The Blame for Ebola

In discussion groups it is easy for me to spot people who get their news from Fox. They have the basic facts wrong. Fox viewers are especially ignorant people, either because ignorance drew them to Fox or because Fox miseducates its viewers.

Long ago I stood in a friend's backyard. I coached a girls soccer team the friend's daughter played on, and he had thrown us a party. He was pulling up stakes, moving to the South to join a spanking new TV network called Fox. As if a new network could survive and make money, I thought at the time.

What is hard is to spot misinformation on the TV shows I like. I watched many a show that explained that the Ebola crisis came about in part because the Republicans had cut funding for the Center for Disease Control, so the CDC was unprepared. Blame George W. Bush. I bought that narrative. It sounded right.

The fact is that Bush increased funding for the CDC. I don't know his motives, of course. Last year (2014) the CDC had a budget of nearly $7 billion. That's not shabby. In 2013 the Republican House authorized more money for the National Health Institute than President Obama requested. Increases and cuts in the budget were passed by combinations of Democrats and Republicans. And I am astonished that I got the thing wrong. (You don't get the whole picture if you stand too close.)

Beyond the Fringe

A few months back, I dropped out of the Healdsburg Peace Project. I did this reluctantly, because I like the members. The Project began about 13 years ago, a hundred people strong. Over the years the more astute members died or moved away or just quit, leaving behind good people whose belief systems were inconsistent with reality. Eventually I had to go, too. And that raises a question. Why does the Left have so little impact on American politics today? 

The first robber-baron era in the United States drew a vigorous response from ordinary people, who organized themselves into several movements that culminated in the New Deal. We are now deep into the second robber-baron era, triggered by the Reagan Revolution. This time the middle class and poor have no unity, no agenda, no plan, no Farmer-Labor Party, no New Deal. We face huge issues: poverty, climate change, racism, nuclear threats, our own dominant weapons industry and fluoridated water. You may wonder why fluoridated water is on the list. So do I.  

In the face of all this, the general public remains passive; and the Far Left in my area seems committed to an angry early-20th-century struggle to repeal western civilization, siding with the John Birch Society, the wine barons and local teabaggers in revolt against the world as it is. 

The actual work of trying to help actual people has been left to religious charities and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. They help a little here and a little there--but they, too, have no plan. The Republicans, these days, offer Wall Street and fundamentalist forms of oppression. What we need are movements that ordinary people will trust and a positive plan that makes sense to the average voter. 

If the Left wants to gain trust, here's a suggestion. Do something useful like gathering and delivering food to hungry people. They might then sit and talk. A plan might emerge.

The Lost Ranch, a family story

My wife and I returned to Northern California from Redlands last night. We had visited a friend in hospice.  Redlands is in the Inland Empire, such a great name for fairly ordinary turf. I would have driven back in one long day, but Susan now insists on shorter days, We stopped at a motel in Paso Robles, which the locals call "Paso." I wanted another crack at looking at my grandfather's ranch nearby, near Pozo.

Many years ago I read a book titled FAMILY STORIES.  I recently tried to find it on the 'net and  on Amazon, but it seems to have vanished. This book was an examination of family stories, which ones were common and what purposes they served. "Grandfather's lost ranch" is a classic. It tells how the family once had some significant property, a ranch or a gold mine or a bank, so the family is really more fancy and unified than it now seems. Anyway, I had once found the ranch site, which is a bit beyond the southern end of Lake Margarita, and the foundation of my grandparents' small house. But I did not realize what it was that I had come across at the time. I last visited the complete house in (maybe) Dec of 1942, and at that time it had no electricity. Primitive. On this trip I wanted to see if I could find the small property again (now part of a county park, I think). Susan and I drove along an empty road (River Road) for some time. The road paralleled the Salinas River, which is no more than a small creek at that point. I did  manage to find the parking lot that had been fenced off on the property, and I marked it on my GPS. I then walked a lot but did not find the house foundation. Maybe it has been taken out as part of a general improvement of the wild scene there.

The story is that some fancy people in San Luis Obispo wanted permission to hunt deer on my grandparents' property. He told them to get lost, so they took the property from him, using eminent domain. The justification was that they needed his ranch to make Lake Margarita, but the lake never came near his small ranch, and his neighbors got to keep their land. Just a story, of course. Susan wants me to sue, but that was 75 years ago, the land is now part of the park around the lake, and hunting is explicitly forbidden. And nobody beats eminent domain. Having seen the land, Susan now thinks more highly of me.

A Major Constitutional Flaw

I used to wonder why Supreme Court decisions were based on flimsy nonsense (even when I liked the decisions). It turns out that there is a simple answer. We have a Constitution that is the hardest to amend in the entire world. It is much too hard to change.  But times change, of course, and we have to keep changing. We often can't amend,  so we get new interpretations that might sound absurd but are needed. Or at times not needed.

Pine Flat

The Press Democrat's Clark Mason told some of this in the Sunday paper.

Near Healdsburg, near the Jimtown store, Pine Flat Road snakes up into the Mayacomas. It's a steep climb used by some Tour de France cyclists for an extreme workout. At the top of the mountains it ends in a locked gate, and on the other side is a dirt road leading down to Lake County. Dan, Tim and I sometimes bike about a half mile up the road, and then we turn around and boast to one another on the way back.

I  have driven to the top five or six times, and short of the top there is a little meadow with a creek. It's bear and cougar country, now owned by the Audubon Society. A great place to stroll. There once was a town there, Pine Flat, with 3,000 people mining quicksilver. They had stores, hotels, brothels, and a stage coach route. That was in the 1870s, and the town had three districts: a Latino district, a Chinese district, and between them was what they called the American (or white) district. But there is nothing left of the town, not a stick, not even one photograph or personal diary, just some newspaper accounts. The town completely vanished.

The stage coach owner and driver, Clark Foss, has a mural in his honor in Calistoga, and the creek that floods Healdsburg is Foss Creek. Foss was famous for rapid stage coach rides, and he did crash once and kill a passenger. Pine Flat had homicides, of course, and the most famous killer there was Eadweard Muybridge. I suppose he is most famous for some photographs he commissioned of a running horse that proved that there were moments when all four hooves were in the air.  Muybridge murdered Major Henry Larkins, his wife's British  lover. The British were unpopular at the time.  Muybridge pleaded temporary insanity and walked free.

The Unicorn Defense

We understand what the Nuremberg defense is. You kill a thousand children, and then, when you are tried for the offense, you say, "My boss told me to do it."  The CIA is not using the Nuremberg defense. Instead they are saying, "There is a legal justification for torture."  And it is true that a legal justification exists in the sense that unicorns exist. They exist as fictions on paper. We can draw a unicorn on a piece of paper and point to it and say, "Dick Cheney  told me to insert vegetable matter into the prisoner's rectum and the unicorn said it was legal." The three branches of our government may or may not agree with the claim. The rest of the world will continue to think the claim is delusional, but only because unicorns do not exist in the same way as zebras. Zebras are as real as the treaties we sign.

The Idiot's Defense

Let's say you work for the CIA, and some lawyer tells you that it's legal to torture people. So you go ahead and do it. It's good for your career. You trust lawyers? You don't know right from wrong? And that is your argument? What are you, an idiot?

Pop Quiz

This is my standard quiz on pop music. Answers will be posted in a few days.

1. Who was the first white man to be named jazz vocalist of the year in DOWNBEAT  magazine?

2.  Which vocalist has had the most #1 hits in American history?

3.  Who was the singer on the best selling recording of all time in the United States?

4. Name the first singer who taped his radio show in advance, so he could edit it.

5. Which singer walked off his film set and wouldn't return until Louis Armstrong was granted his first movie billing?

Arrest Them

Dianne Feinstein is not the worst senator in Washington. I don't like her, but she isn't bone stupid like the Republican senators who deny science on behalf of an imaginary friend who lives on Mount Olympus. She hasn't dedicated her waking life to evil works. Feinstein is a corporate Democrat, herself one of the fancy class, which means she mostly serves her peers, the rational rich, and on occasion she does something for ordinary voters. Today she is releasing a 600 page summary of a longer report on the torture used against prisoners by the second, feckless Bush administration.

The people need to understand and discuss what has been done in our name. Anyone who says we don't need to know is attempting to smother what remains of our democracy. 

Torture is illegal under our Constitution. If a government agent finds himself in a situation where torture is an absolute necessity, he should do it and then turn himself in to be tried. When MLK decided it was necessary to break the law, he broke it and waited to be arrested. He didn't run. He was genuinely committed to the democratic system he was trying to improve. We have let our official torturers run and hide and pretend to be everything but what they obviously are. They broke the law. Arrest them.

