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.