The Conservative Code

The conservative code in this country, subscribed to by many American families, has good and bad aspects to it, as I see it. Conservatives believe that God (or Mother Nature) invented white males to take charge of smaller beings and to make the big decisions. That’s the natural order, in their view.  Stern fathers have privileges, and that’s exactly what they deserve and what Nature intends. 

But conservative white males also have duties, and one of them is to protect women and children. That’s part of the code. Clearly it is not part of Minority-President Trump’s code. He has demonstrated a stupid hated of women again and again and keeps trying to hurt them. 

In the 2016 election, conservatives had to choose between a man who abused women (bad but correctable behavior, as conservatives saw it) and a bossy, assertive woman who wore pants, which conservatives viewed as a revolutionary perversion of the natural order. Many (but not all) didn’t realize that Trump was mentally ill; a majority of white women and, of course, white men voted Trump in.    

Why The Poor Must Die

In this country the rich live many years longer (on average) than the poor. If you want to live a long life, try to inherit money. Cash buys time on this planet.

Even so, I wondered how Republican legislators can justify supporting Trump Care. The Congressional Budget Office (headed by a Republican openly opposed to our current Obama Care) has issued a report predicting that Trump Care will, if enacted, push 22 million additional Americans off of health insurance. That means Trump Care will do two things: boost billionaires by lowering their taxes and kill tens of thousands of our poor citizens each month. How can a legislator justify supporting more death for poor people?

The answer seems to be that Republicans justify Trump Care by flatly denying that it will harm anyone. Also the earth is 6,000 years old.

We have evolved as thinking mammals whose belief systems can at times overpower facts and blind us to probabilities. 

A Dark Continent

In 1941 when I visited my grandparents’ small ranch about 20 miles from San Luis Obispo, they had no electricity. The nearest small town, Pozo, had no electricity. The town lit its church with kerosene lamps. The huge electrical grid that laced together our country was incomplete.

America's huge grid, generators, wires, poles, etc., was built when wood, coal, oil and metal were cheap.

In the June 26 NEW YORKER, Bill McKibben published an article on electrifying Africa today. Parts of Africa are going solar because (drum roll) solar does not need a grid. The price of solar panels is falling. Light bulbs and batteries are growing more efficient. Isolated villages can afford to generate enough power to run cell phones, lamps, fans, television, computers.  Most rural areas haven’t done this yet, but it’s going to happen. 

In Africa, solar is cheaper than kerosene. A company named Off-Grid sells a starter kit that costs thirteen dollars a month (for three years). It includes a solar panel, a radio, some L.E.D. lights, a battery and a phone charger. Another company might sell, even cheaper, a solar lamp, which soaks up sunlight and then glows at night. 

A very popular item in rural Africa, by the way, is an electric fan. That would be my first choice. 

What I wonder is what Africans will do as more and more people make connections with one another. Big unpredictable changes are coming in the next century.

ICE v. Ireland

ICE may have gone too far. They entered the home of an undocumented Irish immigrant in Boston and hauled him away to detention. They plan to deport him. Usually they do not deport the Irish (my ancestry) because they have delightful accents, but this Mick had the nerve to become an activist in the struggle for immigrant rights. 

Boston and the northern half of the East Coast hold a great many undocumented Irish citizens, and no one cares, despite the many sunburns in the summer.

The Geriatric Democrats

As far as I can tell, neither Minority President Trump nor the Democratic Party is capable of learning from experience. Back in the last century, in the Reagan aftermath, the Clintons figured out how to win in a time that revived the Gilded Age. They led the Democrats to victory. The party, now geriatric, has absorbed no lessons since then. They still run for office as if Reagan were peering over their shoulders.

The Cuban Package

Cubans, like many of us, are happy in the usual ways with their packages (paquetes). The government may be puritanically Marxist, and packages may be illegal, but "no one is going to arrest you for buying El Paquete," according to a police official. Many thousands of packages are for sale on the island.

To understand why, you need to know that only 2% of Cubans have access to the Internet, yet they keep up on world cultures. About 50% of Cubans subscribe to an (illegal) package service, where a dealer comes by on a regular basis and rents them a hard drive (pacquete) to keep and download for 24 hours. On the hard drive will be a huge sampling of Internet programing that includes soap operas, sports, movies, travel shows, sit-coms, educational series, etc. As I understand it the packages contain little overtly political stuff and no porn (which is available in Cuba in other, even more illegal ways).

Why America Is Bitterly Divided

Political America is bitterly divided at the moment, and for a reason that I see no one discussing.

Our country was founded as part oligarchy and part representative democracy. That system has demonstrated stability but also a weakness. Our leadership, strongly influenced by the rich, can and does lose touch at times with what ordinary people want.

One negative consequence is that ordinary people, sensing the government has little interest in them or their problems, ignore the government and don’t vote. For nearly half of our population, both major parties seem too distant to bother with. For these nonvoters the government seems irrelevant. 

A second negative consequence is that many ordinary people who do vote become frustrated. Their own out-of-touch parties are not listening or might pay the voters lip service while actively serving the oligarchy. 

In the last Presidential season (2016), voters in both parties attempted to overthrow their leaders at the Presidential level. The Republican voters succeeded and nominated an outsider, Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist. The Democratic voters nearly nominated a democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders), who found strength in the fact that he didn’t belong to the Democratic Party.

The Worst President in History

I’m not a Presidential scholar, but I’ve heard that James Buchanan is the President most often designated as the worst in history. Buchanan failed to head off the Civil War—as did Lincoln, often cited as the best President. Andrew Johnson strikes me as a stronger contender for worst—he did his best to lose the peace after the North won the Civil War. President Grant, who followed Johnson, stood up for civil rights, but after him the South rewrote our history and has been disenfranchising people of color ever since, particularly right now in Georgia.  