 

The 2016 Campaign

Tom Belton reminded me that the voters in 2016 will not be voting out of gratitude. The fact that the Democrats brought them Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Act, etc., will not be decisive. The Democrats have opposed--to some extent--racism, gender bias, climate change, homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that will not be decisive. Gratitude wears thin faster than a cheap t-shirt. What will matter are the plans the two parties put forward to improve things in the future. What will the parties offer? What ideas?

Of course the Democrats could get lucky. The Republicans might nominate another unbearable hairy head. But what voters want is a plan to move this country in concrete ways to a better future. 

The Fearbiters

There used to be a classification of dogs known as fearbiters. In short, these dogs had been abused or improperly trained, they feared strangers and they snapped at kids. They were dangerous to ordinary people and children, like some police officers today. I'm thinking of Andy Lopez, Michael Brown, and the many other unarmed children and young adults who have been shot a half dozen times by a public servant fearing for his life. But are these panicking shooters the central villains in street executions? What about the Sonoma County sheriff who trained the killer of Andy Lopez and then gave the man back his gun and sent him out to shoot again? What about the district attorney who let the killer off without a trial? Or the police chief in Ferguson and the county district attorney there who tacitly endorsed the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown? They could join together and produce a manual in  how to sweep government-sanctioned manslaughter under the rug.

It's not just that government officials thwarted justice. We're used to that. They also ended any hope of finding out what really happened, information that only a trial could have produced. So there is no closure. And the penalty for covering up? None.

Are Americans Stupid?

Recently several aged comedians agreed on TV that people are stupid. The context was a discussion of some truthful dude who helped invent the Affordable Care Act and then said that people were so stupid they had to be misled to give them health care. John Cleese, agreeing that people are stupid, said that what old age had taught him was that nearly everyone doesn't know what he is talking about.  (This is one of the great insights of philosophy, shared by the ancient daoists and Ludwig Wittgenstein.) 

I am now so old I might as well face reality, which is that nearly half of our population is of below-average intelligence. The upper half is mostly delusional by choice. They prefer to believe things like "Mary was a virgin" and "Woodie Allen is a great baby sitter." On a scale of one to ten, nearly all of us are dumb or deluded, especially our Supreme Court, and that is part of what is the matter with Kansas. (Did I mention that I am old?)

Ferguson, MO

Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., a few months back. The exact circumstances are in dispute, and I can't contribute anything useful to that discussion. I can say this. In our country, on average, nearly one black or brown male is killed by the police each day. In Japan the average number of people killed by the police is zero per day. It isn't fair, of course, to make a simple comparison between Japan and the United States. Japan is not very ethnically diverse. Both nations struggle with racism, but in only one country do the police shoot down unarmed teenagers with the backing of their bosses and the district attorneys. Something needs to be done. A lot needs to be done.

Obama in Hell

According to the NY Times, about 2.5 million undocumented immigrants live in California, and a majority of them have been here for ten years or more. One in six or 16% of the children in California have an undocumented parent from Asia, Latin America, Ireland, etc.  What President Obama has done is decide not to seek out and deport the adult members of these intact families.  He's going to let the old folks remain, so they can work and support the children and teach them manners. For committing this dirty deed, Obama will roast in Hell beside Hitler and Stalin, of course, but maybe he figures it's worth it.

Go Shoot Yourself

In the middle of the Civil War, Nancy Pelosi has reminded us, President Lincoln issued an emancipation proclamation, freeing the slaves in the rebel states. His act was clearly illegal.  His lawyers cobbled together a weird justification for what he was doing. They held that slaves were part of the rebel war machine and all parts of that machine were subject to federal seizure (or something like that). Lincoln freed the slaves in the face of the Constitution, many court decisions and the laws of the land. He took away from Southern white men about half their financial worth. But we don't mind that today because what he did was morally correct. (So he cut a few corners.)

Now President Obama, following in the footsteps of many earlier Presidents, has issued an edict that protects the status of families that contain American citizens and undocumented immigrants, and the Republicans are threatening to sue. Are you kidding me? Break up families? Why not just shoot yourself in the knee and acquire a permanent limp?  

Obama's Shoes

Both shoes have now fallen. Shoe One: the President set in motion his plan to grant temporary immunity to about 5 million undocumented people, many of them Latinos. None of them will get to vote, but they have friends, relatives and well wishers who support diversity. If the Democrats and Independents want to keep these five million people around, they will have to show up at the polls in 2016. The next President will decide the matter. Shoe Two: Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate, may be an empty suit, but she has endorsed Obama's plan 100%. The Republican candidate will pledge to reverse it. The side that turns out with enthusiasm will win.

The Democrats who ran away from Obama (elected President twice) also ran against his base in 2014. Some of that base just stayed home this year. The Democrats lost and then blamed Obama. Running with the Obama base might be worth a try two years from now.

Human Folly Is Endless

When my daughters were little girls, they got into a fight on the cement back porch. They were playing hopscotch, and both of them wanted to play with an imaginary friend they called Mr.  Nobody. I had to break up this ruckus.

In Israel there's a place called the Temple Mount that is sacred to several religious groups, each devoted to worshiping their own Mr. Nobody.  One part of the site is reserved for Muslims as a place for them to pray. Jews are not allowed there, but some Jews do enter and then kneel and pretend to tie their shoelaces while actually muttering prayers to a different Mr. Nobody. A day or two back, to avenge this insult, two Muslim men killed four rabbis. Then the two Muslims were killed.         

Tomorrow, another folly will take place. Check your local paper. 

Whiff of Evil

I watched a 2014 movie from Australia called "Lance Armstrong: Stop at Nothing" on TV.  Interesting. Armstrong learned how to juice up after he got smoked in a race by Indurain and found out what Indurain was using. So Indurain was a juicer (won five straight tours), and no one has confiscated his medals. But maybe Indurain wasn't also a sociopath--Armstrong is apparently a sociopath as well as a juicer. The film explores his relationships with other riders, Greg LeMond, etc. Revealing stuff. Real whiff of an unending evil will.

Our Corporate Governance

Now I am trying to figure out the secret TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership, a kind of NAFTA for 12 Pacific Rim countries. It's a secret treaty that is apparently being negotiated by representatives of corporations from the nations involved. I read that the USA has about 600 people on its team and 590 of them represent corporations. I might be paranoid, but I don't entirely trust them. The object might be to increase corporate profits at the expense of ordinary people by raising some standards and lowering others. Some of the negotiations have leaked. For example, 12 nations blocking generic drugs will help America's Big Pharma, and in return America will lower the safety standards on food imported from the other treaty signers. I doubt if there is any way to stop this treaty. The governments will support their corporate oligarchies. President Obama and the Republicans, who control both houses of congress, are pushing for the TPP. Bernie Sanders and Paul Krugman oppose it.

St.Vincent

For those who appreciate Bill Murray's acting, ST. VINCENT is a crotchety, sentimental entertainment and a pleasantly uneven visit to a theater. It held my interest throughout.  Just saying. . . it is sentimental. 

On a completely different note, more than one in seventy children born in America today are burdened with autism to one degree or another. That's a high rate. There are two in my block alone. Science does not know what causes autism, but something does. There is currently no known correlation with gluten, vaccinations, astrological signs, GMO foods or fluoridated water. We badly need scientific research and useful results. 

Brace Yourself

According to the NEW YORK TIMES, "American business is gearing up for a major push on long-sought goals like an overhaul of the corporate tax system, building the Keystone oil pipeline, lighter environmental and financial regulation and winning congressional backing for trade deals with Asia and Europe." In other words, as climate change worsens, the fancy people and their corporations will grow richer, and the purchasing power of ordinary people will shrink. When ordinary people cannot afford to buy new water heaters, we will slip into a recession. Jobs will continue to be exported to places where people are lucky to work for a dollar an hour. 

The only person who can slow this process in the next two years is President Obama. Brace yourself.             

The Brave One

The anti-fluoride movement in Healdsburg, which has its roots in the John Birch Society, failed to repeal fluoridation today by a 2-1 vote. That's a victory for science, common sense and poor children, and I'm happy.  I'm happy to agree with the Press Democrat on this issue. But I noticed that the political figures I usually look to for leadership mostly failed to speak up. They knew fluoride is safe and useful, but they hedged around the issue, pretending to be reconsidering it.  The one exception that I know about was Jim Wood, our new assembly member. He was bluntly in favor of fluoridated water. Jim is a retired dentist. Jim has to look other scientists in the eye. Others might have decided that the issue was too toxic for discussion. Jim did the right thing and took a stand--and then he won big. (Jim Wood will be the only scientist in the state assembly.)     

