The Billion Dollar Blackjack

Unless billion dollar corporations are run by idiots, they get something in return for the tens of millions of dollars they pay politicians. I’m not talking about campaign money. This is personal money, income that politicians have earned, and it goes into their bank accounts. As far as I know, we now have candidates who have legally earned tens of millions of dollars by giving pointless talks (I assume) to corporate leaders. We’re well into a brave new world of perfectly legal graft.

(Note: If you write the right sort of book, corporations can make you rich. They will buy many thousands of copies to give to their employees, just to help you out. (You can be number one on the NY Times book list—with an asterisk to show you are cheating. Take a close look at that list.)

Which Trump Will It Be?

Many people are saying that Hillary faces a problem in the upcoming Presidential debate. She won’t know in advance which Donald Trump she will be facing.

It might be the short, balding Trump who funds Greenpeace.

It could be the Latino-American Trump who is flying to Mexico today to build a giant wall to keep himself out of our country and make it great again. 

It could be the female Trump, dressed in red, white and blue, who loves her three sons and Vlad the Impaler. Also Putin.

Or it might be the borderline personality disorder Trump who has had the hair on his pale legs transferred and rooted to the top of his gong. It will probably be him. 

Trump's Head

Seth Myers last night found the answer to one question. Why did Donald Trump's gastroenterologist believe himself competent to go on TV and evaluate Trump's mental status?  

Because of the location of Trump's head. 

The History of Gun Laws

As far as I know, our first congress passed the second amendment without controversy and without discussing whether it gave individuals the right to own guns. The members of congress had grown up under British law. In those days anyone with money could buy a gun. It was like buying a hoe. Gun permits did not exist. No controversy. Then, over time, everything changed. 

All the recent talk about the intent of the Founding Fathers from both sides of the gun control issue has been pointless. 

In plain English, the second amendment says that people have the right to keep and bear arms so they can be formed up in 30 minutes to defend the country. That turned out to be an inadequate defense system, and technology soon replaced single shot rifles with weapons that fired many times, including revolvers and carbines. In the Civil War a cavalryman might ride into battle carrying four revolvers, giving him 24 shots before reloading. 

Today nearly all murders are committed with hand guns (not rifles). We need new laws.

Chris Christie's Odds

Dumb Donald Trump’s closest advisor is the daughter he would like to date, Ivanka. Ivanka Trump married a Jew named Jared Kushner and converted to his family’s religion. Jared Kushner’s father, crooked real estate giant Charles Kushner, was once prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the State of New Jersey, Chris Christie. Christie sent Kushner to the federal penitentiary in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served nearly two years.

In short, Christie sent Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law to prison. Yet Christie continues to grovel in the background of the Trump family campaign in the hope that Donald Trump will offer him work. What are the odds? 

Stokely

Someone once wrote, “People who know history are condemned to watch other people repeat it.” Recently I joined an integrated demonstration in support of Black Lives Matter, which is itself not integrated. This reminded me of SNCC, a similar group I’m old enough to remember. 

In the mid 1960s, I watched the rise of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Like  Black Lives Matter, SNCC began as a radical and independent student wing of the civil rights movement. Under the leadership of James Forman, Bob Moses and Marion Barry, this group of students, black and white, carried out most of the dangerous sit-ins and freedom rides in the 1960s and staffed many of the registration drives in the Deep South. Three of its members were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. 

Later leaders included Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who began to lean in the direction of violence. In general SNCC looked down on Martin Luther King’s campaign, disdaining his compromises, calling for “black power,” helping form the Black Panthers. Some chapters of SNCC, a collective made up of many groups operating by consensus, expelled their white members. One of my friends was expelled. Distracted by these issues, the group’s influence waned as some members turned toward militant separatism. Many of the best organizers left. The money dried up. The FBI waged an ugly campaign against SNCC, and by 1970 it had disintegrated.

