Can White Men Jump?

Can White men jump? 

In the last 17  Olympics, Black men have won the high jump maybe three times. I can't tell for certain. The winners are not listed by race, of course, nor should they be. 

Charlie Dumas won the first of the 17 Olympics that I remember. He was the first person to high jump seven feet, which he did at Compton Junior College. In that college my father was once a pulling guard (and won a national championship and a small gold football on a chain).

The Olympic evidence suggests that White men usually win the high jump. So why do we commonly say that only Black people can jump?

Part of the answer has to do with class. In America the people who excel in professional sports like boxing and football often are poor, very smart, very disciplined and desperate. That is, they often come from the poorest classes, the class willing to risk concussions. That class once was the Irish and then became the Italians and Jews. Today it's Black Americans. Today Black athletes are the ones we see jumping. 

The other reason we say that White men can't jump is bedrock in the history of racism. Part of the earliest framing of American racism was the claim that God or nature made White men intelligent and compensated stupid Black men by making them muscular and lustful, useful beasts of burden, capable only of the simplest thoughts. So pervasive was that belief that today people still unselfconsciously joke about how Black people are, well, the better animals.

If you watch the NBA, you will see Black athletes who have made themselves extremely fit and learned difficult skills--but what lifted them that final step was intelligence, the ability to outthink and out-prepare opponents. 

Failures with Greed

My family has been in this country since it was founded, but none us has become rich or famous. I grew up working class. In general the white working class gives its loyalty to kith and kin rather than to ideological insights, which is one reason the white working class can disappoint labor leaders, middle class progressives and abolitionists. 

I have never seen a live crowd that supports the blubber I call Agent Orange (our President, who finished second in the election, good enough to win). I have seen the supporters of Agent Orange on television, whooping with mad delight as the blubbering mound encourages them to hate Muslims or Mexicans or Africans or molested girls and women or any legal immigrant not from Northern Europe. 

It’s not easy to describe these gents. Norman Mailer may have done it years ago when he described certain supporters of the war we lost in Vietnam. Basically they are people like me who have not become rich or famous. Some think of themselves (unfortunately) as losers, left only with “hate, dull hate, cloud banks of hate, the hatred of failures who had not lost their greed”  (from THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT).

Taylor Swift's Bottom

I’m not what you’d call a Taylor Swift fan, preferring, as I do, Patsy Kline, Chuck Berry and Beethoven. But not long ago, she was groped in public and made a complaint. The man involved got fired and then sued her for 3 million dollars. Swift’s testimony at the trial was recently published in HARPER’S. (I have skipped a lot of the testimony in the interest of not typing more than needed.)

____________________________________

The man’s attorney: You contend that Mr. Brown put his hand underneath your skirt and grabbed your bare bottom.

Swift: Yes. He stayed latched on my bare ass cheek as I lurched away from him, visibly uncomfortable.

Attorney: Mr. Brown never grabbed your butt outside of your clothing?

Swift: He grabbed my ass underneath my skirt.

Attorney: So you acknowledge that Mr. Brown never grabbed your butt outside of your clothing.

Swift: Rather than grabbing my ass outside of my clothing, he grabbed my ass underneath the clothing.

Attorney: And Mr. Brown never otherwise touched your rear outside of your clothing.

Swift: He was busy grabbing my ass underneath my skirt, so he didn’t grab it outside of my skirt. 

Attorney: And other than the incident under the skirt, Mr. Brown didn’t otherwise touch you inappropriately?

Swift: Other than grabbing my ass underneath my skirt against my will and refusing to let go, he did not otherwise touch me inappropriately. 

Attorney: So you’re not critical of your bodyguard for allowing Mr. Brown to grope you and then walk out of the photo booth?

Swift:  No, I’m critical of your client for sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass.

Attorney: Can you explain to me how, given the stiffness of this skirt—If Mr. Brown’s hand is actually grabbing your bare cheek in the photography, why isn’t the front of your skirt someplace else?

Swift: Because my ass is located in the back of my body.

(Swift won.)