The Glutenous

Wheat was the first crop humans planted and harvested, about 11,000 years ago, and after that brief taste test, we can see today what a disaster it has been for our civilization. That insight is why you can now go to Safeway and buy gluten-free dog food. 

Gluten is a protein, of course, found in wheat, barley, etc. This protein can do great harm to the bowels of people with celiac disease, about 1% of the current American population, and it has already done immense damage to another 39% of the population who blame gluten for their sensitive stomachs and so on. This second group--the sensitive 39%--have not been diagnosed by our failed medical doctors, who claim to have found no link between gluten and physical ailments. 

We are much too smart these days to let western science fool us about gluten or climate change or vaccinations or fluoridated water. Scientists--what are they good for?

The second group of suffering Americans--the 39%-- have mostly been diagnosed by talk therapists, diet authors or by themselves. Self-diagnosis is inexpensive and easy. Simple reasoning helps you detect what has gone wrong. For example, if you drink a glass of water and later on you get a stomach ache, you should stop drinking water. The key insight here is that correlation is causation.  What comes first causes what comes second. The final step comes after you stop drinking water when you realize you no longer have a stomach ache. (See the key insight above.)

Western medical science--and for that matter the Asians, who adore gluten--has found no reason to link gluten to health problems, but there are possible medical problems with wheat. Apples, wheat, honey, watermelons, mangoes, milk, ice cream, garlic and onions contain fermentable oligosaccharides and polyols, which actually can cause mild discomfort in some eaters on occasion. You should give these foods up, leaving them to the likes of the Chinese and me, who are immune. When I see a chocolate eclair it is almost my duty to eat it quickly and keep it out of the hands of my friends, unless they are from Asia, where gluten (not wheat) is often baked into chewy little balls in a red sweet sauce. I admit that gluten balls taste good. I order mine with extra gluten.

Today you can buy almost anything you want to eat in a non-gluten form. The gluten has typically been replaced by fat and sugar to improve its ugly non-gluten taste. Nothing beats fat and sugar. You can probably recall when talk therapists and dietitians were saying that fat and sugar and MSG were bad for you, but now scientists are telling the truth. MSG is chemically harmless!  Good God! Who knew? Things change. Now you can't eat enough junk food, just stay away from gluten. 

I know what medical doctors claim, which is that there is no test of any sort that can confirm non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which they claim is probably an imaginary disease.  Forget science. Just stop eating gluten. A billion Chinese will thank you and more will be left for me.  

Obola

When Obama first ran for office, some squat person in front of me in a line entering the county fair said something that sounded like "Obamanation." It took me too long to figure out that this was his comment on a political candidate.  More recently I've heard "Obola," an attempt by the illiterate to find the right person to blame for a virus.

More interesting to me is the way Americans react to fear and the way that political leaders play on fear.  Look at the situation Nurse Kaci Hickox is in--the governor of her state has been attempting to quarantine her for Ebola although our scientists tell us that she doesn't have it. The governor is up for re-election--Ms. Hickox has been folded into his campaign. He's been hinting in public that someone might want to kill her.  He's probably found a winning if illegal issue. 

Closer to home I have a good friend who has disinvited a guest on the grounds that the guest has visited a country in Africa that does not have Ebola. In other words, the guest visited a county that does not have the disease, returned to America, which does have it, and then forfeited her invitation to the party because she had traveled to a nation that remains Ebola-free.

Hillary

Our major political parties operate somewhat like gigantic corporations.  Taking control of a party can make a confidence man immensely rich. The Clintons understood that and did that and are now in the 1% and growing by the hundreds of millions. For them politics is a business career.

All you have to know about Hillary Clinton is that in 1996 she urged her husband to sign a bill that would strip resources away from poor kids; horny Bill was into "welfare reform," led there by Dick Morris and Hillary. The AFDC, passed by FDR back in 1935 (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), got wiped from the books by the Clintons, who went on to turn the Democrats into yet another party dedicated to obeying the fancy class. Bill got his eight years in office. It's Hillary's turn for eight years, as planned from Day One. That's 16 years of Clintons. And I will vote for Hillary Clinton because the Republicans are getting ready to nominate an amphibian from the dark lagoon.       

The Unbending Beckham

I watched a bizarre program on TV this evening, one worthy of Evelyn Waugh. David Beckham, a tremendously famous soccer star and the husband of a Spice Girl, set out on a journey into the center of the Amazonian jungle. He took along a camera crew and several friends who were less interesting than he was. The goal of this trip into the steaming heart of darkness was to find a tribe so isolated and untutored that it had never heard of David Beckham. With this tribe Beckham would at last be able to just be himself, an ordinary unknown Joe, so to speak, one dude relating to others. He would escape the photographers and handlers and false friends of England. In this quest he succeeded. Not only had the naked tribe members never heard of Beckham, they had never heard of soccer. In fact, I doubt if they grasped the concept of competitive sports.

In an Evelyn Waugh novel, Beckham would have been heartlessly condemned to remain with the tribe for the rest of his life. There was literally no road out. But as it happened, Beckham caught a small chartered plane back to the coast the next morning. In about 90 minutes of screen time only one event held my attention. The tribal people liked to paint their faces and arms with thick lines and symbols. You can imagine their reaction to Beckham's gorgeous array of modern tattoos, which cover his arms and shoulders and neck. The tattoos made the tribal painting look puny, and the locals could not seem to grasp why, when they rubbed at the soccer star's arms, the tattoos did not flake away, as they should, to make way for new ones. 

Why Feminism Failed

Feminism isn't popular among American women. In part that is because all ideologies reduce a complex reality to something thinner and more manageable. Ideologies--religious, psychological, financial, political--often pixelize the world, in some cases so that our eyes slide by the worst parts. That helps us live at peace with ourselves. Other ideologies, while reductive, insist we stare at the worst aspects of life on this planet.

This came to mind as I read an article by Jenny Diski in which she mentioned in passing the four different waves of feminism in my time, resulting today in "unequal pay, unresolved work and child-care balance, and still marrying, forever marrying men." Reading that it occurred to me that perhaps the inability of feminism to succeed might be rooted in how its success gets measured.

Judging feminism a failure because women still marry men sets too high a bar. About 385 million years ago our ancestors began the male/female hookup. Changing genes with a manifesto might not work. On the other hand, President Obama has appointed many judges, and nearly 45% of them are women. That's an advance over, say, what George Washington or Abraham Lincoln did. Perhaps justice for women is gaining ground.

The Especially Golden State Bridge

Believe it or don't believe it, the truth is that the Golden Gate Bridge District is considering taxing (or tolling) people who walk or bicycle across the bridge. This is not an attempt to pay for the bridge, which was paid for decades ago. The purpose of this fee is to keep the riff-raff, the poor people with grimy children, off the bridge and out of sight. The tourists who fly into SF and walk the bridge want to enjoy the views of the bay and the ocean, the City and Marin County. These wealthy visitors are graduates of our finest private colleges and universities, trained to appreciate aesthetic experiences.  Nothing spoils a wonderful encounter with wind and sea more than being jostled by a ten-year-old in run-down sneakers, who is skipping along on the metropolitan pavement for free. 

Unintended Abuse

People are beginning to vote. My wife and I cast our ballots by mail a few days back. For our local city council, I voted for Brigette Mansell, a high school teacher who got into the race for no other reason than to do some good. Somehow she won the endorsement of the Democratic Party, maybe because she's an independent thinker and has not run a typical campaign. She's a citizen, and she's beholden to no one, a rare candidate.

Healdsburg has a significant proposition on the ballot, Prop. P., which calls for a continuation of the 50-year-old project that lightly fluoridates the city water. At this point 70% of America has been drinking fluoridated water for generations, and the science is settled. Fluoridation helps poor people keep their teeth. Rgulated fluoridation is proved harmless and for a large percentage of poor children, fluoridated water is the only dental care they get. If you have any questions about fluoridation, ask your dentist, a scientist,  what he or she thinks. The opposition to fluoridated water is based on paranoia and a few studies that have been misinterpreted or were imaginary to start with. Ending fluoridation, which some of my friends call for, is a form of unintended and ignorant child abuse. (Ask your dentist.)    

A Ferry Ride

This is a true story. Not too long ago I went by myself to a foreign country, and while I was there I fell asleep on a ferry. When I woke, I jumped up and broke my glasses. I fixed them with white adhesive tape and continued to wear them like that when I returned home.  Friends noticed the tape and cracked jokes at my expense.

