Bringing Up Baby

I don't watch the Oscars because I prefer not to be mummified, but my wife talked me into it tonight. Jimmy Kimmel actually made the event tolerable. Naturally a load of undeserved awards were given out, including those for the usual Boston Irish Bummer. As Drew Hagary pointed out, "They’re really gonna give a fucking Oscar to Ben Affleck’s brother. Why not hand them out to Mark Wahlberg’s posse while they’re at it?" 

And then a functionary handed Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty the wrong envelope. Bonnie and Clyde produced an amazing twist ending worthy of a screwball comedy in 1938. The two surprised old folks announced the wrong movie as best picture of the year. Oscars were handed out and then frantically returned and rehanded out to shorter, darker people. Where are Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn when you need them?

Power and Party

Returning from an impressive and progressive town hall in Santa Rosa, where my belief in Mike McGuire was again justified, I got word that the National Democratic Party had elected a new chair, a Hillary man. That should solidify power in the grip of those who see the future of the party as centrist, middling and Wall Street. And, most important, it will keep the party in the same capable and wealthy hands that, by losing, brought us our current House, Senate and President. Next, a new Supreme Court. 

The problem here is that demographics are not destiny unless you can persuade the new voters that you will deliver what they need and care about. Otherwise they won't register or vote. Why should new voters trust the National Democrats? Why should I?  Yes, control of the National Democratic Party can make a poor Arkansas man as rich as a Clinton. It's a gigantic money machine. But the National Party and its aging leaders don't deliver on my issues. They lose elections. They don't know or care what I want or what Black Lives Matter wants or what the nurses want. They do grasp what Wall Street wants. That's where the cash is. If you own a national party, you find a thousand pots of gold in reach.

Sometimes the National Democrats ride by throwing out cheap gifts to the poor. They aren't Republicans. But I (who once chaired the liberal caucus of the California Federation of Young Democrats) am no longer a Democrat. Today I became an independent progressive. Independents outnumber Republicans in California. Earn my vote if you can. I'm listening. Many are not. Nearly half the citizens in swing states, including many young ones, won't listen to stale rhetoric. They need something new. 

A Darwinian Look at Irrational Voting

By now most of us are convinced that people can’t think straight, particularly when voting. Countless studies in fields like cognitive science have established that we mislead ourselves through confirmation bias and so on. We are specialists at justifying irrationality. Look at all the votes that white women gave to Minority President Donald Trump, who boasted of sexually assaulting them. 

We understand that people often can’t think straight.

We also believe, as good Darwinians, that harmful traits cause organisms to fail to reproduce. The harmful traits get evolved out. Unless Darwin was wrong, irrational thinking must be a useful trait. 

In a New Yorker article on-line, Elizabeth Kolbert presented an argument made by cognitive scientists, who tell us that the abilities to deceive ourselves or jump to conclusions and so on evolved on the plains of Africa, where they worked to keep groups of people cooperating with one another. Hyper-cooperation is what made us great, and it depends on misleading ourselves into sharing food rather than eating it alone, which, as Ayn Rand correctly points out, would be in our individual best interest (except that then civilization would collapse).  

Gratitude

I do what Stephen Colbert tells me to do. The other day my wife and I were walking into a store, and the man in front of us entered with a small dog on a lead. The dog wore a canvass rain coat, and on the coat it said "Service Dog." I leaned down in the doorway and said, "Thank you for your service." 

Trump's Secretions

I believe there’s a play about Alexander Hamilton people are talking about. I hope it’s historically sound. If so, it probably contains what John Adams wrote about Alexander Hamilton. “His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I’m convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn’t find enough whores to absorb.” 

No one is talking about Minority President Trumpery like that. Our politicians have grown soft. 

What do you think John Adams might say about Trumpery today?  I’m curious because my cousin traced our ancestry back to one of John Adams’ aunts. I have a stake in the matter. 

Meanwhile, powdered wigs off to Hamilton. He once said to a room filled with founding fathers that “democracy is poison.” Later he invented the system we have today, in which the country is ruled by the men who own it. 

How to Win

The split in the Democratic party seems to be solidifying along the lines predicted by Mike Davis (a centrist faction led by President Obama vs. a progressive faction looking for someone young and blunt). What I have noticed among my friends is that some of them absolutely refuse to learn from 2016. 