Mr. Nobody

There's an old saying in politics, that you can't beat someone with nobody. You need a viable opponent. That does not seem to apply to a President who is on the outside a malignant narcissist and on the inside is a moron. When polled about an imaginary race between Trump and Mr. Nobody, Trump gets only 36% of the vote.

Trumpian Idiots Command the Center for Disease Control

The basic notion is that if you ban a name, then what the word names will cease to exist. We banned the N-word, for instance. I won’t use it. But racism in America has, in some key ways, gotten worse in the last few years, not better. Feminists have been attempting for 50 years to end sexism in our pronouns, but the pronouns and sexism persist.

This history came to mind because recently the Center for Disease Control has banned the use (in its documents) of the terms “fetus,” “science-based” and “transgender.” This is Orwellian idiocy. Apparently the fish brain in charge at the CDC  believes that if we don’t have a word for a fetus, people will no longer seek abortions. Never mind that women have been getting abortions since humanity was invented (that might be nearly 6,143 years ago, according to the leadership at the non-science-based CDC).

Here’s the point.  Our species had children before we had a name for children. Things exist before we invent names for them, and they linger after the names have been banned. 

And how long have civilians who owned individual brain stems known this fact? At least 500 years.  “What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” 

Murder

My second cousin has been tracing our undistinguished family back to before the Revolution. Yesterday I found out, from her work, that my fourth great-grandfather, Steven Strickland, was murdered. He was traveling, probably in Connecticut, and he stopped at a tavern. An American and an Irishman got into a fight, and the tavern owner, who was lame, asked Strickland to separate them. Strickland intervened and the Irishman's brother picked up a stone (a stone?) and pounded Strickland, crushing his skull. Strickland eventually made it home and died. The brother was held in jail for a trial, and that's all I know.

My first great-grandfather was Sylvester Streeter Strickland, known as "Vet." He was an ironmonger and fiddler and sometime union organizer, which got him run out of Los Angeles. He roamed a lot. When young he hired out in some western county to kill off all the coyotes and wolves. He set out poisoned meat and killed every dog for thirty miles. Had to run for his life.  In some camp somewhere he claimed he had fiddled while Bojangles danced.  He married Mary Berry, a pipe-smoking Irish girl right off the boat. I'm no doubt the last person to remember them. 

The American Cornhole League

This week I discovered—to my surprise—the American Cornhole League on ESPN2. (I’m not making this up—you can google it for verification.) As far as I can tell, the league is a creature of the American Cornhole Organization, where you can buy sweatshirts and so on.  

Competitive cornholing, I now see, is a national phenomenon. (According to dictionaries of slang, a cornholer is a penetrator in anal sex.)  

I have to admit it gets difficult for old men like me to keep up with how sports keep changing.

In the game I saw, two teams tried to lob beanbags into a hole. The teams were usually two young men, but I did see one woman cornhole with her boyfriend. The game itself resembled a form of horseshoes that had been simplified for beer drinkers who found horseshoes too complex. I watched a playoff, preliminary to a final weekend In Las Vegas called “Cornhole Madness.” 

After the playoff game between Arkansas and Mississippi State, I went on line for an explanation. The announcers had said things like “There’s not much strategy” and  “The holes are really small,”  but I thought the main strategic point of the competition was obvious: to avoid elimination.  

When California Was Alabama

In 1850 California passed a law that prohibited Black people, Indians and Chinese from testifying in court. In 1860 the state legislature barred “Mongolians, Indians and Negroes” from public schools. The Alien Land Acts of 1913 and 1920 made it illegal for American-born Chinese citizens to own land, according to Joan Didion in WHERE I WAS FROM. 

Those are facts, as far as I know. In those days, California was Alabama. 

The Origin of Morals

I say that I got my morals sitting on the lap of my mother, but that's less than half true. Like most things about us, morality is the product of evolution--modified a bit by culture and personal experience. Morality is Mother Nature's way of making it possible for mammals to live near one another. It has to emerge from natural selection. Science offers no alternative.

One might argue that morality can't be genetic because it isn't identical from person to person. But that is like arguing that walking on two legs can't be genetic because a few people are born without legs and some well-trained people can run faster than others.  