Then one day I was looking for some stuff and found my old glasses with odd frames by accident. Okay, the prescription was no longer quite right, but I washed the dust off the glasses and put them on. I thought, Boy, this will surprise my wife, but it didn't. That was three weeks ago, and she still hasn't noticed. Today I thought, You know, Mabel hasn't actually looked at me recently, which is kind of interesting. 

Two Actors

Last night I was watching an early talkie, RED MORNING, a film I had never heard mentioned. It was a fairly big movie with countless extras, murders, some heedlessly racist elements, etc., and it starred a fetching young woman named Steffi Duna. I'd never heard of her, either, but she was oddly compelling, so I looked her up. Duna had started out as a ballet dancer in Hungary (she looked and sounded Latina to my ignorant ear). She starred in some major films in the early 1930s like ANTHONY ADVERSE, and she married John Carroll and Dennis O'Keefe. I don't suppose much of Duna's work remains available--she did not become a major star--but I decided to keep my eye out for her in the future. She died in 1992.

Yesterday also brought the obituary of Elizabeth Pena, another actor who did not become a major star. I suppose she will be remembered by most people for her roles on television series. I didn't watch those series, but I will not forget her in LONE STAR, a John Sayles' film that I rank in my top ten. How many Westerns end with a brother and sister marrying one another with your approval? The movie is a stunning comment that no matter what the rules are, they do not fit snugly around the complexities of our lives.

Why The Giants Win

On paper the San Francisco Giants seem to be maybe an above-average team, but they've now reached the World Series in three of the last five years. That achievement does not match their mediocre statistics, so what is going on?

Last night, in a game that would decide who will represent the National League in the World Series, the Giants were tied 3-3 with St. Louis in the bottom of the ninth. The Giants had two men on base and Travis Ishikawa, a journeyman backup, at the plate. This was for all the marbles, and in a few minutes Ishikawa would hit a three-run homer. Just before that, Brandon Belt, the Giant's first baseman, was staring at the batter. Then Belt stepped back to get a drink or something, and Brandon Crawford, the shortstop, stole the first baseman's glove and hid it. 

Bruce Jenner's Face

Looking at Bruce Jenner's face on AOL reminded me that on my recent trip to Los Angeles County, made with Mark and Sarah, we stayed at a rundown motel in Redondo Beach. That's where I went to high school. Anyway, across Pacific Coast Highway stood a small stuccoed building that housed a business. The sign on the building read something like this: "$9 Botox Shots. Every single day. Walk-ins welcome."  I tried to fit that invitation into my schedule but then realized I was already expressionless. My goal is to smile.

Uniting Courthouse Square

The time has come to unite or divide Courthouse Square. This happens every 50 years, and we do it to help businesses. We divide Courthouse Square by putting the Old Redwood Highway through it, making it more accessible for customers. Or we reunite the square by removing the road, making stores even more or less accessible, probably.

The process of dividing or reuniting the square takes the Santa Rosa City Council about 20 years of deliberation, which gives the council members something business-friendly to negotiate. The cost this time will be 17 million dollars, which, divided by 50, works out to a mere $340,000 a year.  Of course dividing or reuniting will cost more in the future, but you have to adjust for inflation.

One note of caution--the reason people shop in smaller towns and in malls or anyplace else in the county rather than at Courthouse Square is that small towns and malls do not charge for parking. Recently the metering system down town was changed to make it more confusing, and that might help businesses a little. I can say that I intend to return to shopping down town as soon as parking there is free. In the meantime I prefer that the square be reunited or divided at regular, inexpensive 50 year intervals. The City Council has my support. 

MSNBC and Horror

A year or two back, a friend pointed out that MSNBC provides TV entertainment rather than news. You find it amusing or you don't. If you want a quick review of what is happening, you can find that on BBC or Aljazeera. If you are looking for a deeper discussion, you go to Bill Moyers or Melissa. If you want the Republican slant on things, done in the most kindly way imaginable, you turn to the News Hour on Koch-funded PBS (its guest Republicans outnumber guest centrist Democrats by a 2 to 1 margin). 

I just want to add that, after all, I do learn things by watching MSNBC. In the last few days, for example, I learned that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has been tracking Ebola for forty years.  Ebola is a virus. The CDC knows how to go after a virus, but to eliminate taxes for the 1%, CDC funding got cut. The result: yes, our scientists knew Ebola was flying in on an airplane one day, but they could not prepare. The other thing I learned was something I had forgotten. The mess in Syria, which spawned ISIS, was influenced by climate change. A drought drove poor people into the cities and endangered the farmers. They began to starve. The 1% decided to suppress them. When droughts occur and people get desperate, the horror show begins. But as the Republican say, What, me worry?

The Press Democrat Begins to Dance

The Press (Corporate) Democrat has started its transparent election dance. On issues where corporations have no big stake, the PD supports rational, humane behavior: it endorsed fluoridated water because the science is proven, it benefits the children of the poor who lack access to dentistry and it costs the rich almost nothing. On issues where corporations like itself believe they have a big stake, the PD tortures reason until it yields a position favoring the 1%. In today's case, the newspaper has endorsed a Washington, D. C., wine lobbyist named Gore for county supervisor because he's backed by the wine barons, the developers and the Republican business community, while his opponent, Deb Fudge, is backed by "special interests," a sneering synonym for labor unions. At stake is whether the Board of Supervisors will have a majority that focuses on what is good for the corporations or on what is good for the rest of us. Vote for Fudge.

The most interesting aspect of this predictable behavior is the pathetic mental process of the editorial board. They believe they've carefully thought through an intelligent decision and done a good deed, when in fact they immediately sold out to their corporate employers while hiding the obvious truth from themselves. Feh!   

American Woman

The most successful athletic team representing the United States is, as far as I can tell, the American Women's Basketball squad. Since 1996 they have lost exactly one game in Olympic and World Championship tournaments. Many of the same players return year after year--familiar names to me at this point. Yesterday they beat Spain to win another World Championship. They have great skills, hit three-point shots regularly, and I saw a dunk.  If you enjoy sports, their games are well worth watching.

The Lack of Republicans

According to Pete Golis in the Press Democrat, 51.7% of the voters in Sonoma County are Democrats, 21.3% are Decline-to-State (registered independents) and 21.2% are Republicans. The Republican party--a party of voter suppression, racism and anti-science, dedicated to the transfer of money from the poor and middle class to the 1%--deserves to wither away. The county and the country badly need a new party. The new party should be dedicated to genuine service for all Americans and dedicated to caution, another name for the real conservatism found in all of us, even in pragmatic radicals like me.

 

The Collapse of Western Civilization

I was disheartened to learn that Western Civilization had already collapsed twice. I'd heard about the fall of Rome, but I'd missed the first collapse, which happened about 1600 years earlier and was probably caused by a perfect storm of events: earthquakes, climate change and invasions by a ruthless group of predators called the Sea Peoples (who remain unidentified). 

What fell was a huge tangle of nations that had governments, laws, trading routes, writing, bronze swords of mass destruction, and so on. Major parts of the system were the Mycenaeans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, even the Israelites (a minor group, to be sure). What followed in the West was a Dark Age, followed by the rise of the Greek and Roman civilization, followed by a fall, followed by a Dark Age, which was followed by our current civilization. Of course, I'm not saying that we need to be on the lookout for earthquakes, climate change or barbarians invading Babylon. As Nefertiti used to say, we enjoy the protection of Aten, the one and only God.  

Bombing Doesn't Work, Probably

I have no idea how to bring peace to the Middle East, but in the interest of clear thinking I want to comment on a comment I often see these days on TV or read in my newspaper.  I quote Michael Kieschnick, the leader of Credo, a progressive group in San Francisco, which initiated an Internet petition demanding that Congress end the attack on ISIS. "Bombing won't work. It never works," Kieschnick said. What he meant, I believe, is that bombing by itself never works. That's the best reading. Kieschnick obviously detests ISIS, but instead of bombing he wants us to negotiate peacefully with ISIS. I doubt if that is going to work--let's keep our heads here. 

By the way, an Internet petition has the same effect on real events as a cough has on a hurricane.

The critique that bombing never works also comes from the Right, and what it means to Righties is that we should ship in a huge land army like the one I served in sixty years ago.