Stokely Carmichael, probably SNCC’s most interesting and charismatic leader, called integration “a thalidomide drug.”  He left his leadership role. Later he was expelled from SNCC. He also left the Black Panthers because they held that white members could help them reach their goals. Carmichael argued that whites should organize in their own communities, as Black Lives Matter argues today. Carmichael shifted his activities to Africa, where he worked with Kwame Nkrumah in Guinea to strengthen ties between revolutionary groups in many countries. He became the most prominent advocate of pan-Africanism. Carmichael is one of two people credited with inventing the term “institutional racism.”  

Was Homer Blue?

If you don't tell a child what color the sky is, she will probably say it is white. She has to be taught that the sky and water are blue, because much of the time they are not. I learned this from my car radio.

Homer famously called the sea "wine-red" (or was it wine-dark?).  In all of Homer nothing is called blue. Worse, in every ancient language nothing is called blue. There was no word for blue until fairly recently. "Blue" is the last basic color name to enter any language with the exception of Ancient Egyptian. The Egyptians  knew how to make the color blue, so they gave it a moniker. 

Not much is blue when you think about it.

Joseph, Mary and Jesus Go to Egypt

To escape the king, Joseph, Mary and Jesus make the difficult journey to Egypt, where they are killed by a drone.

The Early Death of Andrew Breitbart

I never paid much attention to Andrew Breitbart, so I learned of his death only yesterday, four years after it happened. In his forties, Breitbart died of natural causes, if you agree with the man who wrote that there is nothing unnatural about wine. Breitbart did love wine, so he might have been fond of Sonoma County. Many people are saying that what made Breitbart famous was his creation of conspiracy theories about a civic group called ACCORN.  He destroyed ACCORN. That task required an agile imagination and a fearlessness that resembled a borderline personality disorder. Also, it took a lot of wine, which is why I chalk up Breitbart's death to work-related causes. 

Why Vote for Trump?

Why does anyone support Trump? He has weirdly prehensile lips, but about half the Republican party dotes on him. No doubt there are dozens of reasons why they care, including those doing it for the money, but the best explanation I have found comes from George Lakoff, a famous cognitive linguist at Berkeley. I’m going to attempt to apply his approach here.

Many but not all conservatives grow up in strict-father families in which the domination of the father is seen as part of the natural order. Nature made men more powerful than women and children. For these conservatives, having men rule is just common sense adherence to facts. What Lakoff points out is that conservative thinking emerges from a set of beliefs about reality that differs from liberal beliefs. For a strict-father conservative, people with pale skin should and do dominate people with darker skin. That’s the way Nature wants it. Building a wall along the Mexican border is, for them, plain sense and the moral thing to do. Allowing people with dark skin into our country will turn us into degenerates. 

What is immoral, to some conservatives, is electing a man with dark skin as President, because African-Americans are weak and easily tempted to do wrong. They lack moral fiber.  That turns the natural order upside down and sets a bad example for others—Americans, if let loose, have a natural inclination toward evil.  You end up with Black Lives Matter. Electing a woman—women are weak—is absurd and, yes, immoral. It blurs the natural order, which is an evil thing to do. Lock her up.

All of that is common sense to strict-father conservatives, and you will not convince them otherwise. They consider liberals both stupid and illogical. Conservatives see liberals as people who can’t see or adhere to reality. These conservative beliefs are rock-solid. 

Today another wing of the Republican party understands that Trump is mentally ill, a lecher, a con man, an absentee father, etc.  As a consequence the party seems to be splitting, at war with itself over which strict father it wants in the White House. Lakoff notes that in some cases a woman can play the strict father role (a tiger mom). 

What Orcas Teach Us

The last time I checked, anthropologists had been unable to find a human culture they considered matriarchal. They had found a tribal community or two where women had equal status with men, and they'd found many matrilineal cultures, where your descent is traced through your mother and not your father.  That makes sense because the mother of a child is sometimes easier to identify than the father. But people still hope to find at least one culture  run by the ladies. 

Whales, it seems, might be a kind of answer, particularly orcas (killer whales), who are among the three species in which females experience menopause. In other species the females remain fertile unto death.

Why would Mother Nature invent menopause and keep females around who cannot reproduce? They take up space.  