You can see something like a moral nature in other mammals. Wolves live in family groups and do their best to take care of one another. A lone wolf is as lonely and desperate and ultimately as dead as Ayn Rand. 

Among humans each tribe is bonded together by morality, and infants, according to psychologists, exhibit aspects of moral behavior while very young.

Peek-A-Boo

I've noticed that some of the pretty women delivering cable news are wearing their hair so that it partly covers one eye. It's like the Veronica Lake hairdo of World War II. (She was a small actress who starred in films in the forties, particularly in THIS GUN FOR HIRE. Goddard copied the death scene from THIS GUN FOR HIRE in BREATHLESS, and Bruce Springsteen wrote a song. . . .)

The government asked Lake to change her hairdo, because women were riveting things in defense plants and needed two good eyes for depth perception.

Anyway, what is this hairstyle about? Is it about making the ladies look half blind and helpless and in need of princes to ride up and save them? Come on. To get where they are, the lovely newsreaders on TV must have the vision of eagles, who can spot a fish in the water from sixty storeys up.

KKK Explained

A few years after our grandparents died, my brother and I sat around one evening looking through a cardboard box of old photographs. We came across one of our paternal grandfather dressed in a white KKK robe and wearing a pointed hat. The photo was taken in the 1920s in California's Big Valley. 

We asked our father what the hell was going on. He told us that Grandpa had joined the KKK for one year because he'd been told they served free beer. That had proved untrue, so he had left the KKK to look for a more generous social club.

My question was: Who would have told our grandfather a dirty lie like that? Fifty years later I got an answer. In the 1920s the KKK suddenly grew huge numbers of members. There were, in 1920, many clubs boosting widespread racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, but it was the KKK that burgeoned because it was a pyramid scheme. My grandfather had paid ten dollars to join, a lot of money from a working man in the twenties (but worth it if you got a year's supply of beer). The liar who recruited him got to keep 40% of the membership fee. If you joined the KKK and then talked ten friends into joining, you came out $30 ahead. 

You could make a living selling caps with KKK printed on the bills. You could make a living by traveling around and giving KKK lectures. You could sell memorabilia and the special white robes (no serious member would wear a sheet). And a hundred years later you can sell caps with MAGA on them. Those caps are making money for someone. 

The Nick of Time

My wife's father (Harry) has been gone a while, but today I thought about him. My granddaughter has asked about her family history. I knew that Harry's parents had grown up in Ukraine and come here about 1909, but when I had tried in the past to find the town, no luck. It turns out that the problem was I couldn't spell the name right. This time the 'net got smarter and coughed up "Tetiev," which is pronounced Teteev. 

There it was, apparently a Jewish settlement about 70 miles south of Kiev, and I wonder if Tetiev is still there. To my shock, back about 1920, 75% of the population was murdered, and the rest fled. 

The Good Teacher

One problem teachers have to deal with is the basic  goal, which is to transform every pupil into an A student. It's not possible, of course, but if you come close, you will get fired for grade inflation. 

Manson and My Relatives

It was good to hear of the death of Charles Manson. During his 50 years in prison, he kept attracting idiotic cult members and, the guards say, planning murders.

My father had an indirect connection with Manson. My dad's sister, Ardith, had her first of eleven marriages to a man named Merle Curtiss, and they had a child together before divorcing. That was my older cousin Sonny. I never liked him.

My father was a teenager at the time of the marriage, and Curtiss gave him some useful boxing lessons. My father kept that fond memory, survived several street fights, and 40 years later he looked up Curtiss, by then the elected sheriff of Kern County. My father was invited to dinner with Curtiss and his wife. He learned at dinner that Curtiss and his deputies were the ones who had caught and arrested Manson, although they get little mention in the saga. Most people seem to think Manson was nabbed by some district attorney from his office in Los Angeles.

The California Difference

I haven't seen much comment on what follows.

Clinton won the popular vote in the United States by about 3 million. She carried California by about 4.3 million and beat Trump 2 to 1. She lost the other 49 states by about a million. 

What made California different? 

Is some ways it wasn't different. There were other states in which Clinton ran strongly. 