Here's the problem. As far as I can tell, no one is claiming that bombing by itself will work in the Middle East. Kieschnick is refuting a position no one has taken. We all agree that ISIS cannot be defeated by bombing alone. And there's another problem with Kieschnick's claim. Bombing by itself does occasionally work, depending on circumstances. I'm no historian, but I'd guess that there have been many instances when a people or a nation quit  after being bombed. I can think of two examples. One was when Churchill bombed the Kurds in the 1920s. The Kurds dismounted, stabled their horses and gave up. The other one happened in 1945 (it's hard to remember that far back).

BOUVARD ET PECUCHET

1. During the height of the Great American Buffalo Slaughter, 1872 to 1874, the whites killed 3.2 million bison and the Indians killed 1.2 million.

2. Flaubert never finished writing BOUVARD ET PECUCHET, a novel about the gap between how people think and reality, because he found no end to human stupidity.

3. Today we are changing the climate of the world, which already has begun to bring on catastrophes that will attack western civilization in unpredictable and radical ways. Note that western civilization has unfortunately disintegrated twice in the past (a change in climate helped induce the fall of Egypt, Babylon, the Minoan and the early Greek network more than a thousand years before Christ and, much later, we dimly recall the fall of the Roman empire). 

4. Do we care? We are Bouvard and we are Pecuchet.

Weed

The small town of Weed, on Route 5 in Northern California, lost 100 homes and two churches in a forest fire this week. Climate change, drought, many fires have damaged the state this year. For me the town has been a regular stop. Where else can I buy a cap that says "I Love Weed"?

An Open Letter to FDR

Yes, Mr. President, we all agree that December 7th was a day that will live in infamy, but what exactly is our strategy here? The American people want to know. 

No one argues that the leaders of Japan are anything but horrible. We should kill them and punish them. But have you noticed that they have allies? Hitler has declared war against us! We're getting dragged into something we don't understand, and in your speech you haven't spelled out a road to victory. What is our exit plan? What is our long-term strategy? Does it make sense for us to arm a socialist country like Great Britain? And just how "moderate" are these British socialists? 

Britain has attacked us twice in the past--how do we know they won't take our arms and use them against us? Why don't you tell us what our armed forces are going to do next? Where will they invade first? Do you even know?

The New War

The war with ISIS that is forming has laid bare the fecklessness of our useless congress, which has the duty of deciding when we go to war. Congress is letting the President decide what to do (and then be attacked for the consequences, whatever they may be). We've learned to expect that sort of thing. But I'm impressed this time around by the pointless nattering of my own favorite political commentators.

 Like most people, I tend to watch, listen and read political commentary from people I agree with. It's more fun that way. What seems clear in this round of war is that my commentators are striking empty poses. They have many criticisms to level but no useful solutions to offer. Nothing. Nada. Just droning criticism, the establishment liberals quoting one another. Only Rachel Maddow seems to have kept her feet under her (so far). 

The right is calling for American troops to be sent. Forget about that. "Bombing accomplishes nothing." (Actually, bombing is what stopped ISIS in its tracks last month.) The American public has been told that we can only fail, and polls show that Americans believe we will fail. ISIS, we are warned, has developed a conventional army, and if there is one thing no one can cope with it is a conventional army (?). "We should train the moderates in Syria," if there are any. The wily ISIS beheadings, some commentators say, have tricked much of the world into a hatred of ISIS, and this works to the advantage of ISIS because, well, no reason. "They have out-thought us again."

Maybe the problem of ISIS should be solved by the people who live in the area, including Jordan and Iran. America should not lead. We should offer help to moderates when we're asked (the Kurds asked). In a cooperative struggle against the medieval genocide of ISIS, perhaps the Middle East peoples can rearrange the sand into more natural countries that work better for the natives in the long run. Or not. It should be up to them.

How To Help Deb Fudge

When Mike McGuire leaves his job as county supervisor to become a state senator, the progressive majority among supervisors leaves with him, unless we elect Deb Fudge to replace him. Her opponent, James Gore, is a former lobbyist for debt collection agencies, and he has been endorsed by every Republican corporate interest group in the county. 

The public service of Deb Fudge is well-known throughout the county and includes excellent terms as mayor of Windsor. At this stage Fudge is ahead by ten points, but Gore has collected all the money in the world (he knows how to do that), and we can expect to see an expertly polished smear campaign in October. Fudge will need help to counter the attack. In general Internet political comments have no impact on voting, but the 'net is useful in fundraising. You can send Fudge a contribution by googling "deb fudge for supervisor" and then going to her web site. I just did that.

The Video

The leadership of the NFL has denied watching the video of football star Ray Rice punching his fiance unconscious, although we now know that they had a copy of the video for months. NFL stands for National Football Liars. 

Many shallow TV commentators have said, Why would anyone need to see the video of the punch? We already knew what Ray Rice had done. How would a video add anything?

The answer is that we are a visual species.  Of all our senses, seeing is by far the most central. We say that seeing is believing, not that hearing or reading is believing. If we want to indicate that we understand something we've been told, we say, "I see."  We don't say, "I smell." Many people, I suspect, hoped that Ray Rice had only slapped or shoved his bride-to-be. Maybe the whole thing was kind of accidental. But once they saw the video, television viewers faced the facts. That is more than district attorney and NFL officials did when they watched the video and then let Ray Rice off with a pat on the wrist. (Ray Rice sold tickets; he made the Liars a lot of cash.)

The New Intelligent Design

Intelligent design used to be the name of a proof of the existence of God. If you look at a house, you can see it was designed by someone at least marginally competent. It didn't just fall together. The parts of a house function as a unit. By extension if you look at the world, the parts function together, so it also must have been designed by someone intelligent, in this case by God.

This argument begs questions. Who, then, designed God? And why do you think the world is well designed? As a friend of mine said recently, the world is a hard place to live in, and it's even harder if you're dumb. 

Today many people believe that the world was not produced by design but by physics and natural selection, which piled one thing on another. The world is jerry-built, according to science. 

Recently Tom Belton loaned me a review of SAPIENS by Yuval Harari. Harari states that there is no evidence that humans have grown smarter over time. I think what he means is that humans were shaped by natural selection, but for the last 5,000 years we have not evolved into a smarter mammal. This explains, perhaps, why our poets are not better than Homer. Obama is not kinder or more empathic than St. Francis. It explains why masses of people live in misery and 1% eat from silver bowls. Today, Harari writes, we are leaving natural selection behind and redesigning things to suit ourselves. Today intelligent design is in the hands of scientists, and scientists are closely related to Neanderthals. 

The situation has created a backlash. I'm a progressive and live among progressive college graduates who believe that GMO food makes you sick, that vaccinations harm children, that fluoridated water destroys your mind and so on. For no good reason they fear the things we design. And why not fear nuclear weapons and combustion engines? Keep in mind that human intelligent design has doubled our average lifespan. I am 80 and still have my fluoridated teeth. Maybe that's why I remain an optimist.

Ferguson

 I've known and liked and respected a great many police officers. But the country has a problem now. An unarmed black teenager was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson. A year ago a 13-year-old Latino in my county was shot seven times and killed because he was walking along with a toy assault rifle. The boy, Andy Lopez, had the right to bear arms but not toy arms, a death penalty offense. A few years back a white teenager was shot to death here. 

This is what I think--some police officers are trained to use revolvers the way pasta cooks use tongs. You use them to protect your hands. A revolver is a problem solver, and you don't need to exert yourself, maybe pull a muscle or split a knuckle or get your handcuffs dirty. If you beat up a kid, you might get blood on your uniform. Keep well back, shoot from a distance and end your shift looking trim. 

Guadalupe Hidalgo

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is the treaty that ended the war with Mexico in 1848. Most  Americans had supported the war and accepted the manifest destiny that God wanted us to own the port of San Francisco (even Walt Whitman). It was a war that we started but lied about, much like the Vietnam War or the Second Iraq War. Mexico was not to blame, as people like Lincoln pointed out at the time. Grant denounced the war, although he fought in it. 

The first thing I learned was that Guadelupe Hidalgo is a building (like Appomattox Courthouse). I learned that Mexico signed the treaty, with a gun held to its head, because Mexico was dividing into factions, disunited and becoming a failed state with no tax base. Ending the war and getting some cash was the only way to hold together what was left of Mexico, the country's leadership thought.

I learned that the sometime President of Mexico, Santa Ana, was in treasonous communication with the American military, offering them advice on how best to win. (Amazing.)

What really matters, aside from the armed theft of half of Mexico, is that the treaty offered protections, property rights and citizenship for the Mexican citizens of California, New Mexico and so on (Mexico had citizens of all races, including Indians) after the Americans took control.