What should they learn? That if you want to win, don’t nominate candidates with high negatives, candidates voters don’t really like. That if you want young people’s energy and votes, don’t nominate ancient centrists who responded slowly to people of color and gays, centrists who bore listeners. 

If you want to win, do what the Republicans do, organize at every level and, unlike either party, work as an exciting progressive national team. 

A Day Without Latinos

Yesterday was a day without Latinos, although the local newspapers didn't give it much coverage. In fact, I saw no local coverage, although the boycott must have involved hundreds or thousands of local people, but maybe I missed something. I did notice mention on national news/entertainment shows. They observed that their favorite restaurants in Washington City were closed. 

Something like that happened in Healdsburg, a friend told me. If you went out to eat Chinese, Thai, Indian or Mexican for lunch, your restaurant might be open, but the kitchen (Latino cooks in all cases) was closed. If you asked where you could dine that was open, no one knew. 

I wonder why this event got so little mention. A lot of coverage went, instead, to a single malignant narcissist who believes he is President of the United States. He was raving on TV. 

The Investigations

I think I’ve got this right. At the end of the first month of his administration, Minority President Trumpery and his team are being investigated by our intelligence community, which suspects them of ratting us out to Russia. At the same time, Trumpery has formed a committee to investigate our intelligence community, headed by a billionaire with zero experience in government and intelligence. Also Kellyanne Conway, the Minority President’s best flack, has been banned from the Republican show “Morning Joe” because of her constant lying. (Is Trumpery an entertaining slob or what? This might be fun except that Trumpery is shattering  Latino families, with worse to come.)

Dead In Two Weeks

Fairly often on TV you see some balanced news panel show. For each guest who can dress herself there will be another who has his pants on backwards. That’s American news.

Anyway, one guest will say something like “Donald Trump is a compulsive liar” or “Minority President Trump is a malignant narcissist.” Inevitably someone else will say, “When did you become a psychologist?”or “How can you diagnose a man you never met?”

I can answer that last question. As I hike though downtown Santa Rosa or ride on the bike path, I diagnose every oddball who looks slightly dangerous. I don’t need a certificate to do this, and I’m not looking to interview some guy wearing three hats and a roll in the mud. I rely on common sense. And I tell you that Trump is nuts. He has adopted the best strategy to use if you’re nuts: be born extremely rich. If Trump weren’t rich, he’d be dead in two weeks.

Trumpery in Court

Last week when Minority President Trumpery tweeted to three judges, “I‘ll see you in court,” people laughed. SNL compared his position to that of a drunk getting beaten senseless in an alley. Coming to hours later and rising from the mud, the drunk says, “Let’s take this outside!”

Trumpery

Roy Reynolds pointed out that we have a perfectly good English word to name the sort of thing we see today in Washington City: trumpery. 

Trumpery is an old word that means worthless stuff, trash, nonsense and twaddle. 

Sessions and Freitas and the Old Jim Crow

Some believe that Minority President Trump’s Attorney General Sessions represents the New Jim Crow, because Sessions expressed a liking for the KKK in the past and he attempted to imprison civil rights workers who were helping people of color to vote. That’s wrong. Sessions is a throwback to the 1940s Jim Crow. That’s 75 years ago, the good old days.

Of course, Sessions would be the first to say that he’s a blatantly racist little puke. Well, maybe not the first.

Because I accidentally brought up the subject of racist pukes, I should comment on Sonoma’s sheriff, Killer Steve Freitas, who endorsed General Sessions. Sonoma must be one of the more progressive counties in the nation, but Killer Freitas actually promoted a frightened deputy who shot and killed a young teenager of color walking along with a toy gun. Killer Freitas believes that shooting unarmed children is a public service and deserves career advancement. His rationale (and the rationale of those who defended the deputy) boils down to this: a deputy has the right to kill any child who scares him. That’s how Freitas trains his deputies to protect themselves from the voters and why he promotes them. This leads me to wonder if we need a new sheriff, one who believes that Latinos have a right to life. 

Getting Rich

Someone will make a fortune by selling T-shirts that read: "I SURVIVED THE BOWLING GREEN MASSACRE."