It wasn't the lack of third parties, which picked up about 6% of the California vote. In what might be the country's most progressive state, the Jill Stein voters and Libertarian voters didn't change the outcome. 

I don't know why Clinton took 61.5% of the vote, although that is about what you would get if you added 95% of the Democrats to 90% of  the independents. But how did the Democrats get so many independents to support a candidate with high negatives? 

My guess is that independents, about 30% of the voters, remain independent because they care more about the issues that affect them than about political parties. They vote for the candidates who support single payer health care, for example. If no candidate supports single payer, they vote for the one who backs the Affordable Care Act.

In California independents (who register as decline to state) are allowed to vote in the Democratic primaries, which tends to create a natural alliance. Maybe the national Democrats should try to earn the votes of independents who like Bernie instead of trying to exclude them or blaming them for Trump's victory,  But it's hard to learn something new. 

No Attempt To Unify

According to Jim Zogby:

"There are virtually no Bernie supporters on the DNC Rules and By-laws Committee and Keith Ellison is the only Bernie supporter on the new Executive Committee. We should have more representation, and it is fundamentally wrong that we will have such a diminished voice in party affairs when, more than ever, we will need 'all hands on deck.'”

I don't know what it will take to get the Democrats to allow progressives to have a voice in the party. So far the loss to Trump has taught them nothing. If the party is to unite, I suppose that will be up to the next Presidential nominee. The Wafflers will do their best to retain control of the party (a silver mine), and the struggle will be interesting.

When The Tsar Got Shot In The Basement Of The Kremlin

This is just a footnote. Many months back Trump’s son or his son-in-law, the more weaselly one, got a note from the Crown Prosecutor of Russia, who offered to meet with him to discuss information about Hillary Clinton. Or something like that. The Trump forces considered it but prudently decided not to act on the offer. Also they concealed the offer from the FBI. Now here is what earned my admiration. The last emperor of Russia resigned  in 1917. I assume that the Tsar had a crown prosecutor at the time. It’s fair to assume that this prosecutor was around 45 years old when he took office. You’d want someone seasoned but still vigorous. That would make the Crown Prosecutor roughly 145 when he contacted the Trumps. Compared to him they were children.  

Judge Moore's Bottom

Yesterday Judge Moore of Alabama held a press conference while surrounded by women preachers. They didn't mind endorsing for the United States Senate a man who gropes frightened 14-year-old girls. These women didn't mind that at all. As they see it, that's how little girls grow up in Alabama. And God bless Alabama. I've never been there, of course. My forebears left the South long ago--I mean they got the hell out. And they weren't particularly smart, either. 

The preachers also didn't mind that the judge told, on national TV, surrounded by genteel ladies, a joke about his butt hole. Fair disclosure--I enjoy some butt hole humor myself, and Judge Moore told a pretty good joke. What a rascal! Isn't he just what we need to help guide the Sentate, America and the Free World? 

Jeff Sessions Takes Out The Trash

Abbie Powe Sessions: Jeff, honey, did you take out the trash?

Jeff: I don’t recall.

Abbie Powe Sessions: I’m asking if you took out the trash after we asked you, son.

Jeff: I don’t recall you or anyone asking me to take out the trash, and I do not believe anyone in this family did ask me. I have no memory of that. 

Abbie Powe Sessions: Your father heard me ask you, and then he asked you, too. Jeff. Did you pick up a bag of beer cans and take it outside?

Jeff: Dad? He might have said something about beer cans, but that was this morning. I had a very busy day at school, and I don’t actually recall a conversation with Dad, but I believe I said to him that you should not be drinking Coors before breakfast. I have no memory of what he might have said, if he did. I talk to people all day long, just to say hello and so on. My day is confusing. You know how disorganized and underprepared I am at school. I’m failing chemistry, and It’s typical for me to speak to more than thirty people in one day. It’s a form of chaos.

Abbie Powe Sessions: Jefferson Beauregard, you’re lying again. And what have we told you about lying? Methodists don’t lie. When your father gets back from the dealership, he’ll have something to say to you.

Jeff: I resent that. You’re the one who’s lying when you accuse me of telling lies. That’s a big fat lie, a whopper. You did not ask me to take out the trash, and I’m not aware for anyone else who did, and I don’t believe it happened.