What actually happened was the Indians and the women of California lost the right to vote, nearly all the Mexican men lost their vast ranches and became second-class citizens, and all of this was winked at by the U. S. Supreme Court. (Apaches were finally granted the vote in 1953, more than 100 years later.) The American courts held that the treaty guaranteed Mexican subjects citizenship in their new country but not the right to vote. Never mind what the Constitution and its amendments said.

I was most surprised by the Supreme Court. Between 1848 and the present, the Court has ruled dozens of times that the treaty, a treaty guaranteeing property rights and signed by the Federal government, can be over-ruled by laws passed by state assemblies. The states passed laws that made it easy to take land from the Mexican owners. The Supreme Court apparently did this on the assumption that it would be good for business. Never mind that in theory federal law trumps state law. The Civil War settled that issue, but the courts paid no attention.

The local laws, in effect, made it easy to transfer lands from Mexican-Americans to the Anglos, often to the 1%. Within 30 years, the Mexican land owners (often called Dons) had lost everything. 

I sometimes think of today's Supreme Court as especially corrupt and twisted in its logic, but I guess that's not the case. Now that Latinos have become a large voting group, I wonder what will come next.

Answering Phones

My destiny caught up with me, and I agreed to volunteer at Democratic HQ for four hours a week from now until November. That is not because I enjoy answering phones or consider the Democratic party to be other than it is: a broad coalition of union, corporate and other groups. The other groups include African-Americans, gays, Latinos, women, Jews, young people and anyone with common sense.

Even billionaires with common sense understand that it's in their interest to keep ordinary people smiling and society functional. I'm one of the ordinary people, and like 90% of  America I never set out to get rich. My goal was to become a decent person. Okay, I've fallen short of that, but is there any greater myth than the claim that the American Dream is to get rich? (What about the strange claim that expressing opinions on the 'net accomplishes something political?)

Where the Modoc People Came From

In an ad for himself, the Rev. Al says, "Unless you're a Native American, you came here from someplace else."  Where does he think the American Indian tribes came from?

Humans originated only in Africa, most scientists believe, and then spread out, and the American Indians came to this continent from Asia. But I should rethink that, because Caucasians and Asians carry some Neanderthal genes. That species--the Neanderthals--apparently originated in Europe, and it has been found in Asia. It must have evolved from African genes similar to our own. That made it possible for the two species to interbreed.  But no Neanderthal remains have been found in Africa, and pure Africans do not carry Neanderthal genes. The rest of us can claim that a little bit of us came from Europe or Asia--is that the right way to look at it? 

The Culture of Poverty

Joe Klein has apparently written a column about African Americans and the culture of poverty, a term from the past. I have not read the column, so I can't comment on it, but I am interested in the term: culture of poverty. It's a difficult term. What can it mean?

The culture of poverty might be an elongated way of saying "poverty," as in "Black people are held down in our country by (a culture of) poverty."

Or the culture of poverty might be a way of saying that it is the fault of Latinos when authority figures tell them to shut up or die. People who aren't white have the wrong culture. According to this theory, wrong-culture people should submit.

Am I right that there is some sort of tie between the culture of poverty formulation and racism? Racism is the belief that the color of your skin determines how you behave. For example, a palomino runs on four legs, but a bay horse uses only the two on its left side. It has the wrong culture, and you can tell it's wrong because the horse is brown. I mean you can see color from a distance, probably. 

 

 
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A License to Kill

Deputy Erick Gelhaus, who killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez, has been put back on patrol by our mindless sheriff. Ten months ago, Gelhaus shot Andy Lopez seven times because the child was seen walking along in peaceful Sonoma County carrying a realistic toy gun (which is legal, of course).

We've seen a lot of police killings lately--from officers who patrol American streets like a jumpy occupying army. They are intent on protecting themselves from ambush and to hell with the young citizens, who make good targets. The best you can say about Deputy Gelhaus and Sheriff Doofus, his boss, is that their judgement is impaired. To arm these shaky incompetents, to send them out with licenses to kill, is absurd, but we can't seem to prevent it.

The Republicans Back a Lobbyist for Debt Collectors

In our county the 1% have learned to run their stooges for public office as Democrats. Republicans don't win. Anyone can register as a Democrat, even a corporate lobbyist like James Gore. He's running against Deb Fudge for county supervisor. 

Deb Fudge is a woman with a long record of unpaid local service as a mayor, environmental leader on various boards, etc. She's trusted.  Gore has come back to the state with no local record at all, but he has the backing of business groups and developers. The California Real Estate political action committee just gave him a bundle, as did the Associated Builders and Contractors, the Sonoma County Alliance (business leaders who try to buy every election), our beloved Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Chamber of Commerce. 

Deb Fudge, representing the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, has to get by with contributions from the party, a few unions, the general public and green organizations. So far she is losing the money race but winning in the polls. 

You might want to know for whom Gore lobbied.  He worked in Washington on behalf of a national group of debt collectors. He lobbied for many forms of alcohol and for a company currently suing the State of California to overturn the regulation of ineffective fire-retardant chemicals. Gore's one sweet guy, but if you're not already rich, don't call him. He'll call you.

(I think I'll go drive my van for a few weeks. Be back in mid-August.)

AN INVENTED PEOPLE

We Americans are quite obviously an invented people, created in 1776. We were made out of Anglo Saxons, Scots-Irish, Germans, Irish, Italians, French, Indians, Black people, Latinos, Jews, Asians, whatever. 

We don't have the dates, but I believe that the Celts were invented much earlier, along with the Huns and the Franks. The Chinese have been re-invented many times. The Israelis, of course, were invented in the last century, and the Palestinians are definitely an invented people. In fact, all of the nations, ethnicities, languages, and so on are cultural inventions. I mention this because I run into thinkers who make a point of telling folks that the Palestinians are "an invented people," as if that made them different. Actually, it makes them like Americans (or Israelis).

Hamas has a trick that never fails

Sooner or later the American people are going to demand that we adjust our relationship with Israel. In the current conflict Hamas is committing war crimes, and Israel is committing war crimes. Both are targeting civilians. Israel claims not to be targeting civilians, but for every adult Israeli civilian that Hamas manages to murder, Israel kills ten small Palestinian children. Tit for tat, sort of.

Israel makes it clear that it has been tricked into killing children, that Hamas shields its missile launchers with Arab children. Then when Israel bombs the missile launchers, the children get killed by accident, and Israel gets bad publicity. So successful is this wily Hamas trick that the Israeli military have been fooled by it hundreds of times in a row. 

There's no way to stop this. Let's face it, when the Israeli military see a missile site surrounded by little Arab children, they are on it like white on a Republican. It's a twofer. In fact, Arab children playing on a beach are a dead giveaway that there might possibly be missiles of some kind somewhere nearby. That's a given, right? Once the children and soccer ball are spotted, the artillery can't resist. (We need to be fair.)

Men Hitting Women

Not long ago a professional football player knocked his girlfriend unconscious and was photographed dragging her body out of an elevator.  She then married him, and the NFL suspended him for two games. The NFL penalty for smoking marijuana is16 games, so the priorities are clear: to hell with women, even if they do buy tickets. 

I have never actually seen a man hit a woman, but my father did. My father was a starting guard on a JC football team that won a national championship. One night he was walking home from work in a seedy part of town. He came on a man punching a woman, so my father grabbed the guy and threw him down. You know what happened next. The woman rose up from the ground and attacked my father. He always laughed when he told that story.

I have seen a woman hit a man. My mother had an Irish temper and my father liked to argue. One evening he came home from work, said the wrong thing, and my mother hit him as hard as she could in the mouth. With red-stained teeth, my father caught her hands and held them until she cooled off. The rule was that you never hit a woman under any circumstance. That was the rule my friends and I learned. It's not a complicated rule subject to wide interpretation--but I wouldn't want to see what those five duds on the Supreme Court might make of it.

The What Generation?

Harper's has published (August 2014) a provocative article by William Pfaff in which he argues against the militarization of America. Most of us join him in opposing militarization. But he makes a peculiar comparison that contrasts the current army with what he sees as the more honorable drafted generation that won World  War II. In Pfaff's vision the old army had a mandate "to treat prisoners honorably and act under Army regulations and Geneva rules at all times." The current army sends drones to kill civilians by the handful. My trouble with this is that I can't get out of my mind the civilians on the ground during our firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm trying to recall the Geneva Conventions, which I read while in the army. I suspect that nuking  60,000 civilians at once might have been a step too far.

Pfaff notes that when Gen. David Petraeus retired in 2011, he wore more than 50 ribbons and badges to the ceremony, including three that celebrated the fact that he had parachuted from an airplane. And so he put Audie Murphy to shame. 