Well, orcas operate in family groups like wolves or humans. Female orcas who live past menopause can outlive male orcas by 40 years. Some live to be 100.  These babushkas have learned where the food is. When the time comes to look for meat or fish, males follow grandma even if it isn't their biological grandma. Abuelas lead by example. Among orcas, grandmothers help grandchildren--even adopted grandchildren--to survive. 

Bazooka

Tonight I watched a musical western from 1936, Rhythm on the Range, starring Bing Crosby, Frances Farmer, Bob  Burns and Judy Canova.  The Sons of the Pioneers provided some of the music. Devotees of The Big Lebowsky will recall that the film opens with "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" by the Sons of the Pioneers--the most famous of the original Sons was Roy Rogers, who has one or two (sung) lines in this early film. In the credits, well, his name wasn't Roy Rogers yet.

This must have been a well-attended film in its day, because it invented a common word.

Bob Burns (more a stand-up comic than an actor) is the victim of a practical joke in the movie involving a metal funnel. He grabs the funnel, attaches it to pipe and then turns the whole thing into something like a trombone. He plays it and asks Bing if he likes the sound. "All I heard was bazooka," Bing says. Burns continued to use the bazooka on stage and so on. Soon World War Two began, and an anti-tank weapon needed a nickname. . . .

Two major films have been made about Frances Farmer, whose career was interrupted by schizophrenia. 

Who Is Maya DiRado?

Maya DiRado was born in San Francisco and raised in Santa Rosa, where she attended Maria Carillo High. She graduated from Stanford with a degree in engineering and management science, and she made the US swim team for the 2016 Summer Olympics.  I think Santa Rosa would have been proud if she had come back with one bronze medal, but instead she won four medals, two of them gold. That was not expected. She beat, by inches, the best backstroker in the world. 

On TV DiRado seems to be as American as a banana split, and I have no idea if she thinks of herself as a Latina, but her father came from Argentina. We need more of these immigrants.

Unforgiven

Last night my brother, his wife and I joined a support group for Black Lives Matter and marched on the Santa Rosa Farmer's Market. I'd never been there before. The market takes up several blocks downtown, and I did not spot any fruits or vegetables for sale. You could buy a paper plate of rice and shrimp or a hotdog.  

Anyway, our group was led by a Latino from the Junior College. We were motley, about 40 people. Some Latinos (young and middle-aged), a  woman from a charity, a woman from a church, one African-American, the Gosses, several junior college students and a young man I recognized as the son of a friend of mine in the Healdsburg Peace Project. We walked to the market and up and down and walked in big circles to music and so on. The second half of the plan was for us to mingle with people at the market and talk to them about why a local deputy (who had shot a harmless hijo seven times, killing him) had been promoted, so the Gosses left and drove to a taco place for dinner. 

Why was this deputy promoted? I saw IN BRUGES. Shooting a child is not forgiven, not by us, not by God.  Sorry. 

Wittgenstein's Silence

"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence," Wittgenstein wrote. Then he was killed by a drone. 

Something, Not Nothing

Either Hillary Clinton or Dumb Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. It better be Hillary. 

At this point I don't want to add to the anti-Clinton nuttiness on the 'net, but I can't stop making one observation. During the whole Clinton v. Sanders debate, I kept saying that Clinton was not a progressive. Yes, she was a woman but not a progressive. I was constantly confronted by old folks (not older than I am) who insisted Hillary was a progressive. They were hurt and furious with me for saying Hillary was not a progressive  Once Hillary won the nomination these same people began to say that now Hillary is a progressive because she adopted much of Bernie's platform. 

In other words, they claimed that Hillary changed. If she's a progressive today because she's adopted Bernie's platform, then she wasn't a progressive back when she was running to Bernie's right.  And one day soon she will no longer be a progressive, folks, but also she will never be Dumb Donald Trump. That's something, not nothing. 

Deputy Gelhaus Strikes Again

Deputy Erick Gelhaus, who gunned down Andy Lopez (a child playing with a toy gun) has once again not resigned from his job in remorse. He hasn't been fired. Instead he's been promoted to sergeant by Sheriff Steve Freitas. Someone with extremely bad judgment has promoted an armed fool with deadly bad judgment. Gelhaus is now the leader and advisor of about eight armed deputies. I can't seem to process this. Has Sonoma County gone mad?

