of course, but what freed them to commit matricide? 

As near as I can tell, the two girls were social outsiders, awkward, reasonably bright, angry nerds, if you can accept that term. To give themselves the illusion of importance, they created a two-girl bubble to live in, a bubble of nonsense in which they were enormously gifted superfolk, living far above the rules of mere conformist society. They were the smartest, most gifted people on the planet. They loved self-centered, sociopathic movie villains and the actors who played them. They turned evil men into their heroes, which is what Ayn Rand did in her writings. Her readership is nerdy adolescent losers, which many people are at one point (many later become successful), but most never commit to evil or they grow out of a mild flirtation with evil without killing a parent or they remain adolescents forever like Ron and Rand Paul.