(Wickipedia says that the 19-year-old Murphy received the Medal of Honor after single-handedly holding off an entire company of Germans for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.)

Planet of the Apes

We see in a photograph a small group of Israelis partying on a hillside overlooking Gaza. They smile, enjoying the fireworks show in the distance, as scores of Palestinian civilians are murdered from the air. I'm not blaming Israel for these happy folk. They don't represent Israel, and they could be from any country. In fact, a ground offensive that will kill more Palestinian children is about to start, and this deadly over-reaction to the murder of a few Israelis has the full support of our President. Obama is a man who tries to model his behavior on Abraham Lincoln, for god's sake. I worked for Obama's election. 

On television I see the editor of THE NATION discussing the shooting down of a passenger plane over Ukraine by someone using complex Russian technology. Her fervent advice is that we find ways to appease Putin, a neo-Fascist dictator, she admits, clear-eyed, and of course a victim. When have we ever treated a Fascist fairly?  Now the Russian Fascists are under verbal attack with only China's oligarchy and America's Teaparty Left defending them. The editor calls on us to give Putin what he wants, appease him in the name of "common sense." We need him, she reminds us.

As Russia and Ukraine and Hamas and Israel kill civilians over a few bits of land, the sky begins to swell with heat. The water rises. We pay little attention, fixed on stealing fruit from one another.

Grant and Lee

It's 150 years since the  Civil War, and yesterday I watched on TV as an ancient southern historian delivered a talk on that conflict. I was struck by one comment this old duffer made, which was that before Grant came east to take charge of the Union army, the two forces, Union and Confederate, had been playing chess; after Grant arrived they played checkers. 

During his lifetime, Grant was the most admired man in  America, more popular even than Lincoln. A negative view of the clash between Grant and Lee developed long after the Civil War as part of a glorification of "The Lost Cause." It's now out of date.

I am no expert, but even I can see that Grant and Lee were not in equal positions. Lee was in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia, one of a handful of separate Confederate armies. He had no control over what Joe Johnston's army was doing in Georgia, for example. This lack of coordination was built into the concept of secession and one reason the North rejected state's rights. Grant was, in 1864, in charge of every soldier in the Union army. Grant had a plan to end the war. If Lee was playing chess, Grant was playing three-dimensional chess.

At the time, most people thought they were smarter than Grant, who was kind of dowdy. Sherman, for example, was absolutely devoted to Grant, a dedicated follower, but he thought he was smarter than Grant. General Grant was one of those creative people who are absolutely brilliant but seem to their contemporaries as merely above average, nothing special. He somehow managed to get the navy to join him in a joint attack on Vicksburg--maybe the first major joint attack in American history. In that same campaign Grant cut loose from his supply line and led his army into Mississippi to forage off the land, the astonishing tactic that later resulted in Sherman's march through Georgia. When Grant was put in charge of the entire army, he sent Sherman to Georgia with instructions to destroy the region's ability to supply the Confederate army with food and manufactured goods (all Grant's plans were worked out with Sherman and Lincoln, but Grant had the last word). Grant sent Gen. Sheridan through the Shenandoah Valley with instructions to destroy the rest of the Confederate food supply. The hard job Grant assigned to himself: keeping Lee and his army occupied, out of the strategic battle, penned up. In the end Lee's army had no food. 

Another way to put it was that Grant was a strategist; Lee, a tactician. Grant, who wore a private's uniform with stars on the shoulders, looked ordinary but wrote the only military memoir by an America general that is taught as literature. His prose was plain and exact. I don't think his reputation needs help from people like me these days. Historians have caught up with him. I'm just struck by how some people can be so much smarter than those around them understand.

Gaza

Hamas and Israel are lobbing weapons at one another again. This is how the leaders of Hamas and Israel win elections, which is why the war between them never ends.  Each year a few Israeli civilians and a few hundred Palestinian civilians are killed, and the leaders are re-elected on platforms promising justice. In this country we have Dick Chaney and Noam Chomsky telling us that we should favor one side or the other in the sociopathic kill-off. Maybe if we got completely out of the way, the voters in these two democracies would elect better people to lead them.

The Truth is Reckless

Last year a deputy sheriff shot Andy Lopez eight times as the 13-year-old walked along carrying a BB gun, a replica of an AK-47. The deputy was within his rights in this county, because he was scared. An officer can shoot as many children as he likes, if he is frightened at the time. Our district attorney will not indict him. 

Common sense has no place here. For example, in these parts, you don't see people--or children--strolling along with real AK-47s. The county is safe from AK-47s.   That's why I suggest  that the next deputy might wait or maybe shoot the child only four times. 

Never mind, the DA won't prosecute, now that she is re-elected.

Someone commented that Sonoma County officers are free to shoot anyone they want. Columnist Chris Smith, something of a dullard,  found the comment "reckless." But what should you write when the truth is reckless?

And what if Andy Lopez had been walking along carrying a genuine rifle.  Is that a death penalty offense in the United States? Or is it protected?

My Insincere Beliefs

One of my parents was a fallen away Catholic and the other was a fallen away Protestant. I was raised like a rope in a tug-of-war in which neither side pulled. As a consequence, my religious beliefs are insincere.  This might be true of many American Christians. For example, I am insincerely committed to the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill." I served in the navy and the army.

 As you know, the United States Supreme Court, which has a ton of power and no credibility, has decided that certain corporations, owned by people with sincerely-held religious beliefs, have the right to withhold contraception from their employee health care plans.  Corporations have this right to withhold contraceptive coverage, because corporations are people, and they can be sincerely religious corporations. My point is that I am a person, too, just like a corporation but smaller.

Like some corporations, I have an employee. A hard-working lady comes twice a month to clean my floors.  I pay her about $25 an hour. I know what you will say, that I have no stake in which contraceptives women employ as long as I don't have to use a condom. But I resent having my right to impose my beliefs on working women limited by the Supreme Court because I'm insincere.

Belle

The story of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave, holds the interest of many readers. Sally's grandmother was an enslaved black woman and her grandfather was an English sea captain. When his child (Sally's mother) was born, the captain tried to buy her and take her to England, but the owner refused to sell her. The handsome Hemings family, stuck in Virginia, served the Randolphs and Jeffersons as servants and lovers for three generations. 

BELLE, a current movie, is about a similar event. In rough outline, at least, the story is true, and in this case the captain did manage to buy his daughter and take her to his palatial family home in England. Slavery was still legal in England in those days, but Belle was raised to be an aristocrat. This led to conflict; hence, the film, which I totally enjoyed. (I have to admit it was sentimental and predictable.) 

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Fluorosis

In a recent letter to the newspaper, a writer claimed that the American Dental Association "warns against regularly mixing formula with fluoridated water."  That's incorrect, of course. The ADA has made it clear that it is safe to use public fluoridated water to mix infant formula. The tiny amount of fluoride is carefully controlled. The writer also claimed that 41% of teenagers suffer from fluorosis (mottling of teeth). In fact, according to the Center for Disease Control, 2.71% of children have moderate to severe teeth mottling, and most of them got it from well water (where natural fluoride sometimes exceeds the best dosage). As in most things, the idea is to ingest the best dosage to strengthen your teeth, not too much and not too little. Hundreds of millions of American have been doing this for 70 years. That's a good test. Ask your dentist or doctor for advice. Don't rely on Internet misinformation.

Pete Foppiano

Some years back, Pete Foppiano ran for county supervisor and came in a close second. I remember him for a series of interviews he conducted with community people on public access TV in Healdsburg. Anyway, he ran in the primary this time, fell short, and now he has endorsed Deb Fudge. Foppiano is one of the good guys.

The Animal Kingdom

The towhee who lives in our hedge has formed an attachment to the similar bird it sees in the side window of our  Camry. Day after day the bird hangs out on the side of the car, jumping back and forth and peering intently at its double, decorating the vehicle in its excitement.

Glass seems to introduce all sorts of problems into animal life. A relative told me recently about the trouble glass brought to the lives of her two cats. They were brother and sister, indoor cats, accustomed from birth to sharing space and warmth. But recently one cat accidentally got outside and came around to peer into the house through a low window.  Its sibling saw it but couldn't smell it, and the fight was on. Each cat raged at the intruder on either side of the window. until an American force arrived and once again made them live together.

The Conservatives

A conservative is someone who wants to keep things the same, conserve things, slow down the pace of change, although changes are inevitable. We are all conservative on some issues. I want to conserve the redwoods.  This country has a few dedicated conservatives (David Frome, for example) but has never had a conservative party. What we have are two quite different liberal/  capitalist parties. The Democrats tend to favor a capitalist system that provides basic help to those who need it--if people have enough to eat and drink and a safe place to sleep, most of them are satisfied. The Republicans favor a tilted business system, an older form of liberalism that helps the rich.