Dumb Donald's Concession Speech, draft two

Dumb Donald's Concession Speech, draft two.

"Seth Myers lied that Ivanka got wait-listed at Trump University. He voted for Hillary. Think about that. Two liars. Hillary lies and she lies. That’s okay. I’ll tell you what I don’t like. Lying Hillary has divided this country so much, and the election was rigged against me. Some people were voting ten or twenty times. They say I lost Georgia, which is not even possible.  It’s so unfair. Guys, guys, would you remove that crippled child? Thanks. Imagine that--a crippled child, like I want a crippled child." (The audience laughs.)  "I really won the race—a lot of people have told me that. Most of them were trash. I love white trash. They have such trust in me. And many Chinese supported me. I do great business with them. Their biggest bank stays in my hotels. The Chinese get great deals from us, because we’re so stupid. We’re giving away the country. But I’m very close to China. Sometimes I’d like to punch China in the face, but don’t worry, they love me, and I never wanted to be President. Not even once. Running was a waste of my time and money, although, to be truthful, I made money from the campaign. The Republicans didn’t vote for me, but they paid my expenses for four months, and they stayed at my hotels and dated the many beautiful women who work for me. Ask Ivanka. I’m talking about good jobs for women. The Republicans gave me a free ride”—Trump smiles—“which is more than I can say for the women they dated."  (Audience erupts into guffaws.) "Sure, it’s sad that our country won’t be great again, but I’ll tell you what will be great. I paid Roger Ailes to develop my new television show. This production will hire the best men, the most beautiful women. You’ll see. We’re going to expose political correctness. Watch for me in the fall. You won’t be sorry.”

(Also on FB)

The TPP and Basketball

One thing I learned  from my untutored reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein was his observation that much of what we do is governed by rules. For example, our languages are rule governed (grammar). Or take basketball. Before you can play basketball, you have to accept a set of rules. The game is a set of rules (plus other unwritten things). There are differences in the rules from one league to the next but no basketball without rules.

If you try to compare basketball with “free basketball” you will discover that there is no such thing as “free basketball.” 

Our markets and our trade activities are also created by sets of rules. Humans decide what the rules will be, but there are always rules. There are no such things as “free markets” or “free trade.” There are just different markets and different kinds of trade.

Also no one I know opposes creating markets. I hear that people opposed to NAFTA or the TPP are opposed to trade. But have you heard anyone say that she opposes trade? What people support or oppose are specific rules set up to govern trade or markets. Glass-Steagall was a New Deal example of a set of rules governing financial activities (before Bill Clinton signed its repeal).  

For me the problem with the TPP is that I don’t trust the people who wrote the new rules. I don’t know enough to judge the impact of the rules on our lives, but. as far as I know, representatives of ordinary working people (labor unions, for example) were left off the committee of corporate types and political appointees who wrote the TPP. NAFTA apparently hurt many American workers. Why should I think that the TPP will be different, when American workers were not represented in the rule-making? If you let corporations write the rules without consulting workers, who do you think will profit from the new rules? Who will get hurt? 

Dumb Donald's Concession Speech, draft one

Dumb Donald Trump is starting to look for ways to emerge from the November election as something other than a big loser with prissy hands. His narcissism won’t allow him to admit a loss. I’m trying to anticipate his concession speech. I’ll be working on this for the next 97 days.  

Maybe Dumb Don is going to tell us that he made tons of money from the campaign. That’s true. He’s a winner. But I think he might begin another way. 

“I’ll tell you what I don’t like. The election was rigged against me from the start. That’s so unfair.  I really won. A lot of people have told me that.”

Documentary Now!

I stumbled across DOCUMENTARY NOW!, a television series about idiotic documentarians. The name reminds us of Amy Goodman, but the 30 minute show is actually a satire on network documentaries. It stars Helen Mirren, Jack Black, Fred Armison and Bill Hader. The producers are Seth Myers and Lorne Michaels.  If you like shocking humor, this is your man. If you like documentaries, this is your wake-up call.