My view is that the worst President has served in the last 100 years. Hoover, to start with, is given bad marks for his inability to rally the country during the Great Depression. Reagan suffered from dementia while leading the Free World, so to speak. Nixon dribbled paranoia and has gone down in history as a crook. That’s worse than dementia. George W. Bush, a dumbass, attacked the wrong country and threw the whole Middle East into a cycle of violence that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. But Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist, seems to be in a class by himself: more demented than Reagan, more paranoid and crooked than Nixon, more feckless and incompetent than Bush.

Them!

When I was about ten, we dropped two atom bombs on Japan, and  we rejoiced. It meant World War II was over. The Axis had been defeated. Our troops could come home. Clark Gable could come home. Glenn Miller would not be coming home.

The Nazis had raced us to get nuclear weapons first, and they had lost, thanks in part to European scientists who had joined our team. Japan had started two separate programs to develop nuclear  weapons, and both had lost

Soon it occurred to Americans in general that nuclear weapons might not be something to celebrate. For one thing, the USSR also had nukes. We also felt guilt. We didn't talk about the children in Germany and Japan who had died as a result of our policy of deliberately bombing residential areas. We still don't talk about that policy. We felt (vaguely) that by splitting the atom we might have enraged Mother Nature. Last night I rewatched one of the key movies built on that theme, THEM!, produced in 1956. 

In THEM! the first test of an atomic device in New Mexico irradiated a colony of ants, who immediately grew to the size of Ford cargo vans. Gigantic ants reached the sewer system of Los Angeles. THEM! was a major movie, starring James Whitmore (who was supposed to be the next Spencer Tracey), Fess Parker, James Arness, Joan Weldon and Edmund Gwenn,  

We brooded for years about the possibility that if we offended Mother Nature, she might,  in revenge, hand us a dead planet. I never bought into that argument. My view was that Mother Nature, indifferent to us, simply preferred dead planets. She had made a lot of them.

Cholera

In the early 1830s, Central American governance was dominated by progressives of European descent until cholera struck the Indians, who outnumbered the whites by a margin of ten to one. The liberals quarantined the worst-hit areas and then sent in medical doctors to save the inhabitants. Medicine, at the time, wasn’t helpful, and the Indians continued to die, which made them suspicious. They began to believe that cholera was a poison dropped into their wells by the ruling class. They formed into a mob.

Some natives believed that medicines were poisons used to finish them off. To be fair and to test this hypothesis, the mob captured a few doctors and forced them to consume all the medicines they carried. The doctors died, convincing the Indians that the plot was genuine. They revolted and won a bloody civil war and so on. 

That’s an unhappy history, but today, of course, we've evolved into a rational and well-educated society, one that elects capable leaders who can cope with the few remaining problems that arise.

The Leaked Report on Russian Hacking

If you'd like to see the leaked government document on Russian interference in our Presidential election, you can find it by googling Intercept. I sometimes find Intercept annoying, but it is a serious and responsible news source that does not cater to corporate advertisers. Intercept insisted on publishing this leaked document, for example, but did redact some sections at the intelligence community's request.

You will recall Putin's recent lies that the hacking had been done informally by patriotic Russian civilians.  The leaked government report "states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document."

Leah Gold

For many years Healdsburg has been run by a group of good old boys connected to real estate. From time to time a candidate not directly dependent on construction manages to get elected to the city council. Once elected he is likely to become at least partly absorbed by the good old boy network, which is quick to befriend newcomers and arrange endorsements by the Press Democrat and related corporate interests.

Leah Gold is the exception. She is not a good old boy or even a boy. Gold was a thoughtful mayor and is a major reason Healdsburg is surrounded today by a greenbelt. If you haven't already voted, I hope you vote for her on Tuesday. 

(she won)  

The Free Press

At last most of the 1% seem to have awakened to the financial implications of destructive stupidity. It’s taken a while, but our super-rich now seem to understand how much money can be made in the new technologies that will be replacing coal, oil and gas. Either China will make that money or California will. Or Europe will. 

Also, if hundreds of millions of people die in climate wars, financial predictions will become unreliable. Big Business can finally see that, which means the newspaper’s editorials can see it.

Meanwhile the Republican politicos are trapped between their corporate masters—who hope to profit from new technologies—and their primary voters—who favor coal with religious intensity. What to do, what to do?  

How To Seize Power

How does an authoritarian come to power in a representative democracy and crush it?  

Trump seems too stupid to have a plan, but he has the instincts of a dictator. He’s a cartoon version of Mussolini as a mindless oaf.

A historian who studies the deaths of democratic governments might give us some answers. Timothy Snyder has said that the first step for an elected authoritarian is to destroy the social institutions that stand in the way of absolute power. 

An authoritarian might go after the courts, for example, or the press. If he can delegitimize the legal system and convince the voters that reporters are liars, he might also get voters to believe that truth itself is different for each of us. That means there is no such thing as a truth or certainty we share in common, an idea floated in the fascist origins of early postmodernism. I may be sure that global warming endangers hundreds of millions of people. You may be sure that global warming is a liberal hoax promoted by folks who are evil for no reason. Or you might be of two minds about it and hire on as a columnist for the New York Times.

How do you stop a national power grab? Alone you can do little; join or form groups to resist. 

California Universal Health Care Bill

A New Analysis Shows 'Medicare for All' Can Cover Everyone While Cutting Costs

"New financial analysis shows California's SB 652 would cut state spending on health care by almost 20 percent as new poll shows 7 in 10 voters support universal coverage plan"

In other words, Canada, which has a population about the same size as California's, supports a single payer system and saves money at the same time. Please, anyone, get word to the PRESS DEMOCRAT editorial board.