For a long time I have been saying that the Republican party has many facets and goals, but the central goal is to help transfer money from the multitudinous poor to the rich. That does not make a good campaign slogan, so the Republican Party lies during political campaigns. Yesterday Paul Krugman published something similar. He was quoting historian Rick Perlstein.  Perlstein wrote that movement conservatism was "an interlocking set of institutions and allegiances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists."

When Authorities Disagree

When two scientific authorities, people entitled to respect in a given field of study, disagree, how should a non-expert respond?  Remember, she is not an authority herself.  

Some people respond by studying closely what each side of a science dispute has said, but often that is no help. Sometimes it can be, as in the case of scientists who found a statistical correlation in some part of the country between slightly lower IQ scores and fluoridated water.  They concluded that low IQ scores led to fluoridation (or the reverse). Even a non-expert like me might notice that (1) IQ scores reflect mostly the ability to score well on IQ tests, so most scientists don't take them seriously and (2) it is a logical fallacy to attribute cause-and-effect to a statistical correlation unless you can explain  how the correlation actually works in flesh and bone. Let's say that there is a statistical correlation in Sonoma County between drinking pinot noir and getting whooping cough. This does not prove that pinot noir causes whooping cough (an epidemic in Sonoma County because so many on the way way left reject vaccinations on the basis of long refuted junk science).

Most scientific disagreements aren't so obvious. How does a layman choose between two scientists in disagreement? That answer is that you see what the genuine authorities in the field say. In cases like climate change, fluoridated water and vaccinations, you find out where the World Health Organization stands. The  WHO might be wrong, of course, but odds are that it is right. You can double-check by looking up the American Dental Association, the Surgeon General, the National Cancer Institute and so on. If they all say the same thing, the chances are excellent that they've got it right. It is true that the Sierra Club is opposed to fluoridation, but when you break your ankle, you don't go by ambulance to the Sierra Club to get your leg set. You go to a medical expert.

Tea Time

The defeat of Eric Kantor in a Republican primary yesterday has made it harder to say that the Tea Party is a false face. The Tea Party as a grassroots movement is still genuine. It went after Kantor, a rightwing stalwart, because he wasn't nutty. He doesn't hate Latinos. He knows the nation needs a government. With no money, the Tea Party thrashed the Wall Street Republicans. This does not translate nationally--that is, this kind of rebellion is today possible mostly in the South and in a congressional district that has been gerrymandered to include as many white racists as possible. But the tea party is a populist movement in certain locations, and not all of them are in Dixie. 

Sgt. Berhdahl

Sen Dianne Feinstein has said that the release of Sgt. Bergdahl is "a mixed bag," which is what I have always thought of her. The wealthy senator is a corporate Democrat and popular in California, because she appeals to the center and to the business community.  She should retire before her ego explodes.

Today I learned that outstanding student debts total to more than our national outstanding credit card debt. That is sick.

The Rise of Bowe Bergdahl

I haven't come across a comment on this, but you might have noticed that Bowe Bergdahl was a private when captured by the Taliban. Today he is a sergeant. The army promoted him to sergeant on June 17, 2011, while he was being held captive in Afghanistan.  That's the hard way to get promoted--I mean, if Bergdahl was a deserter. Hats off to this trooper, right? But now that he's home, will the army bust him back to corporal?

Fluoridation

Long ago, to simplify my choices, I decided I would support the political candidates and causes that did the least harm to ordinary people like me. Science said that fluoridation helped people without much money, so I supported it. The main opponent of fluoridated water was the John Birch Society (which later morphed into the Koch Brothers/ Tea Party). The Birchers also told us that Eisenhower was a Communist. Today the anti-fluoridation movement  comes from that part of the political circle where the crackpot right melts into the paranoid left, the segment where everyone suffers from fourth-stage science denial.

In any case, the anti-fluoridation movement has reached my town, a town that lightly fluoridates its water to prevent cavities in poor children and adults who lack access to dental care. In the United States about 200 million people use fluoridated water and many have been using it for 60 years. That's a solid test, and today fluoridation is endorsed by the National Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization, the Surgeon General, the American Dental Association, and my wife, who took up using fluoride when young and has not had a cavity since. Fluoridation is resisted by people who believe they know more than medical history, more than the National Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization, etc.  And these deluded people have put fluoridation up to a public vote, which is like holding a vote to determine if the sky is blue.

The science behind fluoridation has been settled for decades, but there will always be John Birchers and other paranoids who argue otherwise. For me it comes down to this. If you care about people and their pain and find world science credible, then opposing fluoridated water does not make sense. Scientists tell us that if fluoridation in our town is stopped, cavities will increase among poor children by as much as 30%.  And that will happen to them no matter what ideology we preach.

Who Is Black?

The determination of who was a black person in Jefferson's time was more complicated than I knew. It was something like determining who was a Jew in Hitler's Germany. According to the law in Germany, if you had three or four Jewish grandparents, you were a Jew. If you had only one Jewish grandparent, you were not a Jew.  And if you had two, you were a half-Jew and eligible to serve in the German army--about 100,000 Jews did serve in the army, probably hoping to win a degree of safety for their families.

In Jefferson's Virginia, if you were more than 75% white, you were legally white. Sally Hemings' children were legally white. They were also slaves because their mother was enslaved. I don't know if anyone admitted this might be a problem. It wasn't up for discussion. Jefferson, although obviously a racist, helped his Hemings children settle in the North, where several of them lived out their lives as whites, and he freed many of the blacker Hemings family to earn livings in trades they had learned. In general Jefferson tried to keep black families together, but he died heavily in debt. His possessions had to be sold to pay what he owed, and the usual tragedies took place, mothers separated from young children and so on. 

Vigilantes

I'm reading Gen. Sherman's memoir. He was present as a young officer during the takeover of California and wrote about everyone from Kit Carson to Mariano Vallejo. He preferred Vallejo. Then he returned to San Francisco as a banker in 1856 and tried to deal with the vigilantes, who were hanging people without trials. For some that remains the American dream: we all get our guns, see, and go out and hang people who are different. 

The VA Doctors

The problem with the Veterans Administration medical system is that they have not hired enough doctors.  They don't pay enough to attract the people they need. The system is inadequately staffed, so at many sites the patients have to wait for months to see someone. How hard is that to understand?

Did some VA bureaucrats fake records and try to cover their rear ends? Apparently, yes. Did General Shinseki fail to solve the problems? Apparently, yes. But the core issue is that our elected political leaders are too cheap to fund the medical staff we need. We put these leaders in office. Rather than get help for wounded veterans, they enact tax cuts for the 1%. How hard is that to understand?

Snowden as Hero

In polls we are asked if Edward Snowden is a traitor or patriot, as if we see the actors in our world as simply good or bad, and some of us do. What if our reaction to Snowden is mixed?  I think he handled things poorly, but I wish him no harm. 

I see Snowden as a young man who wanted to be famous for the rest of his life, and he will be. His book, when he writes one, will be taught in college courses. I imagine a panel of enormous egos debating the issues, moderated by Amy Goodman: Snowden, Nader and Chomsky. It will have to happen soon. Nader and Chomsky are aging out. Snowden will be with us for a long time in the role he wrote for himself as the smartest man in America who ran away.

Affirmative Action and Reparations

Affirmative action was adopted by congress and signed by the President because it had mass appeal. It made life a little more fair for women, gays, Muslims, Jews, African Americans, Asians, Latinos, Indian tribes and so on. Reparations is a movement to address the obvious wrongs done to black people, whose recent ancestors were enslaved and who live, much of the time, in a Jim Crow nation today.

Years ago I was walking along some tracks in Buffalo at night and came upon several local Indians sitting around a fire and drinking beer. We got to talking, and they told me how deeply they resented the government help then going to African-Americans--the help should, in their view, be going to the tribes. They'd had a continent stolen from them by the Europeans. Then, in the 1840s our nation took half of Mexico at gunpoint and added it to our western border. American women worked for 300 years without pay or the right to vote. Latino dons who had once owned California were cheated in American courts and died broke. So I suspect that who will pay reparations to whom is a complex matter. I still remember when white men from the city came and took my grandfather's little ranch. They used eminent domain--they wanted the rough land so they could hunt deer on it. 

Social Security and Medicare have survived because there are a lot of poor people and some of them vote. Social programs gain mass support when everyone gets helped.