Words Have Meaning

I recently watched a lecture on time by a deservedly famous Berkeley physics professor. Apparently time is not a settled  topic among physics experts. The professor said repeatedly that time cannot be defined.

When I looked a few minutes ago, time was defined in Webster's Dictionary. Also "time" is a word we invented, and there is no such creature as an undefined word. Words have meaning. If they don't, they aren't words.

If you go around claiming that time cannot be defined, you may seem ignorant or you may seem deeply profound. "Time cannot be defined" is one of those strong-sounding statements that mislead those who utter them as much as those who hear them.

I suspect that what the physics professor meant, in an unclear way, was that time is a fuzzy word we can't make more exact in physics. Fuzzy concepts are often, all the way to the bottom, fuzzy. That's must be true for hundreds of thousands of English words, and there is nothing remarkable about "time" except that the Big Bang created time and, eventually, English, which in turn yielded rolling confusion about fuzzy terms.

Fascist Wit

By now I suppose nearly everyone has heard that Minority President Trump’s candidate for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was listed as the founder of a ‘Fascism Forever’ club at his all male prep school for snotty rich kids. We’re told that this was just a way of poking fun at the liberal faculty. I have to admit that Neil and his pals were pretty darn funny. Laugh, I thought I’d never start.   

DER SPIEGEL

Dylann Roof

If you take Adolph Hitler and his ilk to represent absolute evil, which seems reasonable, then Dylann Roof is of Hitler’s ilk. He deliberately chose to murder people of color who were in a church praying, because, as he said, killing obviously good folks would get more press attention than killing just any black person. 

Recently Roof has been tried in a federal court and convicted and sentenced to death—it’s unusual for a young white man to get the death sentence for killing black men and women. 

I’m opposed to the death sentence. This is not because I pity Roof. I believe he’s getting off easy. If it were up to me, I’d give him life in solitary confinement so he could think things over for the next 50 or 60 years, while serving as an example of death in life.  

Unlike the American Right, I don’t fully trust the federal government. Why people who claim to despise the federal government are willing to give it the power to execute them  is interesting. (It demonstrates that political positions have little to do with logical consistency.)

My main objection to capital punishment is that if we actually placed a high value on human lives and wanted to prove it, we wouldn’t take human lives. Every time we deliberate and then take a life, we prove that to us some lives don’t matter. Which ones matter is a choice in our system.

A poll was taken. About 67% of black people favored life in prison for Roof, while 64% of whites want the feds to kill him. I think we understand why people of color see the justice system as flawed; and many black families belong to churches that preach Christian forgiveness and redemption. 

Malignant Narcissism

So far the NBA has not banned Moslem basketball players, some of whom come from African or Moslem nations. Players had better stay in the States, though, and not go home for a visit. They might not get back in. The same is true for actors who work here but hail from Moslem countries. They should forget the loved ones they left  behind in the old country. 

Minority President Trump's actions are unpredictable. He flails out racist policies like an infant flailing its arms and legs. He might ban anyone next, although I suspect you will be safe if this con man owns a business in your nation. (Always stay at Trump hotels.)

Among those speaking out against our malignant narcissist are many entertainment performers and basketball players and coaches.   

I wonder about the dopes who went for Trump. Apparently many voted to for him because (1) he is nominally a Republican and (2) the voters felt ignored. They felt ignored? That seems to me inadequate--you've been ignored so you put a malignant narcissist in charge of the nukes? 

Grow up. 

No Worse Than Scum

The very flexible Press (Corporate) Democrat has done it again. The editorial board wants Neil Gortex (or whatever his name is) to get a fair hearing and vote from the Democrats in the Senate because “his background suggests he will be no more a conservative than Scalia was.”

The editorial board is Trump’s dog. It rolls over, feet in the air, hoping the Minority President will rub its flabby tummy.

Scalia was a crank, an ignoramus who believed he magically understood what the Founding Fathers were up to when they haggled and compromised and disagreed and created a make-shift Constitution for the free in which black people remained enslaved and women and poor men couldn’t vote. What we don’t need is another half-assed crank like Scalia on the Supreme Court.

What we do need are Democrats and others who will fight Trump on land and on the sea. Trump recently threatened war with Mexico—what more do we need to know?