Abbie Powe Sessions: Never mind. I’ll take the trash out myself. Jesus H. Christ!

Jeff: You lose. And you’re going to Hell, Mom. 

How To Control An Election

Some of the Federalists who helped found this country believed that the nation should be ruled by the rich white men who owned it. That makes a kind of sense, of course, and it helps explain why our local newspaper has endorsed a new plan for voter districts. The plan was put forward by the Chamber of Commerce, dominated by rich white businessmen, and by the Sonoma Alliance, dominated by even richer white businessmen. They own Sonoma Country, in a way, and they own the newspaper, The Corporate Democrat. 

The City, until now, has elected its council members at large. This means that council members have nearly always come from one corner of the city, the ghetto where giant mansions face each other across broad avenues. Poor people and people of color can pound sand, as far as representation is concerned. (That’s in theory—in actuality some decent people win council seats at times.)

Frightened by a lawsuit, the city council now intends to divide itself into discrete districts. There might even be districts made up of ordinary voters, but who gets to shape them?

As I mentioned, the newspaper has strongly endorsed a proposal from the Super Rich, one in which no current incumbent will have to run against another. Is that a sweet deal or what? Who doesn’t like to see loyalty rewarded? I’d hate to stir up competition, maybe. I remember the first law of American capitalism: competition reduces profits.    

FACES PLACES

FACES PLACES is a French documentary about a well-known film director (an 88 year old woman) and a young photographer, male, who set out across France to meet and photograph regular people. They begin to enlarge the photographs and glue them onto buildings and so on. The project begins to get complicated, and the movie ends in an unexpected way. In a sense it is an exploration of the creative process, interactions and a human look at us. It's different. 

More Lies

I don't want to harp on the Donna Brazile revelations. The DNC should just issue an apology and get to work making the party apparatus more democratic. Try to earn credibility. But the Clinton soldiers have dug in like Trump.and insist on denying reality (along the lines of "I did not have sex with that woman").

Consider these two excerpts from THE INTERCEPT. (Google THE INTERCEPT TO to read the full article.)

____________________________________________

The Clinton/DNC agreement explicitly vested the Clinton campaign with control over key matters during the primary season: the exact opposite of what journalists on Twitter caused hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, to believe. Nonetheless, DNC-loyal commentators continue to cite headlines and tweets citing the legalistic language to convince huge numbers of people that the truth is the exact opposite of what it actually is:

(and)

What we actually know for certain – what exists in reality – is that Sanders never signed any agreement with the DNC that contained the control provisions that were given in 2015 to the Clinton campaign. In other words, the provisions cited by Brazile in her “rigging” allegation did not exist in any contract signed with the DNC by the Sanders campaign.

(the contracts are in the public record)

The Scandal

The latest Clinton scandal, the revelation by Donna Brazile that the Clinton campaign took control of parts of the party apparatus before Hillary was nominated, was something many voters already understood. A short apology for unethical behavior would have settled the matter. 

Instead, what we saw on Saturday was a major turnout of Clinton people arguing that buying control of the umpires was normal and there was nothing to look at. That saddened me. What we need right now is a younger, reformed, more ethical Democratic party that focuses on the future, not the past. But the exhausted old faces will not retire, because their lives consist of nada except manipulating political power. They have nothing else to do. 

Daylight Saving, a history

The other day Susan and I were driving somewhere, and we began to speculate on why we put up with daylight saving, a nonsensical, irritating law that does no good whatsoever.  It does not get us an extra hour of sunlight. That would violate the laws of physics. Despite no expertise in economics, Susan and I got as far as the realization that somebody in the 1% was making  big money from daylight saving, but we had no idea who.

It turns out, according to Book TV, that daylight saving in this country was first backed by major department store chains to increase afternoon shopping hours for people with jobs. Later on, daylight saving improved life for morning stock traders who wanted to buy and sell in Europe. (Daylight saving has had nothing to do with farmers, by the way. They’ve always hated it. I think they already knew when the Sun came up.)

The President who tried hardest to get rid of daylight saving was Richard Nixon, I am revising my view of him upward a tick. 

The expert on all this is Michael Downing, who pointed out that American time zones are reset up to strengthen various commercial enterprises, which is why they keep changing. It could be worse. He noted that China has one time zone, so in China some cities see the sunrise at one in the afternoon.   

Donna Brazile

Was the Democratic primary race for President rigged by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign? Yes, Elizabeth Warren said yesterday, after Donna Brazile’s revelations. Brazile served as chair of the DNC at the time, so she should know.

Of course many recognized the DNC bias during the race. It was obvious. Supporters of Hillary Clinton refused to confront it, because it contradicted what they preferred to believe about Hillary. We are all subject to bias confirmation, me especially. That’s how humans operate.

From the day Bill Clinton appeared on the national scene, I understood he was Snopeslike. The man reeked of sleaze. He and his wife ran for office to get rich—they started poor and ended wealthy. The Clintons weren’t crooks like Trump, just deeply unethical, and I have to say that ethics and American politics are incompatible. Some elected officials are more ethical than others, but you’d be pressed to find one that hasn’t betrayed others for personal gain. That’s how the game gets played.

In three national elections I voted for a Clinton.  

I’m writing about the Clintons in the past tense. Please, let them retire with their hundreds of millions of dollars. At long last, let's encourage  the Clintons to slink away.

(also on FaceBook)

How Power Corrupts

For most of us, our favorite President was Abraham Lincoln. One reason is that after he acquired enormous power, he still had empathy for ordinary people, perhaps because he had himself failed often. Empathy in someone in power is rare. In my lifetime I suppose the person who exemplifies that kind of empathy was Robert Kennedy, and he didn’t have it until life had crushed him.

If a person in power keeps in mind how often he has failed, Jerry Useem wrote in the July ATLANTIC, he may remain human. 

We know what Lord Acton said about power (that it corrupts) and Henry Adams wrote that a friend in power is a friend lost and so on. We know what power does to people, but only recently has the power syndrome become a field of study in psychology. The argument is that power changes the brain like a traumatic injury. Powerful people lose some of the ability to see things from another person’s point of view. In power, someone has less need to for a nuanced view of others. You just tell them what to do. People in power lump others together, rely on stereotypes, ask fewer questions and depend on their own gut instincts. They show contempt for others.  They act recklessly and with growing incompetence, Donald. That gets worse if the Donald is aging "bigly" and losing his vocabulary and contact with reality.

Compromising the Civil War

General Kelly, the dope who guards the White House for Minority President Trump, has said that the Civil War was brought on by an inability to compromise. It’s too late now, but an obvious compromise might have saved the lives of many loyal American troops.

White people and black people could have taken turns being slaves. That seems fair. Of course, there were more white people, extra white people, which would have created an imbalance, but if you reclassified the Indian tribes and the Irish as African-Americans, as some did, you’d get roughly equal numbers. (Note to self: everyone is, in ancestral terms, African-American.)

Or maybe men and women could have taken turns being slaves or vice versa.

Reptilian Paul Ryan Eyes

As I watch the Republican Party writhe in agony, I’m impressed by its ability, despite the turmoil, to remain focused on its core mission. That mission is to cut aid to the needy and shift government funds and tax breaks to the 1%. The party may be dying, but it will, by God, punish the poor (with a cold gleam in its reptilian Paul Ryan eyes) and greatly enrich the trolls who own the oligarchy.

Whitefish From The Head Down

The Whitefish contract to rebuild part of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid has been canceled, probably because it looks as crooked as a shark’s grin. According to the Huffington Post, the contract states that “In no event shall [government bodies] have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements.” The contract waived “any claim against Contractor related to delayed completion of the work.”

In short, Whitefish could take the money and do just about nothing. 

Whitefish is an unknown company that had two employees at the time the strange contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was awarded. Headquartered in the home town of Interior Secretary Zinke, Whitefish recently provided a summer job for one of his children. 

My father used to say that whitefish stinks from the head down. 

Help the Giants!

After winning three World Series in five years, the SF Giants collapsed last season. The team needed new players at first base, third base and the three outfield positions. 

The Giants rake in the money. Tickets cost a lot, stadium food and beer cost more and TV revenues remain enormous. The owners float on cash. But their solution to finishing in last place--they need to hire new players at five out of nine positions--has been to fire several assistant coaches. This ridiculous but inexpensive plan has been applauded by buttocks-smooching sports writers like Lowell Cohn. 

Cohn retired last year. Please retire him again.

Hindoos (?)

Charles Darwin was religious as a young man, but later on he wrote: “I had gradually come . . . to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world . . . from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. . . .”

Maybe the Old Testament God, the God of the Torah, suffers from borderline personality disorder. 

You meet America’s religiosity on long driving trips. I recently drove from Victoria to Santa Rosa in two days, and I heard bits from many Preacher-Confidence men; they were working folks for cash on the radio. 

I know religious people who live good lives and do good works. They help others. I’m not sure what they think God may be, maybe a vague all-encompassing-all, but they are good women and men. 

For others the church is a clubhouse, a place where you meet your friends and business contacts.

Personal identity is a major factor in ethnic churches.

Political religiosity works for politicians like Paul Ryan, who no doubt goes to confession and the next day enacts legislation to harm the poor, ignoring his church and the injunction that sooner shall a camel (or rope) pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven. Driven by greed and a lust for power, Ryan prefers to prosper in this life and gamble on his place in the next. Maybe Hell is just a metaphor?

Jelly Belly

Chris Hayes pointed out tonight that Donald Trump says over and over that we are the highest taxed developed nation on the planet. The claim is easily checked. We are, in fact, almost the lowest taxed developed nation. But Trump’s notion of truth and facts is as primitive as his bloated body decay.

Trump believes that truth is flexibly determined by a kind of vote. To defend his lie about tax rates, he claims that many very smart people agree with him. That’s a lie, but to the Minority President, If many people agree that Hugh Hefner died a virgin, then it becomes a fact as far as Trump is concerned.

In English we determine the truth of sentences in a variety of ways. If someone claims that Babe Ruth hit 65 home runs in one season, we can look up Ruth’s hitting feats in a baseball book. If someone claims that a pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead, we can weigh them and compare the results. If a friend insists that Joe Cocker never sang “Into The Mystic,” we can google the song. And so on.  Voting doesn’t come into it. 

Trump is a dope, of course, so stupid that he somehow got himself out front on the national stage, where his feckless brainlessness would certainly be exposed every single embarrassing day. Until a year or two back, he’d been protected by mounds of his father’s money, bodyguards, Chinese banks, whatever. Now he’s a malignant International fool, a strutting, naked jelly belly. 

Wildfire Forecast

In the worst wildfire in California history, Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, 29, who lives under a bridge, felt cold, he said, so he walked down to creek bed near Sonoma, lit a fire and then slowly walked away. The police arrested him. 

After the hottest summer we know of in California, we had huge winds driving our worst fire. That could have happened, in part, because of global warming, which means the risks from Mother Nature and human error may be growing. 

Wait till next year. 

Trump's a bit odd

The wind is up tonight. If it doesn't get too bad, we will be returning to Santa Rosa tomorrow. To my surprise electricity and natural gas have been hooked up to our apartment a week earlier than predicted, probably thanks to helpers reaching us from kindly cities and states.

Meanwhile I have been in San Francisco watching President Moron babble about this and that. None of what he says connects with the world as we understand it. Chaos, of course, has its own hidden basic structure, and in this case it seems that the moron's brainless focus is to reverse everything President Obama accomplished. That's not a plan. It's odd, though. 

The Fire

I suppose everyone knows that Sonoma County is being ravaged by a group of fires that started Sunday night with a 70 MPH wind. This is the worst fire in the county's history. It had never occurred to me that you could have a wildfire in a settled city, but something like that is happening. Whole city neighborhoods we bike through are gone. To date the apartment complex where Susan and I live has been spared, but nearly everyone has left and the wind is rising. I threw some paintings and pillows and clothes in my van. We are lucky--we have places we can go. 

How Democrats Can Win

According to “The Intercept,” the Democratic Party has shifted its focus from private health care options (which have worked in places like Switzerland) to public health care programs. Bernie Sanders introduced a Medicare-for-all bill, and many bills by other senators take a related approach. These include public option bills, a Medicare buy-in bill for those 55 and above, a universal Medicare buy-in, and Tim Kane’s Medicare Part E, with the E standing for everyone. Democrats are also working in some states to let people buy into Medicaid.

Make it happen. Make the Democrats useful for ordinary people. 

Rex Tillerson On Mental Abilities

Rex Tillerson On Mental Abilities:

We’ve all come across morons and elected them (George W. Bush) President of the United States. For example, where I, Rex Tillerson, went to high school in Huntsville, the boys vice principal was a failed gym coach. If you happened to be walking behind him in the hall, you’d spit on his back silently for luck. We’re talking about a man who hung his suit coat up wet, a fool with an IQ of about 84.

And he wasn’t the dumbest SOB I met while young. I won a scholarship to play in the orchestra at the University of Texas at Austin, so I had a kettle drum instructor, maybe the worst musician you could meet. He was an estimated 12% more stupid than the boys vice principal.

After college I got hired by the central production division of Exxon USA, headed up by a tabula rasa from Duke who was twice as dumb as the drum instructor. She ended up sending me to negotiate with some fellow from the United Arab Emirates who couldn’t button his own dress. One estimate of the Emerates intelligence put him at 8% less than the Duke graduate or the same as Donald Trump.

If you followed along, figures don’t lie. We started with a vice principal with an IQ of 84, then a drummer with 12 % less, followed by a Duke grad with 50% less, and an oil tyrant with 8% less than that. That factual history gives Trump a IQ of 34— he’s a fucking moron. It’s not my fault.

Our Leader

There is convincing evidence that the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called the President "a fucking moron." This has surfaced several problems. What sort of cooperation exists in the President's cabinet and so forth? But no one on the tube seems to be commenting on the key problem: the President of the United States is a moron. 

The Road Apples of American Thought, Chapter 22: Sonic Attacks

The state department under Rex Tillerson is expelling 16 Cuban diplomats in retaliation for supposed attacks on American personnel in Cuba, although few believe the Cubans are behind the attacks. The Cubans have nothing to gain and much to lose by such attacks, and Cuban authorities have been cooperating with the FBI.

Are these attacks real? One main theory is that someone has assaulted Americans from a distance with sonic waves, something scientists say is not physically possible. In this administration, science is part of a liberal conspiracy called fact-based reality, and it doesn’t count.

Is some other kind of attack going on?  I have no idea, but we seem sure that the Cubans are not attacking. Their crime is a failure to defend our diplomats against an attack we can’t define. Also Republican hacks in Washington hope to reject Cuba. (Many Republican business leaders see Cuba as an interesting market.)

Presidents Meet

According to Seth Meyers, when Trump visited Puerto Rico the other day, he asked to meet with their president. 

Pure Evil

Today Minority President Trump referred to the act of the loony terrorist who killed around 60  people in Las Vegas last night as “pure evil.”  On the same day the Republican lawmakers let the CHIP act expire (after 20 years). Nine million children lost their health care coverage. No more check ups, immunizations, prescriptions, dental care, eyeglasses, X-rays, etc. It’s hard to weigh these events against one another, but which was purer evil? 

Both were calculated. One meant sudden death for a few; the other, many illnesses and slow deaths for many. The motives behind one are unknown. The motives behind the other (saving poor children from an unhealthy reliance on government aid, saving money to give tax cuts to billionaires) are well understood.

Shots Fired

America is averaging one mass shooting a day now (a mass shooting is one in which at least three people are killed). This morning we woke to the worst of them, at least 50 killed in Las Vegas last night by one nut armed with automatic weapons. The local police officers, according to witnesses, behaved heroically, as did other first responders, something to keep in mind.

There is no other western nation in which these massacres happen on a daily basis. 

Nevada’s attempts at gun control are lax to nonexistent. The reason behind weak gun control is not to protect the right to hunt quail, as you probably know. Many Americans insist on the right to overthrow the government with small arms fire, even if that means arming lunatic native terrorists.

Once again we are left to sorrow.